Nurturing the first wind to get to the second

There are many good reasons not to run.  But if you decide to run anyway, there are still issues that can get in your way.  I'll write this to address some of the ways that I've found to optimize my run and make it quite enjoyable.  As a rower friend of mine, Ken Clemmer, commented that rowing is the art of knowing what not to do as you strive for efficient motion.  Running is simple enough.  But there are some habits than can make running difficult or tedious.  I hope some of this is valuable.

I took up running when I was a agile teen thanks to the inspiration of my high school track team and friends.  Over the years, thanks to genetics, exercise and nutrition, I have bulked up to an ungainly 6 foot tall stature.  But as the nimbler sports seemed to recede from me, running stayed a constant.  (I love rock climbing, but find it very challenging due to my weight to muscle ratio.)  My biggest hurdle in running has been managing asthma.  Asthma is caused by highly allergic bronchioles that swell in reaction to pollutants and pollen, often complicated by secondary factors as the lungs try to flush out the irritants with fluid.  Exercise can exacerbate asthma symptoms for various reasons including cortisol release and abnormal breathing patterns.  But exercise can also improve asthma management if done in a low stress and controlled fashion.  It's my personal belief that running reduces dependence on medications and can lead to expanded lung capacity.  Before running, it's important, if you're asthmatic, to get your allergies under control.  Don't run if it's going to result in needing the use of bronchodilators.  Excessive use of epinephrine (Primatene Mist) albuterol (Ventolin etc.) can lead to your lungs permanently altering their shape due to the manner of shallow breathing that asthmatics can fall into.   

I like to run with minimal visual or social distraction.  Forests are great if you are near to one.  But cities are filled with distractions and dangers which make excessive momentum a bad thing.  Indoor running can minimize the impact of pollen, as well as the risk of being injured by moving vehicles or territorial animals.  When on treadmills, I avoid mirrors and TV screens.  You want to sink into the moment in a run, rather than be casting about for visual stimulus or being overly self-conscious about getting sweaty and exhausted in front of others.

Music can be an excellent tool for focus in a run.  I also find running to be a great mental state for appreciating subtleties of my favorite music.  So if you live in a country where you can gain access to a musical device and a library of good music, I recommend experimenting with different songs that have BPM (beats per minute) that you can pace your run to.  Slower music may compel you to pace your stride longer, faster BPM may compel you to run in a manic or fast manner.  So it's good to experiment with music that suits your desired pace and body size. 

I think of three forces of forward propulsion in my run.
1) Desire to run.  It's easier for me to have a good run in the mornings.  If you're not in a good mental state, your run can be sloppy and unrewarding.  It's better not to run at all than to force it and have bad associations with your run that are actually due to something else.  A good mood is enhanced by a run.  A bad mood seldom is.

2) The amount of sugars in your bloodstream.  Make sure that you're well nourished, but not bloated by a meal.  The previous day's meal is probably going to give you the energy you need for today's exercise.  I think it's great to have juice before a run.  Your body isn't going to be doing any meaningful digestion during a run, so complex carbohydrates aren't going to improve your energy much if consumed immediately prior to the run.

3) The amount of oxygen you can keep in the bloodstream to rapidly metabolize those sugars.  This is the biggest factor for me.  So I'll go into extensive detail about it.  This is the core of my running experience.  The first two factors are important.  But breath is the most critical. 

To optimize breath, there are a few things you can consider.  I always start a run slowly, pacing my breath evenly with my stride.  Typically two paces for every in-breath, and two for every out-breath.  Starting a run fast can deplete the oxygen in your blood rapidly and set up a pattern of breathing to compensate that will quickly exhaust you as you hyperventilate to compensate for the rapid surge of speed.  Long ago I learned the trick of pursing your lips to blow air at pressure like a silent whistle.  This increases the pressure in your lungs.  At higher pressures, hemoglobin in your blood will take in Oxygen at a higher rate.  (This also can help with hypoxia when you are mountain climbing.)  If you feel momentarily short of breath, in addition to altering your stride or pace, try pursed-lipped out-breaths until you feel your blood oxygen level is balanced.

If you've ever wondered why breathing too much or too fast could trigger bronchiole constriction, I recommend some reading on Ukrainian doctor Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko's theories.  His concepts in general are based on the idea that hyperventilating causes imbalance of gas intake to the bloodstream, other than oxygen.  Constriction of the bronchioles by his theory is an adaptive reaction to limit the imbalance in the bloodstream.  While I'm not a practitioner of formal methods of Buteyko, this concept has helped me understand a bit better why the higher-lung panting, that chronic asthmatics typically do, actually exacerbates symptoms in an "asthma attack". 

To avoid breathing too rapidly when running, focus on the out-breath.  Asthmatics tend to focus on breathing in, rather than on breathing out.  While these would seem equivalent.  Altering the focus can result in deeper breathing patterns and using your full lung capacity, which in turn leads to slow deep breath rather than manic panting.  When running, if you suddenly feel the "itch" feeling of bronchiole constriction, slow/lengthen your pace, slow your breathing to longer out-breaths and then determine if you should continue.  Sudden stops can exacerbate symptoms too.  So it's good to view everything about exercise as gradual.

When your breathing is optimal in a run, you can unlock a tremendous amount of energy and endurance.  It typically takes a quarter or half a mile of running before my pace is optimized.  This is when the run gets really fun.  It's a feeling of being zoned-in.  Time seems to slow.  You'll be aware of the flow of your body in ways that you can make subtle adjustments.  After a mile or so, you may get a feeling of "second wind", as your run becomes very calm.  Your breathing may slow even more.  If you want to keep going, you can pay attention to a few other things that will make your running endurance better.

There are many good instructions on running stride.  I'm not much of an expert here.  What I focus on is having my head balanced like a golf ball on a tee, with little neck muscle involvement, and no throat constriction.  I tend to land slightly on the ball of the foot in my stride instead of the heel and avoid excessive upward motion or shock to the heel/knees.  I tend to relax my arms.  Holding them up can make me speed my stride.  Letting them hang lower lets me have a longer slower stride which I enjoy.  I give little thought to speed.  If I'm tread-milling, speed is only weighed against the blood sugar I feel.  High energy times I'll run faster with longer strides.  Low energy times I'll run slower with shorter strides.

A Buddhist abbess once commented in a Zen Center dharma talk that as your practice improves the inefficient things you do will fall away until there's nothing but the practice.  As I get deep into second wind, my run feels like this.  I'm able to breathe very calmly and my thoughts can sink into the music I am enjoying and the splendor of what it feels like to be a human.   (I regret I don't recall the name of the abbess who gave the talk.  http://sfzc.org/ was the venue.)


This article is dedicated to the memory of Robert Volberg.  Restauranteur extraordinaire.  Founder of Angeline's, Berkeley.  Robert died of an asthma attack June 23rd, 2010.

Joining the Mozilla BrowserID Initiative

Have you ever had trouble remembering the login to one of your dozen or so online accounts?  Or have you ever had confusion over which user is logged into a given webmail or social network on a shared computer?

Mozilla Firefox is rolling out a new browser-based initiative to permit the storing of all IDs associated with one single login identity.  You can think of it as a single key to your online identities instead of a keychain of dozens of unique keys.  BrowserID will be even more secure than the complex conventional manner of site login management as the user will be able to centrally control all accounts associated with your personal online content.

Over the coming months I will have the privilege of working with their engineers to bring this platform to a broader audience through partnerships with leading browser,  email and social network providers across the web. 

BrowserID will enable you to toggle between professional and personal online accounts with ease and make it much simpler for families to be able to share computers without confusion resulting from users having different browser cookies for different signed in users across multiple web properties.  Like the BMW being able to identify its driver when he/she approaches, the Firefox browser with BrowserID enabled will be able to effortlessly escort you to your frequented websites without the typical confusion of multiple cryptic logins.

From the company that popularized browser-based advertisement controls and tabbed browsing, a new advancement in web technology is about to unfold.  Web surfing is about to get faster and friendlier.

Stay tuned as we roll out more exciting features of this product to a browser or website near you.

EEG hats for everyone

NeuroSky Chip Toy

There are a few interesting companies developing "Brain Computer Interfaces" for toys and digital devices.  These devices read electrical fields above your scalp that indicate activity happening on the inside of your skull.  Though the devices can't capture thoughts, they can signal what regions of your brain are active at any given moment.  What this means is that the skin of your head can be used in lieu hand gestures, replacing a keyboard, mouse or joystick input.

Developers should care about this because two of these companies are seeking our help, in that they are inviting us to code applications to leverage their consumer headsets.  My colleagues and I have been testing the different tools to see if they can socket into mobile apps for use in stress management or mobile gaming.  These tools are currently in use in the medical field for those who lack the ability to leverage conventional computer interfaces.  The question is whether these tools will ever supersede the hand (keyboard/mouse/gesture), or the tongue (Siri/DragonDictate/GoogleVoiceSearch) for interfacing with computers.  

Force Trainer - Uncle Milton

NeuroSky is the price performer in consumer electronics so far.  ($40-$70)  Devices have been mass produced with Mattel and Uncle Milton Toys to bring these to households in the US market with a very basic single command that comes from the cerebral cortex and (perhaps) the frontal lobe.  The significant benefit of NeuroSky's chips and sensors is that they are dry-contact, not requiring the wet or gel contacts used in medical-grade EEG.  The left forehead contact is the point that is supposed to affect the toy, elevating a ping-pong ball when the mind is still in concentration.

NeuroSky MindFlex Toy

NeuroSky claims to be coming out with a new headset similar to the toys released by Uncle Milton (above) and Mattel (left), but that will interface with your mobile applications instead of the hard-wired hard-coded toys previously released.  They are hosting meetups in Silicon Valley to work with developers on coming out with the first round of apps that will interface with these headsets.  So stay tuned on that front.  One thing they tell us though is that there will still only be the on/off command structure of the frontal lobe input.  So don't expect to do right/left or complex motor interpretation such as a spatial game.

A very attractive aspect of NeuroSky products is that they are already bluetooth based.  So the player doesn't need to worry about wires.  This can give the user the illusion of some kind of telepathy, which the presence of wires might minimize. Also, the dry-contact sensors overcome the potential consumer adoption hurdle that medical grade EEG gel contacts would encounter. 

Our experience with the NeuroSky chip is that it is very easy to set up but challenging to manipulate.  The process of control is to occupy the mind with a focused thought for a steady period to keep the contacts in the headset sensing a continual steady signal.  High mental activity causes the ping-pong ball to drop and not move.  And, allegedly, a still but focused mind causes the steady signal necessary to complete the circuits and turn the lights/fan on.

Epoc Headset and USB

The more versatile consumer headset is the Epoc headset from Emotiv.  ($299) This one has 16 sensors across the top of the scalp.  So it is able to pick up points that can reflect complex motor thoughts such as right/left/forward/backward.  In addition they claim to capture some emotive states and even facial expressions.

The advantage of the Epoc is that it is already open to developers, interfacing to your computer through a USB key.  They are soliciting all developers to start filling out their proprietary app store (iTunes model) for games and tools that other consumers will be able to use with their own Epoc headsets in the future.  So we have the opportunity to start coding for a headset that is already pretty close to medical grade.

Currently, developers need to code their apps in Windows only for the PC platform.  In the future, we may be able to use this tool for Apple and mobile operating systems as well.  But there has been no promises on this from Emotiv.

Epoc Touchpoint Scan

The disadvantage of Epoc is that you do need to use wet-contacts to the scalp in order to pick up the electrical signals.  It's unlikely that consumers will be willing to re-apply the saline solution for each sitting of their EEG games.  But, this is what we have to work with at this point.  The process of training for the Epoc is a very gradual pairing of discoverable point contact combinations and specific output commands the user wants to exert on the Epoc-compatible game or tool. 

There isn't much point of consumers purchasing the Epoc at this point because the developer community hasn't yet produced a broad range of tools or games for exploration. 

NIA Headset & CPU

I would like to give an honorable mention to the NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) headset from OCZ.  It's "honorable" only because it's no longer in the race, as OCZ has discontinued manufacture of the product.  However, they were able to develop quite sophisticated software for the PC interface, produce a small CPU to read and interpret the input signals, and manufacture the headset for under $100. The disadvantage of the NIA was that it read only three point contacts across the forehead, and would also pick up electrical signals generated by the muscular motion of the eyebrows.

I really appreciated the ambitious scope of the NIA software to capture right/left commands that could be mapped by the user to actual USB and keyboard keystrokes used in game control.  If it didn't have the requirement of needing to be calibrated in Windows, in theory this would enable an EEG control for xBox, Playstation, or any other device that accepted the market-standard and platform-agnostic USB input.

NIA direct USB Input

A common critique of the brain computer interface products is that they are complex to start using.  I'd have to say that the NeuroSky products are the easiest to use out of the box.  (Both the MindFlex and Force Trainer were up and running in less than a minute after battery installation.)  Epoc and Nia take multiple steps to set up and quite a long process to calibrate to the user.

All these devices require a learning curve as the user gets familiar with the idea of sending signals to a machine from a part of the body that tends to be largely passive.  In the distant future the thought of interfacing with a new device through the skin on our scalp will take only as long as one's first interaction with a touch screen.  But now, watching users wince and squint as they try to flex their brains with these devices shows the inherent foreignness of the concept to mainstream consumers.

Air-Wire Device Pairing for Games

I'd posted back in June about opportunities and approaches in pairing between mobile devices as smart phones and tablets proliferate.  ncubeeight has teamed up with ViSSee computer vision of Switzerland to create a new US joint venture, Air-Wire, to develop paired-device infrastructure tools for game developers interested in creating more robust and immersive gaming experiences.

Through the iPhone App Store, Apple has re-invented and expanded the shareware model of the 1990s.  But whereas shareware depended on free software to all with a small percentage of customers contributing toward the development costs, Apple's App Store permitted a more lucrative model, where every customer chips in a little bit, creating a boom in scalability for the independent developer community. 

Now that many consumers have multiple smart devices (iPhone, iPad, Macintosh Computer, AppleTV) in their household, new multiple device interaction can be used by one consumer through wireless pairing of devices used in a single task.

The benefit of the ViSSee computer vision tools is that a mobile phone is now able to capture gestures beyond touch through input from the embedded camera, interpreted by the native device CPU.  (central processing unit)  Air-Wire's products will permit an iPhone to be used as a joy-stick or input mechanism for a game running on a separate device, be it another iPhone, iPad, Computer, TV or utility-connected device.

Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii have have pioneered infrared-based peripherals for remote input tracking to replace the mouse, trackball or stylus (which were abstracted controls for gaming computers) with more intuitive body movement tracking based on natural body motion.  Now that many "smart devices" such as mobile phones contain both a camera and CPU of their own, they can render intelligible messages to a remote computer as preprocessed input commands without needing the infrared.

Air-Wire's infrastructure tools will, for example, permit driving games to detect foot position for input commands such as braking and accelerating that the player uses to control the tablet-hosted game while using the tablet itself as a steering wheel, in turn projecting the screen of the game play through Apple's Air Play to an external screen.

As device-pairing opportunities expand with the distribution of tablet, mobile, and clothing accessory remote chips like the Jawbone "UP" wristband, more market opportunities open up for developers.  And we'll have more to show you.

Apple's foray into washable electronics

Mark Weiser wrote in Scientific American article "The Computer for the 21st Century" an insight I've often thought on:  "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."

I've been thinking a lot about the legacy of Steve Jobs and his Apple computer after the announcement of his stepping down from his CEO role to become Chairman of the Apple Board of Directors.  Apple's products have significantly shaped my life over the past two decades, starting with my first Mac, an SE30 that I bought in 1987.  Since then, I've bought over twenty Apple products and over the past two years worked in the app development space. 

I'm of course very grateful for the way Apple products have inspired me through my educational years, in my career as an inventor and businessman, as well as in my avocation as a composer.  What Apple has done in it's app marketplace is a radical reinvention of the shareware model of software development, enabling everyone to pay some small amount instead of only 1-2% as in shareware's previous incarnation.  Apple has made it possible for small businesses like mine to pursue their passion for invention, making small projects profitable like never before.

Apple has changed my life significantly for the better.  That's a big statement.  But I'd like to comment on a small life vignette today.  When American car manufacturers turned to the Japanese auto industry to understand how to improve their own manufacturing process, they found that it was the attention to incredibly small detail that led to the success of the Japanese manufacture process.  Apple has always done that.  What always amazed me with Apple products is that new computers would be packed with features their future users wouldn't even know they could ask for, or even want.  Speech recognition, games, full movie editing suites, music composition suites.  Apple just put them in, knowing that users would become creators if they had the software without the hurdle of having to buy it.  That meant Apple computers were more expensive than Windows husks.  But their users would find themselves doing more with them.

There is one particular detail I just learned about Apple's touch-screen "Nano" iPod recently.  Like Mark Weiser's ideal computers, that disappear, the shuffle has a propensity of getting lost quite easily.  Ask me, I just washed mine on the warm cycle with my gym clothes.  The surprising thing is, on a whim, I plugged it into my clock radio.  It immediately was able to play songs from memory!  The water of course had drained the battery by shorting the exposed charging contacts.  But after a day or so had fully recharged and the screen lit up.  What kind of company makes washable electronics products?  I'm not surprised it's Apple. 

Surely Apple doesn't tout that its products are waterproof.  They don't tout a lot of features that they include free of charge.  But it sure is a delight to find new benefits when you don't expect them.  I do not suggest you try to wash your shuffle deliberately.  (I'm not planning to ever repeat this experiment.)  And if you ever do wash your iPod Nano or iPod Shuffle, and you want to recharge it, it's best to attach it to a USB port or into the charging station of a clock radio rather than a socket charger which could be risky in the case of an actual short circuit if the casing has been compromised.

So I must thank Apple again for surprising me with the water-proofedness of my iPod Nano.  It's always the small details they pay attention to that make Apple users so cultishly loyal to their brand.  As their technology "disappears" into the fabric of your everyday laundry, it helps for it to be wash-and-wear ready.

My phone is self-aware

My Egypt trip including Abu Simbel, Aswan, Luxor, Cairo

In early April I wrote of the need to utilize our mobile phone technology to address use cases ranging from personal navigation issues to large scale disaster response.  On the small scale, my personal scenario involved getting lost on a mountain top after sunset in Jordan (wanting to retrace my steps with my iPhone).  On the large scale, thousands of souls were lost on the coast of Tohoku, Japan when a tsunami struck in March, their loved ones not knowing where they were, even though many of them likely were carrying cell phones that could have been tracking their position, if there'd been an app for that.

Subsequently, several crafty developers uncovered a location file that resides on iOS4 Apple phones.  Unfortunately, there aren't ways to access this data in real time from the personal perspective, or from a server backup from a broader perspective.  However, at the O'Reilly "Where 2.0 Conference", Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan demonstrated and published a program called iPhone Tracker for individuals to view their own device-embedded data.  I recommend everyone try this if you're an iPhone user. 

My motion through Cairo over a five day period

Using the iPhone Tracker application on my Mac, I was able to extract data my iPhone had captured during my trip through the Middle East.  Upper left you can see my tracks from Egypt's southern-most town of Abu Simbel, along the Nile through Aswan and Luxor (Old Thebes) and on to Cairo.  Zooming into detail on my Cairo stay, at right, you can see the day I spent at the Cairo Museum and Tahrir Square overlapped with the day I spent in the historic Islamic Cairo quarter, then two separate days for the visit to Coptic Cairo and the Citadel Mosque built by Salah ad-Din atop the hill to the south of Cairo to defend from crusaders.  The far right cluster of points is my last few hours at the airport before departure. 

Since the release of the iPhone Tracker for computers, the research and development team at the New York Times has launched a new web service to allow any user to upload their personal location history file to the web for backup in case Apple discontinues or alters the format of the location file.  You can do a similar rendering of your data like the maps above by visiting their service www.openpaths.cc  

According to Apple he location file on iPhones is meant to keep a history of phone connectivity through cell towers or wi-fi hot spots as reference points to quickly render map data, not for actual tracking of a user.  (The data stays on the phone and is not transmitted externally.)  However, I see incredible value in an app that actually does transmit location information to an external server for the use of location-backtracking as I needed while in Jordan, or as relatives need to check in on the location of their loved ones in emergencies.  As the technology is now prevalent to do this, it just takes the will and the time to make it so.

Stay tuned...

Future-scope

I was listening to the Apollo 11 logs sampled in the Austere composition "Principium Somniferum", recorded when the spacecraft departed Earth's gravitational field to be captured by the Moon's.  It's a profound composition inspired by the similarly profound story of men sling-shotting themselves in a bubble of metal away from the protection of Earth's physics toward a desolate chunk of rock based on an extreme faith in their mathematical calculations and belief that they'd packed adequate provisions for the journey. 

The transitional moment the Houston engineer spoke of reminded me of a concept my father often pondered and discussed.  Humans, being bipeds who evolved with their brains accustomed to living at walking or running speeds, have to adapt their thinking to the discontinuity of the way we travel today.  Our minds have a timeline of prediction that leads minutes, hours, days ahead of where we are at the present time.  When we make large leaps like from SFO to NYC, he says there is a point before we get to our airplane that our minds make the leap ahead of us.  For those moments after the mental leap, our bodies walk in old-space while our minds operate and plan in new-space.  We become spatially-spread zombies with head in one place and body in another.  (This may be why it's so disorienting to have our flights cancelled.  As it's virtual decapitation.)

These thoughts in turn make me think of how long it will take for our technology to catch up with our travel-bound heads.  Our location based services (LBS) are great at tracking the trail we've left behind.  They help us savor our last meal with lovingly posed spreads on Yelp, they help us scan the crowd at a venue we visit to see if the digital presence of our kin can be sniffed through the crowds on Foursquare/Gowalla.  The first pioneers of the space are using the mechanics of group interaction to capture shared intentions.  (Ditto, Plancast and Tripit see that social momentum of friendship can result in shared plans that otherwise might be solitary if not communicated.) 

The way we engage with the world through social interactions is perhaps the easiest way through current technology to make predictions about the future.  For example, we can tell if a 415 area code starts communicating intensely with 212's, more than all local interactions, that this phone's owner in travel-zombie state.  Tools like Waze crowdsourced maps can measure velocity to make aggregate predictions about the status of the location they are moving through and even of the phone owner themselves. 

We are soon to see a future-scope tool, perhaps first in mobile app form, that will help us make the "teleporting" leap from where we are to where we intend to be.  Perhaps we can flag to those around us a status message of "I'm not really here" so they behave courteously to our zombie bodies as the shift in reference is made to our new place of being.  Perhaps those in our new location will be able to sense our presence.  Our disembodied head of intent will manifest its presence before our physical body has to show up.  Our travel limbo will always be disorienting until body and mind can move at the same speeds.  Right now technology we experience is footprint-centric instead of intention centric. 

As we slingshot ourselves about in our metal bubbles with extreme faith, half present where we are, perhaps technology will help us be the slightest bit more aware.  Often, in travel, we could not be more absent.




For downloads of Austere's Principium Somniferum visit:
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/freqmagnet
For Austere discography visit: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Austere

Quoted from Apollo 11 Mission logs:
"This is Apollo Control at 61 hours, 39 minutes. We've had no further conversation with the crew since our last report. Flight Surgeon says there is no indication at this time that they have begun to sleep, but we expect they'll be getting to sleep here shortly. Coming up in less than 10 seconds now, we'll be crossing into the sphere of influence of the Moon. A computational changeover will be made here in Mission Control at this point, as the Moon's gravitational force becomes the dominant effect on the spacecraft trajectory, and our displays will shift from Earth-reference to Moon-reference. At that point, which occurred a few seconds ago, the spacecraft was at a distance of 186,437 nautical miles [] from Earth, and 33,822 nautical miles [] from the Moon. The velocity with respect to the Earth was 2,990 feet per second [], and with respect to the Moon, about 3,272 feet per second []. The Passive Thermal Control mode that was set up for the second time by the crew appears to be holding well at this point, and all spacecraft systems are functioning normally. Mission going very smoothly. At 61 hours, 41 minutes; this is Apollo Control, Houston. " 

Source: http://history.nasa.gov/ap11fj/10day3-flight-plan-update.htm