neo-epicureanist

I have approximately 20% bodyfat, and I weight about 173 pounds. In order to get down to 10% bodyfat, I have to lose about 17.3 pounds. The plan is to lose 18 pounds total in rapid time.

I’m sort of tired of “slow” diets. So, I’m going to go on a serious cutting diet, much like that outlined by Lyle McDonald in his Rapid Fat Loss Handbook. Basically, it is outlined as follows:

• Work out 3 days a week on SS-like program.
• 15 grams of protein (60 calories) each before and after workouts.
• Additionally, consume 15g carbs during/prior to workout.
• Consume an additional 166 grams of protein throughout the rest of the day.
• You get one free meal a week, and one refeed.

Calorie totals: 724 calories from protein daily, 60 calories from workout carbs 3 days/week. The structured refeed and free meal will probably contain, between them, an additional 2500 calories at most. Total calories per week: 7,748. My maintenance: approximately 17,500. Deficit: about 10,000 calories. This equates to about 2.8 pounds lost per week.

Diet for three weeks. Total weight lost: a little over 8 pounds. Break: 1-2 weeks at maintenance (2500 calories). Diet again. Another 8 pounds gone. Boom. Let’s do it.

Today in class our teacher decided to calculate the determinant of a 5x5 matrix. This took a long time.

While she did that, I thought about how many 2 x 2 determinants one has to calculate to find the determinant of an N x N matrix.

It takes N! / 2 calculations of 2 x 2 determinants. The 1 / 2 coefficient is there, I realized (and at this point the teacher was probably just starting work on calculating her third 4x4 matrix determinant), because the truly atomic calculation involved in determinants is really the scalar product — a fully-expanded formula for the determinant of an N x N matrix takes the form of a bunch of products which are added together. Since a 2 x 2 determinant introduces two products, there are N! products in a N x N matrix. Each product, it is easy to note, contains N integers.

This is assuming there are no zeros in the original matrix. A smart cofactor-expander can minimize his work significantly by taking advantage of zeros. Unfortunately, exactly how much he can minimize it seems difficult to calculate, since zeros on outer “rings” (where a ring is the two columns and two rows that one can use to cofactor-expand a matrix) affect whether or not zeros on inner rings are significant.

For instance: five zeros on one side of a 10 x 10 matrix will reduce the work of expanding it by 50% (measured by numbers of product terms). However, if there are three zeros on the next-innermost ring, I am unsure how much more they reduce the total calculation required. Maybe if our teacher was calculating a 6 x 6 (requiring potentially 5,039 discrete operations), I would have had enough time to give the problem the thought it deserves, or at least requires.

I went to the store today and got the ingredients for making some Scooby Snack protein bars. Of course, I bought the cheapest shit I could find instead of natural organic everything. I made one “batch” as described in the recipe, which produced about four “bars,” each about the size of a Clif bar.

Total Cost At Store

• Safeway Oatmeal, 42 oz. @ $3.49
• Bob’s Flaxseed Meal: 16 oz. @ $3.79
• Skippy Peanut Butter: 15 oz. @ $3.29 (sale)
• Safeway Clover Honey: 12 oz. @ $2.89
• Nonfat milk: 1/2 gal. @ $1.79 (sale)
• (Already Owned) Protein Powder: 5 lbs @ $45.99
• Total Spent: $15.25

Materials Used For One Recipe — Four Bars

• 7 Oz. Oatmeal ($0.58)
• 14 Oz. Protein Powder, by volume ($8.00!! I think this number is bullshit, I didn’t use 20% of the container. Better estimate: six scoops, totaling $3.46)
• 3 Oz. Peanut Butter ($0.66)
• 3 Oz. Honey ($0.72)
• 2 Oz. Milk ($0.06)
• 2 Oz. Flaxseed meal ($0.47)
• Total: $5.95
• Per Bar: $1.48

What about macronutrients? The entire recipe has approximately 2448 calories, 246g carbs, of which 35g is fiber, 78g fat,and about 200g protein. That puts each bar at 612 calories and 50g protein, meaning that I probably won’t eat a whole “bar” in a single go. In the end, the bars are less protein-cost-efficient than skim milk but they’re a cut above almost anything you can get at college cafeterias, and very inexpensive (note that if you lived off them, it would cost about $5 a day if you were dumb enough to not buy in bulk).

Shall not include those most-commonly-known utilities (such as those contained in GNU coreutils. Organized by category.

Please note that these are Atomic Processes which are not necessarily provided by Atomic Utilities.

Images and Related Media. Advanced editing not included.

• Screenshots - scrot: scrot screenie.jpg. imagemagick: import -window root screenie.jpg.
• Rotating Image - imagemagick: convert -rotate 90 old.jpg new.jpg (rotates clockwise).
• Change Image Format - imagemagick: convert old.bmp new.jpg.
• Resize Image - imagemagick: convert -sample 420x340 old.jpg new.jpg.
• View Image - imagemagick: display img.jpg. feh: feh img.jpg.
• View Thumbnails of Directory - feh: feh --thumbnails --index-info "%n" (includes filenames of images).

Internet Tools.

• Downloading File - wget: wget http://www.example.com/file.jpeg.
• Uploading File - ompload: ompload file.jpeg.
• Uploading File To Location - scp: scp file.jpeg user@luketurner.org:files/file.jpeg.
• Uploading Text - ompload: echo “this is text!” | ompload. sprunge.us: echo “this is text!” | curl -F “sprunge=<-” http://sprunge.us.
• Instant Messaging - bitlbee: with your IRC client.

I’m a big fan of Arch Linux. This is primarily because, unlike Windows, Arch Linux encourages the use of single programs that perform atomic processes. This is probably due in part to Arch’s following The Arch Way, but it owes more to Arch Linux’s reasonable adherence to the Unix philosophy, often abbreviated “Do one thing and do it well.”

An atomic process is a single task that can’t be reasonably broken down into further sub-tasks that a user might wish to use independently. For example, consider the new tool I was recently looking at: cap.sprunge.us. Basically it takes a screen capture and sticks it in a specific URL so you can share your current desktop or whatever (for instance, cap.sprunge.us/example).

This tool is very interesting to me because it makes uploading screenshots very convenient. However, it does not adhere to the idea of a program doing one thing: creating a screenshot and uploading it is not an atomic process. Instead, we want a tool to create screenshots (scrot or imagemagick) and a tool to upload (omploader or a simple sftp copy to your domain). Creating a screen capture is not something that can be broken down into further tasks that are independently useful — it is atomic. Uploading a file is also a relatively atomic process.

Sure, scrot screen.jpg && ompload screen.jpg is not quite as nice as a simple cap, but if why install cap just so you can do something that you can already do with two programs you have installed? Silly. Hell, just put this in your ~/.bashrc: alias cap="scrot desktop_shot.jpg && ompload desktop_shot.jpg && rm desktop_shot.jpg" and you have similar functionality already.

I realize this may not have convinced you, and that’s okay. Next up is a list of programs that provide nice atomic processes. In order to avoid boring the Linux adept, the list is not to include standard Linux utilities.

Tonight I suddenly felt like I was desperately lost. I don’t think it’s my fault, exactly — my getting lost. We’re designed to get lost. Not physically designed, but culturally designed. Not really lost, either, because we’re guided. The guiding is probably the problem.

What do you say when someone asks you what you want out of your life? What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? Many people want wealth or security or love. Some people want happiness, but that’s vague to the point of dodging the question. If you’re like me, your answer varies. Peace of mind, that is, freedom from desire. Answers. Self-actualization — the realization of your potential. All of the above.

I consider these things to be important — more important than money, or success, or security. Well, I forgot about that recently: how important they are. I’ve thought about it more than ever in the past few months, but I don’t think I’ve really been thinking, just circlejerking. All the while, I’ve followed society’s direction. The nice thing about the path laid out by society is that it hands you a direction all figured out already, so you don’t have to think about it. If you do think about it, society’s path seems insufficient. It certainly isn’t working for most people who take it, so why would I expect it to work for me? I’m applying to internships left and right. I’m seeking employment after college. I’m working hard or hardly working to get good grades.

I think I need a different path. Well, I know I do. But it’s hard to give up the security of the American Dream, because even if it doesn’t work out nobody blames you for it — you get to be a victim. That’s always nice. And besides, what would another path be? What kind of choices can give you what you want in life?

Sometimes I think it’s the little things. Taoist masters could be found in any profession at any time, in any place. It’s not what they did for a living that made them who they are, it’s how they lived. I think it’s time to pay more attention to how I live, and how I think about things.

I like to say that I seek Answers with a capital A. Am I really looking for Answers? Where do I expect to find them? Science provides answers and answers can lead to Answers but there is bound to be an easier way. Answers lead to understanding and understanding brings peace, and understanding maybe also fulfils potential, or so I’m hoping.

Anyways, maybe it’s narcissistic to think that I would be the one who breaks free of society’s path and forges my own trail into the future (exclamation!) but I don’t know if there’s anything special about me or not. I don’t think it really matters, anyway.

I just read an interesting blog post called The Emptiness of American Consumerism. I didn’t especially like it, and I shall use it to explain some of my big issues with the anti-consumerism movement (and was hinted at in a couple of very well-known movies from 1999).

TEoAC (as I heretofore dub the blog post in question) begins with an imaginary anecdote describing in very negative terms a life which appears to consist primarily of working and shopping: the very paragon of a vicious cycle. Such an anecdote serves as a lifestyle to rally against, however, it is also one which is remarkably unrealistic (and not objectively bad). The picture thus painted is sufficiently bleak to produce a sudden recoiling in the reader, who of course doesn’t want such a life for themselves.

Anti-consumerist manifestos almost always start out this way. It’s by painting this exceptionally negative picture that consumerism is made into a specter whose presence converts regular people into spineless automatons. However, such an appeal to fear does not serve to help people understand what consumerism truly is, any more than a picture of a naked man standing on a rock under a waterfall tells us about the nature of an ascetic.

In short, a presentation of an imaginary case of people who are clearly compensating for a lack of emotional completeness with their possessions is an insufficient argument for a sweeping decrial of consumerism. Sorry, TEoAC. You’ll have to try harder than that if you want to convince anyone.

Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs): Expected to be primarily detailed explanation and derivation of formulae learned in first day of PDEs. No mandatory homework. The teacher seems to cater the class to the lowest common denominator, that is, someone who doesn’t like math. Difficulty: 4/10.

Partial Differential Equations (PDEs): Without background in ODEs, may be difficult to keep up. Seems like a good teacher. Graded homework. Difficulty: 6/10.

Mathematical Biology: Expected to know ODEs already. However, the small class size (11 students) is likely to result in a more informal setting which will reduce perceived difficulty. Much of the assigned work is based on Mathematica computation. Difficulty: 5/10.

Intermediate Spanish I: Extensive assigned homework, and in-class discussions in Spanish. Expected to learn about 20-30 vocabulary words a week. Homework estimated to be one hour per hour of class. I apparently don’t remember how to speak Spanish for shit. Difficulty: 9/10.

Design I: Focused on “projects” which are artistic but not requiring much talent (e.g. cut and paste, basic abstract sketching, etc.) Teacher claims class will be “easy” — I’m inclined to agree. Difficulty: 5/10.

Computer Science II: Oriented around C++ programming. Primarily graded on tests and programming assignments. Teacher is low-level “systems programmer” who told us to use vim or emacs. I don’t have any experience with C++, but I know more about low-level programming than your average comp sci newbie. Difficulty: 6/10.

Christian Leadership: Apparently, focuses on both halves of its name equally — textbooks on both Christianity and leadership (think Peter Drucker). Taught by a Fr. Kuder, an excellent teacher whom I’ve had before — I got an A in his class. Not much expected homework. Difficulty: 4/10