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Showing posts with the label life and health

Something that mattered

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I recently joined a Toastmasters club local to me, to improve my public speaking skills. In the educational pathways available, the first formal speech one gives is the "icebreaker", in which you speak for 4–6 minutes about a comfortable personal topic. Here is my icebreaker speech, which I accompanied with a slideshow of pictures as I spoke. Something that mattered Thank you, Mr Toastmaster, for the privilege of letting me introduce myself to this group. I'm going to share with you just one of many childhood interests that have played a large part in shaping who I am. That interest is flying. Flight in any form. It started when I was two years old, terrified of the monsters flying over our house who would eat me. Or so my parents told me; I don't remember it. We lived near the flight path of McClellan Air Force Base. My mother took me to the base to face my fears. She showed me that airplanes were machines that fly like birds, and that people fly them. ...
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The four little pigs

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There are stories on the internet about "the fourth little pig", but before I ever saw those, a decade ago I made up my own story called The four little pigs as a bedtime story for my toddler. I've always liked the perspective I put on the original tale. Once upon a time... ...there were four little pigs: Curley, Hurley, Turley, and Xerxes, all brothers. These four pigs knew they had to build a home to protect themselves from the weather, and also from a wolf who roamed the area and who, it was said, had a particular fondness for eating pigs, especially tender young pigs such as themselves. From the wolf's point of view, he simply wanted to feed himself and his family, and if he could nab a tender young piggy, so much the better. The four pigs were all quite intelligent and each one had his own idea of the best approach to building shelter. Unfortunately, they couldn't agree on anything about their new home. They disagreed about where to build the house, w...
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My sensory deprivation diet

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This entry has nothing to do with numerical methods, mathematics, logic, gaming, or anything else I've written about. Well, there may be a few numbers. Maybe.   One day in January this year, while spending precious minutes of my life browsing YouTube as people tend to do on occasion, my clicks led from one thing to another ranging from music videos to Maker projects to magic acts, and then I landed on a 9-minute video called " How Penn Jillette Lost over 100 Lbs and Still Eats Whatever He Wants ," featuring Las Vegas magician Penn Jillette talking about his experience with what seemed to be a dangerously unhealthy diet in which he ate nothing but potatoes for two weeks. It's called a monotrophic diet or simply mono diet. The idea is, you eat just one food ingredient (like potatoes) for a while, and you lose weight due to the calorie deficit. I mean, who wouldn't lose weight if you're hungry and you know that your only option is to eat another potato? ...
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Syncing Office 365 Outlook to Google calendar using Power Automate

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When my employer switched over from the Google office suite to Microsoft's Office 365, it caused unexpected disruption in my family. I had been sharing my work calendar with my wife (sharing no details, just busy times). It became an integral part of her calendar, to help her coordinate (between her job and my job) who picks up and drops off my son from school, and to let her know when I was free to take a phone call during my work day. Since the switchover to O365, my ability to share a calendar externally was eliminated. Based on documentation I could find, it should be possible, but the option doesn't appear in my employer's implementation of Outlook. I can view my personal Google calendar in my work Outlook calendar, but I can't share it the other way. Microsoft's Power Automate provides a way to solve this problem. It lets you create flows of data, triggered manually or automatically by events, to move data around, not only among the Microsoft products but ...
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Whose hands are biggest? You may be surprised.

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A recent project to create an ergonomic handle for 3D printing led me down a path that introduced me to anthropometric measurements of the human hand, which in turn revealed some interesting facts about hand sizes. I had no idea that hand size is dependent on nationality, but I found a number of research articles on this topic. For those who don't want to read further, the answer to the title question is: Based on the data found, Filipino males have the biggest hands, by a significant margin. In fact, the margin is large enough that this population may be considered an outlier from the general human population with respect to hand size. Even Filipina females have larger hands than most males of other nationalities. On the other end of the spectrum, Vietnamese females and Indian females have the smallest hands. Now you can read on for the whole story, or you can skip down to the chart at the end. Idea for a toy My unintentional investigation into hand sizes started while de...
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Elliptical-blade NACA airfoil propeller

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You don't see aircraft with elliptical wings anymore. The most famous aircfaft with such wings is probably the Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft from World War II. Elliptical wings have the most uniform theoretical distribution of lift and therefore the least induced drag. In the case of the Spitfire, the gentle taper of the ellipse near the wing root also provided more room to mount weapons internally than a straight-taper wing, while providing an overall thinner, low-drag cross-section. However, with all curved edges, elliptical wings are expensive to construct. Of all the kinds of drag that a wing or propeller blade experiences, induced drag is an unavoidable price for lift. Induced drag has nothing to do with the drag created by surface area, surface roughness, or thickness of the airfoil. Induced drag depends on the planform shape of the wing. It is also inversely proportional to aspect ratio (the ratio of wing length to airfoil average chord length). The optimal and ...
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