Depression and Exercise

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Talking to a friend earlier this week whose wife is a dancer. I was pointing out that I get a bit crazy if I don’t exercise, and he said the same thing happens to her – that he has to make her get some exercise sometimes just so she’s not unpleasant to be around.

It’s common to hear that from people who exercise a lot. I know it from my own experience: if I go more than a couple of days without cranking up my heart rate, get kinda anxious and depressed, lacking mental focus, that sort of thing. I know enough about how science works not to trust anecdotes, but this is me, so I take it seriously.

Turns out, according too a piece this week in Velonews about exercise and depression, mine and my dancer friend’s anecdotes are commonly reported, but apparently no one has ever studied the issue:

Many people describe feeling worse, cranky, irritable, and moody if they don’t get their exercise – a phenomenon that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been formally examined.

There’s good data suggesting a link between exercise and a reduction in stress, and between a reduction in stress and a reduction in depression – a place I’ll gladly go. But, as scientists like to say, clearly more research is needed.

More on Pantani

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I don’t wanna belabor this Pantani thing, because there’s something a little bit unseemly about a 45-year-old man even having sports heroes, let alone one as questionable as Pantani became. But back in 1998, when I was first learning seriously about cycling, it was Pantani I admired.

And in particular, it was this day, the 16th stage of the 1998 Tour, over the Col de la Madeleine.

This was before OLN, so I followed the day-to-day stuff with Steve Wood’s daily dispatches for Velonews.

Jan Ullrich was the defending champion, and was riding well until the 15th stage, a mountain stage, when he cracked and Pantani put big time on him. Unwilling to cede anything to the Italian, Ullrich came out hard the next day, the 16th stage, attacking at the bottom of the day’s final climb. It was futile but noble – there was no way Ullrich could make up the time he’d lost.

Pantani went with him, just marking his wheel. No one else could follow. And they rode together, old champion and new, banging away for nearly two hours, by themselves.

That fall, when I inherited my “new” bike, I had it painted celeste. And as soon as I could, I started riding it in the mountains.

What will people do with this computer?

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Seth Nickell’s point about the distinction between what people will do with a computer, versus what they could do is the perfect antidote to the endless “they crippled my window manager” arguments. The arguments seem to have lessened thanks to stern management of GNOME’s goals, but Seth’s thermostat example is a classic if needed for future use.

When I first came over to the GNOME world four years ago, one of the first bits of documentation I wrote was for the old desk-guide applet. I was fascinated by the fact that you could have a bunch of different desktops that you could click back and forth among, but the terminology and strange behaviors left me a bit confused. I ended up writing this:

Note

Different window managers use different jargon to describe virtual desktops and the subdivided workspaces within them. Enlightenment divides your working area into “desktops,” and then subdivides those into “screens.” Sawfish, formerly known as Sawmill divides your working area into “workspaces” and then subdivides those into columns and rows. Desk Guide applet calls the workspaces “desktops” and the areas within them “viewports”. See your window manager’s documentation for more informaton on setting up and managing your virtual workspaces.

Yikes! That’s way worse than Seth’s thermostat. And now I can’t remember. Was it viewports the evil Havoc Pennington took away? Or was it workspaces?

Brit Chastises Us

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We may be allies on some really big things, but the British government’s top science advisor isn’t so keen on U.S. policy with respect to climate change, accordng to the Independent:

Britain has attacked President George Bush’s administration for failing to take action on global warming, as part of an intensifying drive to get the United States to treat the issue seriously.

Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, took the opportunity of a speech on Friday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to brand the President’s position as indefensible.

Arriving straight from talks with senior officials in Washington, he pointedly reminded the US that it has signed up for the Kyoto protocol on combating global warming, which the President has been trying to kill.

And he added: “Climate change is real. Millions will increasingly be exposed to hunger, drought, flooding and debilitating diseases such as malaria. Inaction due to questions over the science is no longer defensible.”

King, you may remember is the one who, in an article in Science last month, said climate change was more dangerous than terrorism.

Riding to the PJ

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Jaime and I went up a new road (new for me, anyway) yesterday, out into the pi?on-juniper woodlands north of town.

If there is a quintessential landscape of my home, it is the PJ, vast low-slung forests sweeping north from where I live. The trees, gnarly and stunted, have no majesty whatsoever, but a sort of approachable modesty, hardscrabble survivors that I have always adored, since I remember camping among them at Navajo National Monument in northern Arizona as a kid.


Utah Juniper

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What I Wrote Elsewhere

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From today’s Journal:

The mystery is this: Somehow a little more than 200 million years ago, hundreds of dinosaurs? possibly thousands? died together, at one place, at one time.

Entombed together in stone, they were left for Rinehart and his colleagues to dig up, to try to figure out what was responsible for this prehistoric slaughter.

Peeking Beneath the Sea

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I know I have defended the robotic missions to Mars against charges that they cost too much, but Robert B. Gagosian, in today’s Washington Post, gives voice to an alternative perspective based on questions about parts of the Earth that we have not yet studied well.

Gagosian, head of Woods Hole, loves the Mars stuff, but offers a strong, apples-to-apples argument about the exploratory science that could be done here on Earth for a comparable cost:
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