January 27, 2012
Sarah Smith — Scientific embarrassment
January 25, 2012
Adrian Sutton — The Business of Standards
Recently I’ve been getting spam from the “standards organisation” OASIS inviting a company that I don’t work for1 to join a new standards initiative. There’s no pretense that I’m being invited because of my clearly superior knowledge of the area involved, merely that the company could get great advertising exposure by participating – including being listed on a press release! Naturally we’d need to become OASIS members and pay the appropriate fee, and to be in the press release you’d have to be at minimum a “sponsor level member”.
On the one hand it’s nice that they aren’t pretending to be anything other than a for-profit marketing company, but isn’t it a bit sad that we think standards are just a marketing tool?
1 – yes, they’ve done so much research into how much I have to contribute that they’ve got the company wrong ↩
January 22, 2012
James McPherson — Need to work on the heart rate
Did a shortish ride around the district with Tim this morning. Rather than going over Arrabri Ave and back via Mt Ommaney Dr, we headed left up Mt Ommaney Dr so we could freewheel down the hill to the Jindalee boat ramp. I really noticed my lack of fitness – had to stand all the way up to the summit, and my hr didn’t recover to my normal spinning level for about 90 seconds. I’m going to have to do lots of this before I start trying to train up Mt Coottha.
January 21, 2012
Ben Fowler — Speedcubing using the Fridrich Method: transitioning to a 3LLL
I haven't timed myself for a few months, but I'm definitely getting faster. I now can confidently solve using the Fridrich method with a four look last layer, but I'm now attempting to reduce that to a three look last layer (two looks for the "orient last layer" step, and one look for the "permute last layer" step). Moving from a 4LLL to a 3LLL requires memorising an additional set of 15James McPherson — Happy to knock a minute off
Last weekened I did a 40k ride into town and back. Rather than stopping for coffee at Cup in West End as I frequently do when riding with friends, I thought I’d see how I went without any more stops than required for traffic lights and intersections.
I did almost the same ride again today (less 80m), and was interested to see that I was faster over that distance by about 100 seconds. Also, while my pace was better (22.4 vs 22.1 km/h), I burned fewer calories.
For a giggle, I looked at the last 4 rides I did along that course, where I’d ridden more than 40km, and then the last 4 rides I’d done over that course with at least 39 km. That covers 7 weeks or so, from 1st December. I’m intrigued to see that while my average pace has improved a little (19.5 to 22.4), my calorie count has decreased. I don’t feel like I’m more fit, and my weight is still fluctuating between 87.5 and 88.5kg on a daily basis. I still need to move more (note to self, GET ON THE TRAINER DURING THE WEEK), and I am trying to eat less.
[Those grabs are from my Garmin page, in case you were wondering]



