The Personal Journal of James Vornov
On Friday, I drove to Rockville, Maryland for a business meeting. While crawling in some early morning traffic, I pointed the D300 out the car window and grabbed this scene.
I’m now considering selling the D80 since I no longer notice the added weight of the D300 and I’m so enamored with the images that I hesitate to pick up the D80 at this point.
Today I ran 20 minutes of random length intervals, Speedplay, at the suggestion of The 20 Minute Fitness Solution. I ran on the local high school track doing two 400 meter intevals as the longest and a bunch of 8 second run / 12 second jog cycles with a few sprints of varying length thrown in.
While I may just be enjoying the efficiency of these short, high intensity workouts and benefitting from the novelty and lack of adaptation due to my inexperience, I’m beginning to suspect there is something else going on here as they feel very natural to me. They are short, hard and fun.
It may be, as Clarence Bass speculates here that these high intensity intervals bring a higher percentage of muscle fibers into play- including fast and slow twitch fibers. If, as I suspect, I’m not a gifted endurance athelete, but I am strong, I may benefit more from training that recruits the stronger side of my muscular abilities.
This image was small, generally unsuccessful experiment in manipulating light in a street photo as if I had used lights in the street on the subject. The original had very flat lighting. I’d like to rework this from scratch to get a more cinematic and dramatic quality.
I spent some time trying out the monochrome conversion method that VIncent Versace describes in “Welcome to Oz”. It’s complex and I don’t fully understand it. Some of the steps don’t result in the state he describes in the book. Some of this may be changes in Photoshop CS2 to CS3 however.
He describes a method in which rather than blending the RGB channels together, three separate layers are created- one for R, one for B and one for G. He then goes through the effects of changing the order of the three layers and then, of course, using masks to select how different areas of the image are converted.
For example, in this image I wanted the grate to be dark, which it isn’t in the color version. I wanted the sill to be close in value to the rest of the paint. This took a bit of painting back bright or dark layers in these areas.
Overall, it’s a destination that I couldn’t have gotten to without the methods. Using the transformation preset that engineered into a monochrome film is a much more constrained process.
This week in Baltimore we had record high temperatures- reaching 70°F yesterday. So I needed to get out on the roads and do some bicycle riding. The 20 min interval session of 8 seconds of work, 12 seconds of recovery works well indoors on a trainer. I was faced with how to push the intensity in a similar way on the bike.
On a quiet stretch of road, I was able to keep an eye on the elapsed time readout of the Garmin 305, but it’s not a reasonable way to ride. Eventually, I figured out that it was about 12 full pedal strokes in 8 seconds, so I pushed for 12 and then let up. On a short ride, I got into a rhythm of pushing 12, resting for about the same, driving my heart rate up to the same zone that I did on the trainer for a 20 minute session. On a longer ride, I just threw in 8 second intervals keep my heart rate up during a longer 90 minute extensive ride.
Not Practicing
It looks like I’m not alone in Maryland as a non-practicing physician:
State lacks practicing physicians — baltimoresun.com: “While the state has about 25,000 licensed physicians, the second-highest rate per capita of any state, nearly 40 percent are engaged in teaching, research and administrative duties, according to the study, and some of the rest spend part of their time in such nonclinical work.”
One the insights that I had many years ago was that in practice, one had no way to leverage one’s activities. Economically a physician is valued for their direct time in providing care. And procedural activity, like surgery or angioplasty, is valued per unit time way above examining and diagnosing. In research and business, there are value multipliers as others participate in the enterprise. The return on time is potentially much higher for a phyisician outside of practice.
Low FDA Approval Rates
The rate of new drug approvals for the pharmaceutical industry is dropping. One reason may be FDA delay:
Eye on FDA: Impact of Approvable Letters 2007 – Part 1: “However, it is important to think about the implications of so many approvable letters. They represent more than an inconvenience to companies and to patients who are awaiting therapies with serious implications for both, as well as for investors in companies, particularly smaller companies that do not yet have a product on the market. ”
The drug is safe and effective, but is not yet allowed to market. This in between status for a drug can drag on for years, destroying companies.
Late this afternoon I went out into my backyard with the express intent of harvesting images for use in Photoshop compositing. While I sometimes have problems in images capturing a full range of intensities, I am more often frustrated by focus problems. Even with the small sensor and relatively small apertures, I often which that I had more real front to back focus.
In this image I combined an image with the foreground trunks in sharp focus with one that had the rear trees sharp. As it turned out, I used the image with the foreground in focus and painted in the trees in the back along with the fence behind. Like a high dynamic range photo, it creates a bit of a “hyper-real” impression because photos usually lack this kind of selective focus. I hope it helps guide the eye back from left to right and front to back through the image space, landing on the nicely lit fence.
I’m building a small portfolio of these tree images, but I’m still exploring the possibilities in their arrangements and patterns.
Worth the Subscription
I subscribe to the online edition of The Lancet Neurology. The 2007 Round-Up was worth the subscription price itself. I need to keep up very broadly and these are the kind of overviews that help me the most.
Also in The Lancet Neurology:
The Lancet Neurology: “We used a unique response-conditional crossover design to provide rescue treatment if needed, and patients who showed an improvement in inflammatory neuropathy cause and treatment (INCAT) disability score during treatment were re-randomised into a 24-week extension phase.
I’m reading this both to gain some insight into immunologic treatment successes, but I’m trying to figure out how useful the trial’s design might be. I’ve been skeptical of enrichment designs in the past, but this may be a more clinically relevant way to study the reality of clinical responses.
Memories
I did my MD, PhD training as well as my medical internship at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta. I’m sorry, but not surprised that it may close.
A Safety-Net Hospital Falls Into Financial Crisis – New York Times: “Once admired for its skill in treating a population afflicted by both social and physical ills, Grady, a teaching hospital, now faces the prospect of losing its accreditation. Only short-term financial transfusions have kept it from closing its doors.”
When I trained, Grady was a resident’s hospital. Care was provided by residents under the direction of Chief Residents who had completed training and were often specialty fellows continuing training and a group of incredibly knowledgeable teachers who ran the services and provided checks on care through morning rounds. There were teaching attending physicians, but their function was to teach and supervise, not provide care.
After I left, medical reimbursement rules changed so that the attendings had to provide care and sign off everything if the school was going to be able to bill at all. Having to switch from resident care to medical faculty care kicked a big prop out from under academic medicine and was one of the forces that eventually led me to my career in industry.
After 6 months of regular writing here, I took down my previous weblog. Because of it’s long life, decidingbetter.com had better page ranking than this weblog on Google. I’m redirecting the domain here for now and plan to hold on to it.
I looked over the referer log for the last 6 months and found that there was only one theme that was getting regular searches, which was some posts on chromogenic C41 process black and white film. That should be replaced, since I don’t think there’s a great deal of information on this alternative on the net.
But the site was ugly, was probably leading to occasional attacks on my home network and wasn’t where I wanted searchers looking for my net writing. For now then, I’ve consolidated here.
I’ve been reading Vern Gambetta’s weblog for some time now.
Functional Path Training: Variation: “The human organism is highly adaptable so it must be continually challenged with new stresses and increasingly challenging movement problems to solve.”
As a pioneer in Functional Training, he stresses that conditioning programs- endurance or strength need to be designed as preparation for the activity itself. At first, I thought this meant staying away from weight machines and using medicine balls and agility drills, but I’m beginning to think that the idea has much broader implications.
As I’ve explored some of the websites that favor high intensity interval training for general conditioning (Hillfit, The 20 Minute Fitness Solution, Mark’s Daily Apple) I’ve begun to understand that we may have been damaged by the “Aerobics Revolution” just as we have with low fat dieting.
Mark’s Daily Apple » Blog Archive » A Case Against Cardio (from a former mileage king): “Unfortunately, the popular wisdom of the past 40 years – that we would all be better off doing 45 minutes to an hour a day of intense aerobic activity – has created a generation of overtrained, underfit, immune-compromised exerholics. ”
There’s a strong emphasis on relatively low intensity, extensive training across the fitness literature. It led me for years to take long fitness rides, keeping my heart rate down. In reading Joe Friel and Brian Clarke last year, I began to get some idea of work volume and hard easy training, but in the end, my fitness over a good bit of the year was stagnant, especially when training time was short.
I now think that the problem is that the professional atheletes that these approaches have been developed for can stress themselves with very large volumes at the moderate intensities. I can squeeze in a 3 hour ride on some Sundays, but not all. And I can’t get more than about 10 hours of duration in a week. Once I’m adapted to the 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1 hr training week, I can’t get anywhere since I’m adapted to it. At first I thought that there would be some adaptation since more work could be done during the same time, but I’m now seeing that such gains will be limited.
As a 50 year old who’s been active for years, my limiter is no longer my 2-3 hour endurance at 60-70% of VO2 max. And I would probably gain little developing my 3-5 hour endurance even if I had the time. My limiters are strength and oxygen utilization (VO2 Max). I need to stress those systems to force adaptation and improvement in my ability to hike, run and bicycle.
Returning to Vern Gambetta, cycling through different activities that empahasize different abilities, while maintaining the overall base is likely to be the most efficient and productive means of functional conditioning. I think he presents some of these ideas in a practical way in this article: Rethinking Periodization.
