How to Lose Weight the Easy Way

If you think you have to follow strict rules or suffer to lose weight, think again. The easy way to lose weight is to indulge your weaknesses. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? But when I finally understood this concept, I understood why most diets fail us. That's right, the diets fail us because they force us to follow rules that go against human nature. It's really quite simple, the more you can't have something, the more you want it. Until you become absolutely obsessed. Think about it. Suppose you like to snack at night. If you follow a diet that eliminates snacks or eating after a certain time of day, you constantly have to fight the urge to snack at night. And that's like asking to fail. In fact, that's probably when you will fail. And if you decide you can't live with that restriction, you'll abandon the diet altogether. But if you schedule a satisfying snack for that time every night, it'll be easier to stick with your weight loss diet plan. So by indulging your weakness, eventually you overcome it.

Another common problem is having a sweet tooth.What if your diet doesn't let you indulge often enough? Or you're only allowed to take one or two small bites of a tasty snack and it doesn't satisfy you? That's almost like torture. This time, suppose chocolate is your weakness. If you can't have it, how are you most likely to fail on your diet? That's right, by eventually giving up and splurging on chocolate because you'll feel deprived and become absolutely obsessed with eating it. But if you put chocolate and other sweets in your weight loss program in amounts that are satisfying, you'll reduce or even eliminate the problem. And you're much more likely to stay on your eating plan and lose the weight. So again, by indulging your weakness, you overcome it. Now understand that when I say you overcome your weakness, I don't mean you won't crave chocolate. I just mean you're more likely to keep your cravings under control and stay on your diet. And you may find that the more chocolate you eat, the less chocolate you want. It's like working in a candy store. If your boss never allows you to eat candy, you'll want it more. Sure, you may try to follow the rules at first, but eventually, you'll start sneaking candy. You'll promise yourself you'll only do it once, but we both know you'll do it again, and again, and again until you're stuffing yourself with as much candy as you can get.

Now suppose your boss tells you that you can eat all the candy you want whenever you want. Your face will light up as you imagine yourself gorging on candy every day. But the reality is you'll probably indulge in your favorites at first, then level off. You may eat candy from time to time, but your obsession will evaporate. After all, if the candy's always available to you, what's the urgency in eating it? You'll still like candy as much as you always did, but you'll probably eat much less when you know you can have it anytime. It's just human nature. The more you can't have something, the more you want it, and the reverse is also true, the more you can have something, the less you want it. So you're less likely to binge and ruin your weight loss. Again, by indulging your weakness, you overcome it. Have you ever tried a low-carb diet? When you cheated, did you reach for another steak or did you grab some carbs? Exactly, we always cheat on a diet by breaking the rules. So stop torturing yourself with strict rules. Instead, indulge your weaknesses and lose weight the easy way.

What is Gravity?

One of the most familiar forces is also the most mysterious, and that is gravity. In general, gravity is the force that pulls together all matter (which is anything you can physically touch). The more matter, the more gravity, so things that have a lot of matter such as planets and moons and stars pull more strongly. The amount of matter in something is called its mass. The more massive something is, the more of a gravitational pull it exerts. As we walk on the surface of the Earth, it pulls on us, and we pull back. But since the Earth is so much more massive than we are, the pull from us is not strong enough to move the Earth, while the pull from the Earth can make us fall flat on our faces. In addition to depending on the amount of mass, gravity also depends on how far you are from something. This is why we are stuck to the surface of the Earth instead of being pulled off into the Sun, which has many more times the gravity of the Earth. Most of us know the effects of the mysterious force called gravity. However, the question "what is gravity" is not very easy to answer, because we don't really understand what this force actually is. What we do know about gravity is mostly due to the work of three men, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Kepler worked out the details of how the orbits of the moon and planets can be described mathematically. This is also known as the Kepler laws of planetary motion, but it does not answer the question "what is gravity".

Newton, reportedly while observing an apple falling from a tree, got an inspiration that allowed him to work out how the force of gravity can be described mathematically. It later became apparent that there are some scenarios where Newton's mathematical description does not quite hold, but it still the simplest way of describing gravity. It does however also not answer the "what is" question. Newton was uncomfortable with his own theory of gravity. He said that his theory never "assigned the cause of this power". He was unable to experimentally identify what produces the force of gravity and he refused to even offer a hypothesis as to the cause of this force on grounds that to do so was not sound science. Einstein later worked out how the force of gravity is not quite a force, but rather an artifact of the natural movement of objects through curved four-dimensional space-time. Einstein reportedly got the inspiration for this imaginative leap in understanding of gravity by contemplating a man falling off a building. Such a falling man would not experience any force while he is falling, at least not before hitting the ground and suffering severe forces. In his monumental 1916 work "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity", Albert Einstein unified his own Special Relativity, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the crucial insight that the effects of gravity can be described by the curvature of space and time, usually called 'space-time' curvature. The radius of curvature is modified by relativistic factors, by a gravitational time dilation and by a velocity time dilation.

This causes the acceleration of a falling object, as experienced by the free falling object to be larger than what Newton predicted. So, what's gravity? The truth is that at the most fundamental level, no one really knows. This blog only summarizes the basics of Newton's and Einstein's gravity in terms of the gravitational acceleration caused by curved space-time and velocity. We may have to wait for a theory of quantum gravity to be completed for a better answer. Quantum gravity is the field of theoretical physics attempting to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity in a self-consistent manner, or more precisely, to formulate a self-consistent theory which reduces to ordinary quantum mechanics in the limit of weak gravity (potentials much less than the speed of light squared) and which limits Einstein's general relativity to large actions (action much larger than the Planck's constant). The theory must be able to predict the outcome of situations where both quantum effects and strong-field gravity are important (at the Planck scale, unless large extra dimension conjectures are correct). Although some quantum gravity theories such as string theory and other so-called theories of everything attempt to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces, others such as loop quantum gravity make no such attempt, they simply quantize the gravitational field while keeping it separate from the other forces. So far, cosmologists, physicists and mathematicians have not arrived at a consistent theory of gravity that melds quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity.

How the Digital Age Changed Everything

When I first started reading science fiction, around the age of twelve, the world was a different place. A telephone was a black instrument chained to the wall by a cord. Books had hard covers. Computers were a gleam in some scientist's eye. Even science fiction was packaged in 8 ½ by 11 magazines printed on blotting paper with garish covers on them. Getting to the moon was an impossible dream. The only people you considered your friends lived in your neighborhood, and you corresponding with people by writing a letter on paper and mailing it. Only a few people had TV sets and the shows were in black and white. Even the science-fiction writers I read could not guess the changes that would occur in the twenty-first century. Of all the changes that have occurred since then, none changed our way of life more profoundly than the home computer and the internet.

And the changes are accelerating. Who would've ever believed that one could carry around a powerful computer in your pocket? That people would read books on devices that would threaten the print book industry? Children would go online for cartoon coloring pages? And who would believe that you could get information on any subject simply by typing in the subject and clicking on an icon labeled Search? Or order any item at the lowest possible price simply by typing and clicking an the back of a gadget that looks like a bug or a mouse? That people would be in constant touch with people they hardly know all over the world and get all the details of their lives? Or that people would spend hours in virtual worlds? Or that secrecy would come to an end where even the most repressive government cannot control what information their people receive or what secrets are revealed? Or that people would get in traffic accidents because they are typing messages while they drive? That I could talk to my daughter face-to-face even though she lives three thousand miles away? 

That a gadget in my car would give directions on how to go anywhere as I drive, telling me exactly when I need to turn as I approach the intersection? And that is only the beginning of the changes that are occurring. Soon we'll have robot servants, driverless automobiles and the ability to speak to our computers instead of having to type or use a mouse. Just recently a video game allows a person to control the action by simply waving arms around. And what about the special effects in movies these days? And now 3d TV sets are available. The digital age has ushered a new language as well. Here are few of the new words: lol, faq, IM-ing, fb, e-mailing, e-books, download, upload, web site, internet, web page, tweeting, unfriending, writing on a wall, Twitter, Facebook, Google and googling, and on and on. It's hard to say what will be next. Today's world goes so far beyond the world of my youth that even the most imaginative SF writers of that time could not imagine it.

You say May Day, I say Lei Day

May 1st is the best time of year for a holiday. Everything around is sprouting or sprouted, and summer vacation is around the corner. Admittedly, 'summer vacation' becomes an oxymoron as soon as you have kids. Still, expectation is in the air. For me, this day is forever tied to childhood celebrations in Hawaii where we'd wear muumuus and handmade leis. The neighbors were generous with their plumeria trees. We'd fill paper grocery sacks with blossoms, and then sit outside stringing them till our fingers were sticky with plumeria milk. At school, we perform hulas and play the ukulele, both of which we'd practice in music class. It's a sad reminder that art and music are now considered as "extras" and not funded as part of the curriculum - but that's another post. We don't have good lei flowers in Seattle. Tulips are too fragile. Rhodies are toxic. And what would I wear it with? I haven't owned a muumuu in years. (Actually, a good thing). But the sun might come out for brief visits today, and I've got a grown-up sized hula hoop. What more could I ask for? Happy Lei Day! You didn't think I'd post a picture of me hooping, did ya?