Dr. X's Free Associations

Walking or Running For Calorie Burning?

Is rededication to exercise one of your New Year's resolutions? Are you thinking about what to do for cardio and calorie burning? If so, the following might interest you.

In another blog, a discussion of running versus walking came up. One commenter said that walking and running burn the same amount of calories per hour. I offered that they don't burn the same amount per unit of time, they burn the same amount of calories per unit of distance. Basic physics. Moving a specified mass over a specified distance requires the same amount of energy regardless of speed. And since runners generally cover more ground per unit of time than walkers, they usually burn more calories per unit of time.

The commenter responded that my observation is "predicated on the assumption" that runners move faster than walkers and the commenter insisted that they generally don't.

I'm sure some walkers walk faster than some runners; I was speaking generally. I think they move faster on average, but I never studied the question.

Vintage New Year

Venice Beach, CA

Obesity Associated With Neuronal Injury

That's the claim:

After humans and rodents eat a high-fat diet, their brains begin to show evidence of injuries in just 24 hours. If they keep eating that yummy fatty stuff continuously, the area of their brains that regulates weight — the hypothalamus — will show evidence of serious inflammation and structural damage.[...]

That may help explain, researchers said, why dieting and exercise often lead right back to a "set weight" for obese individuals.

"Obese individuals are biologically defending their elevated body weight," said Dr. Michael Schwartz, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington and the senior author of the paper to be published in the Jan. 3 edition of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Eager to explain why that set point seems to exert so much control over a person's weight, Schwartz said, numerous researchers have speculated about the existence of "fundamental changes" to brain neurocircuits that control energy balance.[...]

Schwartz said the findings show "solid evidence of a change affecting the key hypothalamic area for body weight control with the potential to explain the problem."[...] "We did not prove cause and effect between the hypothalamic neuron injury and defense of elevated body weight — that comes next," Schwartz said.

Vintage New Year: 1944

New Year celebration at the Hollywood Canteen. Tarawa veteran Seaman First Class Clayton Johnson, Dolores Moran and Cpl. Bing Crosby wishing everyone a Victory New Year for 1944.

Vintage SoCal New Year

Somewhere in Southern California, 1933.

Vintage Photos: 1952

Christmas morning in the "drunk tank." Downtown Los Angeles.

Township Bans Water Fluoridation

Ed Brayton:

A local Tea Party politician in Hartland Township, Michigan has managed to convince that township’s board of trustees to ban the addition of fluoride to area water supplies. Seriously, have I died and gone to the 1960s?

Maybe he's a dentist who needs a bump in his fillings revenue.

This is Ingenious

Rob Walker at the Atlantic, via Retriever:

When a set of online teasers for a new camera called the Lytro appeared earlier this year, you could have been forgiven for seeing the invention as just another gimmick. The camera’s attention-grabbing feature is a kind of after-the-fact autofocus: with a click, any blurry portion in a picture can be snapped into sharpness—another step in the march of idiot-proof photography. [...]

The underlying technique is called “light-field photography.” A traditional camera, of course, captures light reflected off its subject through a lens and onto a flat surface. Proper focus is important to ensure that the image you get is the precise slice of visual reality you want. But “computational photography,” pioneered by Marc Levoy of Stanford University and others, takes a different approach, essentially using hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene and processing the results into a many-layered digital object. One of Levoy’s former students, Ren Ng, added the twist that resulted in the Lytro: instead of using multiple cameras, he integrated hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.

The upshot is a photograph that’s less a slice of visual information than a cube, from which you can choose whichever layer would make the most pleasing two-dimensional image for printing and framing. But you can also leave the picture as it is—a three-dimensional capture suitable for digital display or distribution—and let others do the fiddling. Rather than a definitive, static image, a light-field visual object is intrinsically interactive.

Not mentioned, but apparent, by combining with Photoshop, you could select parts from different layers and merge into one image, no doubt achieving some startling effects. Yes, it's more idiot proofing, but so what? You still need an eye for light and composition and a good photographer will still do better than a rank amateur like me, even with all that technology.

Major Boo-boo at the New York Times

Chicago Tribune, Reuters:

A New York Times employee misfired an email offering discounted subscriptions to customers who had recently canceled the newspaper, sending it to more than 8 million people instead of the 300 intended recipients.

Questions about the emails hit Twitter on Wednesday, but it took the newspaper several hours to figure out what happened.

Initially the newspaper said it had not sent out those emails.

“The email is spam and was not sent from The New York Times,” company spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha had told Reuters.

She later apologized for the mix-up: “We regret this error and we regret our earlier communication noting that this email was spam.”

The incident spawned a parody Twitter account, NYTSpam. "Cizali$, anyone? I'm tired of trying to sell papers," it said in one of its early Tweets.

I received one of these emails minutes before reading this story. I assumed it was spam and didn't open it because it referred to me as a subscriber, and I'm not a subscriber. In fact, I was going to post an alert for NY Times subscribers to watch out for fake Times spam.

Roving Mobs Return to Chicago Mag Mile For Some Amusement and Terrorism

I understand that the mayor and police chief don't want to scare people away from a ritzy, showcase shopping and dining district during the holiday season, and merchants don't want to scare off visitors, but some Chicago cops who say they were there are reporting that multiple, large mobs of teens were bullying, bumping into, provoking, stealing, threatening, groping women and generally acting like uncivilized idiots in the area of North Michigan and Chicago, and over on Rush, earlier this week. It sounds like a repeat of last summer's "vacation fun."

Not a peep about it in the print press yet.

This comes from Second City Cop, where in between a certain amount of the inevitable cop dumbassery*, there is also plenty of honest reporting. I trust the cops on this one.

* dumbassery: "Nothing short of carpet bombing will ever solve Englewood."