futurehead

Analyzing "and/or"

As someone with a somewhat logical mind who does a lot of editing, here is a question I've always wondered about.  (Warning:  this one is seriously geeky.)  How, exactly, is the formation "and/or" supposed to work?  I've always thought that it has two possible interpretations.  But, I've never seen this addressed anywhere, so perhaps I'm the only one on earth who reads it this way.

As an example, look at this sentence:

That assumption of yours is wrong and/or unfounded."

"Unfounded" meaning you do not have any evidence or reason to make the assumption, "wrong" of course meaning it is actually incorrect.  What exactly does the "and/or" mean?  The possibilities, it seems to me, are:

1. The assumption is (wrong and unfounded) OR (wrong OR unfounded). 
   
2. The assumption is ("wrong and unfounded") OR it's ("unfounded").
   

MEANING #1:  Under this looser interpretation of "and/or" it does not matter in what order the two terms appear, because either one may apply.  It might be rewritten as "the assumption is wrong and unfounded, or it is wrong, or it is unfounded."  There are 3 possible states

MEANING #2:  This meaning is how I've always interpreted the expression.   It might be rewritten as "the assumption is (wrong and) or unfounded."  There are only 2 possible states.  It could also be rewritten as, "the assumption is unfounded, and perhaps also wrong."  Here the order of the two terms matters a lot, because the second expression ("unfounded" in my example) must always be true, while the first one ("wrong") may or may not be.  Under this interpretation it would be incorrect to reverse the terms and say "the assumption is unfounded and/or wrong," since an assumption can be accused of being unfounded but not wrong -- but a person who assets that an assumption is wrong, cannot but also assert that it is unfounded.  In other words, you would never say it's wrong without also saying it's unfounded.

Somebody oughta clarify what it means. Who?  Who knows.  Maybe me.  Okay, I hereby declare that the proper meaning is #2 and that #1 represents nothing but muddy-headed, sloppy thinking.

Okay maybe nobody has a clue what I'm trying to say here, but mark my words, this is the kind of thing that the fate of empires hinges upon! 

How to Lose Weight

Here is a distillation of my own experience & observations on how to drop pounds.  I make no more claims than that this has generally worked for me.

• Get over the hump on exercise.  When you haven't been exercising, it's painful and hateful and heinous.  But, after you do it steadily for awhile (a week or two perhaps) you "get over the hump" and suddenly one day you find that if you skip your workout, you miss it and crave it.  That starts off a virtuous circle whereby you enjoy exercise and therefore do it regularly and therefore enjoy it, etc.
  
• Figure out an exercise routine that is convenient.  The key is for it to be convenient enough that you'll actually do it regularly so that you *do* get over that hump.  If it's too sporadic, it will remain unpleasant.  By far the easiest thing to do is open your front door and go running out it, turn around however many miles later, and run back home.  Or bike to work, or find a pool or gym that's convenient enough that you can actually fit it into your daily routine.  But the more logistical baloney you have to go through to get going (getting in car, driving to gym, etc), the less you'll do it, especially in the period before you get over the hump. 
• Find a rich source of exercise.  Don't let it just be exercise alone for no other purpose but exercise.  Make it a social occasion, or a beautiful run in the outdoors that you find renewing and enjoyable, or something competitive that inspires you -- figure out something that has multiple positive dimensions that make it a rich and enjoyable part of your life and not a joyless chore. 
• Exercise without expectations.  Once you begin exercising regularly, you may well find to your amazement that despite all your hard work you do *not* automatically start shedding pounds.  Don't be discouraged or surprised; you are in this for the long haul and you should begin your new exercise habit without expectations.  The point now is to learn to enjoy the exercise and get good at it (and of course, you will be doing yourself a lot of good that isn't reflected by the reading on the scale yet).
• Eat low carbs for a few weeks.   After you've been exercising for a while, try cutting out most carbs from your diet for a couple weeks.  Personally I don't usually go much longer than that, but when I do it typically bumps my weight down by 5-8 pounds -- and then, thanks to my continuing exercise, it usually stays there. There's big debate over the low-carb approach but the anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness is overwhelming, and my own experience backs that up.  By cutting carbs and getting your calories from fat instead you can lose more pounds with less suffering than you might expect. 
  
  • The secret is that fat calories make you feel much fuller than the same amount of carb calories, which actually make you feel *more* hungry often for reasons that some theorize have to do with insulin cycles and the like. 
  • Kind of like with exercise, once you get over an initial "hump" of unpleasantness you will be amazed how you cease to crave a lot of foods. 
• Keep food out of your visual field.  Eating is an animal function and we are of course at root animals.  I find that when food enters my visual field, I (pretty much automatically and unstoppably) eat it.  So, when I get to work I put my apple behind my monitor until lunch so it doesn't call out to me constantly as I work.

Now that I've expanded my writing into the diet field, I may have to tackle romance novels next. . .

A Theory of Sports Injuries

What I learned from my stress fracture: Five Lessons

I've had a hard time with my recovery from my Fibular stress fracture & I feel I've learned some lessons the hard way.  I am finally back running again approximately 7 months after my injury. For the possible benefit of others, here is a distillation of what I have taken away from the experience:

1. Take it seriously. The same day I got my hairline crack in my bone that didn't even shoe up on an x-ray, a friend had a bike accident and had to undergo surgery for a broken hip that included implantation of a steel bar in his leg. He was back on the bike before I was -- largely because neither I nor my stupid doctor took the injury seriously enough and I reinjured it, probably a number of times. Ironically, if I had had a catastrophic fracture and been put in a cast I'd have almost certainly healed much faster. If you get a fracture, do yourself a favor and push for a cast or a boot.
2. Pain is a poor guide. Some activities feel fine while you're doing them but nevertheless prolong healing. For me, those included cycling and swimming. A good guide: if you can't do it without pain the day you're injured, don't do it until you're healed.
3. An injury can be a blessing.  You might be cursing your sore knee for sidelining you, but it could be saving you from a far worse injury (see below for fuller explanation).
4. Increase your running VERY gradually. As I've written before, the 10% rule is too fast, especially once you get beyond a few miles.  Think in terms of several years to build up to marathon distance.  That's because while the muscle soreness you feel goes away in 3 days, tendons and ligaments and bones are on a minimum 6-8 week healing cycle.
5. Building endurance requires walking a fine line. If you want to increase your ability to do long runs or other activities, you must of necessity strike a delicate balance between stressing your tissues enough so that they get stronger, and stressing them so much that they get injured.  I wrote about this before, but I have since refined my mental picture of how this works.  Here is a graphic showing how I think about it (click for full-resolution).

Here's my explanation of what this means: When you do a run (any workout but let's use running since it's the most stressful on bones & tendons) of a distance that is the green zone, a particular tissue -- your patellar tendon, let's say -- can withstand it without injury; it is adapted to that distance.  But if you don't do any longer runs, it will never get stronger.  When you do a longer run that stresses it (distances in the blue zone), you damage that tissue slightly, though not enough to disable you or even to notice.  If given the chance, the tendon will heal, toughening in the process, and it and all the other tissues you stress will then be stronger (your green zone will grow).

But, if you keep doing long runs before your green zone has time to expand and/or without enough healing rest time and/or without increasing your distances gradually enough, the condition of your patellar tendon (represented by the black line) will continue to get more ragged until one day boom! you've got an injury. You're in the red zone. 

The above chart just shows one tissue.  Really of course there are hundreds of tissues stressed when you run (or maybe thousands -- check with your favorite anatomist).  Let us imagine that we were able to chart the condition of a bunch of them; you'd get a mess that might look something like this:

What this tries to convey is, if you've been running a lot, you're likely stressing a whole bunch of tissues beyond their capacity.  However, it only takes one to break through into the red zone to put you on the couch.  The result is that all those other tissues (which you are probably not aware are nearing injury) then have time to heal.  That is what I mean when I say an injury can be a blessing -- a bout of tendonosis may seem like a curse but by taking you off your feet it may be giving your bones and other tendons a chance to heal, and possibly saving you from a far more serious red zone incident.  If you're lucky, that tissue that first registers its complaint -- the canary in the coal mine -- will be something that heals relatively quickly and easily rather than, just to pick a random example, something like a fibular bone fracture that will sideline you for 7 months!

Maybe some doctor would like to take issue with minor or major details of this view, and I'm all ears, but until I'm persuaded otherwise this is my own working theory for How Things Work that will guide my future training.

Tapas #11: Ditty #8

This week: a very short piano improv.

Jay Stanley - Ditty #8.mp3 (256k, 0:35, 1 meg)

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