complich8’s journal

Rather than try to shape the random things floating around in my head into coherent, readable whole-posts (and thus spending several hours I don’t really have to spare right now, thanks to wanting to sleep), I’m just going to give them to you in half-finished one-liner form:

1: When you lose weight (by burning fat, say), you actually exhale the lion’s share of the weight you lose in the form of CO2. This is … somewhat amazing, and slightly counterintuitive … you’d think that you pee or poo more of it out. But really, poo is just the stuff that never made it into you to begin with, and urine is excess water and filtered-out waste products that aren’t really a huge part of your energy cycles.

2: Related to 1: I wonder how much CO2 the average person in the average day actually exhales. Also, what’s the concentration of CO2 in exhaled air? And what percentage of lung capacity is actually replaced with each breath? How much of breathing is that mechanical pumping, and how much of it is essentially in-lung diffusion of new air into stale old air? How much of the O2 in the air we breathe do we use up? I’ve been unable to find answers to this … maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.

3: colds are a pain in the ass. Well, not so much the ass as the throat, sinuses, occasionally ears and head. Actually, the ass has been just fine and dandy through the cold I slept off this week. Also, it turns out sleeping a lot is actually a remarkably effective strategy against colds. 2 or 3 days of 15 hours a day asleep really knocked that virus flat!

4: Last semester was ok. I had meant to write more about it, but there’s not much more to really say. In retrospect, I can certainly live with a pair of B’s, considering the approaching 600 hours of time I put into video games last semester. Hmm, anti-pattern…

5: I spend too much time playing video games, so this semester I’m not going to. When I start watching video files, there’s natural stop points (like, when one episode ends), and they’re easy to take advantage of. I have a much smaller appetite for that stuff than gaming.

6: Regular schedules are interesting. Before getting knocked flat with a cold, I was doing a slightly early of regular schedule (like, 5-6 am awake, 9-10pm asleep). It was nice. Now I’ve got a 10:30 am class three days a week, and without the influence of gaming I think I’ll be able to maintain some semblance of a morning!

7: Scrubs is surprisingly pretty good. Got hooked on two or three random episodes I saw on tv over New Year’s. It was good times. Now I’ve got the first 5 seasons downloaded, and I tore through one season in the last week (partly because it’s good, partly because I’m not playing games and homework has just finally started to happen at all, and partly because I was sick Sunday through Tuesday or so and didn’t really feel like doing anything other than sleeping, watching videos and laughing). I figure, at the current rate, I’ll be finished with the 5 seasons that I’ve got by … umm, probably Valentine’s day, at the latest.

8: related to the whole regular schedule + not gaming thing, I’ve actually already gotten started on my first CS project. It’s … not bad, but a little tough to think about, because I don’t really want to pull in JDBC or BerkDB or anything insane to implement what amounts to two tables, a relation and four or so queries in this java app. But it’d be SOOO easy to turn this from a java app into a couple JDBC calls. In past CS classes, I’ve typically spent like 4-8 hours coding and 2 hours thinking about how to implement stuff on any given project, and then just sort of dropped it on turnin however it ended up. So far, I’ve actually done a lot of option-weighing on how to implement this project, even though it’s relatively trivial to implement a basic functional version. I want efficient, dammit! And I’m going to get it!

9: classes this semester are interesting so far. Not that we’re very far in. Databases (348) class is ok, projects and homeworks are interesting, I’m hoping the textbook is good (still waiting for it to show up in the mail). Unfortunately, the prof is … sort of scatterbrained. I’m getting a bit demotivated to go to his lectures, because he’s not really presenting a lot of information in meaningful ways. Already I’m starting to see other people falling off of that wagon too … there were about 6 fewer people in Thursday’s lecture than in the lecture before it. In a class of about 36 people, that’s fairly significant. Also, 5 more people left between 5:00 and 5:30, when class let out at 5:45 or so, and I saw at least 3 or 4 of the people who stayed napping. It’s a shame, ’cause the guy is nice and all, and knows his stuff, it’s just that he’s sort of a random scatterbrained teacher. Not that I’m one to talk about randomness :p. My other class is neat though, Environmental Ethics. I’m behind on the reading because I’m also waiting for that book, but lectures 2 and 3 we watched An Inconvenient Truth, which was sort of cool. The lecturer there also seems fairly interesting and engaging … I’d say about 55 people in that class. It’s good times though. I missed Wednesday’s class because I felt like I needed hours 7-12 of sleep still. Tomorrow, short of vomiting up an organ, there’s nothing that’ll keep me from going though :p.

10: Speaking of random … I think it’s sort of interesting that it’s possible to use a push for accessibility to push for a certain degree of freedom, or at least openness in software. Like, one of my directors at work wanted to get uber-protective and lock down some course content in insane and impractical ways, until I pointed out that it was sort of despicable and probably a violation of at least the university’s accessibility policies (because it would render the material unusable by screen readers and unprintable), while not providing any protection from anyone remotely determined to break it. She gave in, and so instead of distributing some sort of insane right-click-disabling printscreen-catching nonselectable text-image-flash-inexplicable-monstrosity application for this course content, we’re just giving people straight-up, ordinary, highlightable, selectable, printable, readable pdf files (and the streaming audio and video in the flash web interface we’ve got going to sync audio/video with slide presentations … which is sort of neat). Made me think though … setting a requirement like “has to be accessible to people with handicaps” pretty much precludes excessively exotic answers to what should be simple and generic problems. Neat!

That’s it. There’s more back here, but … umm … yeah, that’s enough randomness for one day, and sleeping is good too.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 12:19 am and is filed under Beyond Nerddom, Idle Musings, life and times, observational, window to the soul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.