This, that, the other thing

[magid]

In the tradition of the national spelling bee and the national geography bee, there's now a national vocabulary bee. I wonder if there will be middle school kids from the spelling bee moving to the vocabulary bee, since they'll know all sorts of stuff about word roots already.

Google maps is great for the US (and Europe), but the Middle East sucks. The mapped features of Israel are: the boundaries (including the green line), and nothing else. No cities, no roads, nothing, just gray. Mapquest does a lot better, both having cities and streets, but only major roads are named, no matter what level of detail tried, and I know there are at least some little streets that aren't there. The most useful options I found are here, but they're not searchable, and there's only two sizes. There was one searchable site, except that my computer couldn't make it work (I don't know if it's a firewall issue, a font issue, the website itself...). What I'd been hoping I could do was an online pedometer to track my walking, but that isn't available, so I'm contemplating getting a cheap pedometer to give me some approximations (and however cheap, it should last a week before it breaks.).

Silliness from Shabbat dinner: the ultimate in non-junk food drive through would have ordering at one end of the Chunnel, pick-up at the other end, plenty of time for a real meal to be made to your exacting specifications. "Please drive on through."

It looks like there's a time bank in Cambridge through Cambridge College. (Also one in Somerville, and one in Lynn.) Neat.

I'm thinking of getting a/some T-shirt(s), one (or more) of these (with interesting information on the tag, too). They're pricey at $40 Canadian, though. (For more info, scroll down to the December 13 post in Netivat Sofrut, or look here (though the site design is weird, at least to my work machine).) Anyone local interested in going in on an order?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe an Israeli could suggest a good site. Wouldn't a pedometer actually be less approximate, that is, more accurate, than a web-based service?

Tunnels as drive-throughs is a clever idea. How long is the trip through the Chunnel? Would folks still want to remain in the car?

The t-shirt site comes up strangely for me as well, with the too-small frame. I think I'd like the shirts better if they had only the Hebrew word.

On the news Sunday morning: Wasabi Spill in Space.

[magid.livejournal.com]

The problem with a pedometer is that it measures how many steps are taken, and it's not always accurate (being on a train or bus, for instance, can mess with its mechanism). In the directions for my last pedometer, it suggeted I try to walk with same-size steps, which is ridiculous for me: the steps are different depending on mood, weather, surface conditions, etc. The reason they do that is because they multiply what you've programmed in as your one stride length by the number of steps you've taken, and tell you the mileage. However, the online pedometer will tell me how far I've walked, as long as I know where I've gone, and considering how close up I can get, plus the satellite photo option, that can be pretty accurate. It doesn't include incidental walking (around the office, pacing the house while doing housework), but I'm more focused on tracking the miles I rack up in noticeable (> half-mile) chunks. So for me, tracking miles and not steps, the online version is much more useful. (And one of the online versions lets me save a map of my route, so when I'm traveling somewhere outside my usual, I can link to where I went, which is neat. I'm a dork.)

The Chunnel is apparently a three-hour drive, so plenty of time for all sorts of fancy meals to be made :-). I don't know whether they'd have to stay in the car; maybe there'd be a picnic area too?

*nod* about the T-shirts. The other option that would've been neat for the English would be to have it elsewhere in the small font, making it more... optional, somehow. At the end of a sleeve, or on the back by the neck.

Eek! Hordes of intergalactic sushi mavens will be descending on our planet soon!

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, you are of course right. I hadn't been thinking of the obvious difference between counting steps and measuring distances, and certainly not of issues of only counting non-trivial walking and of miscounting of steps.

Maybe the online pedometers should be called instead something like online ped-odometers, to indicate that like odometers, they measure distance, not steps like pedometers do, but like pedometers, they measure movement by a person, not a machine like odometers do.

That feature of that particular online version does seem neat. If you're a dork, then being a dork must not be a bad thing at all.

The picnic idea is nice. Aren't there some foods that even when going to a regular fancy restaurant have to be ordered in advance?

You are smart to think of options. The tag of course could remain the same.

*giggle*

[magid.livejournal.com]

If you want to try the one that lets you save your route, it's here. It'll track elevation, too, if you want.

I've heard that there will be something like an nth power pedometer, that someone would wear and all sorts of body data would be available to the wearer online, like level of exertion as well as distance, and heart rate data, stuff like that. Not quite to market yet, though. (And I don't know whether I'd want all that data online, even securely.)

Really, all the number tracking is to keep myself motivated to keep moving, and to be able to point at accomplishment X (walking 1200 miles this year, for instance). I don't want to get too caught up in the bookkeeping*. I just picked up a pedometer, and there'll be plenty of time on the first flight to figure out how to make it work (in time for a nice walk around Heathrow, I hope).

* One of the few (only?) words with three doubled letters in a row.