北京美女 - The beatiful women of Beijing

That is the title of the first Chinese-language book I've started to read, usually one page a day at bus. It seems to be Harlequin-style romantic book, and that's exactly what I need. Shallow plot is good if you don't understand every sentence. Easy topics like love, sex and success are good for maintaining interest despite slow reading speed.

I chose it, because it was the first book in the shelf for which I recognized all the characters in the title. The second such book was 告诉我你的梦 - Tell Me Your Dreams by Sidney Sheldon. When this Chinese reading binge is over I'll know chick lit really well.

If some girls asks what I'm reading I'll say it's a classic of zen buddhism, since 2/3 of Chinese character tattoos I've seen on girls have included such references.

Gym-induced personality changes

The cutest girls in Tampere train at my gym, but it's not only about trained young bodies, tight shirts and short gym pants. Pumping iron puts chemicals to my blood, which make me horny among other things. I don't act on it though since it would be too easy to scare them.

No matter how much make-up the disco dolls spread on their face, they don't get near the level of sexiness, especially since alcohol inhibits horniness. When I'm really drunk, I may look at a girl and notice on intellectual level "She has all the features I consider sexy" while wondering why looking at her doesn't invoke any biological reaction which it usually does when I'm not drunk.

• Adrenaline is emitted well before you start exercising when you know you are going to experience stress, making you feel totally awake.


• Endorphins are body's internal opiates. Exercise makes your body ache and endorphins balance it so that healthy exercise feels good while too sternous one doesn't. These opiates make you addicted to good stuff.


• Testosterone increases making you feel aloof and healthily indifferent about the small slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

The dark side of personality change comes the following day. Exercise tends to keep me awake, so I'm tired the next day. Endorphins are no longer balancing the soreness of the body, making me grumpy.

On bad days I have certain kind of "biochemical anger" where I feel angry even if there is no one to be angry against. My mind seeks explanation for the biochemical state of anger by browsing through various small slights that people experience daily and enlarging them.

Overall, gym-induced personality changes feel good. Nowadays I know not to train too hard and to keep enough days in between to avoid biochemical anger. The aloofness makes me just shrug off insults, drama, rejection and embarrassment which would have paralyzed me earlier for weeks or months.

How strong is strong?

In India, 3 of us went to gym to benchmark our bench press max.

I lifted 50 kg in this unfamiliar move. I had started to train 3 months earlier twice a week.

Samppa lifted 70 kg. He was sporty in his youth, without specializing in any single sport. Was.

Juha-Matti competed in Finnish championship in weightlifting when he was young, but now at the age of 31 he had been drinking, smoking and eating greasy pizza more than the others combined. He still lifted 85 kg.

Pasi had not trained at any point.

Later Jani joined us. He was the most fit of us. Sports is his lifestyle, and it means gym and skiing in the winter and jogging and cycling in the summer. He didn't bench press, but he would have surpassed all of us - and if not, his total fitness was undeniably the best because he practised regularly. He convinced me that life is a maraton when it comes to staying fit, and good lifestyle choices produce good fitness results. Having "good genes" or identifying as "athlete" as teen is good for you, but your own lifestyle choices trump them at age 30.

So here's my scale for judging strength, based on this very small sample. The scale is for educated office workers - if you get any practise in your work, or lack the middle-class healthy habits, your game is different.

Bench press max:

• probably below 50kg: You are in the bottom 20%. Train a bit. Begin with some non-scary individual sport like jogging. Listen to your body.


• Over 50 kg: You are weaker than average. Find a sport which you like, and practise it regularly.


• Around 70 kg: You are smack in the middle 20%. You know what suits you and how to stay fit. Don't stop like Samppa did.


• Around 85 kg: You are in good shape, either because you have good lifestyle or good sports history. Congratulations!


• Over 100 kg: You are strong enough for all practical purposes. Your marginal benefit from more weightlifting is going down sharply. Switch to some other hobby where you learn new things - or good luck for competitions, if that's why you train.

Recovery drink

When I returned from India, I could bench press 40kg for 10 reps. For the next 3 months, the result varied between 6 and 12 reps. Then I bought a weightlifting book. The diet advice in it restored slow but steady progress.

My most important new habit was recovery drink. It contains juice and whey protein, and is based on the following advice from my weightlifting book. I drink half of it before exercise and the other half after exercise.

Whether it is Gatorade or orange juice, active people have been fuelling their workouts with carbohydrates [my take: juice is just fine, I prefer it to gatorade since it contains unresearched good stuff]. Carbohydrate consumption before, during and after your workouts is very important as these carbohydrates will help blunt cortisol release, stimulate insulin release, and replenish your muscle glycogen stores so that your body is ready to go for its next training session.

While consuming carbohydrates is better than just drinking water, new sprots nutrition research consistently shows that adding a small amount of protein or amino acids (the molecules that make up protein) to your workout drink will make a huge difference in your progress. A recent study examined the effects of a carbohydrate workout drink vs. carbohydrates + amino acid drink over the course of a 12-week training period. At the end of 12 weeks, both groups lost approximately 4 pounds of body fat. However, the carbohydrates + amino acid group gained 5 pounds more muscle (for a total of more than 9 pounds) than the carbohydrate group.

Recovery drink also abolished reckless hunger which I used to suffer during and after training, so I could train longer while feeling better.

To sum up, the recovery drink was recommended by theory books, removed hunger and improved results. What more can you ask?

In addition, I take magnesium, zinc and fish oil. Fish oil, whey and maltodextrose are recommended in this Pakkotoisto thread as basic supplements, but in my case juice replaces maltodextrose. Magnesium and zinc are recommended in this thread about rising testosterone levels. Fish oil also contains lots of vitamin D, which is recommended by pretty much everyone nowadays.

Taking supplements is cheap and convenient, so the burden of proof is very light for taking them. The reason I don't take more of them is that some of them may have unresearched downsides as told in the previous post about vitamin C. It's a bit scary idea that one wrong kind of supplement can abolish the effects of endurance training.

Unintentional anti-ad

Today, I saw a foolish ad for a recovery drink. First it showed a banana. Then it said that banana is for apes, drink Gainomax instead after exercise. What's so foolish in it?

My magnesium container says "Ravintolisä ei korvaa monipuolista ruokavaliota." (Nutritional supplements are not a substitute for a versatile diet). This is true since only a fraction of effective compounds in foods have been researched, and new results are emerging even for age-old compounds like vitamin C. One study found that too much vitamin C abolishes endurance training effects, so it is not recommended to eat too much vitamin C if you want to make progress in athletic training. Here they say that although training causes oxidative stress, dulling it by antioxidants like vitamin C is no good. Fruits and vegetables are still healthy despite the fact that plain vitamin C is not that good, but nobody knows what makes fruit-C better than supplement-C.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that Gainomax is a substitute for fruits and vegetables like banana.

Besides, what's wrong with apes? An alpha male gorilla thumping it's chest is a known symbol of masculine strength. In more refined circles, "parkour ape" is a title of honor for those who demonstrate prowess in climbing, hanging and jumping.

My sister's art exhibition in Tampere

Budapest: Bought a flute

This time they had an English-speaking salesman. A flute fits my life situation well. I don't have time nor energy for real instruments like keyboards or guitar. I can carry the flute anywhere in my backpack, since it's small and durable. As a solid piece of wood it won't break down.

Thanks to portability, I can practise anywhere. If I practise it for 15 minutes a day for a year, that should give enough speed and songs to have some fun with it (that level or practise with keyboards or guitar would only get me frustrated at not getting the tunes I want).



I didn't just trust my own judgement when buying it since I can't play flute. A couple bypassed the vendor stand and the man picked this model of flute and played it for a while, obviously pleased with the sound although he didn't need it. Also this chart was necessary for proving that it could play enough notes to be useful. They actually gave a phone number and email address for asking any questions about the flute, which highlights the importance of trust when selling musical instruments.

Budapest: Good place to get some pussy

A review says "smoky, loud, small, crowded - and unapologetically so."

Clothes shopping

There was a free music festival at Chain Bridge. Lots of people, some musicians and some street vendors. One vendor was selling flutes. I ask how many notes a flute can play, but the seller didn't understand the question. He turned to another person on the vendor stand who at least got the question, but her English accent was so thick that I gave up.



I know only 2 truly profound mottos, and saw a T-shirt today with one of them. All other mottos are "ironic" humorous shit, or simple rules of thumb that require immense situational judgement before application. Here are the two mottos. A blog post could be written about either of them.

Watch your thoughts, they become your words.
Watch your words, they become your actions.
Watch your actions, they become your habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

God give me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to always tell the difference.

Budapest: Drum'n'bass

Just came from Corvinterö, a nightclub. They had a drum'n'bass event named "Breakbeat Massive vs. Deaf Company".

In Finland, people go to drum'n'bass parties to dance, and dance they will unless the police stops them. In Hungary, good drum'n'bass DJs are such a commodity that it's more like normal disco.

Corvinterö had two floors, a disco floor where drum'n'bass was played and a roof floor. Dancing started only after it came dark and people on the roof floor went down. Dance floor percentage was about 1% before the last 3 hours of the evening, during which it went up to 33%.

Expecting dance, I was there from the very beginning. Unfortnately, I couldn't make speech contact with the natives even if they were extroverted enough to make dance contact with me in the beginning when there was just one group of people on the dance floor. Even young people here don't speak English, so speech contact ended up in confusion despite 2 attempts with 2 different groups. Fortunately I could order drinks in English instead of pointing the menu with finger.

It was so much like Finnish events it's almost depressing. I'm getting bored here in Budapest as I'm alone in the middle of non-English-speaking people. It's too hot to be comfortable and the air is somehow bad, I've had flu symptoms the whole time I've been here.

Fever & zen buddhism

Small flu makes it feel immensly relevant to walk on kitchen floor's tiles without touching the tile borders. My sister's boyfriend recommended a book about zen buddhism before leaving, and it fits this mood exactly.

It started with an attack on language and conscious thought. Standard language-philosophical stuff in "the map is not the terrain" style about how all abstractions leak. What happens to a fist when you open your hand? It emphasized that conscious sentences are just small part of everything that goes on in our heads, and zen buddhism aims to work in intuition and thought without subjecting it to concepts.

The second part is about the history of buddhism. They tell that in Indian society there is a tradition for men who have served their role in society (raised kids out of the nest, etc.) to withdraw from life and caste and concentrate on meditation and elightenment. Sounds appealing, there are just a few practical tasks to complete before I'm ready to go, namely, learning to seduce women, marry one, pop out some kids, and raise them.

If some sane person recommends me some specific meditation course, I'm ready to try it out of curiosity with an open mind and without expecting anything, since I have a time gap to fill after stopping one hobby. Sane doesn't include Hare Krishna monks selling religious literature.

The book reads like a pale shadow of true Zen, so I'm not linking to its Amazon page.

Heaps of old crap

Now that Bunker'44 set new standards for a truly good exhibition, today's museums felt lacking. Piles of objects, only glass cages setting them apart from high-class handicrafts.

Rath György museum was the wierdest. I'm interested in China and went to the museum to see their Chinese and Indian collection. I was the only guest surrounded by 5 members of staff. Only one of the staff spoke English, the others pointed things while speaking Hungarian. Luckily there were English guide papers (in the zoo there were no English explanations whatsoever).

But if I pay the ticket, then the lack of other visitors is their problem, not mine.

The image below shows Weituo, the defender of Buddhist monasteries, wood, lacquered, gilded. This is all they told about the statue. Simply copy-pasting the wikipedia page about Weituo would have added so much depth.



In the age of abundant information, organizing it is the key. Go to China and buy handicrafts of all Eight Immortals you don't yet have, put them to the same shelf and stick Wikipedia page about them next to it. Who cares if they are cheap copies, as long as you get right their meaning and use in daily life. A little can-do attitude please.

In Hyderabad they sell off-the-shelf religious idols in handicraft shops, and they look magnificient compared to Rath György collection.

Megan, Vera and disco music

In the previous post I claimed that disco music is all about dancing, and that most people listen it to get a better dancing experience despite not really liking the music (but not really disliking it either). I'll count the evidence I see including Vera.

People listen disco to get more out of dancing: 6 points - Me, Miss Marketcrash, Parapara dancers, DJ Ozma, Megan, gym group exercise songs where disco is considered a neutral genre which is not strongly liked or disliked.

Some people like disco music just like some people like any other genre: 2 points - Vera, Megan


Megan describes her listening habits here. Her roommate described it as "simplistic pop", and she describe it as:

I love me some mass-produced Top Forty and Hip-Hop. The older and genre stuff I listen to was probably for mass consumption in its day.

It probably includes some/plenty of disco. Megan fits to both categories since she also likes hard dancing.

To me it seems that people who like disco music listen a lot of music but don't process what they hear that much. Megan says she listens a lot of music all the time:

But here’s the thing. I listen to it. All the time. I walk in the house and turn on music. I sing along while I cook. I put it on in the background when guests come over. I pick songs to match my mood; I turn it loud when I need energy. I know all the lyrics and look them up if I can’t catch them. I laugh at jokes in songs. I listen to music. Chris has all this complicated stuff in his library, but I have never walked in on him listening to it. I believe he likes it, but I know that he wasn’t cranking tunes the summer he painted his house. I have to prompt him to DJ. You people who claim sophisticated challenging musical tastes, I secretly do not believe you actually listen to music much.

Vera also listens a lot of music. Vera also said that she considers music equal to food in the sense that she doesn't get fed up with it despite listening many times over - this is probably also the case with Megan, as she has memorized the words and still is not fed up with music.

If the music went through a solid analysis & memorization module in Megan's and Vera's head, then they would at some point end up in a situation where they have listened all the good songs so many times that they are fed up with them, simply because of repetition, and their playlist would be filled with uninteresting songs and they would not bother to turn it on so often.

Budapest: Gellert Hill

I'm spending summer holiday at my sister's place in Budapest, while my sis is working on an exhibition at Tampere and using my place.

All who have played civilization remember that rivers give food and trade bonus and hills give 100% defense multiplier. Budapest is at river Danube (Tonava in Finnish). Gellert hill was one of the first settled positions. The Celtic Erave settled the northern slope before the Roman empire!

The hill was named after the bishop Gellert who was converting the locals. He became a martyr after the locals pushed him down from the hill to Tonava in a barrel.

Nowadays, the small fortress on the top of the hill has been converted into a museum surrounded by lush parks.

Here are great views, no wonder they chose this as a defending position.







The best museum at the hill is named Bunker'44. During the second world war, a bunker was built for air defence and command center inside the hill's small fortress. The museum is located at this wet and rough concrete bunker.








Instead of artifacts, the museum contains photographs, wax dolls and long descriptions about Budapest's fate in WW2. In the end of the WW2, Soviet forces put Budapest through one of the longest, most destructive and bloodiest sieges during the second world war. It lasted 100 days, civilians were not evacuated, and destruction was comparable to that of Stalingrad. To add to the messiness of the situation, droves of Hungarian POWs converted to Soviet side to avoid the fate of a POW. The Germans did mass executions of Jews (scale: x * 10000) while the Soviet did smaller mass executions after the war (scale: x * 100).

The Memory Remains

Almost no one really likes disco music. It is a very pragmatic genre where music is suitable for the situation when it attracts people to the dance floor. This requires among other things that it is not too ridiculous, although ridiculouness is inherent in disco.

Once I went into parapara dance class. Parapara is a Japanese club dance and the music is mainly Japanese disco music. Even the long-time dancers didn't express any liking towards disco music. At car they listened other kinds of Japanese music (for example Antic Cafe, a rock group). When they said that some song is their favourite, they meant that they like to dance the choreography for that song.

The only person I know who has expressed liking disco music is DJ Ozma, and as the initials tell he's a DJ and his job is to evaluate music based on its ability to attract people to the dance floor.

Lately, I've been going to group exercise classes at the gym. Some of them are dance classes. The movements in group exercises are like rabbit-duck figures which seem ridiculous hand-waving of efficient exercise based on context. Music is part of that context. Playing classics of disco like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Ray Charles etc. links a dance class to a respectable tradition of disco dancing, while playing second-rate bands which were ridiculed as long as they have existed (Waldo...) makes jumppa movements seem especially embarrasing.

So I hope that the music of Michael Jackson lives on. Inside his genre of choice, he has undeniable musical merit which advanced the genre.

Update: Also Miss Marketcrash struggles with disco's inherent ridiculousness and empahizes dancefloor.

Heavy metal is too loud for wimps

It was too loud for me, my right ear still rings irritatingly and hears a bit less. Now you are probably gonna say "What the hell!? You went to EasterMaster without earplugs!!!???" And you are right. It's insane to go there without earplugs.

But I had earplugs; the music was so damn loud that I got hearing damage even with them. Logical deduction: I'm becoming a wimp.

There were 4 bands. Diablo and Amorphis were the big names. However, the previously unknown bands made the best performances.

Profane Omen had two musicians playing topless. The guitarist had a sixpack, something I notice and envy now after starting the gym hobby. Like this video shows, they have a sense of humor, the singer displays moonspell-scale showmanship in gestures and their songs push through all obstacles like diesel engines.

Callisto was the polar opposite. The music was quite weak (in the Portishead sense, weakness as conscious choice for self-expression) and bordering on sleepy. This made the parts with some rhythm and growling singing to stand out even more. First I was disappointed, but the band sounded the better the more I listened it.

Callisto didn't even attempt any contact with the audience, and it was sometimes even difficult to notice where one song ends and another starts, so people were clapping in wrong places.

Didn't talk to anyone nor attempt to. Went there because had nothing else to do.

Crystal ball 2012: The history of stranger chats

It all started in March-April 2009, when the first stranger chat, omegle, gained enough users to become an internet fad. The UI at the time was minimal, it just connected random people to chat with each others. It suffered from many problems: trolls, quick disconnects, drunks, people having different expectations about goals of chatting, etc. Because of these problems, many people didn't yet realize how big thing it was going to be. But some did.

Since many chatters seeked contact with the opposite sex, it was the first market which got split away. In July 2009, Speeddatestrangers.com came online. It filtered chat partners by sex. When the user count increased, it was possible to do more fine-grained filtering by country and age, as large number of users ensured that connect times were reasonable even after filtering most people away. Speeddatestrangers.com also had mail: after disconnecting the chatters could send anonymous private mail to those they really liked, and just as easily ignore private mail from others.

At this time, the movers and shakers of the web industry realized that stranger chats were a natural oligopoly: The more users you have, the heavier filtering you can do, and the better match you get between the conversants. There is room for only a few megachats who can do heavy filtering to match like with like. The big players started to implement their chat engines, but it took years before the effort bore fruit.

1.7.2009 - 31.12.2010 was time when many small stranger chats surfaced and different methods were tried. The major features that developed were:

• Filtering matches.
• Soft matching based on optimizing large amount of lesser criteria.
  
• Anonymous mail after discussion.
• Ignore features for excluding creeps and too enthusiastic private mailers.
• Reputation points. Machine-rated reputation points excluded quick disconnecters and copy-pasters, while peer rating effectively removed overly rude talkers.
• Option to reveal full identity during chat.
• Visually themed chats.
  

Also, specialized chats for specific target audiences mushroomed. The long tail behind the few big filtered megachats surfaced.

Two business models emerged. Big chats brought ad revenue. The second model was to commodize the stranger chat engine. StrangeWays, Inc. and ConnectBox were the biggest players. They started with very simple, omegle-class engines and kept adding features as time passed, copying and integrating the most successful features which surfaced in various stranger chats. StrangeWays was an offshoot from a web design company and it specialized in flash/silverlight clients and visually impressive chats. The revenue came from customization. ConnectBox was easy to install and scaled well, and was the engine of choice for smaller communities. Also open-source chat engine development started, but as always it was years behind the commercial offering.

Just like peer-to-peer networks beat video stores by instant gratification, stranger chats started to beat traditional dating sites when users got fed up with writing 20 mails without a single response. Stranger chats were a way to ensure that the other side was at least minimally interested.

Nowadays, all big dating sites have stranger chats, but true to their roots they are a bit different. Match.com has the biggest user base. The user chooses a set of strict criteria (sex, age, country) and further soft preferences (hair length, eye color, hobbies) from traditional dating criteria. Be2.com also has strict criteria, but it uses keywords in user's profiles to do soft matching. Eharmony.com puts once again quality over quantity: They use exactly the same algorithm to calculate compatability, and the users tell the server how much they are ready to wait. If they are ready to wait 10 minutes, they can expect pretty likeminded company.

All big webhosting companies offer stranger chats as extra service for any customer, just like they have offered web stores for ages. Smaller chats are commodity, and the open-source engines do the basic service well. Some big companies have tried stranger chats to promote common company values, but fears about spreading trade secrets and rumors have made them rare.

Once again the big companies which integrated the new innovation into their basic business model collect the biggest bucks, and a few quick entrepreneurs got rich during the time it took for engine commodization to run its course.

Quick talk training simulator

Omegle

I'm getting married

At eight o'clock, the doorbell rang. Behind the door were 3 dark-skinned men. When I instinctively pulled the door shut, one of them put a shotgun in the gap. Boy was I frightened! But when they said "You're getting married." I realized it was something worse than a robbery or a quick death.

In India, there was a girl named Smita in the next cubicle. Pretty face, young body, the stress of working a long shift in the middle of an alien culture in an officially certified shithole country, lack of other things to do; all these factors combined into an volatile coctail which made me to stupid mistakes, and now I'm going to pay full price for them. She's now pregnant.

Her relatives knew people in Finland, and they made it clear that they won't hesitate to use force against me to maintain her and the family's reputation. So I'm not sure how much longer I'll be here in Finland before going back there. The ultimate threat is not what happens to me but what happens to her if this is not solved.

Initiative of the day

Being untrained in quick talk, all I could say was "Oh, they started this kind of campaign!" when I entered gym and noticed a new "exercise 30 times in 90 days" campaign. Two girls were recording their gymgoings to the public tables.

It took some time to find the humorous angle. After exercise I went to sauna and commented to the other person there "Now they have started a public humiliation campaign! If you don't come here for 90 days, they are going to write your name on the table: Simo, 0 times." The other person expressed disbelief, after which the conversation quickly petered out.

Last week was tired and uneventful.