Fitness, Now Start Exercising

Ok, you got your diet down. You're feeling way better. If you did it right then you even have your own favourite multivitamin. Clearly you are not super toned and jacked, though, and you know you have to exercise for that. However, it does prove to be a little daunting to figure out where to start when you see all sorts of people doing all sorts of things for their exercise. So first things first, we have to define your goal!

Are you trying to improve for a sport? Then maybe you should figure out which exercises will supplement that the best and work with that. Or maybe this is something more general, like getting buff or strong, or maybe you want to be able to run for days on end. Unfortunately, you can't train all these types of fitness at once.

Endurance
Do you want endurance? Well that means you are going to be trying to stimulate your type I muscle fibers, AKA your slow twitch muscle fibers. These fibers aren't as large as their fast twitch counterparts but they do have their own unique role of allowing one to sustain stress for a long period of time. In order to gain endurance you will also want to be working on your heart, generally in the form of cardio. If you want to do weight training then you'll probably be focusing on doing high reps with less weight.


Strength and Speed
So yeah tearing phonebooks in half and bending iron rods with your bare hands is pretty cool too, so how do you get that? Well, strength, speed and explosiveness is generally found in the form of fast twitch muscle fibers. Sorta the opposite of endurance, you'll want to focus on doing sprinting and very heavy resistance for only a few reps to gain strength. Some people shy away from this thinking they aren't making any gains because their muscles aren't sore, but that's because they have a misconception of how strength and muscle works together.

You see, muscles do not produce linear strength. This is why the 150 lb powerlifter can outlift the 300 lb bodybuilder. First, lets look at the flight or fight response. When you are undergoing an adrenaline rush you get stronger, faster and smarter. If you have the capability of doing this, then clearly you are not using 100% of potential otherwise. That's because your CNS restricts you from preforming at a level which may damage you. It doesn't want you to bench 315 because that's *scary*. So what you need to do to get stronger isn't really build muscle, but rather convince your CNS that you are capable of doing what it thinks you can't. This comes from doing really, really heavy, hard things.

Cardio
The heart is your most important muscle. Having good cardiovascular function will provide a plethora of benefits ranging from immune system strengthening to improved social activity. No matter which other type of fitness you pursue you should always do some sort of running/jogging/biking/whatever in order to keep your heart strong. The human heart beat is finite!

Flexibility
Similar to how you only use part of your muscular capacity, you only stretch as far as your body thinks is safe. Flexibility is a very easy part of fitness to implement within one's routine. Convenient times to stretch or do yoga would be in the morning and after (not before) exercise. If you do any form of stretching other than dynamic you risk tearing soft muscle tissue, which could lead to injury during exercise.


There's are lots of different pursuits that you can have with your fitness, but as long as you focus on the right areas you should be able to apply the same simple concepts to all of them.

Did you hear about that Egypt thing?

So as some of you may know, I am 100% Egyptian. There is quarrel in my home country and it is my duty to evangelize those of our situation! Doom may come! But together we are strong!


First lets get some facts out:
Hosni Mubarak is the President of Egypt at the moment. Some people hate him. Some like him.
Riots and Protesters are abundant within the streets of Egypt.
They even took away Facebook.

So what's going on over in Egypt? Well, besides the poverty, unemployment, and a surplus autocratic governmental corruption, people can't even use Twitter any more! Which was blocked due to people collaborating protests against Mr. Mubarak. Some slightly less humane measures are being taken such as tear gas and baton beat downs, whatever. Freaking internet access country-wide was abrogated and thus many organizations and companies that were not even involved with primitive protesting are suffering due to this cat fight. At least they're letting the relatively affable military handle this instead of the police.

Anyways, enter stage left, USA. Aside from Israel, Egypt, parasitically, receives more aid from the USA than any other country. More than 1.5 billion dollars.  Naturally, we're marching over there to see what's going on with our investment. Some of them, including reporters and human rights activists, are getting arrested and thrown in jail, or even being beaten by "gangs" that support the President. Anyways, back to the elite. Obama has been taking some actions to communicate with Hosni in attempts to persuade him to resign, allowing an interim, or provisional, government to be formed ... kinda like the one in Iraq. Either that or transfer the power of the government over to VP Omar Suleiman. A situation worth following.


With possible more than 300 people dead and a lot more wounded we have quite an itch on our planet.

Book: The Dumbest Generation

So I was perusing Barnes and Noble when I had perceived a peculiar book protruding out of my Mathematics section. I quickly procured the culprit for further interrogation when I noticed that it was a book detailing why people underneath the age of 30 are stupid. Baffled, I had to prod further, which promptly led to me polishing the book off on the spot.

At first I was highly skeptical seeing as we are, in fact, the information generation. In addition to that we score higher on IQ tests than ever before. However, the book happened to boast a very wide base of statistical information (probably why it was in the math section) that made it hard for me stop reading. Though, a lot of these statistics (there were a lot so I'm not going to list them) really seemed like they were only partial evidence and neglected other information. It's fairly easy to get information to fit a theory (instead of the other way around), after all. After reading it I do find a lot of the points made hard to refute.

Affirmative
There was a lot of stress on the way that today's youth allocates their time. Natural, seeing as most of us are guilty of watching too much television or playing too many unproductive games. However, because we prefer playing those games and watching those movies instead of furthering our education the industries have reflected this behavior. This is a poisonous downward trend, but should eventually taper off.

Negative
Ugh, books, really? I know I'm writing about a book right now and clearly I do read books, but this book really stressed that people don't read books anymore. A large amount of that statistic could easily be attributed to all the alternative sources we have. Fiction is easily replaced by stories within video games and movies, which are definitely becoming more intellectual. Nonfiction is even more easily replaced by Wikipedia. Furthermore, games require one to make decisions and plan out their agenda whereas books do not. Books are becoming obsolete.

Especially classics. They're classics. We have vastly superior contemporaries. Screw the 20's.


Affirmative
Nobody really seems to know much about what's going on with the government or with the world in general. That sorta segregates the youth from political decisions that they would have otherwise been able to be a part of. We, our generation, is going to be running this country and every single city in it. Look at your friends, which one do you trust to do it? Got one? Good, now how many more can you count?


Negative
This book also tends to focus on the USA in regards to other countries. Which is kinda weird to me seeing as we have all kinda meshed into a single community. One that fights with their neighbors, but a single community nonetheless. We have very good methods of information exchange and communication that allow us to easily breach cultural and physical boundaries when it is wished. Segregation of countries is a very classical approach to demographics.

Extremes
There is also the total exclusion of extremes in this book. Back in the 50's if somebody wanted to be a mathematician then they have a physically limited ability to study math. This is not true in the information age. If somebody wanted to be an amazing mathematician, there is nothing stopping them from knowing it all. If somebody really wanted to become an expert at absolutely anything they wouldn't be stopped, and because of this capacity the chances that somebody will develop an extreme ability with a given subject is bound to be much better.


Check this book out if you'd like, but take it with a grain of salt and don't be too quick to internalize all the skewed presentation of the statistics.

6 Parts of a System

After brushing up on Aristotle's 'Parts of an Object' I decided to assemble and supply diction for my own, similar rendition, titled

6 Parts of a System

First lets define a couple things
Universal System: The all encompassing entity of the mechanical universe.
Isolated System: An arbitrarily designated subsystem within the universal system.

Now let us carry on...

1. Location
First and foremost it does well to designate what the coordinates and boundaries are within a system. Whether this is universal, galactic, global, local, or inside a given room or not is up to the person defining the system.


2. Time
There will always be a birth followed inevitably by a death when it comes to systems. Very literally, the system of one's person will eventually cease to exist. This is true with everything and therefor applying time boundaries as well as physical boundaries makes a lot of sense.


3. Relation
There is going to be some sort of reason why an isolated system is partitioned from the universal system. For example, when handling most matters on our planet we don't consider what other planets might think about it, since we can only work within our realm anyways. Another example may be that we want to look at how Facebook works and therefor would define an isolated system for substances related to Facebook. The relationship between the entire system would be that they all have something to do about Facebook.

4. Substance
There are going to be items within a given system. For example, our global isolated system includes countries, oceans, mountains, people, paperclips, and buttons. A chemist could sum this stuff up much easier in terms of which chemicals are naturally found on Earth, however, we have linguistics to help us with this. In linguistics we take arbitrarily defined sets of atoms (like those within a button) and classify them. So lets say that within the isolated system that is the room that you're sitting within there are the substances {You, Desk, Computer, Chair} etc. These substances also have certain properties or...

5. Attributes
This one is easy. Colours, weight, height, sound, smell, taste, etc. Basically all the properties of a substance that you can assimilate with your senses. Next!

6. Activity
Last but certainly not least there is activity. Look around you and you'll notice that some things are animate and some things are inanimate. There's also activity that you can perceive quite so adeptly with your senses including gravity, drafts, and radioactive decay, for example. Also, there are two types of activity. Intraactivity and Interactivity. I made these words up. Intraactivity would be all activity that is happening within an isolated system, such as your heart beating within the system of your body, whereas interactivity is activity that is happening to an isolated system or from an isolated system. For example, if you say you're room is an isolated system and a car drives into it then you just suffered some serious interactivity.


Khrisstian: 1
Aristotle: 0

Fitness, From the Top

I find myself training people or giving advice to people about fitness as part of my daily life. Something that I can never really fit in, but find to be the most important part for any new fitness enthusiast, is how to get your diet down. The reasons this is the initial issue that needs to be fixed is attributed to the following

Why begin with your diet?

1. Muscles aren't Everything

Alright, lets say you're the person that eats whatever you want and goes to the gym (also probably whenever you want) in order to build fitness. You probably even see some progress. Well, if you're not eating well while your muscles are getting enough fuel to get bigger and stronger (bigger probably because you're just now filling out your natural frame. Stronger because your CNS was so inefficient before) then your organs are probably having some difficulty keeping up. This is because every day you work out your organs have to deal with the breakdown of your body as well and aren't getting all the proper support they need. You can't keep this up for long before your body rejects you from making any more progress.


2. Muscle is Rebuilt in the Kitchen

Going to the gym does not necessarily make you stronger. For example, when fresh to working out and when after working out one can no longer perform as well athletically. That's because the person's muscle fibers are all ripped up and need some time healing back together. The only way they can do that is if they are properly fueled. This comes from a good diet. Another note, if you tear your fibers up too bad don't expect them to heal up very quickly. So if you work out biceps every day a week, there's the reason you still have 13" Pythons. ;)

3. Healthier

Because everything you do will be effected by the support of a good diet whereas only certain operations are effected by the support of good exercise; most notably, your capacity to experience and internalize information related to fitness objectively.

4. Required

No matter where somebody start with their fitness pursuits, this is always something that they will be required to eventually do.



How to diet


Step 1: Organization

One can't expect to have very luxurious understanding and success when it comes to projects, including a diet plan, unless they're organized. Keep track of what you eat. Now don't go overboard and try to write down every calorie and every type of calorie if you don't want to. Just do something that works for you. maybe that's just taking a glance and what's on the label and trying to remember it. You must however, be reading nutrition facts. ;)

Step 2: Information

The best result will always come from the most informed decision. Before you try throwing together a random diet based on what people tell you and the media shows you it does well to read a tad; not talking about reading all the latest gimmicks and what _exact_ food may be something to avoid, but rather the physiology and science behind what you are eating. Here's a inquisition method you could use to progressively learn relevant information:

1. What does protein do? What about carbs? And now fat?
2. What are all the types of fats? Trans? Saturated? Unsaturated?
3. Complex carbs vs. simple carbs?
4. What do amino acids do? Enzymes?
5. How long does it take for certain foods to digest?
6. What are ways digestion might be slowed down or sped up?
7. What are all these micronutrients and vitamins for?
8. Can I overdose on different vitamins?

You better have your own questions by here. :P


Step 3: Motivation

You probably won't like doing things you don't want to, so a little motivation can help. If you want you can keep track of your measurements, weight, exercise stats, etc. Other things like how fast you can solve a Sudoku (lame) puzzle are effected by health, too, keep in mind. Learn some neat quotes, whatever. Just keep yourself interested! (I do this by learning new things in the field (: )



By the way. You can use those same three steps for doing anything.

You're welcome (:

Destroy the Village

I just indulged in a physics game that I found on http://www.physicsgames.net/

Seeing as this was a flash game I don't want to be overcritical of the graphics and audio. The graphics were not in a very aesthetic fashion, but the music was decent. Anyways...

The main premise of the game is to control a rocket and try to murder the townspeople littering different structures. There are unlockable rockets, though most are generally just better than the previous so it's more of a strange level up system. The actual gameplay was very nice, though. Seeing as while there was the conventional blow up the rocket next to the person method, you could also cause projectile deaths, nudge people off cliffs, or crush them with debris. A lot of this requiring very complex maneuvering to get the flashiest kill.

I found it worthy of my 10 minutes.

Exponents and Imaginary Numbers

I made this flowchart as a means of handling the different exponents that could be on (i). Just fill in for (x) and follow the flowchart to get your answer.