Miscellaneous

This week I will be heading to the International Congress on Physical Activity and Public Health in Toronto, Ontario.  It should be a terrific conference - the program includes presentations by friends of Obesity Panacea including Drs Jen Kuk and Meghann Lloyd, not to mention other internationally renowned physical activity researchers like Steve Blair, Peter Katzmarzyk and Neville Owen.  There will also be a large number of oral and poster presentations on a variety of topics by my own lab group, including my own poster ("Relationship between daily steps and clustered cardiometabolic risk…
After just under 4 years, my PhD has finally come to an end. The congratulatory emails, phone calls, blog comments, FB and Twitter messages have been rolling in steadily - I thank you all for the kind words, and will try my best to respond to everyone personally in due time. As Travis briefly explained yesterday, the defense went off smoothly despite my nerves. I was asked quite a number of questions (many more than during my Master's defense), but my committee members were all very friendly and polite so I felt pretty comfortable during the question and answer period. All the questions and…
Just a quick note to let everyone know that Peter (aka Dr Janiszewski) successfully defended his doctoral thesis this morning!  As usual the presentation was excellent, and the reviewers all seemed quite impressed with the work in general.  With any luck he will have some time to share his thoughts later this week.  And in case anyone was wondering, Obesity Panacea was actually mentioned positively in several of the questions! I couldn't be prouder of Peter and the work he has done during his PhD, please join me in congratulating him! Travis
I'm sure everyone remembers the recent headlines of the 42-year old woman in New Jersey, Donna Simpson, who is attempting to become the fattest women on earth. While she currently weighs ~600lbs she is hoping to crack 1000lbs eventually. Apparently her boyfriend is supporting the initiative, although her little child is too young to voice an opinion. In order to feed her habit, she raises money through her website which allows random men to watch her eat excessively. While this certainly sounds a bit nutty, and goes against grain of the prevailing dieting culture of Western society, gainers…
Apologies for the lack of posts the past few days - the workload at school has been very high for both of us this week.  In honour of this weekend's Boston Marathon, below is an interview I conducted last year with former Boston Marathon Champion and prolific writer Amby Burfoot. Amby is a fascinating guy and extremely knowledgeable about running and physiology in general, and it was a real pleasure to be able to ask him a few questions. My girlfriend and I competed in our first Boston Marathon last year, and if you're curious to know what it was like, be sure to check out my lead-up post, or…
I am slowly making progress on the big evolution/creation book. I passed the 25,000 word mark yesterday (Whoo hoo!) but my contract calls for 100,000 words (D'oh!). I am nowhere near running out of things to say, but I am such a painfully slow writer that 75,000 more words seems like an awful lot. I am one of those people who writes a sentence, then stares at it for a while, then runs off to play three games of internet chess before deleting it and trying again. Oh well. All you can do is keep chipping away. Which is my long-winded way of saying that blogging is going to continue to be…
Nathan Lau's Chocolate Haupia Pie This entry for the Scienceblogs Pi Day Pie Contest was sent to us by reader Nathan Lau of the House of Annie food blog.  It is a chocolate haupia pie, which Nathan describes as a "Hawaiian-style coconut milk-based pudding".  He has the full recipe and step-by-step instructions and pictures on his website and it looks absolutely delicious!   We're hoping to take a final crack at making a pie of our own later this afternoon, and I'll update this post with some pictures if we get it done before the end of the day.  To see all of the current pie contest…
Image by Pauladamsmith. So it appears that ScienceBlogs are once again celebrating Pi Day (March 14) by throwing a pie making contest called the Pi Day Pie Off.  ScienceBloggers can take part, but fortunately for us, so can their readers (this is where you come in).  I know that a lot of our friends and readers are foodies (I'm looking at you Summer Tomato), so I wanted to let everyone know about it while there is still time to enter.  It can be any kind of pie (dessert, meat, pizza, or otherwise), so be creative.  Details on contest entry are below the fold.  To enter, just send us an…
I just came across this photo on Fail Blog, and I tend to think that rather than a escalator FAIL it portrays a HUGE WIN for promoting physical activity. You trick people into thinking they'll get an easy escalator ride, only to find out they actualy have to use their legs to get to the next floor. Brilliant! Peter Janiszewski
Saw Avatar earlier tonight. Short review: Wow! What a great movie! Slightly longer review: OMG! What a freaking awesome movie!! Longer review, with no spoliers (!!) below the fold. James Cameron's movies tend to be visually spectacular but short on plot. Titanic coms to mind. The part where the ship actually sinks was pretty cool. The other parts, where paper-thin characters say implausible things to each other, was less so. Avatar was very much in that mold. Its just that “visually spectacular” really does not do the film justice. It is simply amazing. Strikingly beautiful with…
Gosh, there sure is a lot of snow out there! Update (1:00 am): Whoo hoo! My street just got plowed. God bless taxes!
My calculus students had a test yesterday. Having now graded them I understand, like never before, the meaning of the word “futility.” Their logic is not like our Earth logic. My future elementary school teachers had their test today. About forty minutes in to a fifty minute period, as I was begininning to get nervous that no one had yet handed it in, one of my students asked if I was angry at the class when I wrote the exam. Everyone else then noted they were wondering the same thing. Get the idea? At least we get a week for Thanksgiving, starting at the end of business on Friday. I'…
For anyone who has access to a print edition of The New York Times, today's crossword was constructed by my cousin Barry Boone! I believe this is his fourth puzzle for the TImes. It has an election day theme, so go have a look.
OMG! A new Tony Jaa movie: Back in 2003, a little Thai movie called Ong Bak introduced the world to an elephant-herder-turned-martial-artist named Tony Jaa. Directed by Prachya Pinkaew, the movie became a global sensation and rocketed Pinkaew and Jaa into the international celeb-o-sphere. They quickly collaborated on a follow-up called Tom Yum Goong (aka The Protector) that became the most successful Thai film ever released in America. Two times lucky, the Thai studio Sahamongkol Films eagerly green-lighted Jaa's dream project: Ong Bak 2 (Magnet Releasing), to be written, directed, produced…
The main reason I haven't been blogging lately is that I have been seriously under the weather for the past week or so. These days people are seeing swine flu in every case of the sniffles, but I am unconvinced. My symptoms: fever, cough, general achiness, fatigue, sore throat are certainly consistent with swine flu, but they are also pretty generic. All I can say is that even when things were at their worst on Monday and Tuesday (I was shivering in eighty-five degree weather) things never went from “Very Unpleasant” to “Pondering the Afterlife.” I didn't even cancel any of my classes,…
The overlords at Seed have informed us that there will be some server maintenence starting at 7:00 tonight. Alas, it will be impossible to comment during that time. Take that Turkish spammers!
Had a great time in Cincinnati, and will be doing a couple of posts about it shortly. In the meantime, how about some cat pictures to tide you over. Here's Emily in a pensive mood: And here she is on her favorite bookshelf: Here's Big Ol' Isaac engaged in a favorite activity: And here he is having declared victory over my backpack. For some reason both cats really like to sit there:
An interesting video interview with the author of (the excellent) Mind Wars. Here are direct links to the videos.
I have a cat named Isaac who is currently tipping the scales at around twenty pounds. In an attempt to control his weight I feed him light cat food (Science Diet, to be exact), and give him the absolute minimum he will let me get away with. A number of people have suggested getting a laser pointer. Kitty sees the red dot on the ground and goes a little crazy trying to catch it, thereby getting his heart rate up and burning a few calories. So I finally got around to buying one. Brought it home. Isaac greeted me at the door (he's very sweet). Pulled out the pointer and tried it out.…
Just finished teaching my last class for the term. Feels soooo goooood. Well, there are still finals to get through, and the extra-long office hours I generously hold on the days before the finals. And then comes the grading. Sooooo much grading. First the exams. Then the course grades. Then a lull of a few days. And then the inevitable complaints from a few disgruntled students. Graduation is in there somewhere which is actually kind of fun, except for the part about getting up way early on a Saturday. But then comes summer break. Yaaaay! Since I am not teaching any summer courses…