Song: Black Tea Party

Reality: black and brown kooks are treated differently than white kooks.

First Walk Back: slooooow.

I bribed Olivia with a promise to the trip to the Spotted Cow.
We walked for 32 minutes; about 1.75 miles at my current pace. It was weird having Olivia have to wait on me.

Nevertheless, the knee stood up to it. Note: I am recovering from the incisions themselves and not the internal work; there is nothing inside the knee that needs to “heal”. Just the incisions and the stuff that was cut to make them.

15 July 2010 II

Knee: I had my final doctor’s appointment today. I was able to hear was was actually done:
1. My knee cap was shaved
2. Damaged parts of my outside front and inside bad meniscus was cut away (no sewing)
3. Damaged parts of the cartilage on my lower thigh bone (articular cartilage) were cut away.

Now I meet with the PT tomorrow to be educated on the exercises I am supposed to be doing.

Swimming: he doesn’t want me in the water until August 9 (to keep the wounds from being infected). Oh well; that should give my shoulder a nice long time to heal up, if I am smart about it.

So, I hope to start the stationary bike this weekend, leg weights (as the PT allows) and light upper body weights and yoga classes when I can knee down without pain.

Physical Fitness It turns out that when it comes to heart disease, it isn’t just working out that matters. It is reducing the amount of “still time”; you really need to move around and “do” stuff:

Recently, however, scientists from the University of South Carolina and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., parsed the full data. In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

Most of us have heard that sitting is unhealthy. But many of us also have discounted the warnings, since we spend our lunch hours conscientiously visiting the gym. We consider ourselves sufficiently active. But then we drive back to the office, settle at our desks and sit for the rest of the day. We are, in a phrase adopted by physiologists, ‘‘active couch potatoes.’’

The amount of time that most Americans spend being inactive has risen steadily in recent decades. A 2009 editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that, on average, adults spend more than nine hours a day in oxymoronic ‘‘sedentary activities.’’ For studies like these, scientists categorize activities by the number of METs they demand. A MET, or metabolic equivalent of task, is a measure of energy, with one MET being the amount of energy you burn lying down for one minute. Sedentary behaviors demand one to one and a half METs, or very little exertion.

Personally, I stand when I teach, take stairs, take quick walks, pace, etc. Sitting still really irritates me.

15 July 2010 (am)

Knee: my swelling is way down. But I am feeling a twinge or two at the entry points (where the arthroscope went in) and in the stiff tendons behind my knee. This is different from the previous pain; this is the “we’ve been in one position for two long” stiffness and is to be expected. Maybe a swim and a light weight workout isn’t too far away?

Posts

Is gravity really a consequence of other things (e. g., forces in another dimension)? There is some non-crackpot speculation that this is the case:

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Dr. Verlinde’s argument turns on something you could call the “bad hair day” theory of gravity.

It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all — even if he has not yet answered them.

“Some people have said it can’t be right, others that it’s right and we already knew it — that it’s right and profound, right and trivial,” Andrew Strominger, a string theorist at Harvard said.

“What you have to say,” he went on, “is that it has inspired a lot of interesting discussions. It’s just a very interesting collection of ideas that touch on things we most profoundly do not understand about our universe. That’s why I liked it.”

I admit that I don’t have anything approaching an understanding of these issues. But here is one thing I know: for a long time, people wonder why gravity is such a weak force. For example: gravity can be easily defeated by a tiny magnet (which can attract a paper clip with enough force to defeat the earth’s gravity). People think that perhaps this is due to gravity being multi-dimensional in some way (gravity reaching into “perpendicular dimensions” that we can’t see); this conjecture is that gravity is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics.

Mathematics and randomness Have you ever wondered how a “random number generator” is really a bit of an oxymoron (something that is random can’t be produced by an algorithm). Now-a-days, we can obtain randomness from quantum signals! Check it out.