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Table of Contents
Off-the-wall ideas: Just can't weight? Trying to make sense of the relationship between exercise and weight loss
Articles:
by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com
I've been keeping records of weight and exercise, trying to uncover patterns and find ways to effectively lose weight. I've found that when I exercise extremely hard, I typically gain a few pounds the next day and the day after. Obviously, that's frustrating, resulting in a decline in motivation, and a fall-off in exercise for a week or so after that.
Now it has finally dawned on me what seems to be happening:
When I exercise far above normal, my body seems to automatically shift to a different gear. Sensing that I'm sweating a lot, my body starts to retain more liquid. Sensing that I'm burning a lot of energy, my body lowers the rate at which it uses energy. And those changes stay in effect for a day or two after the exercise, hence leading to weight gain.
That's how I would explain the fact that when I walked 16 miles one day, the next day I gained five pounds, despite the fact that I hadn't eaten much.
I suspect that many people have run into this barrier without understanding the mechanism. And many weight-motivated exercise programs have been abandoned as a result.
To try to break through this barrier, I'm going to try a regimen of steady exercise -- building very slowly, with no major day-to-day change, and always exercising some each day.
If you have had similar experience and related suggested, please email me at seltzer@samizdat.com
The value of your palm device depends on the information you put in it and the ease with which you can access that information when needed. So how can you keep your palm filled with the contacts, events, and notes that matter to you, without time-consuming and error-prone hand input?
There are sync services you can sign up for that will load your palm with info from the Web -- pick one or more channels and the service will push info on those topics onto your palm whenever you sync. But what at first seems like a convenience, soon devolves into a nuisance, cluttering your palm with unorganized information -- just one document after another, using up all available memory space.
The power of the palm comes from the ease of using the built in applications -- like schedule and address book. This isn't a PC with gigabytes of space where you can just dump everything. This is prime real estate, private property. You want to put up no trespassing signs, no spamming signs.
Your email files may be a mess. Your PC may be out of control with all that you have saved on it. Your palm should be an oasis of order and control. This is where you want to put the information that matters to you, what you need to help organize your life, info you might want to reference repeatedly, info you are going to want to consider in making important decisions, and getting together with people who are important to you. You don't want to hook up a fire hose from the Web to your Palm.
A new company that I've been doing some consulting for -- Coola -- has a quick and easy way for transferring pre-selected chunks of information from the Web or an email message to a palm device. To receive information this way, you click on a special link on a Web page or in an email, and the associated information will be added to the appropriate application on your palm (schedule, address, or memo) the next time you sync.
You can also send information this way to friends, customers, and business associates who use palms. It just takes a minute to fill out a form at their Web site www.coola.com and get the link for inclusion in email and the code for inclusion on Web pages to make it easy for others to move your particular information to the right application on their palms. You could use this technique to pass around your electronic business card. You could even include a link in your standard email signature to make it easy for recipients to move your contact info to their palms. Likewise, when you send out email about an upcoming meeting or event, you could include a Coola link that makes it easy for everyone to move the details to their palms. For a meeting, you can even include an alarm that will buzz a pre-selected time before the event, as an added reminder.
For instance, if Dave and Bill had an email list of regular listeners to this radio show, they could send out a weekly email message with a link that would move a note with details on the upcoming program into the schedule on listeners' palms for 7 to 8:30 on Sunday morning, with an alarm so they'll remember to tune in on time.
Once you've registered, you also could use this technique to harvest info that you want to move to your own palm, even when you don't have your palm with you. Simply fill out a form for an event or a contact -- maybe copying and pasting from a Web page or any document to the Coola form, then click on the resulting Coola link, and the next time you sync your palm the info will automatically move to the application you chose.
With this approach your palm becomes your safe harbor, the place where you keep the information that counts, and also your way to build a bridge from the world of the Internet to the physical world -- with content gleaned from both worlds and organized just the way you want it.
Give Coola a try at www.coola.com and let me know if you come up with creative uses for this new capability. You can reach me by email at seltzer@samizdat.com.
Today you have a variety of ways of communicating, and the method you choose helps define the relationship and set it limits. Some people you give your work phone number; others your home; and still others your cell phone or pager number. Some people you give your work email address, others you give one or more personal email addresses, and a select few you admit to the circle of people with whom you do instant messaging.
The direction of technology has been to make it possible to reach you anywhere anytime. And your choices in how you give out your contact information have defined some of these means as public and others as private. Direct communication can be very valuable, but only if you have made the right choices -- giving the right degree of intimacy to the right people.
Pagers and cell phones can interrupt you wherever you are -- which is a nuisance if the caller is someone you don't need or want to talk to right now, but which is a critically important if the right person is calling. Likewise, instant messaging interrupts your train of thought while you are working at your computer and is only welcome if the right person is contacting you for the right reason. Hence we build virtual walls to protect our time and to preserve certain channels of communication for certain people.
If you have a PDA with the Palm operating system, you just got another choice, allowing even more intimate communication. Coola calls its new service "send to a friend," but it would be better dubbed "sync to people." This capability helps you synchronize your activities with the people who really count -- your spouse, your secretary, your team, your number-one customer...
If you want to have a discussion, pick up the phone or instant message. If you want to make sure that key people have your meeting on their schedule, have critical contact info, or have a key memo available for ready and repeated reference, use Coola's sync-to-people capability.
This communication method is an offshoot of Coola's technology for moving pre-selected chunks of info from Web pages and email messages to the palm. When you click on a Coola link, the associated info will be moved to the appropriate app on your palm (schedule, address, or memo) the next time you sync.
You can, as an extension of that, choose to send that same info to a "friend" who has a palm OS device. If the friend is registered at Coola and has authorized you to do so (added you to a list of "friends"), he or she will receive an email alert and that info will go straight to the friend's palm the next time he or she syncs. If not, the email tells the friend what to do to register and/or to add you as a friend and get this info.
With a minor addition to that capability, Coola has created a whole new way of communicating with and relating to those who are close to you personally and in business. You can now fill out forms at Coola and have that info go straight to the palms of designated "friends" the next time they sync.
Have your secretary register at Coola and use this method to send you updates to your calendar, important contact info, and documents you need to reference at tomorrow's meeting. Then syncing your palm is like stopping at a filling station to get the fuel you need to carry on your business.
If you are a manager or a team player, have the people who report to you or with whom you work closely sign up as your "friends." Then you'll be able to synchronize your schedules whenever you sync your palms.
Remember when your PC was a standalone device and then you got connected to others over a LAN, and then over the Internet, and the value of your PC escalated -- changing from a box for creating and storing info to a means for sharing info and communicating?
Today your palm device probably serves as your personal organizer, amplified by the ability to sync to info on your PC. Now thanks to Coola, it can become a new way to define and organize a group of people, helping you to sync with people, not just info.
Try it and see how this capability can help simplify your life.
Sooner or later we'll all be reading electronic books like in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- using portable computer-like gadgets. Then the nature of books themselves will change since they won't have to be read linearly from beginning to end, but rather will have many hyperlinked and search-based paths; and with sound and video as well as text. Already there are tens of thousands of books in plain text electronic form available for free over the Internet, thanks to volunteer projects like Gutenberg. But while I applaud those efforts and download many of those texts, I must admit that I rarely read them -- only when I haven't been able to find a print edition of the same book. That's partly a matter of habit and largely a matter of eye balls -- it just isn't comfortable yet either with regard to the experience of text on a screen or portability. My eyes get tired when trying to read something lengthy -- so I'm inclined to print out the articles and book chapters I come across on the Web. Also, my laptop's batteries run down too fast, and my palm's screen and type size are a nuisance for anything but short messages.
But in the meantime, long before the electronic book comes of age, the Internet is having an enormous impact on the book industry.
Take for instance, the Harry Potter phenomenon. I got hooked reading the first three books aloud to my son. So when word got out four or five months ago that a fourth book was in the works, I went to Amazon and placed my order. At that time, I was surprised to find that many others had done so also -- that already the new Harry Potter book was the number one best seller at Amazon, even though it had not yet been published. This was truly extraordinary. Books are usually not purchased in advance of being manufactured. It's usually a wild gambling game on the part of the publisher -- guessing how many will sell, printing that number, shipping them off to distributors and stores, hoping that they get shelf space and visibility and word of mouth, and then having those distributors and stores return unsold copies for full credit.
Before, the publisher only learned about demand after the crucial decisions had been made. Before, the publishers only contact with the reading public was indirect, based on feedback from the distributors and book stores.
Now, thanks to online book sellers like Amazon, the process has been speeded up greatly, and buyer behavior is changing radically. In fact, by Saturday, July 8 -- the official publication date -- Amazon alone had sold 357,644 copies of the new Harry Potter book. They have even set up a special "Harry Potter Store" where they try to point fans to other similar products and where they also keep a count, updated hourly, of how many copies have been sold at Amazon.
But what about immediacy? Here's a book in high demand, a book that people have been anxiously awaiting for months. Why order it over the Internet and wait for days or weeks for it to be delivered, when you could drive around the corner and pick up one at a local bookstore?
When I ordered my copy, I selected "standard shipping" -- 3 to 7 days. I didn't want to pay a premium price to get it quickly, even though I was tempted to do so. I suspected that with this high level of demand, local stores will soon be out of stock. I even suspected that Amazon would soon be out of stock, and that in any case, it would probably be a couple weeks after the publication date before I could get my copy.
Much to my surprise, I got an email from Amazon the night before telling me that at no extra charge they had upgraded me to FedEx overnight/Saturday delivery and that my copy was on the way. Then at 11 AM on the day of publication, it arrived. That's service. That's delighting your customers. And that's turning what could have been a logistical nightmare into a triumph. In a broader sense, the Internet, by changing the nature of ordering and distribution is redefining the rules of the game for printed book publishing.
Meanwhile another important change has crept up on us, without anywhere near the fanfare of the Harry Potter book. Technology has been making it possible to economically produce printed books in smaller and smaller quantities. Typesetting has become a matter of converting ordinary word processing files. And the machines used for printing and binding have become so flexible, thanks to computer control, that it is no longer necessary to print thousands of copies of the same thing at the same time to drive down manufacturing costs. In fact, it is now possible to economically print and bind a single copy of a book.
In other words, with this approach, customers could order books before any copies are printed, and publishers would be able print and distribute individual copies on demand, eliminating the enormous waste in the present hit-or-miss system. But how would that actually work?
People who frequent bookstores typically want to hold a book in their hands and flip through the physical pages before making up their mind. But people who have grown used to buying books over the Internet, don't need that tactile experience any more. Descriptions, reviews, and excerpts are sufficient to help them decide. And clearly there are hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people who have gone through that change of habit already.
But what about immediacy? I recently bought a print-on-demand book from 1st Books www.1stbooks.com. I had heard about a new translation of Good Soldier Svejk, a comic novel set in the First World War that has an enormous reputation in Europe, but which had been rarely read in English because of the poor quality of the translation in the Penguin edition. I placed my order at the 1st Books Web site, paid my $10.95, plus standard shipping by credit card. And five days later the book arrived at my house -- an attractive, professional looking, easy to read, and well bound paperback book.
If the word spreads, this way of producing and distributing books could and should become the norm. With no waste in printing and distributing and warehousing large quantities of books that people don't want, the costs and risks of book publishing could diminish greatly. And that could lead to an increase in the variety and quality of books readily available to the public. In other words, today, thanks to the Internet as a means of connecting buyers and sellers, we are seeing the beginnings of a major revolution in book publishing, still long before electronic books begin to replace paper.
For general reading, electronic books still don't work for me. They can be valuable for reference and research, but I don't want to read an entire book on a screen yet (if I can help it).
This means:
1) I'm not about to invest money in dedicated electronic book gadgets. Since e-book reading is not a high priority for me, I'm not going to rush out and buy a RocketBook or anything else like it. Rather I'll wait until general purpose, low-cost gadgets are available that are convenient for reading books on, but also can do other tasks that matter more than that for me.
2) Those electronic texts that I do want today -- primarily for reference and research -- I'll want in a format that enables me to search, edit, cut-and-paste, change formats, etc., with the same kind of ease that I do with word processing documents. I don't want texts that are read-only (e.g., pdf files). And I don't want to be constrained by encryption schemes.
3) I am very interested in books printed and bound on demand. I recently ordered a copy of Good Soldier Svejk from 1st Books. With standard shipping, I received the book in just five days. It's a high quality, very readable, well-bound paperback, for $10.95. That's terrific.
4) Online sales of both print-on-demand and electronic books depend on having a flexible and powerful search system based on an index that includes the full text of books. Ideally, the full text of all these books would also be indexed by the major public search engines, so people would not only be able to find the books within the sites, but find the right sites in the first place.
5) Online sales of both print-on-demand and electronic books also depend on having excerpts, reviews, and other descriptive information readily available at the Web site. I happened to have bought Good Soldier Svejk because of word-of-mouth. There was nothing at the Web site itself that would have induced me to buy it.
6) From a publisher's perspective, the set up for electronic books and print-on-demand books should be simple and intuitive, allowing untrained people to do all the work themselves -- uploading plain text or Word files and making formatting choices. And when you do it yourself, setup should be free to the publisher and to the self-publishing author. (For those who don't have the time or inclination to do it themselves, a setup fee of a couple hundred dollars would be appropriate.)
7) The online service that delivers electronic books and print-on-demand books to the public, should make its money based on sales. If, like Fatbrain, they charge the publisher a hosting fee, or like some other services, they have other charges the publisher must pay, then this service devolves into "vanity publishing" -- where the service preys on self-publishing authors, rather than actually trying to sell books.
8) For direct sales of print-on-demand books to the public, a revenue share of 60% to the publisher and 40% to the online service would be reasonable and fair. But another scale is needed to accommodate sales of books through Amazon and other online book stores. To get my books listed as "available in 24 hours" at Amazon, I, as a small publisher, need to participate in their Advantage program, which means I ship them a few copies of each accepted title on consignment and Amazon keeps 55% of any sales, with me getting 45%. Hence, as a publisher, I would want to be able to order half a dozen or a dozen copies of any of my books from the online service at a substantial discount (e.g., 20%, instead of 40% of the list price) for me to then redistribute through other channels, like Amazon Advantage.
I held another chat yesterday with small press authors and publishers. Gradually, it has dawned on me that what is happening now is analogous to what happened in the early 1970s.
Back then, offset printing became cheap enough so anyone could have a few hundred or a few thousand copies of a book printed at reasonable cost, and thousands of folks rushed to do so, thinking that a whole new world had opened up, that no longer would authors be dependent on the publishing establishment.
Within a few years, many had woken up to the fact that "printing" and "publishing" are not synonymous. Yes, you can pay to have your book printed (just as publishers do), but that's just one small piece of the job.
Now alternatives to traditional printing are available via the Web (ebooks in multiple formats and print on demand) and the Web can also serve as a point of sale (a la Amazon) and a means of distribution (in the case of ebooks). And we see a proliferation of "ebook publishers" or "online publishers". But once again, there's been a basic misunderstanding. Companies like 1stbooks, xlibris, and fatbrain are not "publishers". Rather they are the online equivalent of printers. They don't do much or any selection or development of manuscripts. They don't work with authors to help them make their books as good as they can be or need to be. And they do virtually nothing to promote the works that are available at their sites.
As a result, lots of people are going into this with grossly unrealistic expectations; and the backlash is liable to be very damaging to this new industry.
I'd like to see an "online printer/hosting service" that is set up to work with real publishers (both small and large). All texts are handled the same in terms of the formats they are available in, the quality of the print-on-demand, etc. And all texts are searchable (full text -- a la AltaVista) across all publishers at the site. But each publisher establishes its own procedures for selection, editing, and promotion of books, as well as its own pricing and terms for authors, and its own policies for making excerpts available as free samples online. And each publisher has its own branded area within the hosting service. Authors can opt to go direct and be available in a "self-publishing area" or even to call themselves a "publishing company".
But it's up to each "company" to promote itself and establish its own individual identity based on the quality of the work that it presents.
Do you know of anything like that today? If so, please let me know. seltzer@samizdat.com
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has already made about 2500 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Many of these are available now or will be soon on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html or send your email request to seltzer@samizdat.com)
New corrected versions of etexts previously released:
Honore de Balzac -- Father Goriot (frgrt11.txt in 1998)
Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities (2city12.txt in 1994)
The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot (marbo10r.zip in 2000)
New etexts (in their directory for 2001 = /etext01)
Eleanor Atkinson -- Greyfriars Bobby (bobby10.txt)
George Borrow -- Romano Lavo-Lil or Romany Dictionary or Gypsy Dictionary (rmlav10.txt)
Annie Roe Carr -- Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp or The Old Lumberman's Secret (nsapc10.txt)
Charles Darwin -- Coral Reefs (coral10.txt)
Margaret Deland -- The Way to Peace (wy2pc10.txt)
Alexandre Dumas, pere --
H. Rider Haggard --
Oliver Wendell Holmes --
Herman Melville --
Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Long Live the King (llkng10.txt)
Rafael Sabatini -
Edgar Wallace -- The Clue of the Twisted Candles (clotc10.txt)
George Wrong -- Washington and his Comrades in Arms (wacia10.txt)
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