I've had a treadmill desk for several years now and haven't noticed any issues with this. It's fine to walk when you're just reading or doing light tasks. I do need to sit when doing concentration heavy work though.
You can, but most of those poor quality treadmills are meant for light use (i.e. running at high RPM for 30-60 mins per day, 3-5 days a week). If you try to run the same treadmill at low RPM for several hours per day every day, you'll burn out the motor pretty quickly.
That's not to say that people don't try though, there are plenty of DIY treadmill desks made out of exactly what you describe.
If you're largely sedentary, getting an hour of exercise per day doesn't counteract the fact that you've been sitting for 12 hours per day. [1]
Simultaneously, walking slowly all day does not burn many calories compared to a proper workout. But that's fine, because the goal of walking slowly all day is not to burn calories, but simply to keep you from sitting all day.
It seems to me the best approach is to simply do both.
So, this guy isn't doing much good, with 2.5-3 miles walking a day at 1.8 miles/hour (1h25m to 1h40m of walking)?
I expect that, in 10 years or so, we will SE more nuanced publications about the health effects of sitting less.
Looking at chimps in nature, I expect the optimum will be something where you don't sit in the same position for hours at an end, but hobble a few meters every half hour or so and grab some fruit or groom a colleague (the latter would require significant changes in workplace ethics and law)
I get up every hour almost without fail, and walk all the way across the building to get a drink, or bathroom break, or any excuse, sometimes I do nothing at all. Often I walk to a different floor. This was on dr advice a long time ago WRT back probs and general health. I'm a heck of a lot more productive in the 10 minutes after I get back than the 10 minutes before, so its almost certainly a substantial net gain to my employer.
I do the same daily mileage as the author but compressed into my lunch hour, in addition to the above, weather permitting. I'd be interested to see shoe wear stats. When I slack off in the depths of winter or the peak of summer I can see my shoe soles not wear when I don't do a couple miles of pavement at lunch hour.
Its also interesting to look at financially, I can only get a couple hundred miles out of a pair of shoes, and I need to buy decent walking shoes not cheap junk solely based on appearance. I would guess shoe wear on a rubber belt is very low compared to concrete... then again I don't pay for whatever wear I cause to the concrete sidewalk and someone is paying for his treadmill wear directly or indirectly.
When I worked in a suburban office building I walked the nature trails and shoe wear on shredded bark was approximately zero, and it was more emotionally satisfying than dodging panhandlers in the city.
Related to above I tried wearing trail hiking boots and the wear was high on pavement. Lunch hour walks would probably be a good strategy for breaking in new boots, but it doesn't work long term for exercise.
It was an interesting article although there's plenty of space for further study.
Similarly, simply standing has been shown (by some studies, though I don't know how far these are through the peer review and such processes) to be beneficial. This is why some use standing desks. The differences (to posture, circulation, a few more calories burned, & so on) may be small - but a small positive is still a positive.
Mercedes has been dominant the past two races as well so it's not necessarily a spoiler to say they have been owning the season. On the other hand today's race ended a few hours ago and I didn't expect to run into race results on HN of all places. Oh well.
To be fair to him, a thread all about which team is dominating F1 is the kind of place on HN that I would expect to see races discussed. Not sure that shouldve taken you by surprise! Anyway, sounds like the race was good enough for you to enjoy anyway.
The desk itself is electric height-adjustable which makes it easy to switch between walking/standing and sitting with the push of a button, and the monitors are mounted on arms so I can move them to the correct height when I switch positions.
It took some getting used to before I could walk for extended periods of time, but now I don't really think about it anymore, I just start walking and before I know it, an hour has gone by. That said, I have found that it's hard to really concentrate while walking. If I find myself in the middle of a particularly difficult programming problem, I'll often need to sit down before I can really think about it.
But there's a lot of time throughout the day where I'm not doing anything that's super mentally challenging, like reading HN :) or catching up on email or finishing light programming tasks, and I try to walk as much as possible during those times.
At this point I typically walk between 1-3 hours total per day, and end up alternating between walking/standing/sitting every hour or so. Sometimes after sitting for a while I find myself starting to feel sleepy, switching to walking at this point usually wakes me right back up and keeps me going. Not sure, why, probably a circulation thing.
The setup wasn't particularly cheap to put together (though you could certainly do it for a lot cheaper than I did), but after a year I've concluded the cost was totally worth it considering how many hours of my life I spend (and will continue to spend) in front of a computer.
I had a bunch of Amtrak points sitting around that I recently redeemed for a bedroom sleeper trip between Seattle and Chicago.
It was an interesting experience but not one that I would repeat. It is by no means a smooth ride, and even with the bedroom I found it quite difficult to get any sleep. Between the horn constantly going off, the bumpiness of the tracks, and the hourly stops/starts, I basically ended up staying awake for 2 days straight.
While I was initially able to get some work done during the trip, after the first night I was way too sleep deprived to be able to continue programming.
But then again, I am a light sleeper, and I have trouble falling asleep on planes too.
I can sleep on a park bench that is on a non-stop roller-coaster (planes are a breeze) so for me sleeper trains are a delight, but I haven't take one in over 10 years since European flights got cheaper that trains. I do miss those long train rides across Europe, where you would meet people easily in the restaurant car. Amtrak I've never tried as I've never had the time nor inclination for train travel when in the U.S.
Trains in Europe are a pleasure compared to most of the U.S. system. I'm not sure if it's because Amtrak shares track with cargo trains or what, but the ride is pretty bumpy, noisy and much beyond a few hours not worth it with nothing to do and noway to sleep. I've done 20+ hour trips twice on Amtrak and I'll never do it again. I can see doing maybe a D.C. to NYC trip, but the economics of such a trip don't really work out for me over a plane even if door to door the train is only slightly slower (in fact I actually like the drive better).
Higher freight traffic in the U.S. has partially something to do with it. Buffering strengths here require that a passenger train be able to withstand 800,000 pounds of force without deformation, leading to trains that are nearly twice as heavy (and thus slower) than trains in other parts of the world. Europe, on the other hand, doesn't have quite as stringent requirements, and instead of requiring rigid frames they mandate crumple zones, which are arguably just as safe. MetroLink in SoCal has started employing something similar on their cars.
To give an idea just how big freight traffic is in the U.S., freight by rail is something like 1.7 trillion ton-mile (39.9% of freight by ton-mile). The total across all modes in the EU is 1.4 trillion ton-mile, of which rail makes up 17%, so only about an eighth of the U.S. in freight. This has led to fairly different rail systems.
Sure tax it to oblivion. Air travel impact per person is surprisingly low (comparable to driving). Trains have lot of fat which is not included in their footprint.
This is fiction. At best (long journeys) planes have per-seat co2 emissions comparable to an entire 5-person car, that's 5x. On journeys where planes actually compete with cars, double that. Add to that the 2-4x multiplier (greenhouse effect of co2 injected into upper atmosphere vs ground level).
Source on air travel being better than cars please.
I'm genuinely curious because I've always been told that flying is worse, and it would be nice to feel less guilty about flying.
Coming to think of it maybe planes are worse because of the fact that, even if driving is worse for the same distance, people are willing to go much further with planes because they are so much faster, and therefore end up polluting more overall.
For start why is long distance flight 10x cheaper than train?
Air planes require much less personnel and have no tracks. Trains are still in 60ies with fat unions and zero innovations. Also how is 50 ton airplane less efficient than 5000 ton train?
And if train takes 5 days instead of 5 hours, you should also count in the foot print of person who is traveling. In one sleeping coupe you could fit 6 aircraft passengers...
Sure airplanes do make traveling easier, but that does not make them less efficient.
I'm a light sleeper, but sleep pretty well on trains, all things considered. Planes are another matter, as it takes an iron grip on the armrests to keep the things in the air!
I wrote a lot of the early bits of Hecl ( www.hecl.org ) on trains between Padova and Rome.
We recently converted our project from IB to doing everything programmatically and could not be happier with the result.
As the app has evolved over time and grown in complexity, we felt we reached a tipping point where using IB was slowing us down more than it was helping. Same for auto-layout.
Part of this was because the app simply has a lot more functionality today than it did three years ago, which means there were a lot more nibs to manage than before. Part of it is because we started developing more custom views that did not map to any existing IB components and thus had to be done by hand anyway. Part of it is because we found we had to switch to drawing certain things programmatically for performance reasons. Either way, I'm quite glad we made the conversion.
That said, I agree that most apps should start with IB and only move onto the more complex stuff once/if the need arises. IB helps a lot out of the gate (and also makes learning the platform a lot easier since you can visually see what you're setting up). Once it gets to be a hindrance, you'll know, and you can then make the decision to switch later on. And if your app goes nowhere, then you'll have wasted less of your time.
I also strongly agree that explicit is better than implicit, and configuring a view programmatically allows you to fully specify what its behavior should be, rather than what it happens to be. When you revisit a nib several months later after originally configuring it, sometimes you forget whether the configuration option you selected in the dropdown was intentional, or was it the default, or was it merely accidentally changed at some point?
