Shack Attack

Whiteboard Art Part One: Portraits of a Shackelford

2010-09-04T10:11:36-07:00

I use individual whiteboards to check my students' comprehension. If they use them well, staying on task and working quickly, I give them a minute or two to doodle. One of their favorite subjects is yours truly.

For comparison, here's an actual picture of me:

More art coming soon!

TaskRabbit: One-off Personal Assistants for City Folk

2010-08-31T12:18:11-07:00

Last night, a friend told me he's been part-timing for TaskRabbit, a service that connects people with free time with people who need stuff done. How it works (according to the site):

1 - Sign up and post! When you post a task, you'll describe it, indicate when it needs to be done & set the price you'll pay.

2 - Like magic, you'll hear from a runner who wants to help. They may accept your price or counter with a price they believe is appropriate.

3 - Your runner does your task! If your runner pays for anything while doing your task (like groceries they pick up for you), you can reimburse them through our site.

4 - Once your task is complete & you have paid your runner, you rate them to indicate your level of satisfaction.

He's delivered urgent mail, picked people up from the airport, bought groceries and supplies, and done other miscellaneous gophering tasks, for an average of $12-20 each.

If you sign up with this link, you get $10 to spend free on the site, which is probably enough (or almost enough) to get a runner in your area to do something for you. Pretty cool! Need some OJ from the store? Find a restaurant for a date? Have someone come to your house and help you with minor computer frustrations? Go spend your free money.

The Human Body and Energy Equilibrium

2010-08-26T12:58:02-07:00

Heard some woman at the supermarket yesterday obsessing over the number of calories in some crackers. Made me think of this:

Let’s say there is a person whose caloric intake is 2700kcal per day, which is quite the likely number. 2700kcal/day makes a total of 1000000kcal per year. That’s 10 million kcal in a decade or roughly 12 tons of food.

For a person to keep his weight within 5kg in the course of a decade he must have an accuracy in controlling energy intake and expenditure of 0,4% or 11kcal/day.

Having this kind of accuracy is impossible. 11kcal is the equivalent of a medium sized fart. What this shows, is that it is highly unlikely that energy balance is matter of cognitive control. We cannot tell people to count calories because it rests on an assumption of an inhuman accuracy equivalent to that of a very, very accurate machine.

via a great post on human metabolism at Ramblings of a Carnivore. It's more or less a restatement of Gary Taubes' ideas, but they're ideas worth restating.