Variable

One of the most fundamental principles in fitness is progressive overload: gradually increasing workout stress over time, so that your body adapts positively to that increase. Perhaps that’s adding five pounds to your squat each time you lift to build strength, or lengthening successive runs to go from a mile to a marathon.

But while overload is easy on paper, it’s far more complicated in real life. Human bodies don’t adapt linearly in even the best of conditions, and progress is even more unpredictable once you factor in life stress, travel, lack of sleep, or a night of heavy drinking and too much dessert. Continuing to overload beyond what your body can keep up with leads to overtraining, which in turn causes illness and injuries, setting progress back.

So as you move forward in training, it’s useful to be able to monitor how well your body is adapting. While there are a number of approaches that work, one of the simplest and most empirically validated is tracking heart-rate variability (or HRV).

We tend to think of our heart as beating in a steady tick-tock. In reality, each beat varies a bit from the last. In fact, a healthy heart has a great deal of variability, whereas increasing regularity (as data from the Framingham study and others have consistently shown) drives increasing risk of heart disease.

Heart-rate variability results from the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is like the gas in a car, revving our bodies up for increased output, whereas the parasympathetic is like the brakes, bringing us down into rest and relaxation.

When the sympathetic nervous system overwhelms the parasympathetic, your heart-rate variability decreases. And, similarly, when your sympathetic nervous system overwhelms the parasympathetic, you’re on the road to overtraining.

As a result, monitoring heart-rate variability is a great way to simultaneously monitor overtraining.

While, previously, measuring HRV required specialized equipment (whether an EKG or a chest-strapped heart-rate monitor), the brilliant folks behind the app HRV4Training recently developed and clinically validated an approach to measurement using just your smartphone.

The way it works is simple: each morning, right after you wake up, you hold your finger over the phone’s camera lens for one minute. From that, the app determines your HRV for the day, compares the number to your moving averages over the past seven days and two months, and kicks out a simple recommendation: something like “go ahead and train, but limit intensity,” or “if you planned intense training, go for it.”

As I admitted on Friday, I’ve sometimes been lax with daily HRV tracking. But I always regret it when I am. HRV provides a great window into how I’m adapting to the progressive overload of my workouts, and it’s been a powerful tool in helping to keep me healthy and injury-free, moving forward over the longer haul.

So download HRV4Training, and overload yourself, just the right amount.

April 24, 2017

Z’s

I admit it: I’m both lazy and forgetful.

So while I sometimes manage to track useful health markers (like, for example, heart-rate variability each morning with the excellent HRV4Training app, to monitor over-training), I also often end up going for days and weeks ignoring them completely.

That’s why I’m particularly enthused about any app that works regardless of whether my brain is engaged, like AutoSleep for Apple Watch and iPhone.

Unlike other Apple Watch sleep trackers, this one doesn’t require me to actively tell it when I go to sleep and wake up, yet it’s surprisingly accurate nonetheless. Even better, as I only wear my watch to bed some nights, it still works even when the watch is on the charger. Sure, those nights don’t include sleep quality (which the app derives from heart rate and restlessness data from the watch), but it still accurately clocks start and stop times from when I plug in and unlock my phone (something that, shamefully enough, tends to be my last and first actions of the day). And it even correctly subtracts time for early morning pee breaks, as I (like, I think, most people) briefly turn on the screen of my phone when I get up in the middle of the night to see what time it is.

If my trailing average sleep duration closes in on eight hours nightly, I’m well-poised to hit PRs; whereas, if I’m averaging under seven hours (or, worse, six), I’m lucky to get through my workouts at all (and, frankly, equally lucky to just get through the day). When I keep track of that number in my head, I find I overly weight the prior night (or two), and can barely remember how much I slept on any nights even a day or two further back. AutoSleep’s home page serves as a far more reliable reference.

Knowing when to push myself – and when not to – has been key to keeping me training productively and injury-free for long stretches. If you think it might be for you, too, download AutoSleep; it’s well worth the $2.99 cost.

April 21, 2017

Key to Happiness

As the old adage goes, you only value your health once it’s gone.

That appears to apply to the health of your digital devices, too; I never realized how much I enjoy the left-side shift, control, and command keys on my MacBook until they suddenly gave out earlier today.

Since then, I’ve discovered that I use command- and control-dependent keyboard shortcuts pretty much nonstop, and I capitalize each ‘I,’ and the start of every sentence, using the left shift key by habitual default.

Having popped out and cleaned all three keys to no avail, I’m planning to simply leave the laptop at rest overnight, in the unrealistic hope that the wonky keys somehow miraculously fix themselves. And, barring that, I’ve blocked out all tomorrow morning to camp out at the Apple store, to see if their team of Geniuses can get things fixed relatively quickly in-house.

In the meantime, I’m at least getting to put my iPhone thumb-keyboarding skills to the serious test. As they say, fml.

March 22, 2017

Casted

While I'm working, I try to avoid multitasking, because a decade of research has shown that human brains suck at it.

But during relatively large swaths of my days, I end up doing non-work, low-brain-intensity tasks: I spend cumulative hours walking my dogs, riding the subway, shopping for groceries, cooking dinner. And through all of that, I usually listen to audio from my iPhone.

For the first half of the day, it's audiobooks. I tend to read non-fiction with my eyeballs, and listen to fiction with my ears; between the two, I can easily cruise through a book or more each week.

But from lunch on, I primarily listen to podcasts. Alongside a couple of news-aggregating daily emails, and an occasional jaunt through Twitter, it’s how I get nearly all of my world news and analysis. And it’s my primary channel for finding interesting new people, ideas, books, films, and more.

A number of friends and family members have mentioned that they, too, want to take up more podcast listening; but with literally hundreds of thousands of podcasts on iTunes, it’s often hard to know where to start.

To that end, here’s what I listen to regularly. My own interests vary pretty widely, so your mileage may vary. It’s also worth noting that the current list veers more heavily towards politics and policy than it did a year ago, now that we live in the land of Trump. But, regardless of your interests, I think these are all at least worth a single episode test-listen; in my experience, after just a couple of minutes, you’ll be able to decide whether each warrants further listening/subscribing or not.

I’m a big fan of the Overcast app, which I find far easier to wrangle than iOS’s built-in Podcasts app. So, rather than link the below Podcasts to their iTunes pages, I’d suggest you download Overcast, and just enter the below names into its search engine (the plus sign at the top right of the app) to find them instead.

I listen to pretty much every episode of these shows:

  • The Art of Charm
  • The Ezra Klein Show
  • FiveThirtyEight Politics
  • Fresh Air
  • Pod Save America
  • Slate’s Political Gabfest
  • The Tim Ferriss Show
  • Vox’s The Weeds

These are more hit-or-miss for me, though I listen to a good number of their episodes:

  • 99% Invisible
  • a16z
  • Barbell Shrugged
  • Brute Strength Podcast
  • Bullseye with Jesse Thorn
  • Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
  • FoundMyFitness
  • Freakonomics Radio
  • Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin
  • The Joe Rogan Experience
  • Longform
  • On the Media
  • Planet Money
  • Radiolab
  • Savage Lovecast
  • Slate’s Culture Gabfest
  • TED Radio Hour
  • This American Life
  • Waking Up with Sam Harris

And, finally, here are some newly-discovered shows that I think are likely to be good, but I can’t yet really vouch for:

  • Conversations with Tyler
  • Intercepted
  • Pod Save the World

It’s pretty extraordinary that all of this content is available free online in today’s world. Take advantage of that, and give these shows a listen yourself.

February 1, 2017

Honey

Given the crazy prices in NYC stores, I do most of my shopping online. Amazon Prime, in particular, has been a lifesaver, as something like a bag of dog food costs about 50% less there than it does at the PetCo in my neighborhood.

But when shopping on Amazon, I’ll often find several vendors selling the same thing at different prices, so I spend a fair amount of time searching around the site to make sure I’m getting the best deals.

Similarly, when I’m buying from any other site, before I check out, I Google around for potential coupon codes, then try them out on my cart. Though that, too, takes a bit of time, I can often save 10-15%, and I’m cheap enough for that to justify the effort.

Over the weekend, however, I discovered Honey, a great Chrome extension that does both of those things automatically. Now, I can save minutes and save money.

On Amazon, Honey will mark a given item as the best-priced version of that product, or link you across to a cheaper iteration of the same thing.

And, elsewhere (say, JCrew, PsPrint, or Intuit), it will test out coupon codes for you behind the scenes at checkout, automatically entering the one that gives you the largest discount.

It’s a small tool, but one that (especially if you shop mostly online) can add up to big savings. Try Honey, and save some time and money yourself.

January 31, 2017

Movies 2.0

From the always-excellent Daring Fireball:

Natalie Jarvey, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:

“Amazon has not only scored its first Oscar nominations with Manchester, it has also become the first streaming service to earn a best picture nod. Manchester received six total nominations, including Kenneth Lonergan for directing and original screenplay, Casey Affleck for lead actor, Lucas Hedges for supporting actor, and Michelle Williams for supporting actress. The Salesman, Iran’s selection in the foreign-language film category — which Amazon is distributing in the United States — also received a nomination, bringing Amazon’s total nominations to seven.”

Amazing success story for Amazon. There’s been a lot of talk over the last decade or so that Hollywood was wary of Apple doing to them what the entertainment industry thinks they did to the music industry. In the meantime, Netflix and Amazon are kicking their asses.

I spent the first third of my career in the tech industry, and the next third in film, so I saw from the inside the disdain that both of those worlds have for each other.

Tech entrepreneurs long believed that they could bring across their industry’s tools, ideas, and processes, rethinking how film and television is made and distributed to yield better content and broader audiences.  Whereas the studio execs believed those tech folks were hopelessly naive, and totally out of their depth.

Looks like we now know which side was right.

January 26, 2017

Tech Tools: Words

Yesterday, Evernote released a much-anticipated (and much-needed) update to its clunky iOS app. For many users, however, the simplicity (or, perhaps, feature-paucity) of that update, paired with the company's recent substantial price hikes to its premium service, just served to further disappoint. While Evernote was early in pioneering the idea of a searchable digital 'everything box' for ideas and notes, the slow pace of improvement, and lack of simple, user-requested features, has left a bunch of folks looking for alternatives.

I abandoned Evernote a while back, and now depend primarily on a trio of Mac apps (paired with iOS counterparts) to handle my world of text. Along with a browser (and Gmail in it), they cover about 90% of my daily computer use, so I've auditioned a slew of other options, too, and can strongly endorse all three of these:

1. BBEdit.

I started using BBEdit literally 20 years ago. Back when I regularly wrote code, this was where I did so. Now, I use BBEdit primarily to wrangle my productivity, running my life from a folder of about a dozen text files. Goals, projects, today’s to-do list, books and movies I’ve watched/read and want to watch/read, my grocery list, a workout journal, a trumpet practice log, etc. If I took one thing away from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it was the idea of getting things out of my head and into a trusted system. For me BBEdit is where that happens.

Additionally, BBEdit is exceedingly powerful at manipulating text; you can use GREP in the ‘search and replace’ box, and for those like me whose command line skills are slow and rusty, menu items to find duplicate lines, sort lines, prefix/suffix lines, process lines containing a specified string, etc., come in handy pretty frequently, as I often end up grabbing large lists or pages of text from other sources (the web, digital books, etc.) and need to organize them into some kind of useful form.

This one’s nerd-tastic, I know, but I spend more time in BBedit than anywhere else. You can demo it free, but if it doesn’t seem worth the cost in your life, you can also default to the free, pared-down version, Textwrangler.

On iOS, I use Editorial, which is by far the most powerful mobile text editor I’ve found. And as I use Dropbox to back up my files, I can seamlessly keep the desktop and iPhone versions of my text files in sync between the two apps.

2. Ulysses.

I use this, on both my Mac and iPhone, for pretty much all the longer-form writing that I do. (In fact, I’m typing this post in Ulysses right now.) It’s a minimalist text environment that helps me focus on getting words down on the page, it effectively manages documents inside the app (and automatically syncs things between desktop and mobile), and it can quickly and beautifully export your words into anything from HTML to formatted PDFs, eBooks, or Word Docs. If you’re (god-forbid) still writing things in Word, try this instead, and make your life waaaay better.

3. NValt.

Basically, this is for everything that doesn’t go into BBEdit or Ulysses. While I use the former for structured lists and plans, and the latter for any document that might require thought and drafting, NValt is my quick and simple repository for the kinds of odds and ends that pop up throughout my day.

You can pull up NValt with a simple keyboard shortcut, and your cursor is waiting in a search / create bar. As you type, NValt shows you a list of all the notes in your repository that match your search; to create a new note, you just hit ‘return’ at the end of the line, and a new note’s created with that search term as its title. (Try it out; it makes much more intuitive sense than I’m doing justice.)

Pulling the app up right now, the most recent files include a list of links to some fancy quesadilla recipes (last night’s delicious dinner), show dates for a couple of jazz groups I’m hoping to catch in the next month or two, instructions for a pranayama breathing technique, the IP addresses I jotted down while helping to set up my grandmother’s router, and notes I’ve taken while reading Tools of Titans. It all just gets dumped in here, and I can pull it up as needed with a couple of keystrokes.

NValt also syncs with the free Simplenote, so I can search and add new notes from my phone, too.

So, that’s it. BBEdit (with Editorial). Ulysses. And NValt (with Simplenote). If you spend a bunch of your day working with text, too, I strongly recommend giving all three a try.

January 18, 2017

Ethics Co-Processor

Maciej Ceglowski, on the Internet of Things, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the role humans might play as AI takes over the world:

My favorite Internet of Things device is a fan called the Ethical Turk that subverts the whole idea of scriptable people.

This clever fan (by the brilliant Simone Rebaudengo) recognizes moral dilemmas and submits them to a human being for adjudication. Conscious of the limits of robotkind, it asks people for ethical help.

For example, if the fan detects that there are two people in front of it, it won’t know which one to cool.

So it uploads a photograph of the situation to Mechanical Turk, which assigns the task to a human being. The human makes the ethical decision and returns an answer along with a justification. The robot obeys the answer, and displays the justification on a little LCD screen.

The fan has dials on the side that let you select the religion and educational level of the person making the ethical choice.

My favorite thing about this project is how well it subverts Amazon’s mechanization of labor by using human beings for the one thing that makes them truly human. People become a kind of ethics co-processor

January 13, 2017

Mobilized

With yesterday’s ten-year anniversary of the iPhone, I spent a bit of time marveling at how far pocketable technology has come in the past few decades.

At the time the iPhone launched, I was happily toting a Blackberry Pearl, a big upgrade at the time after years of carrying a series of Treo’s.

But my mobile nerd-ery extended far further back than even that, to 1999, when at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I stumbled across a small booth where a Canadian startup called Research in Motion was selling a new email-enabled two-way pager they were calling the Blackberry 850:

rim-850

At the time, the company I was running built software for hedge funds, and I remember the bankers staring at my Blackberry, incredulous that anyone might need – or even want – to check email away from their desktop.

Of course, the Blackberry existed in a parallel universe to my phone, a trusty and chic Motorola StarTAC. So at the same point, I also owned a Starfish ClipOn Organizer, which piggybacked thickly on top of the flip-up screen, stored a “whopping” 1000 contacts, and allowed you to – get this bit which blew my mind at the time – dial your phone just by clicking a contact’s number on the Starfish:

233_01

The Starfish also boasted a calendar, and a notes app. Though as there was no data-entry mechanism, the notes were read-only. And as the Starfish synced by popping the thing off the phone, and then sticking it into your PC’s PCMCIA card slot, the calendar was perpetually out-of-date.

Today’s a far cry, indeed, from those primitive times back in 2007 or 1999. Back when we couldn’t check Google Maps any time we got lost, couldn’t search the web to find relevant information on the fly, had to spend dinner actually paying attention and talking with the real people physically surrounding us.

January 11, 2017

Trolley

In the world of ethics and moral philosophy, one of the most venerable thought experiments is the so-called ‘trolley problem,’ the most basic version of which is:

A runaway trolley is careening down a railway track. Up ahead, five people are tied onto the tracks, unable to move. Next to you is a lever; if you pull it, the trolley will switch to a different track. You notice that one person is standing on the second track. Is it more ethical for you to do nothing, and let the trolley kill the five people on the main track, or to pull the lever, and send the trolley over to kill one person instead?

Over the last fifty years, philosophers have debated the implications of the problem, complicated the question with a huge number of incrementally muddier variants, explored the neurobiology of how our brains consider such a choice, and polled vast swaths of respondents about what they might decide if faced by the (original or muddier variant) situation in real life.

But, up until recently, the thought experiment remained largely academic. In the past few years, however, with the rise of self-driving cars, it’s very much moved into the realm of practical concern.

While human drivers react too slowly to reason through hard choices in case of an accident, an artificially intelligent computer driver would have plenty of processor cycles to more fully consider its actions. Should it swerve your car away from a kid in the street to instead hit an older adult? How about away from that kid and into two older adults? Or away from that kid and into a concrete wall, even if it killed you, the driver, in the process?

Of course, technology tends to far outpace legislation, and in the rare occasions when we do legislate quickly around emerging technologies, the ‘solutions’ we bake into law often create problems far worse than the ones we intended to solve. So, for the near-term, I suspect we’ll be living in a world where private companies get to determine the ‘right’ answers to various trolley problem scenarios.

Which means, by basic game theory, that car companies will all default to solutions that save the driver, no matter what. (Consider choosing between two cars you might purchase: one has an ‘ethical’ decision algorithm that might kill you, while another has a more selfish algorithm that will always save your own ass; even though it may entail some rationalization about why you’re not a jerk for doing so, you’re buying that second, selfishly-programed car.)

That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised by a story in this month’s Car and Driver about Mercedes’ self-driving car plans, in which Mercedes became the first major manufacturer to explicitly stake a driver-first position. As their Manager of Driverless Car Safety explains:

If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car. If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.

So there you have it. As more than a handful of wags have pointed out in the days since, it’s kind of nice to know that an AI Mercedes driver will be just as much of a douchebag as a human Mercedes driver.

Going forward, however, I suspect we’ll be hearing increasingly about the trolley problem, and about the countless other related and equally hard situations in which we task AI’s with comparatively valuing human lives and well-being in their decisions.

Perhaps, a few years down the road, we’ll be legislating about it, too. Though I’m not too bullish on that kind of legislation having a broad impact. Given how hard people work to crack the DRM on DVDs just to avoid paying $3 rental fees, I can barely imagine the black-market of car upgrades that would emerge if a hack is all it took to convert your government-mandated ‘ethical’ smart-car into an ‘always put me first, no matter what’ machine.

But perhaps the inevitable popularity of that kind of hack should be comforting; whatever our differences, at the end of the day, it seems we’re all just Mercedes drivers at heart.

October 25, 2016