Health & Beauty

Health

Having some extra time I wanted to find out if I was living healthy and how I could live more healthier.

That made me wonder how do I measure my current ‘health’. I will narrow it down to physical health although mental health has  influence on your physical health.

The only value I know, regarding physical health,  is the BMI which gives you an indication regarding the state of your weight.
However your physical health is not limited to only your weight, the body being a complex system has many other health variables that are not easily seen or measured. This poses a problem, if I can’t measure the exact state of my current health how do I know what to improve?

Ok then let’s look the other way around. What are the available and controllable factors that influence physical health:
- Exercise (types, frequency and intensity)
- Food & Drinks intake (types, frequency)
- Work environment ( type of work )
- Living environment
As you can see these factors are the same for large groups in society. So while you cannot measure your own state of health you can monitor the health of a large group of similar living people. The most common health problems among that group are most likely to develop in yourself. From that information you can adjust your controllable factors to minimize the risk on developing those types of health problems.

The problem with this reverse approach is that the measurements  will always be behind with your current health status. Any current changes in for example the living environment factor can show up a year later or even more.

Here’s some current health improvements that I identified for myself:

1. Exercise focus on flexibility because my work environment consists of sitting in a chair for prolonged times.
2. Eat more fresh fruit and vegetables intake because current preprocessed foods I buy lack the daily nutrient requirements.
3. Work on deep breathing, currently I am not using my full lung capacity e.g. shallow breathing, limiting my abilities.

‘Beauty‘

I have identified several minor appearance flaws and tried to minimize or make them disappear. In order from top to bottom:

• Dandruff: I am using Head and Shoulders 2in1 classic clean which works perfectly for me, however I do not know what the mechanics (or in this case helpful ingredients) behind preventing dandruff are.

• Messy hair: If left unattended my hair tends to be a bit of a mess after drying so I use a little wax to have that bit of extra control over it. I prefer a light form of wax over gel since it feels more natural.

• Thick brows: With the use of a comb and scissors I keep the length of my eyebrows in decent proportion also I use tweezers to remove any excess hair below the eyebrow line to give it a less wild and more cleaner look.   There’s not much more to do about it doing anything more would just make your natural eyebrows look weird.

• Red eyes: Been unable to find the cause of this and solve it. However barely noticeable under normal circumstances.

• Dark circles under eyes: Using a vitamin K and E creme at night to prevent further darkening and reduce the current darkness. however results so far are minimal / barely noticeable.

• Dry cheeks: After washing I get extremely dry cheeks, solved it by using a moisturizer (though comedogenic) after washing.

• Black spots on nose: Caused by pores clogging up with sebum and dead skin cells. Used to use pore strips but those caused scarring. Now  I am using a daily exfoliator with beta hydroxic acid (salicylic acid) which works moderately good in reducing.

• Peeling lower lip: The inner part of my lower lip keeps peeling, unsure about the cause since the rest of the lips seem to work normal. Currently using the lip balm labello during the day and  vaseline moisture locking cream during night. So far moderate success at preventing peeling.

• Back acne: Have not identified the cause  however unnoticeable during daily routines.

• Dry skin on knees and elbows: Cause: probably the frequent rubbing of the skin against the clothing. Solution: Apply vaseline.

• Cold hands/feet: More exercise for better circulation of the blood and keep your core warm (chest/shoulders/stomach) allowing more heat to flow to the extremities.

Sound but no video with windows media player 11 stream and Vista.

Case:
Wanted to watch a streaming lecture but I only got sound and no video.

Setup:
- Firefox
- Windows Media Player 11 (fully updated)
- Windows Vista

Solution:
- Right click on the black video
- Choose options
- Make sure that option ‘detect connection speed’ is chosen (sorry screenshot below is in dutch, but its the option with the red arrow)

Afterthought:
Why can’t I never find these solutions on a microsoft site, I always have to read them on some other forum obscured between all very complicated and tedious other possible solutions. Anyway hope this helps others, took me way too long to figure it out. I hope future computers have enough AI to figure this stuff out for me

Useful Programs in Windows

A list of awesome programs:

Diskdigger: Recover any file!

Euroglot: Multiple language dictionary.

Mathcast: Makes good formatted formulas and insert them into Word (as a pic)

<in progress>

scribble: Windows Live Writer

Changed from w.Bloggar to Windows Live Writer because I couldn’t set wordpress categories in w.Bloggar. So far Windows Live Writer looks very snazzy and should do the job just fine also. I still miss an option to edit previous posts though!

Update:
In Windows Live Writer Build 14.0, while writing a text, pressing enter makes a new paragraph. If you want to have a normal next-line, you have to press shift-enter.  So yeah a big thumbs down for that, since I am really used to using ‘’enter’’ automatically while writing :X

scribble: MMORPG and User Generated Content

Having played WoW for a short time heres what I want to see MMORPG’s should develop more split into two categories that are imho the strongest point of mmorpg’s: Social and Creative.

Social Generated Content

• An MMORPG is basically just a game with a big social element. This means players will likely want to communicate on a broader scale with each other and not just ingame. A lot of this is currently accomplished using community based fora’s, IRC, vent etc. and existing users of MMORPG’s are savvy enough to set these up. But when an MMORPG starts to appeal for the broader audience, integrating these social functions into the game helps improve the game experience for the ‘lazy’ user
• Also with rising popularity of social games like Mafia Wars or Farm Town on Facebook, it might be worth to integrate a mini game linked to the MMORPG in which users can gain XP or items for their character.  (A simple form of grinding)
• Another feature which would increase social buzz is having your avatar 3d image and stats also available off-game on a website. This way players can show and compare their highly customized characters.

Creative Generated Content

• The story told in an MMORPG is of course finite until there comes a new expansion out. Other online games like RTS’s and FPS’s increase their longevity, beside bringing out expansions, by letting users create their own maps. Some of these user generated content games are so good they make it into the next version of the game. The same should be possible for an MMORPG, in the form of alternate servers where players can toy around with their own created instances. This way it doesn’t interfere with the regular game servers.
• Users should be able to express their creative nature, for example let them build their own housing, items etc.

w.Bloggar

First test using w.Bloggar. I was searching for a windows wordpress application which I can use to post quick notes on interesting subjects. Usually I am too lazy to go to the wordpress site, login and write. I’ve been used too twitter apps like tweetdeck so maybe that is why I have become so lazy . Another reason is, I don’t really like typing in the wordpress editor, somehow I’m (maybe irrationally) afraid I’ll lose my text.

scribble: Human Motivation

Blogpost: When can paying people become counterproductive:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/when-can-paying-people-become-counterproductive/

TED: Science of Motivation – Daniel Pink

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y&feature=channel_page

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In short:  Motivation can be internal (sense of purpose,  meaningful) or external (monetary etc.) however  internal motivation works better for tasks where goals, rules, paths and more parameters are fuzzy or not known while external motivation works best when the tasks are simple and clear beforehand.

scribble: LHC presentation

Awesome and easy to understand presentation on the LHC (background and working) by Dr. Shulamit Moed. I mean bringing together beer, science and killer legs beats, hands down, every presentation I’ve ever attended.

http://vimeo.com/5452133/

For the ladies theres rock star scientist Brian Cox:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html

Internet: Information free and payed

Also what I noticed while watching the movie Resolved 2007 was that lots of debaters accessed databases of journals etc. which require subscription fee like EBSCO, Project Muse, Lexis-Nexis etc. to acquire solid material for debate.  Which reminded me of my own search of material at home. Usually I do search information at a PC on my university this grants me (unknowingly) access to most databases of journals the university is subscribed too.  But when I do some late night searching on my home PC, I stumble upon not accessible papers even via Google but more via specialist databases of journals.

I am still not sure if this divide in free and paid knowledge is appropriate for the internet.  I am leaning  towards initatives like arXiv which is based on the open acces movement .

Debating Forms, my 2 cents

I remember participating in a debate where I had to take a position I knew (and everybody else with common sense would know) was wrong.  However setting aside that notion, I started a decent research and armed myself with an abundance of facts and counter-facts. That combined with some slew side stepping of points I couldn’t win and some humor/ridicule I was able to win.  I did feel a little dirty afterwards but also knew that if the opponent had done a little more research and had been a little bit sharper I would have lost. Heres some more debating techniques: http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-propaganda.html

The reason I remembered it was after watching the docu/movie Resolved 2007

In that movie they describe 2 different types of debating

• The classical almost clinical chessform type with clear affirmatives and negatives.  The goal is to win which is determined by amount and strength of arguments/counter arguments.
• The ‘identity-purpose-method’ type or I’d like to call it the pursuit of a solution.  The goal is to learn by understanding the problem and try to solve it using back and forth arguments for both.

In my opinion the first one is suitable for when you are bound to a time frame and you know the question is small enough to resolve within that timeframe. The second one is applicable to larger questions which aren’t that obvious to resolve at glance and require deeper investigation. This will require more time and is less suitable for a timed competition. Basically I see the types as different algorithms to solve a certain question/resolution both provide a good output provided they are used on the right question/resolution.

On a side note, I still find the fast debating style in competitions utterly ridiculous. If we acknowledge that it is a sport and the winner is not always right then it wouldn’t hurt to bring some eloquence and charm back to bring in more spectators.