I headed up to Rumney with Dunbar, Keller, their associated padres, and some of the newer members of our club yesterday. It was my first time back to Rumney since last season and it was a gorgeous day. I wasn't climbing that well, but I did find I was mentally really focused, which has been a problem for me. Instead of wasting time being scared, I was quite calm and thinking about the climbing. I tried my first 12 at Waimea, the ultra-classic Technosurfing (12b). It's no joke (obviously). There's a big dynamic move off a sidepull and a very low foot to a crazy move where you have your hands matched on this slightly slopey rail. Then you have to heel hook above your head and make these powerful moves on these little crimpers, slopers, and one really big pocket. It's a little heady to be doing all these moves with a foot above your head, to say the least. I also tried to onsight Goldbug (10d) at Main Cliff, and blew it when I got the wrong hand on a clipping hold. But I was still pretty happy about that. I'm generally not a very good onsight climber, and Rumney is notorious for very beta-intensive climbs. Everyone else seemed to have a good time as well. Dunbar got up Flying Hawaiian (11b). Karen on-sighted Junco (8+). Lauren onsighted Lonesome Dove (10a) and took some impressive whippers on Poly Purebred (10b). Rikka managed to do the crux on that same climb, which was pretty impressive. And Keller literally fell on the last move on China Beach (14b). I heard there were other impressive things going on, but that's all I remember. I'm taking a week off to rest and let my sore shoulder fix itself. I'm trying the 3 weeks bouldering, 2 weeks endurance, 1 week rest cycle that Eric Horst says you should do. And since I'm also taking a break from cardio (good for me, but it's just too mentally gruelling for me to be a grad student, train for climbing, *and* do cardio all year round), I can relax a little this week.
I've been teaching myself all about the product operator formalism for NMR spectroscopy. It's quite cool, but very complicated. But beyond being complicated, they're really difficult to get a good physical intuition for, as they are mostly abstract symbols, rather than moving objects I can picture easily. Of course, on some level, you have to regard these quantum mechanical equations as magical widgets which let you predict things. Certainly, I can competently manipulate the operators and maybe even speak sensibly about which part of the density matrix they're from and what they mean. But as for a deep understanding? I think that's going to have to wait. I need to review some of the "basics" first: lots of linear algebra, some differential equations, and lots of quantum mechanics. At this point, my poor math skills are just holding me back. I just got myself this book by Tannor which *says* it's an introduction to quantum mechanics, but really isn't. It takes a really interesting approach to quantum mechanics. Instead of going through the usual rigmarole of "define the potential, write the Hamiltonian, find and sketch the eigenfunctions," it talks about time-dependent phenomena, which are easily the most interesting bits of quantum mechanics. It talks about femtosecond laser pulses, coherent control, and all sorts of other goodies I know basically nothing about. But I want to post-doc in non-linear spectroscopy, so it's got the double bonus of being super interesting *and* relevant to my life. How many people can say *that*? There sure are a lot of horrible, mean things about being a grad student in this department, but at the end of the day, I'm learning cutting edge science in an ultra-modern laboratory. There's people all around me doing cool stuff. Most of them are smarter than me. What more could you possibly ask for in life?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Body Heat Loss
Ever heard that "you lose up to three quarters of your body heat through your head, so you'd better put on a hat?" Ever notice, that on your steep alpine approach, that when you take off your hat, you're still bloody hot? I just read an interesting explanation for this "paradox":
http://wildernessmedicinenewsletter.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/heat-loss-through-the-head-and-hypothermia/
This guy took some intrepid volunteers and measured the rate at which they lost heat through various parts of their bodies. They found that there's nothing particularly special about the head; under normal circumstances, you lose about 7% of your body heat through your head. This jives with the "rule of the nines" which says that your head and neck account for about 9% of your total body surface area. The rest of the article is rather unclear, and I leave you to decipher it for yourself; it's hard to tell what people are wearing, how things were measured, etc. Surely, it matters what you're wearing: one can imagine that if you're dressed from neck down in a thick down suit, you're going to be losing more and more body heat through your head, even as the total amount of body heat you lose goes down.
To clarify the situation, I looked around some more. In the British Medical Journal,
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec17_2/a2769
Vreeman and Carroll demolish this and many other myths. Apparently, the myth stems from an army study where, as mentioned above, the subjects were wearing survival suits. Well, duh. Indeed, a rigorous study in the Journal of Applied Physiology supports this:
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/2/669?ijKey=8424233366f33e094555aea4283b303397b32ab4&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
So, there you are. If you forget your hat, your ears may feel cold, but you won't collapse from hypothermia (necessarily).
In completely unrelated news, I've been training my core strength a bit. According to the US Marine Corps and Army PFT standards, I'm quite a wimp. I don't know how I'd do at running (but I'd probably be terrible). I was regularly doing 7 or 8 minute miles over 5 miles for a while, but then my shins started hurting terribly and I switched to stair climbing instead. Despite the surprisingly mediocre athletics facilities at school here, there's a machine which functions like an escalator, except that you walk up it backwards. It feels very much like hiking but it's stairs, not uneven terrain, so the workout isn't quite as good.
Anyways, I should be able to do 3 pullups, 50 crunches or 65 situps, and 58 pushups (various sources). With pullups, I have no problem. I can easily crank out 10, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to get to 15 or even 20. The crunches and pushups are another story, though. I can do about thirty of each at the moment (after doing them for a few weeks), so clearly, core strength is a bit of a weakness for me. But I'm doing them every day or two, so in a few months, I should be "up to spec." I've noticed that when I climb very steep terrain, I do struggle to keep my feet on, particularly for big, semi-dynamic moves. So it'll be good for my climbing, and good for my overall health, too. My shoulders have been clicking oddly and I've had some elbow tendonitis (on the inside), so I've been doing shoulder presses (raise a weight above your head starting with your arm to the side and your elbow pointed towards the ground) and reverse wrist curls (hold a weight with your arm horizontally and your wrist pointed all the way down, and curling it back up to the neutral position). It seems to be helping.
What sort of core workouts do you do? Keller told me he does some sort of ridiculous circuit which "makes people puke." I'm not really into puking, personally, so I'm not aiming for that at all. But he did tell me it involves all sorts of exotica like clapping pushups. That's just overkill, at least for now. I *would* like to be able to do a front lever and one arm pullup, though. I can do a half-lever (hanging from both arms, body horizontal, with one knee tucked in), in so-so form, for about five seconds if I'm hanging from rings. And I can do a one-arm lockoff with my right arm (left is weaker) for about five seconds, although that is pretty stressful on my shoulder. So I'm making progress, but it's going to be quite a while before I have that kind of strength. But that's part of the fun of training right? It's the dizzying highs of success and improvement, followed by the doldrums of injury, regaining old ground, and plain plateaus. Woo hoo!
http://wildernessmedicinenewsletter.wordpress.com/2007/02/14/heat-loss-through-the-head-and-hypothermia/
This guy took some intrepid volunteers and measured the rate at which they lost heat through various parts of their bodies. They found that there's nothing particularly special about the head; under normal circumstances, you lose about 7% of your body heat through your head. This jives with the "rule of the nines" which says that your head and neck account for about 9% of your total body surface area. The rest of the article is rather unclear, and I leave you to decipher it for yourself; it's hard to tell what people are wearing, how things were measured, etc. Surely, it matters what you're wearing: one can imagine that if you're dressed from neck down in a thick down suit, you're going to be losing more and more body heat through your head, even as the total amount of body heat you lose goes down.
To clarify the situation, I looked around some more. In the British Medical Journal,
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec17_2/a2769
Vreeman and Carroll demolish this and many other myths. Apparently, the myth stems from an army study where, as mentioned above, the subjects were wearing survival suits. Well, duh. Indeed, a rigorous study in the Journal of Applied Physiology supports this:
http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/2/669?ijKey=8424233366f33e094555aea4283b303397b32ab4&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
So, there you are. If you forget your hat, your ears may feel cold, but you won't collapse from hypothermia (necessarily).
In completely unrelated news, I've been training my core strength a bit. According to the US Marine Corps and Army PFT standards, I'm quite a wimp. I don't know how I'd do at running (but I'd probably be terrible). I was regularly doing 7 or 8 minute miles over 5 miles for a while, but then my shins started hurting terribly and I switched to stair climbing instead. Despite the surprisingly mediocre athletics facilities at school here, there's a machine which functions like an escalator, except that you walk up it backwards. It feels very much like hiking but it's stairs, not uneven terrain, so the workout isn't quite as good.
Anyways, I should be able to do 3 pullups, 50 crunches or 65 situps, and 58 pushups (various sources). With pullups, I have no problem. I can easily crank out 10, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to get to 15 or even 20. The crunches and pushups are another story, though. I can do about thirty of each at the moment (after doing them for a few weeks), so clearly, core strength is a bit of a weakness for me. But I'm doing them every day or two, so in a few months, I should be "up to spec." I've noticed that when I climb very steep terrain, I do struggle to keep my feet on, particularly for big, semi-dynamic moves. So it'll be good for my climbing, and good for my overall health, too. My shoulders have been clicking oddly and I've had some elbow tendonitis (on the inside), so I've been doing shoulder presses (raise a weight above your head starting with your arm to the side and your elbow pointed towards the ground) and reverse wrist curls (hold a weight with your arm horizontally and your wrist pointed all the way down, and curling it back up to the neutral position). It seems to be helping.
What sort of core workouts do you do? Keller told me he does some sort of ridiculous circuit which "makes people puke." I'm not really into puking, personally, so I'm not aiming for that at all. But he did tell me it involves all sorts of exotica like clapping pushups. That's just overkill, at least for now. I *would* like to be able to do a front lever and one arm pullup, though. I can do a half-lever (hanging from both arms, body horizontal, with one knee tucked in), in so-so form, for about five seconds if I'm hanging from rings. And I can do a one-arm lockoff with my right arm (left is weaker) for about five seconds, although that is pretty stressful on my shoulder. So I'm making progress, but it's going to be quite a while before I have that kind of strength. But that's part of the fun of training right? It's the dizzying highs of success and improvement, followed by the doldrums of injury, regaining old ground, and plain plateaus. Woo hoo!
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