Catching Up

Okay, so my early results of the Great Experiment are this: I got tired of not listening to specific stuff when I wanted. It does appear that the shuffle function of media player doesn't really assign a weight by play count. Oddly enough, the two bands that were played the most were the Beatles and Black Sabbath.



I'm trying to figure out why Michael Jackson's death has evoked such a sense of melancholy in me, as I was never really much of a fan. Sure I have Thriller, and I enjoy listening to it, but I was never rabid about owning every piece of music he'd ever released, like I occasionally get about other bands. One of the articles I read offered some clarity and insight into my sense of loss: Generation X is losing its icons. Maybe not its heroes, but the people who inspire nostalgia in Gen Xers. Boomers remember where they were when JFK was shot and listening to Sergeant Pepper for the first time. I remember listening to Thriller when I was a kid, and watching the premier of the video. I remember where I was when the shuttle blew up.



I look at the Boomers and realize that they were the generation that threw their opportunities away, in defiance of authority. Thanks to this, our generation never had any opportunities. We came from broken homes, or from uninvolved parents--parents who were still following the "if it feels good, do it" philosophy, often at the expense of proper parenting. Our generation has had to find ways to rediscover the values our parents never imparted to ensure we teach those to our children. We learned our lessons of love from romantic comedies, not from our "free love" elders. They had their Easy Rider and Peyton Place. We had The Breakfast Club and The Celestine Prophecies.



So hats off to Wacko Jacko. You were definitely iconographic of Gen X.

Grampa Art: R.I.P.

I found out this week that my grandfather died. It is a sad occasion. He was my last surviving blood-relative grandparent. (I have a grandmother left--my maternal grandfather's second wife. I barely remember his first wife, my actual grandmother. I was very young when she died, so I've always just accepted my step-grandma as my maternal grandmother. She is the coolest old lady ever anyway.) Art was also one of the few relatives on my dad's side of the family I liked. He always made time to take me fishing.

Art lived to the ripe old age of 96. You will be missed, gramps. For you practicing catholics out there, if you could say a few rosaries for him, it would be appreciated.

Step Banking

I offered to explain this concept in an earlier post. The idea of step banking does not apply only to arthritics; it may apply to anyone with bad feet, legs, etc. So I've been told.

Imagine, if you will, that you are allotted only so many pain-free walking steps each day. Say this number is 5,000 (this number is hypothetical and arbitrary, being used for the purpose of explanation; your "number" will be different based on the factors of your infirmity). You can walk that many steps in a day without having your feet (legs, etc.) hurt.

Now, if you do go past this allottment, this does not necessarily mean your feet will start hurting right there. What it tends to do, actually, is subtract from the amount of painless steps you can take the next day. To continue our illustration, say you walk 6,379 strides in a day. This means you will only get 3,621 steps the next day (Day 1: 5,000-6,379= -1,379, which is subtracted from your base total for the next day; Day 2: 5,000-1,379=3,621 treads you start the day with). You do not get those 1,379 footfalls back. If, that next day, you walk your usually allotted 5,000 paces, you will only get 2,242 steps the day after (Day 3: your adjusted base total of 3,621 carries over, because there was no opportunity to replenish your stock of footfalls. Thus, Day 2 works out as: 3,621-5,000= -1,379; Day 3: 3,621 carries over as base, which means 3,621-1,379=2,242. I know, it's complicated.)

So how do you replenish your stock of viable steps? By resting. To again hypothetically quantify, you could say that for every hour of rest, you get 200 steps back. If you rest for four hours, you get 800 painless footfalls returned. If you rest for eight, you get 1,600. If we apply this to our example:

Day 1: You walk 6,379 steps.
Day 2: You're allotment of steps for today would be 3,621 strides, but you rested for six hours for a gain of 1,200 strides returned to you. Therefore, you would have 4,821 pain-free treads alotted for today.

Certain activities enact a penalty applied to your amount of steps. For instance, in my case, stairs would equal 1 1/2 footfalls each, and each tread taken on uneven ground would equal two steps on a flat surface. Standing in one place, for me, is also bad. Every minute of standing still eats into my allotted paces for the next day. To continue our example:

Day 1: You walk 6,379 steps.
Day 2: After resting for six hours, you are alotted 4,821 strides for today. You walk 3,000 on the floor in your office and home, but had to do some field work, and walked 1,500 paces in a grassy, gopher-ridden field. Those 1,500 footfalls in the field are equivalent to 3,000 normal steps. Instead of 4,500 strides used, you have thus taken, for the purposes of banking, 6,000 steps that day.
Day 3: You have 3,821 steps banked again for this day. If you had walked all your paces on day 2 on flat ground, you would have reset to your normal 5,000.

You cannot build up a reserve of possible treads for the next day by resting extra. You will always start out with 5,000. Also, when resting, the longer you are continuously off your feet, the more effective it is. If you rest for four hours, but do so by getting up every ten minutes, you will pretty much negate the effect.

Now, mind you, there are no actual numbers involved. But when you've had your affliction long enough, you'll know. You'll be able to tell exactly which footfall will start inhibiting your ability to move the next day. My advice at that point is go sit for a few.

More on the Great Experiment

I came across this interesting article while looking into the concept of randomness in playlists:

http://www.cnet.com.au/itunes-just-how-random-is-random-339274094.htm

My own experiment is much simpler--having cleared and repopulated my library, I'll be shuffling the playlist, consisting of all songs in my library, everyday for the next 30 days, and seeing what my playcounts look like at the end of that time.

The Great Experiment

Okay, so I've reset my playcount on my media player again, cleared my library and replaced all the files. So now we'll see if my shuffles are a little more random and not influenced by weighing the playcount to make it appear that I prefer certain songs more than others. (It shouldn't anyway, since I almost always have it on shuffle, meaning that the player has played those songs more than others all by itself.)

The goal here is to not hear the same songs over and over, to have a balanced shuffle, which seems to get more out of balance as days go by. Not that I actually think that there's some guy monitoring my playlist from Microsoft headquarters. I'm just attempting to understand what factors influence the frequency that a song appears in a shuffled playlist. I'll post my findings when I have some.