Testosterone backlog

I have a bunch of links to T-Nation articles that I’ve been meaning to blog about. Here they are, all at once.

• Pulling your Chain for Massive Gains by Charles Staley and Keats Snideman

Why this article? It focuses on the posterior kinetic chain — basically, the muscles behind you from your ankles to the back of your skull. Oversimplifying a little, your posterior kinetic chain is what makes you strong — the rest (yes, including your beloved pecs and biceps) are just decoration. This is why Olympic lifters who don’t look very impressive in street clothes can put three hundred pounds overhead, while badass-looking movie stars need help with a bag of cat food. PKC strength is a big thing with me.

• Meat! by Dr. Lonnie Lowery

I’m sick of the idea that meat — red meat in particular — is somehow intrinsically unhealthy. Much has been written about the horrors of saturated fat — like the horrors in The Exorcist, they are fictional — but Dr. Lowery’s article is the first I’ve seen in a long time that deals comprehensively with the benefits of eating meat, rather than debunking the dangers.

Bottom line: meat is your friend.

• The Truth about Bulking by Christian Thibaudeau

TTaB doesn’t speak to any of my prejudices or pet peeves, but it’s a damn good nutrition article and the world (or at least the web) needs more of those.

• Hormonal Optimization through Sleep by Dave Barr

Again, we need more articles on sleep optimization.

How not to run a campus pub, vol. 2

Seems like everyone’s landscaping these days — late September is the season for it in greater Vancouver.  The smell of fertilizer is in the air.

Speaking of bullshit, it seems that the campus pub is making last Friday’s “all ages, all night” theme a regular weekly event.  After all, who’d want to relax with friends and beers on a Friday afternoon?

Combos for conditioning

I’m not a huge fan of conditioning workouts, mostly because they’re hard. This, of course, means that I need to do more of them, to get my conditioning back where I want it to be. On the other hand, I despise “cardio” work — even bag work. When I assault the heavy bag, I’m much more interested in power and technique than I am in pushing my conditioning limits. I don’t want to train to hit things half-assedly just to get my resting heart rate down a few BPM.

Crossfit lives at the extreme end of the “weights for conditioning” spectrum, but there’s plenty of good stuff closer to the middle that isn’t as scary. I’ve been doing this combo for a little while, and like One-Dumbbell Hell it’s pretty good:

1. 3 squat cleans
2. 3 presses
3. 3 front squats
4. 3 split jerks

Done continuously, of course — your hands never leave the bar. Work up to ten sets in thirty minutes, then add weight.

Digital typographeekery

Earlier, I mentioned that I place a great deal of stock in the way a document looks, and mentioned Concrete Mathematics as an ideal of mathematical typesetting.

Well, now I’ve found the eulervm package for LaTeX, and it’s making me very happy indeed. I’ve also found a decent survey of free math fonts for LaTeX, which is also quite helpful. Strongly recommended for people writing math-y documents that aren’t under the thumb of journal (or thesis) style guides.

Stacked dead trees

I had occasion to go to my university’s library today, which reminded me that I don’t do that nearly enough.

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had by browsing the shelves of a well-stocked library — and by well-stocked, I mean a library that deals in specialized books, not rudimentary introductions and half-assed popularizations. Libraries should cull their collections of redundant books whenever it’s practical to do so (and yeah, I realize that it’s rarely practical). We don’t need copies of the Linear Algebra I textbook from thirty years ago nearly as much as we need more esoteric books.

The pleasure of browsing comes from finding unexpected treasures. In an honest-to-balls library, you can chance upon Lie groups on your way to the section on matrix algebras, or computational geometry on your way to computer graphics. It’s like sitting at the bar in your favourite pub and spotting a new beer on tap next to the Guinness. “That looks promising — let’s see what it’s like.” Just as you’d order a pint, you can pick up a likely-looking volume and scan the preface and table of contents. Flip through the book, look at the figures, slosh it around in your brain — and you don’t have to leave a tip if you put it back on the shelf.

The same thing is possible in a poorly-culled library, of course, but it’s harder to find the real gems when they’re hidden in vast rows of unbearably dreary first-year textbooks from the 1960s. It’s utterly impossible to duplicate this process of discovery online — the closest you can come is “Patrons who checked out these books also checked out these:” (with apologies to Amazon.com).

I should spend an hour a week browsing the stacks.

How not to run a campus pub, vol. 1

I don’t really want this to become an ongoing series, but I have a feeling I’m going to have plenty of material (up until I defend and graduate, at least).

My university’s pub isn’t exactly what you’d call a happenin’ place. This isn’t really a good thing — not just because I’d like to spend some time in a good pub, but also because a well-run pub could make plenty of money for our student union (which owns the pub). A student union that makes a lot of money from its pub is a student union that doesn’t need to rape the grad health plan. See where I’m going with this?

Okay, so the pub manager (or the SU flack who tells him what to do) wants to increase attendance. How do you pack people into a pub? Putting on a show might help.

The only problem is, they booked an all-ages show. All-ages, in this enlightened first-world democracy, means no booze. Now, I’m just an academented ivory-tower theorist, but I’m labouring under the impression that bars, pubs, taverns, and the like make money by selling booze. There’s something wrong with this concert idea. (Besides, who brings their kids to a university? Faculty. Profs don’t have time to go to shows, particularly at the beginning of the semester.)

And you know what? They did it for Friday night. That’s right, folks, let’s usher in the weekend with a dry show! This is the second Friday of the new school year, too — with plenty of incoming frosh just waiting to fill up their tabulae rasae with first impressions of campus life. Way to build a loyal customer base, there.

As far as I can tell, this is what happens when an earnest, well-meaning student administration (“let’s build a family-friendly culture on campus! It’ll be great, even though there are no families on campus!”) gets in the way of an otherwise competent campus institution (the pub, for instance, does a great job of hosting the grad socials — two-dollar beers and mellow atmosphere).

Math is hard!

Okay, now I’m joking. (Well, in context. There’s plenty of hard math out there — but I’m not writing about it this time.)

So I picked up the text for my Numerical Linear Algebra course today: Trefethen and Bau’s inventively named “Numerical Linear Algebra“. It’s surprisingly fun — not the word I’d usually associate with numerical books, but Trefethen’s on a mission to dissociate numerical methods from “calculating numerical error”. The first three chapters give a delightful intuition of what linear transformations do.

When I went to buy the text, the counter clerk freaked out. I don’t know whether she’d been traumatized by a linear algebra course in the half-forgotten past or whether she was offering me sympathy for “having” to take such a course, but she treated Trefethen and Bau like a Lovecraftian protagonist might treat the original manuscript of the Necronomicon. She even touched it gingerly, moving it around with her fingertips on the corners, as if it might eat her hand if she provoked it with less tenuous contact.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist playing the blasé Ph.D. student (which role pretty much suits me these days). Every time she offered up something of the form “Linear algebra is soooo tough!” I replied with “Nah, this course looks pretty straightforward” or “It’s a required course, they can’t make it that challenging” or the like. (Best of all, it’s true!) This attitude, of course, convinced her that (keeping with the Lovecraftian theme) I’m some sort of eldritch horror, or space alien, or perhaps both, like the fungi from Yuggoth.

Best fun I’ve had at the bookstore in ages.

Graphics is hard!

One of the delightful things about going to conferences is that you (occasionally) get to fly around with profs and have candid conversations on airplanes. (Extra credit to Austrian Airlines for fuelling this particular conversation with excellent coffee.)

I’ve TAed my university’s “Graphics for Undergrads, Part One” course for two years running now. Now, the funny thing about computer graphics is that it’s not just chock-full of scary math (yes, Virginia, you have to know calculus and linear algebra to pass this course) — it’s also chock-full of scary programming assignments (yes, Victor, you have to know how to use pointers and write well-factored code to have a snowball’s chance in hell of completing any of the programming assignments). Graphics isn’t just hard, it’s hard. (With italics and everything!)

Somehow, though, we keep getting students who think we’re going to teach them “easy” stuff, like Max, Maya, and Photoshop. (First clue that you have a problem: you think art is “easy”.) These people don’t expect to have to do much programming (if anything, they expect to learn how to use OpenGL — as if knowing the API is all they need. If that’s all you want, folks, NeHe doesn’t charge tuition). They certainly don’t expect to do any math. You should see the looks on their faces when I explain ray-tracing in terms of the rendering equation. (Okay, yeah, I’m cruel — but the bright students appreciate it.)

I don’t understand why Graphics I doesn’t have a terrifying reputation here. At my undergraduate institution, Graphics I was a scary goddamn course — almost as bad as the compilers course.