Automated updates: 2025-01-12

2022-06-09-code-honor.md

@@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ I see that the violent anger at aliens doesn't end with Picard.  Notice that Yar
 
 Would more people go to therapy if the doctor recommended solving problems through racially motivated cat-fights?  Only one science fiction franchise has the courage to even ask...
 
-More seriously, what does Troi's job as "counselor" actually entail?  She doesn't seem attached to the medical staff, visually distances herself from the crew, doesn't seem to attend therapy sessions, doesn't abide by any confidentiality rules, and seems to broadly oppose a lot of Starfleet's principles, speaking dismissively about the Prime Directive and goading Picard into more than one violent confrontation.  Oh, and when Picard introduced her to Riker, she pressured Riker---her other boss---to acknowledge their prior relationship.
+More seriously, what does Troi's job as "counselor" actually entail?  She doesn't seem attached to the medical staff, visually distances herself from the crew, doesn't seem to attend therapy sessions, doesn't abide by any confidentiality rules, and seems to broadly oppose a lot of Starfleet's principles, speaking dismissively about the Prime Directive and goading Picard into more than one violent confrontation.  Oh, and when Picard introduced her to Riker, she pressured Riker---her other boss---to not acknowledge their prior relationship.
 
  > **PICARD**: Some of it I do understand. She is a rather lovely female.
  >
@@ -172,11 +172,11 @@ Apparently, the tradition continues of asking gift recipients why they don't per
 
 Having offended everybody else, by this point in the episode, *Star Trek* decides that it needs to have a hot take about...multi-blade razors, maybe?  I can't find a reference for whether cartridge razors made it to market by this point, and can't remember any commercials for the product until closer to the end of the series.
 
-That said, what *art* does clean-shaven LaForge mean?  If we saw him sculpting his serial number into his beard, or even just trimming a goatee, I might let this pass.  Instead, nothing about his presentation suggests that his artistic efforts anything unlike a chemical depilatory.  Was he the kid who always drew polar bears walking through a blizzard for his art projects?
+That said, what *art* does clean-shaven LaForge mean?  If we saw him sculpting his serial number into his beard, or even just trimming a goatee, I might let this pass.  Instead, nothing about his presentation suggests that his artistic efforts look any different from a chemical depilatory.  Was he the kid who always drew polar bears walking through a blizzard for his art projects?
 
  > **LAFORGE**: It's too old. And you didn't tell it very well.
 
-Apparently, LaForge doesn't understand human humor, either.  I don't want to imply that I find the joke---or Brent Spiner, for that matter---at all funny, of course.  But age has nothing to do with the quality of a joke.  The oldest known joke, preserved by Sumerians, says, "something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap."  It almost certainly loses something in the translation, but the sentiment wouldn't seem remotely out of place in a family sitcom.  Dress it up as someone worried that their dainty significant other might leave them, instead of the weird headline format.
+Apparently, LaForge doesn't understand human humor, either.  I don't want to imply that I find the joke---or Brent Spiner, for that matter---at all funny, of course.  But age has nothing to do with the quality of a joke.  The oldest known joke, preserved by Sumerians, says, "something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap."  It almost certainly loses something in the translation, but the sentiment wouldn't seem remotely out of place in a family sitcom.  Dress it up as someone worried that their dainty significant other might leave them, instead of the weird headline format, and a wife farting on her husband would probably get a laugh.
 
 And if that joke still basically works after almost four thousand years, the problem with Data's "joke" has nothing to do with its age.
 

2022-08-18-angel.md

@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ It especially seems shady, when they introduced the virus on the way out of the
  >
  > **RIKER**: Why, what is this attitude? On Kabatris I had to wear furs to meet the leadership council. And on Armus IX, I wore feathers. This objection doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Beata is a woman, and an attractive one, does it?
 
-In this episode about the terror of inequality and sexism, the episode takes a moment---actually, multiple moments---to show Troi and Yar as holding absurdly regressive views on gender roles that barely anybody held when this aired.  It also shows that they expected Riker (and frankly, so would I) to feel so insecure in his masculinity that he would worry about wearing something that, in twentieth century American culture, would seem coded as feminine.
+In this episode about the terror of inequality and sexism, the episode takes a moment---actually, multiple moments---to show Troi and Yar as holding absurdly regressive views on gender roles that barely anybody held when this aired.  It also shows that they expected Riker (and frankly, I'd expect it, too) to feel so insecure in his masculinity that he would worry about wearing something that, in twentieth century American culture, would seem coded as feminine.
 
 Interestingly, I can't find a reasonable reference to any "Armus," *except* for someone who we'll meet in about two months in hopes of making us feel like this world has stakes.
 

2025-01-06-epiphany.md

@@ -35,13 +35,9 @@ As I put it in [last week's post]({% post_url 2024-12-30-rizal %}), not much act
 
 Partly to not leave another task completely hanging, but also to stay on "lighter duty" work for the week, I continued reformatting the code for consistency.  Eventually, this will drift into refactoring the worst of the code---a lot of this project "evolved organically," code for slop that I wrote as I needed it without a plan---but that'll need to wait until I have the fortitude to push through the code.
 
-## Library Updates
-
-I'd like to move onto better projects, including revisiting some items that I've forgotten about.  But continuing to clean up the **Morning Dashboard** code might prove irresistible.
-
 ## Next
 
-
+I'd like to move onto better projects, including revisiting some items that I've forgotten about.  But continuing to clean up the **Morning Dashboard** code might prove irresistible.
 
 * * *
 

2025-01-12-exercise.md

@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: Exercise
+date: 2025-01-12 07:57:12-0500
+categories: 
+tags: [advice, health, public-domain]
+summary: The closest that John can get to fitness advice.
+thumbnail: /blog/assets/Jon-1976-06-03.png
+offset: -14%
+description: The time has come to haul out the clichéd new year's resolution.
+spell: Jørgen Müller crankery
+---
+
+* Ignore for ToC
+{:toc}
+
+I'll try to keep this post brief, because we all have better things to do.  But even shorter?  You can probably [start reading this section](https://archive.org/details/b29806951/page/40/mode/2up) of the book if you don't care what I have to say about it...
+
+In the spirit of the new year, I know that plenty of you probably have made a resolution to get into shape, either for the first time or again.  And while we have [mixed evidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_resolution) on the utility of resolutions like this, and I don't generally participate, it seems common enough that somebody might find it useful to know my general path through (arguable) fitness, especially given that we increasingly find that exercise seems like [the most potent medical intervention ever known <i class="fas fa-copyright"></i>](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-exercise-may-be-the-most-potent-medical-intervention-ever-known).
+
+![A three-panel Jon comic strip, featuring the pre-reboot version of Garfield, who says: I'm getting lazy. It would do me good to get some exercise. In the second panel, he yawns and stretches a paw. For the punchline, he declares it much better.](/blog/assets/Jon-1976-06-03.png "That sounds about right...")
+
+For the record, I grew up somewhat active, in that I walked frequently---and still do, even if I can only pace around the living room---but otherwise stuck to indoor activities.  School required occasional participation in sports, but I always did my best to put in the absolute minimum effort.  In other words, I aggressively avoided exercise for a lot of my life.  And I didn't eat well, either, but who did, back then...?
+
+And rather predictably, that all eventually caught up to me as I aged out of the "my body will magically recover" phase of life, leading to a few months when I felt pretty miserable.  Therefore, I needed to fix that.  And while I still wouldn't call myself "fit"---although maybe I should?---I've felt healthier than I have over the last few years than I ever have, and wish that I had figured this out earlier, because it turns out to not require much effort.  Definitely don't think of me as anything like an expert, but I at least picked up *something* useful to share.
+
+## Requirements
+
+In fact, when I started thinking about trying to get into shape, I had some bare-bones criteria.
+
+- Any workout needed to happen at home, because I absolutely would never take time every day to commute to exercise.
+- The workout couldn't require equipment, because I'd either drag my feet on purchasing it, misplace it, or forget to replace it when it breaks.
+- It couldn't push too hard, because if I had an actual health problem, I didn't want to make it worse.
+- It shouldn't make me look like a top-heavy weight-lifter, because especially at my height, that looks like ridiculous overcompensation.
+
+I tried a bunch of small systems, compromising on this requirement or that, and I couldn't really stick to them.  One workout plan *almost* worked, a resistance band thing that recommended tracking progress in a spreadsheet, but it focused more on upper body strength, and missing a couple of days got me right out of the habit.
+
+## The Right Book at the Right Time
+
+Then I accidentally ran across some random blog post---which I can't find now, rather predictably after something like a decade---where the author talked about his weird grandfather's obsession with an exercise plan by a Danish athlete with a useless name and plenty of uncomfortable photographs of the author exercising.  That, other than the uncomfortable photography, sounded interesting enough to pursue, and I found it, Jørgen Peter (J.P.) Müller's **My System**, more importantly with the subtitle of *15 minutes work a day for health's sake*.  Danish weirdo, useless book title, *got it*.  Oh, and it came out in 1904, placing it firmly in the public domain in the United States, so feel free to snag a digital copy of the revised edition for yourself with no concerns about some mini-Müller demanding restitution.  Or read it here, if you want to do something like that.
+
+<iframe
+  src="https://archive.org/embed/b28130169"
+  width="740"
+  height="507"
+  frameborder="0"
+  webkitallowfullscreen="true"
+  mozallowfullscreen="true"
+  allowfullscreen
+>
+</iframe>
+
+Admittedly, a lot of the book gets...weird, weirder than the partial image of the cover up there with a statue appearing to do the cabbage patch, both in its prescience and in its crankery, to say nothing of far more pictures of a middle-aged Danish man in his underpants than you probably imagine.  For example, Müller talks about diet, hygiene, sleep, and even smoking as impacting health---though I don't understand his problem with beets and sardines---which we really wouldn't talk about for another bunch of decades, but he also spends an inordinate amount of time explaining how to *properly* dry yourself after bathing, as if your towel needed a user manual[^1], has a weird digression on not heating your home past various thresholds, and some occasional sexism so outdated that I can't even decode the misconceptions behind it.
+
+[^1]:  In all fairness, though, since reading that section, I've gotten by with smaller towels and less time drying off, so maybe he knew better than I do...
+
+{% cw Assume that I gave you the obligatory caution that you should check with your doctor before starting any exercise program, even though this one does specifically include versions of each exercise for people with limited mobility or other health problems.  Or live dangerously, but at least stop before you hurt yourself, OK?  I tried to save you... %}
+
+And, in fact, even though the book clocks in at only around a hundred pages, you can get away with skipping the forty pages of explanation and jump to the eighteen or so pages that cover the eight main "fifteen minutes" exercises.  Start there, if this has caught your interest like it did mine.  You'll also probably want to check the section for beginners, altering the difficulty of the exercises.
+
+### Other Books
+
+I haven't yet read them, and they have even more hilariously bad titles, but Müller also published [**My System for Ladies**](https://archive.org/details/mysystemforladie00ml) and [**My System for Children**](https://archive.org/details/b28079991/page/n5/mode/2up) that seem to try to take into account different preferred body-shapes.  [**My Breathing System**](https://archive.org/details/b29930728) seems like the other major book in the set.
+
+Not having read them, I don't know the crankery-to-utility ratio on the books, but if healthy for you doesn't look like Müller-in-underpants, you might want to check the alternatives.
+
+## How It Went
+
+Not only did this not take much effort to stick with, but it also had fairly quick results.  The sit-ups build abdominal muscles, which restricts the stomach, meaning that I soon stopped over-eating, which made me more energetic.  And soon after that, people who I wouldn't expect to look closely commented on my body shape unsolicited (approvingly), so apparently it does its job.  Apologies if you hoped for creepy before-and-after pictures of me, but no.  And no, I probably don't have a body that looks like the author's, but it comes significantly closer than the vague barrel-shape of my youth did.
+
+Over time, I've added more exercises, some of which didn't survive.  The "rubbing exercises," minus the literal rubbing parts, work really well for winding down before bed, and the neck exercises seem useful and almost obligatory in a world where we all spend so much time on camera.  I've added those and some yoga-derived poses to my evenings.  And I now do some minimal strength training as I get older, so that I don't hurt myself in my daily life[^2].  I tried to supplement with the [Seven-Minute Workout <i class="fas fa-copyright"></i>](https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/ss/the-7-minute-workout-slideshow) for a while, but it took too much out of me at the time, though the overlap between the exercises did convince me to replace Müller's sit-ups with crunches and push-ups with planks.  All that now takes longer than fifteen minutes---currently close to an hour, scattered throughout the day---but that still beats a lot of alternatives, especially given that it costs nothing but the time and I can do any of it while watching television or listening to podcasts.
+
+[^2]:  It turns out that sneezing shouldn't hurt your back...
+
+Critically, though, it all takes so little that I can actually manage to do it every morning and evening, and feel sluggish if I skip the morning.  And because of that, if you want help getting into shape, I can't recommend starting anywhere other than Müller's book, and really wish that I had run across it much earlier in life, so I mention it to folks out there.  And if exercise hasn't interested you, maybe give it a try now, before you need to do it.
+
+I said this last week, but have a happy new year, everybody, and---if you try to use the occasion as a pretext for self-improvement---good luck on your resolutions.
+
+* * *
+
+**Credits**:  The header image is the [June 3<sup>rd</sup>, 1976, **Jon** comic strip](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jon_-_1976-06-03.png) by Jim Davis---yes, the famous cartoonist who still works on (a version of) the same character---in the public domain due to lacking a copyright notice on the strips and periodicals.