Category: General

So – somewhere or other, again, I heard the expression “don’t judge a book by its cover!”

Unbidden, the thought popped into my head. “Why not?”

Much like Mike Rowe likes to go off on “work smarter not harder” as not only trite, but actively harmful, I realized that while there was a kernel of truth buried in there, it had long ago been overused unto pointlessness.

The question comes down to a very simple one – what are you judging?

I’ll grant you this. A cool cover on a book does not mean it was written in a way that you, or I, as readers will find to our individual tastes.

Nevertheless, the cover does serve to tell us many things.

It has the author’s name on it. If we’re familiar with the author, we can already start forming an opinion on how likely we are to enjoy it, and what genre it may or may not be in depending on what the author writes.

It has a title. If that’s chosen reasonably well, it tells us something about the story, its theme, or its tone.

It has a cover image. The details of this image may not match, in any particular, a scene,person, or anything else in the story. Nevertheless, if done well, should evoke the mood of the story, and give us some indication of whether or not spaceships, swords, rayguns, monsters, detectives, druggies, cops, superheroes, or pretentious philosophers are involved.

It will have blurbs.

All of this will be carefully constructed by the publisher in order to get you to look at the book, get interested in the book, buy the book, and read the book.

Ultimately, they want you to come back and buy more, so they want to avoid a total disconnect about what the jacket promises for genre, tone, and topic, and what is inside the book.

In short – you don’t know before you read the book if the story is actually any good, but you can get a lot of information about what kind of story it is, and what the publisher thought was important for you to know about it.

This applies to people as well. You can’t always tell deep things about a persons character, or all of their depth and likes and dislikes, but you can tell a lot from how they dress, how they present themselves, how they speak, and body language.

You may not know everything about them, and first impressions may always be wrong, but the “cover” of how a person chooses to present themselves does tell you a lot about them.

Recently, an article was published on the effectiveness of taking notes by hand on paper vs. via typing/computer.

I found it interesting in part because it reflects something that has been part of my learning and creative habits, that I always assumed were formed mostly by the unavailability of cheap portable computers, and the ready availability of pen, pencil, and paper. Even though typewritten notes were more thorough, there was effectively no impact on the ability to remember facts when questioned a short time later, but there was a noticeable difference – in favor of those taking notes by hand – in how well ideas were retained.

When the experiment was run again, with the results being measured by a test taken a week later, the differences were even more pronounced.

Why is this? I don’t know. Part of me has long felt that the time taken to write things out – since writing is muscle memory – forces you to focus more on what you are writing, and that the need to condense the information simply to keep up as you’re writing it forces you to re-work and better understand the information. You also have the aspect that repetition and/or greater sensory involvement (tactile and / or spatial when it comes to diagrams and notes) helps improve menory and understanding.

The upshot is that I realize I’ve always done something like this. When I want to concentrate and actively understand something, I don’t type out the notes. I doodle, or write them by hand. Or simply don’t take notes so I can utterly focus on a conversation (parent teacher conferences, for example). When studying for advancement exams as a mechanic in the Navy, my practice was to read through once (getting an overall feel for the main poitns presented), to read through with a highlighter annotating the most crucial information, and then to go through the hilighted sections and make my own annotated handwritten notes.

I scored quite well.

Additionally – and this is a habit I see in a number of digital and 3D artists who grew up with ready access to computer-only tools – drawings, models, and sketches almost always start out on paper or other physical media before being scanned in to use as a starting point on the computer. Many many artists only convert to digital after the work is finished. Yes, I expect to see some changes to this with some of the excellent tablet-driven sketching programs, but then these programs work hard to provide the feedback and feel of a piece of paper and pencil/pen/paint.

Finally – whether it’s mapping out roles in a program, or the functions and hardware in a network, that almost always is first done on paper as well, regardless of what drawing tool (Viso, the google drawing app, Omnigraffle, etc.) is used.

(Before starting, I’ll note that I had my friend, and fitness trainer Mike Bronco of Bronco’s Gym and the book Man School go over this to make sure I didn’t advise something utterly wrong. Any mistakes made here are utterly mine.)

This post is a change of pace. Usually I talk tech, the computers and stuff I use, and sometimes even philosophy. I like to make things better for people, and I’ve chosen a certain focus. I don’t wander off of it that often because I’m not planning on becoming an expert 3D modeler, a professional illustrator, or anything else that would normally cause me to post on a completely divergent topic. 

Say, as an exercise coach.

Yet, I do have an interest in my own health, and knowing and pushing your body is part and parcel of developing the will and focus to push your mind, and to not be pushed around in turn, physically and mentally. The body and the mind are inseparable. Learning to better focus and ground one, to ignore distractions, and to make it do what you need it to do even as it protests, makes you better able to do the same for the other.

As a result, over the last few years I decided to make a focused attempt to regain my physical conditioning. I’m older, and never quite expect to achieve the physique I had in my early Navy days, but dammit, I wanted to be better.

One of my friends, Mike Bronco,  is a fitness coach with a ton of experience, and I started working out with him and several other guys out of his garage on a weekly basis. I learned a lot there. I also dug up other sources that I cross-checked, and found reputable. Depending on exactly how fit you want to be, and how intensely you wish to improve, and how much logging you want to do, there are several paths you can take that all work, but they boil down to some simple rules. 

1) It has to be sustainable. Sure, as you get healthier and stronger you may be able to lift more, bike further, etc., but if it’s not something you can find time in your schedule for at least several times a week for the forseeable future because it requires time or gear you do not have regular access to… forget it.

2) It has to be enjoyable (and therefore self-motivating).  But there’s a catch here:  Is it enjoyable for the sake of the movement itself, or, for the results it provides?

If it’s for the results – it won’t work. Stu Mittleman, one of the world’s leading coaches says, “the running itself is the reward – not what the running gives you.”

It has to be joy driven, not reward driven. I love to swim, I love to skate, I hate to run. Without a drill sergeant hanging around day in and day out as in boot camp, you’ll never get me fit by running. I’ll quit. The only time I ever ran regularly was so I could prepare for the Cooper River bridge run – and then I quit immediately after. Working 12-hour shifts in Norfolk I took precious time off to spend more than an hour on the boardwalk rollerblading almost every single day.

3) You don’t need anything fancy. A cheap workbench or exercise mat, and gravity exercises are an excellent place to start. A pull-up bar, and light weights can readily be added, and the collection of weights can be easily and cheaply expanded through second-hand stores as you need them.

4) Do more, but not always.  What? Shouldn’t you try to do more than last time. More reps, more weight, but always try to push a little further. You’re doing this for self improvement, right?

Well, yes. You want to improve. You need to keep pushing. But not. every. workout.

As Mike told me –  DON’T push yourself every time to do more than the last time.  Olympians spend 80% of their time doing the same or even less than last time out.  Only 20% of their work is actually beyond current limits (even less for highly trained athletes).  The reason is simple:  You get stronger when you rest and you can’t sustain high intensity for long periods of time.  The folks who push constantly tend to be injured quite a bit, and eventually burnout and quit altogether.

I’ll note in all honesty that when I originally asked Mike for input I’d said almost the opposite here – always do more – thinking that the following rule, “Don’t overdo it” would be enough.

The thing is, the lower intensity has a purpose. One – you’re already doing it for the sheer joy of it. You’re still operating your body at or near the limits to “keep in practice.” You’re mentally getting comfortable with the new boundaries, and better preparing yourself for pushing them. 

It’s also about form. And stability. it’s about the mind mastering the body.

Why do squats with no weight or small weights instead of something near your max? Because doing it that way allows you to focus on your form. How you move your body. How you brace yourself. Your position. Where the strength flows.

Ditto when you run. Or skate. When you’re not at your limits, you can practice your form. To be more efficient. To be more effective.

Or curls – to work on how your holding and moving the weight rather than expending all of your energy simply lifting it.

For that matter, one of the reasons to do single-leg squats is not to make you stronger. You can effectively squat even less than you think – and a large part of the reason why is because your body is expending a lot more of it’s effort to simply keep you stable.

When you return to doing full, regular squats, you’ll find that you can lift more, because you’ve become more stable.

5) Don’t overdo it either. Didn’t I just say that? Well, yes. It’s important enough to repeat as its own rule. Your body needs time to heal. That is where you actually get stronger, and the workouts just force your body to rebuild. Heavy workouts every day don’t give your body that time, and make you burn out. Pushing too far past your limits simply injures you, and that wastes time and energy recovering just to get back to where you were.

6) When you’re pushing yourself, don’t just work for “x’ reps. If you do ten, and you can comfortably do ten, then you’re not doing enough to force your body to rebuild and to become stronger. Push yourself to your limits. It helps to have friends to watch your back when you do this so that you don’t overdo it.

I told you it was important.

7) Accountability. Most people need this to really improve. Workout with friends, keep a log, do something to make sure you’re improving and not slacking off.

And don’t make it complicated. Whether you’re tracking your workouts or changing out backups, “complicated” means you stop doing it, unless you actually enjoy running the numbers (see Rule 2).

You also pick up other things. Over time you integrate them into a cohesive whole. All sorts of little things over the years, and even more bad information that I had to unlearn to distill into what I know today that made me wish I had good guidance “back then.”

High Intensity Interval Training

The most surprising thing I discovered, and only recently discovered the source of scientific backing for, was that unless you really, really, really want to be a marathon runner, you can literally get most of the cardio conditioning you could ever want simply by working on your strength, and with short series of intensive exercises instead of hour-long stints running, or on a cardio machine. 

As described in the Wiki article, the basic concept is that working for 30, 40, 60 or more minutes at a fairly steady pace is not the most time-effective way to improve cardio conditioning. Instead, short, intensive bursts of intense whole-body exercise, with short interspersed breaks, push your body further, and also give you better conditioning to apply bursts of strength and power since it also improves your body’s anaerobic capability as well.

It is very flexible. It can be done with any excercise that uses large muscle groups: squats, sprints, “burpees”, etc. It can be done with weights ( I recommend without or very light at first) or with gravity alone. It can be done on various cardio machines – though as a practical matter treadmills take too long to change speeds readily. It is also easily logged. 

As mentioned in the Wiki, the basic protocol for the Tabata is simple: 20 seconds of maximal effort, followed by ten seconds of rest, repeated eight times. The total is four minutes. No cheating on the breaks. You should also warm up before, and cool down after. You can use a wall-clock with second hands, any number of gym timers, or one of the available iPhone and Android apps. There are other variants that are not quite as intense, but also effective, and all of them involve alternating fairly intense workouts with “down” periods.

It is very important to be careful with high-intensity intervals if you’re not already in basically OK shape already. A period of at least 6 weeks conditioning is paramount before anyone – especially those new to exercise – should do these high-intensity workouts. Walking is still without a doubt, the world’s best and most effective from of exercise.  It is natural for the body. Walks are fun! In the meantime, start working on your strength, which carries over to cardio a lot more than most people think it does – especially excercises that deal in large muscle groups.

Then, when you get started, instead of doing a strict Tabata, you can start by doing sprint – walks, or adding sprints to your jogs. There are also several other formats that don’t push the intensity anywhere near as high, but that start conditioning you to work at full output for more than a few seconds.

Remember. Rule 5. Don’t overdo it. If you’re doing it every day, you’re doing it wrong. Your body needs a day or two to heal. That’s where you actually get stronger. Not the workout itself. 

If you wish to log your performance, and all of your sets are really maximal effort, then the number of reps or distance covered for the last set is a convenient shortcut for logging your performance and fitness over time.

So as we near the end, you may notice what I have NOT told you.

I haven’t told you which exact exercises to do. There’s no magic combo. Even if there were room in this post, there are plenty of sources that illustrate the available options. Some gyms have weights, some gyms have machines. I prefer weights because of that whole stability thing – the real world doesn’t conveniently give you a brace anytime you have to move something. Some people like to run, some people like to swim.

It’s about what works, and what you enjoy.

As long as some exercises work on strength, some work on balance and stablity (karate and yoga are also good for that…), etc. You will be well rounded and overall “fit” – not just a muscled freak. Some of the excercises should let you establish a steady a rhythm – say running, swimming, or skating or walking – but some should be unpredictable. For example playing basketball, or cross-country running, or adding some footwork to your skating. 

It’s about having a fit life, and being prepared.

One more thing. There’s a rule 8.

8) Have fun!

… even moderation.

One of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn in my life – one I still struggle with daily, is that of realizing that usually, “Good enough” is just that. Good Enough.

The problem of course lies in part that – at least in simple programs and math problems – there is no fuzzy “it works.” Things are either correct, or not. As a child playing with the family printer, sending the correct sequence of bytes to a dot-matrix printer resulted in a pretty graphic. Sending another sequence resulted in a jumbled mess. It’s really easy for an incipient geek or computer programmer to fall for the illusion that everything is that black and white, or that at least in the realms of programming or engineering, everything should be perfect.

Of course, it cannot be. For one, people and natural systems are chaotic. Secondly, even engineering is not that straightforward. I learned this lesson the hard way in the Navy, and the teacher was ironically what would appear to be the most unforgiving tutor: maintenance on power plant and propulsion systems aboard a nuclear submarine.

At first glance, that seems ludicrous. The loss of the Thresher almost single-handedly kicked off the birth of rigorous Quality Assurance paperwork and documentation for every critical safety system on submarines. Later, the Iwo Jima had a steam plant leak that killed ten people due to the use of the wrong bolts in reassembling a high pressure steam valve, which subsequently failed. This resulted in a similar program being instituted for surface ships. Obviously there are times where a lack of attention to detail, doing things a little less “perfect” can have deadly results.

The thing is, “perfect” here depends on the standard you wish to achieve. A NASCAR stock racer will blow the doors off a minivan or Humvee, but would fare poorly on anything but the smoothest pavement, and both would be hopelessly mired in conditions that a Humvee would blow through with ease.

Even when you have a primary purpose, there are conflicting standards. On a minivan, the desire for cargo space and the ability to haul said cargo directly conflicts with a desire for fuel efficiency and handling.

The art of engineering, and it is an art, is an art of putting together design choices such that, when all is said and done, the strengths reinforce each other, as many weaknesses as possible cancel out, and the final result is “good enough” at all of its respective jobs.

You have to get used to it.

With submarine maintenance we lived in two worlds. On the one hand, we thoroughly documented the proper installation of the proper material and size O-ring or gasket, with the proper torque applied to the bolts for seawater and steam valves. We obsessively checked off verifying the status of ballast tank valves before a dive. Mistakes got people killed. We spent hours practicing startup and shutdown procedures, done by the book. We drilled over and over again on casualty procedures to hone our response to any problem… and this is where the break with “perfection” began.

There is an “ideal” way to shut down any piece of equipment on a submarine that is listed in the technical reference. There is also a standard startup and shutdown procedure employed as part of the overall ships procedures. In many cases there are even alternate “emergency” procedures, and these are all found in volumes of engineering manuals and procedural guides. Yet there are often discrepancies between what the maintenance and technical reference state for starting up or shutting down a system, and the ships procedures. These differences exist because a motor, a diesel engine, an oil pump, a condenser does not exist in isolation, but as part of an integrated and interconnected whole.

These “standard” procedures are often modified. Revisions are supplied by the Navy as a whole based on maintenance and other accumulated data. The engineer and CO have wide latitude to promulgate changes (“Standing Orders”) as long as said changes don’t break things. They even have latitude to break things and order people into situations that will kill them in order to get the job done.

Lastly, casualty training has a brainstorming component where many what-if’s are asked, because it’s widely understood that when things fail, they’re not likely to fail strictly in isolation (unless it’s relatively minor), but in ways not strictly covered by the manuals.

In short, when things actually break, we don’t throw out the manual, but instead use it to – hopefully – make wise choices in what we’re actually going to do. And often enough we ended up improvising repairs to keep things running when the “proper” parts and tools were unavailable. Maintenance procedures would be pieced together as needed from multiple references, choosing the appropriate steps and discarding those that did not apply.

What I learned, in short, was that instead of striving to meet an arbitrary, unchanging standard of perfect, I should strive to meet the requirements of my priorities, because the real world keeps changing the “specification” you have to meet. Push comes to shove, accomplishing the mission, followed by keeping the ship running and keeping the crew alive trumped nearly every other procedure written down.

And since you didn’t have the time or resources to do everything as perfectly as possible all the time, you had to choose which things must be done “right” – accomplished no matter what – which things should be done well (“good enough”), and which things not to bother doing in the time available, and to be happy with the result of your decisions.

Of course, it never hurts to strive to be a little bit better at whatever it is that you happen to be doing, each time you do it – that is the path to mastery.