31 Days of December

November passed, and this year I'd forgotten about Nanowrimo, the annual tradition of trying to write a novel in the month of November, which also happens to be the month in which people try to grow moustaches for charity. Both are difficult, and I've never completed either.

I tried to complete Nanowrimo one year; I started strong, like a rookie marathon runner carried away by the exuberance of all the surrounding participants, the newness of it all. After a week I was several thousand words ahead. Of course I proceeded to crash hard and miss the deadline by a wide margin.

But it was a good exercise in the power of habit and steady, incremental effort, and so I'm going to try something on a smaller scale this month: a post on my blog every day. Though it seems eminently achievable, I have not, in all the years I've had a blog, ever achieved this.

It's often less about finding the time or about writer's block as it is about forcing myself to think critically about something every day outside of work and then pushing every post and line of thought to conclusion instead of abandoning ship midway to check Twitter or Instagram or my email.

Today marks one.

Ciclotte

I like the look of the Ciclotte, a high end exercise bike that looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Most normal exercise bikes are a visual blemish for most urban living spaces, but the Ciclotte is a real conversation starter.

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However, those handlebars look to revere form over function. Though they are said to be adjustable, a more traditional handlebar shape would be far more practical for quick maneuvering into a variety of common positions.

Also, it costs over $11,000, so your wallet will be losing weight faster than you will. Maybe they'll make it into a local Soul Cycle class soon where I can give them a whirl while sweating and crying to the uplifting sounds of Beyonce's Halo.

Amazon Prime Air

In a promo spot for tonight's episode of 60 Minutes, Jeff Bezos promised to drop a big surprise. Well, he delivered (according to Twitter since those of us here on the West Coast haven't seen the episode yet).

Announcing Amazon Prime Air, delivery by drone. 

We're excited to share Prime Air — something the team has been working on in our next generation R&D lab.

The goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations.

Watch the video of a recent test flight.

I mean, really. Tacocopter was ahead of its time.

Tyler Cowen's arguments against 23andMe

Tyler Cowen offers several reasons why he decided not to send in a saliva sample to 23andMe:

1. I thought there is option value and I can always do a test later, for a better and more accurate service.  (I hadn’t thought of the FDA shutting the whole thing down, but still I expect the service will return in some manner, if only under another corporate banner or from overseas.)

2. I thought the “worry cost” of negative information would exceed the benefit of whatever specific preventive measures I might take.  Most useful ex ante preventive measures, such as diet and exercise, are fairly general in their application and I didn’t think there was likely much to be learned about specific measures for specific potential maladies.  And here is an interesting short piece on the likelihood of false negatives.

3. One might take more preventive measures with one’s ex ante and more uncertain knowledge than with one’s ex post and more certain knowledge.  For instance an absence of negative information might have encouraged me to slack on exercise, to the detriment of my eventual health outcomes.

4. I wouldn’t describe privacy concerns as my major worry, but at the margin still they counted for something.  I felt eventually this service would prove equivalent to making my genome public information, via something called GenomeLeaks or the like.  Why do that without having a better sense of its longer-run implications?

23andMe held a sale a long time ago, and I sent in a saliva sample. I can attest to Tyler's second point. Opening my test results for things like my chances of getting Parkinson's Disease was terrifying, and it's not clear how accurate the results are.

It's disheartening how much of life's happiness depends on ignorance or self-deception, but even though 23andMe forces you to read and agree to a waiver that lays out all the uncertainty inherent in its current test results, it's likely that test results indicating a highly elevated risk of Parkinson's or some other fatal condition would have haunted me the rest of my life.

TellSpec, the handheld spectrometer

Kickstarter and Indiegogo have become the sites to discover the most intriguing new hardware, and an example is TellSpec, a handheld spectrometer that was funded by an Indiegogo campaign. As described on the website, the TellSpec combines “a spectrometer and a unique algorithm to tell you the allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients in your food.”

Some of the mockups of the TellSpec being pointed at food items and sending data to the iPhone app look they were made with ClipArt in an old version of Powerpoint (is that a first generation iPhone?!), but they have time to improve the visual design of the interface. The real power is in the spectrometry, and if that really works, in a device you can hang on your keychain, that's very exciting.

Improving the diets of Americans has proven so difficult over the years, but I do believe in heightened transparency. For me, the most eye-opening experience in making the invisible visible was the time I was at the in France on a Tour de France cycling vacation and my roommate lent me his glucose monitor. Taking a reading after eating each meal and seeing my blood sugar spike transformed an ordinary baguette into a lethal pulmonary bludgeon. If I didn't have to prick my finger and draw blood to take readings at every meal, I'd buy a glucose monitor and use it regularly.

Some restaurants print calorie counts on their menus, and others even include some information about basic carbohydrate, sugar, protein, and fat content, but the TellSpec could potentially provide that for any ingredient on your plate.

The Indiegogo campaign concluded, but you can preorder one for $320 from the TellSpec website.