Entries in Life

I finally understand where this myth is coming from. John Walker of The Hacker’s Diet (and so much more) is the source. Under “What, Me Exercise?” he lists various activities and the calories burned. Bicycling gets 300/hr while jogging gets 700/hr. Now, if you don’t put out any effort and spend a lot of time coasting along, then, yes, you may as well walk for your exercise. The Final Sprint offers this:

The standard comparison is that one mile of running equals four miles of cycling, but that’s lousy science. Although running requires the same amount of energy per mile at any speed (110 calories per mile), riding is affected by wind resistance so the faster you ride, the more energy you use. So you have to compare running and cycling at different cycling speeds.

Which makes a ton of sense. Now, take this “activity calculator” and compare 90 minutes of cycling at around 13mph (~1100 calories) to 90 minutes of running at 6mph (~1400 calories). We’re not accounting for hills here (which changes things considerably) so this doesn’t reflect the actual number of calories being burned on my ride, but it’s a good estimate. Still, the comparision of 1400 to 1100 isn’t quite as dramatic as John Walker’s chart would have you believe. It is only a quarter more calories instead of double the amount. Come on, people! Trust, but verify! The Hacker’s Diet is a great resource, the excercise portion, at least, has some funny numbers. (I know, he probably got his numbers from somewhere else and that source is wrong, but two people I know who’ve read John Walker’s book have claimed running burns “a lot more” calories than cycling, so I suspect the book is the source of their misinformation.)

(via Jim’s shared items feed)

It has long seemed to me that there are really just two religions in the world, and they show up in each tradition: one runs on risk/ welcome/ abandon/ grace/ transformation/ forgiveness/ creativity/ multiple-possibilities; and the other, on security/ control/ rules/ order/ stability/ only-one-possibility. – Two Religions

This does seem to be a theme that shows up a lot. But I would argue that it is possible to fuse the two strains of thinking. It is hard. It is very difficult to be at once about rules and grace; transformation and order do not easily co-exist, but it is possible to have both. The Orthodox are obviously all about order and stability. There are also, if you can handle them, a lot of rules. But I’ve only seen “control” and “only-one-possibility” from one very bad priest. He was young and a convert, though, so it is easy (for me) to forgive him. Instead, I’ve seen an abundance of grace and forgiveness within the Church. And not just at the parish level. It seems to be throughout the fathers. I won’t go so far as to say that welcome, creativity, or multiple-possibilities is widespread in the Church, but then, I don’t see a lot of emphasis on security and control.

That is all. (Ok, so I realize some of you will need some more information. Brad Fitzpatrick, with Danga and now SixApart, is pretty amazing when it comes to the software he’s developed and released to the public. These range from utilities to provide secure backups on hardware you don’t own (brackup) distributed job schedulers (The Schwartz) and others I’ve written about. Note for you Perl-bashers that he did much of this in Perl.)