CodeYear Week 3

January 28, 2012 Education / Technology
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I got the email for CodeYear Week 3 on Mon­day, but didn’t get to it until Thurs­day between classes. It took me about 45 min­utes to fin­ish, and was basi­cally a big review of all the mate­r­ial pre­vi­ously covered.

We did have to put the con­cepts together into a very basic dice game, but I hope that’s not what they meant when they said I would be work­ing on a game by the end of the first month. It was a just a ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tor with weighted results — 1s get you 0 “points” while dou­bles get you bonus “points.” There was no user input to speak of.

Hashing

January 27, 2012 Drink / Exercise / Games
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Thanks to Fitoc­racy, I just found out about hash­ing today.

Hash­ing, which is short for Hash House Har­ri­ers. It’s an old British colo­nial game the red­coats would play to get over hang­overs. Basi­cally, one per­son is a “hare” and has a head start on a race. The hare leaves scraps of paper (or chalk marks) as a trail for the “hounds” (other play­ers) to fol­low. It used to be trail run­ning but some groups do urban courses now. There is no fit­ness require­ment because the fast hounds have to slow down to check the trail and so every­one has a fair chance. The best part is that these events usu­ally stop at a pub for the mid­point and always end at one for the fin­ish line.

So it’s a children’s game with beer as a prize. How can you not be excited about that? I don’t think I can do the one tomor­row, but who’s down to check out an upcom­ing hash with me?

Or find one in your area with this site.

Eat Stop Eat

January 25, 2012 Books / Diet / Food / Read-A-Day 2012
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Today, I burned through Brad Pilon’s Eat Stop Eat, another book from the sug­gested read­ing list at Lean­gains.

This one was focused on Inter­mit­tent Fast­ing. The read­ing was short and sweet, but did not leave me com­pletely con­vinced. He did add foot­note cita­tions, so I may look through those. The basic prin­ci­ple is that brief fasts drop insulin and raise glucagon and growth hor­mone, lead­ing to fat loss.

Assum­ing that the sci­ence is solid, I’m not sure how I would imple­ment it. There seem to be a lot of vari­a­tions on IF. The author rec­om­mends 24-​hour fasts once or twice a week. Lean­gains rec­om­mends a 16-​hour (14 for women) fast every day. Fast-​5 is another pop­u­lar IF plan that rec­om­mends a 19-​hour fast every day.

As for the rules — dur­ing the non-​fasting times, you eat as nor­mal. No extra calo­ries in prepa­ra­tion for a fast or as reward after a fast. Dur­ing the fast­ing times, only non-​caloric drinks and sugar-​free gum are allowed. From a strict calorie-​restriction per­spec­tive, I can see how this plan would work. And it would be rel­a­tively easy to do long-​term since there are no types of food restricted, but it seems to fall back to count­ing calories.

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