My weight training programme (video)

Here's an 8 minute video where I describe my weight training routine, which starts with an exercise bike HIT warm-up followed by floor exercises and free weights (dumbbells).

As of Saturday morning, 23 people have viewed this post .. and 3 people watched the video. What were the other 20 doing?

Some mistakes in my commentary:

• the heaviest dumbbells are 14 kg each, not 14.5 kg 
• the first weight routine is the 'bent over row' (not 'back over row') 
• it's the 'bicep curl', not 'bicep crunch'.

The order I do exercises varies, there's no rule which says 'heaviest weights first' - in fact that's rather deprecated. Sometimes I start with arm flaps (not the technical term).

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Credits to Clare for the camera work.

A good night's sleep

Clare complained this morning that she had not slept well last night,

"Lying on my side my hips ached, then it was my shoulder. Just couldn't find a comfortable position."

On our way to the shops this morning, I ran some suggestions by her.

"We could replace that expensive new mattress we bought recently with a neutral buoyancy flotation tank?"

"You know, breathing isn't optional with me."

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My second thought was more inspired.

"You know those vertical wind tunnels? They shoot air up a tube at high speed and it supports people. They learn how to sky-dive. It would be the ultimate air bed!"

I thought I ought to mention a few minor difficulties.

"The air speed is 120 mph. And I believe the four 500 hp engines are quite noisy, expensive to run and would probably occupy too much space."

Clare thought these objections reasonable.

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I finally recalled the best solution to a comfortable night's sleep - the levitating frog.

"Remember that YouTube video of the levitating frog? It's held up by a strong magnetic field. If we get some superconducting magnets we could simulate zero-g above the bed. You'd float all night!"

Clare got quite excited by this, until I remembered that it took a 10 Tesla field to levitate the frog. Clare is perhaps three hundred times heavier while the strongest sustained magnetic field ever created is around 40 Tesla.

"There is a small downside. Every metallic object in the house, including the fridge, would be accelerated to insane speeds and would smash its way into the bedroom. The house would be shredded within milliseconds of pressing the on-switch."

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We decided to compromise on Anadin Extra.

GR as a spectator sport

I have now finished Prof. Susskind's ten-part General Relativity lecture course. Yes, we met the Field Equations in lecture 9. I feel like an American who has been shown a cricket test match by an informed guide: I sort of know what's going on, but I'd be completely incompetent at actually doing it.

I am nonetheless delighted.

I have now moved on to an area where I'm equally ignorant: thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Luckily, Prof. Susskind has a ten lecture course!

Professor Leonard Susskind in action

Here's the link to the complete set of Professor Susskind's Theoretical Minimum courses.

General Relativity

My first thought was that Professor Susskind lacked empathy. He'd be asked a question, plainly a little off the plot. It was clear to me and to half the audience what mistaken assumption the student was making but Susskind never seemed to put himself in the student's mind. He just filtered the question through his own, correct, understanding and seemed not to understand the questioner's context. It reminded me of the many stories of Paul Dirac - how autistic!

Prof. Leonard Susskind

But as I've worked through the lectures I understand the man more. His style is immensely attractive. Very casual in sweatshirt and and cords, he ambles around behind the bench snacking on shortbreads and taking swigs of coffee from a cardboard cup. He makes 'mistakes' all the time, 'forgetting' constants and exponents. Students often pick him up on these.

I get him now. He never looks stressed during questions because he knows everything. He makes the 'mistakes' because it keeps the audience awake and involved: those little cognitive dissonances. He stresses the big picture because that's the narrative which conveys the underlying concepts.

He is the perfect complement to the textbook.

His genius is even deeper. In early lectures he covers enough differential geometry for General Relativity. Differential geometry is hard: as I absorbed his lecture I kept thinking Riemann was a genius. And yet he conveyed the key concepts of generalised coordinates, the metric tensor, connections, curvature and geodesics perfectly. Ditto for tensor algebra and calculus. Truly the theoretical minimum!

Here are the ten lectures I'm referring to (YouTube playlist).

Yesterday Susskind told me about falling into a black hole using the Schwarzschild metric and coordinates. We started from the metric, integrated over a trajectory to get a distance, looked at the conditions under which this trajectory would be a geodesic (it's stationary) and then did some algebra to get velocity at various distances from the black hole from the viewpoint of a distant observer. We derived the well-known weird results that the object appears to stop at the event horizon and takes an infinite amount of time to get there. This is not the view of the freely-falling observer: the formal resolution of this puzzle is to come.

Karl Schwarzschild

At the end of lecture 5, a student asks how Karl Schwarzschild was able to derive his eponymous solution to Einstein's field equations for a non-rotating black hole while serving in the hell of the first world war (he later tragically died). Susskind shakes his head in reverential awe and says only that sometimes, when things get tough, he himself finds peace just thinking through the equations.

'The Martian' - interview with the author

If you have a few moments, an interview with Andy Weir, author of 'The Martian'.

My sister found this sufficiently gripping that she abandoned both Andy Murray and the Tour de France to watch it. It's good stuff.