Todd Osborn

Todd Osborn (TO) recently contributed an all-time WITI classic. Here, he shares some tips when you need to workout at home (as most of us now do). Note: he’s not a trainer or physician, rather a sharp guy kindly sharing his recs. - Colin (CJN)Todd here. When I was in the military I worked out regularly. I never enjoyed going to a gym so I would focus on effective bodyweight exercises that could primarily be done in a dorm room. Nowadays, my only goal is to stay healthy—not working towards any military qualification. I've always tried to take in all the data to see what actions are most effective and adaptable whether a dorm room, hotel room, or any other personal space.Why is this interesting?Now that everyone is securely in their homes and has promised not to go anywhere unless absolutely necessary, you may find you're not getting as much walking in as you would on a normal day. Likewise, you can't even get to the gym with all those fancy machines. So here are a few tips on doing a small workout at home. Much of this is obvious but still comes up enough to warrant repeating. I'm a fan of doing bodyweight exercises, so there are a minimal amount of equipment recommendations.Always warm-up (10 minutes of jogging in place is fine) and always stretch after your workout, not before. Don't stretch muscles that aren't warmed up, you're asking for hurt. Speaking of which, if you start to do a move or pick something up and it hurts, stop! Do something else. Don't "power through." Assuming that you all aren't 25 years old, if you get hurt it's going to take weeks to get better. Quarantine sucks in general but it will depress you even more if you're stuck at home looking at the new Amazon dumbbell you can't pick up. Now, one side note to this is you might have some specific stretch you want to do before a unique exercise, but I’m just talking generally and if you have a special pre-workout stretch you need to always do it after warming up. For me (and I think many others) the shoulders are the main area to be wary of. Most people do push-ups wrong, check a video on the right way. I can imagine people stuck in the house thinking they're going to get busy on a "1000 push-up challenge" and quickly damage a rotator cuff. I recommend always doing some door frame shoulder stretches first (yeah, I know, I just said not to do stretching first, ha, but this is the only thing). It pushes your shoulders into a place where they should be. It's very slight, but you'll feel your posture get a little better when you do it. For just about any exercise I can think of, you'll get more out of it with less chance of pain if you keep your shoulders back with the shoulder blades down and together. Also, do some arm circles in your warm-up—tiny ones and large ones—if you're like me you'll hear some little pops as you loosen up and it's good to get that out of the way.If you're doing anything with weights—including bodyweight, like push-up, pull-up, and the like—be sure not to miss out doing negatives to get the most out of each move. For example, if you're doing a pull-up, try to get up there in 1 second but slowly lower yourself back down over 5 seconds. If you want to use a weight right now, I suggest a modular kettlebell. Something like this is good for a small space and versatile. You can get quickly winded just doing swings, and you can add weight as you get stronger without having a million different sizes taking up space. On a budget? Fill a couple of plastic milk gallons with water.Ordering an exercise bike right now is a great way to get your delivery driver to hate you, so a good speed rope will suffice. Just something simple like this is perfect, and doing some cardio in a confined space will really help you mentally since exercise is a great antidepressant.You're stuck inside with limited space, but try not to do all your exercises sitting down or on a bench. And when you find some exercises you like, try to switch them up even slightly to keep getting the most out of your workout—you don't want your muscles to get acclimated to the same motions. Also, don't rely on memory. Write down your progress. You'll be able to see that you're getting better and what goals to set next.Now, of course, this doesn't start working in an hour like Tylenol, you need to start it and stick with it. This newly forced change of lifestyle can be used as an opportunity to break bad habits and start new positive ones. It would be a fantastic twist to come out of this healthier than when you went in. (TO)Product of the Day:We have hot water heating and my apartment gets particularly dry in the winter. Now that I’m spending almost all my waking hours inside, I’ve found myself feeling particularly dried out. I have a couple of humidifiers around, but I particularly like these little $10 humidity gauges (they’ve also got temperature). The ideal indoor humidity is apparently somewhere around 40-60 percent. (NRB)Quick Links:In an effort to not read the news for 20 minutes I got an Apple Arcade subscription (free trial ftw!). Last night I played Cricket Through the Ages on my Apple TV for an hour of laughs and distraction. (NRB)An oldie but goodie: I am the Orson Welles of PowerPoint. “I don’t let marketing get in the way of a potential masterpiece. You see I don’t create mere presentations. I use technology and the language of our times to evoke human emotions from my audience. I don’t settle for default settings and I’ve never met a template I didn’t break.” (NRB)Why Japan is so successful at returning lost property (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Todd (TO)Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Home Exercise Edition

Hi there. We’re taking a few days off, leading up into the New Year. To satiate your desire for WITI, we have a few classics lined up for the next few days. The best point is it will be new for many readers, thanks to our amazing growth this year.  One of the coolest things about this newsletter and community is the people we meet and Noah and I appreciate your support very much. Onto the edition. -Colin (CJN) Todd Osborn  (TO) is a candidate for WITI’s most interesting man in the world award.  He was an Air Force Airman based in Okinawa, speaks Japanese, and is an  in-demand DJ and producer (check his superb track Hold Up, here, dub remixed by Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard). He’s also a rare bourbon connaisseur, fixes and flies planes, has fabricated a video game kiosk out of hospital equipment, and owns an actual hovercraft. Todd here. I've always loved the "bonus  track." An extra tune on an LP—it might be an alternate remix, maybe  only found if you let the silence of the last track play out, or  possibly even hidden before the first track on the CD (play track 1 and  hold reverse to rewind into an unlisted tune)!Around 2003, I was getting deep into the process of how records are made with my friend Ron Murphy  who ran National Sound Corporation. (Ron, a legend in the Detroit music  community, sadly passed away in 2008.) Briefly, the master recording is  transferred ("cut") via lathe onto an acetate covered metal disc. That  disc is coated in a nickel-plating and when that plating is removed you  now have molds to stamp your records out of hot vinyl.Ron was  great at creative thinking and he came up with interesting new ways to  cut records—continuous closed-looped grooves, tracks that play inside to  out, two tracks cut side by side (parallel spirals) that look like one,  etc. Ron's first foray into record cutting was a small plastic toy that  cut into plastic and badly recorded your voice. This led to us talking  about alternate methods to make and copy records. I had been working on  replicating motorcycle parts using high tensile plastic resins for  detailed molds and thought they might be able to handle the detail of  record grooves. I made a few prototypes  and honed the process well enough that the loudness level was nearly as  high as the original and seemed to last many, many plays without  degradation of sound because these resins were much stronger than vinyl.  I could only mold one side at a time and the first examples looked like  peanut brittle on the flip side from all the air bubbles. As  I refined the process, I realized I could make these single sides  extremely thin and still hold up (and not waste resin). I figured if I  made them half the thickness of a record and then fused the two single  sides into one I would have basically replicated a 12". But looking at  these thin halves got me thinking: what if I put a 7" flexi disc (the  kind you used to get as magazine inserts years ago) in between these two  sides before fusing them? It would be interesting to mold two awful  tracks but then have a flexi disc inside with two amazing tracks. My  hope was that after selling a few of these, someone would hate the  record so much that they would smash it, and lo and behold, they were  rewarded with two secret tunes! Before I got around to all of  that, the fact I was getting the resin so thin yet strong gave me  another idea. I had Ron cut an acetate of a tune where the label on a  record normally is. Then, when I made my mold, I used the thinnest layer  of resin I could get away with and laid the printable side of a CD-R in  it as it was drying. So now I had a normal looking CD.  Still thin enough to be played in a car stereo but had one secret  analog recording on top that could be played on a record player. These  ideas ultimately didn't go anywhere outside of prototypes.Skipping  ahead to early 2009, I had a friend who was perturbed that he had given  out advance MP3's to a few select people for personal enjoyment and yet  they showed up on music sharing sites. I wondered if there was a way to  make these traceable back to the source of the leak. I ran across a  little program called MP3nema  that lets you hide and extract hidden files in mp3s, tucked away  between frames. You could add images, PDFs, and the like, though they  needed to be pretty small (a 3 min 128k MP3 that is 30MB would be  suspicious). So I was thinking about making a text file with the  person’s name and hiding it in the frames—like personalizing it for  them. They can still mess with the MP3 metadata and the file will stay  hidden unless they totally re-encode the MP3. If I see the track  floating around online, I can extract the txt file and see where it  originated. This was also useful to just trace the path of your files.For  instance: post an MP3 that has a file hidden with the name of the site  on a few social sites that has a file hidden with the name of the site  A  few months later go on Soulseek and download your tracks and see which  source had the most exposure. But to get back to the hidden track theme,  the main idea I had was that instead of text or a picture, why not hide  an MP3 within an MP3? Nowadays you could distribute this via Bandcamp  and wait quite a long time, then announce that there is a whole other  tune that can be extracted.Why is this interesting?With  all this hidden track talk, I recently ended up in a situation where I  could hide a track in a track ... but it isn't actually even there.  Sounds confusing, I know.In 2020, tracing a track to see who's  playing them isn't such a novel idea. Content ID algorithms will tell  what coffee shop a tune is being played at, who searched for it, and who  should be paid royalties. This is the protocol that flags Youtube videos if someone has uploaded copyrighted content,  and also how programs like Shazam identify the song you are listening  to. Years ago you could do simple tricks to circumvent this system, but  they've kept advancing the algorithm and I haven't found any evidence of  people being able to reliably fool it since 2013. A quick  summary of how it works: it takes a middle area of 16 frequency bands of  the musical spectrum (it's using the middle part mainly to account for  bad speaker systems where high and low frequencies are the first to  disappear) and then records energy points within these bands and  connects the dots—pretty analogous to matching a unique pattern of  points on a human fingerprint. I casually DJ at a friend's bar every  week in a very laid-back situation and I often see people trying to  Shazam songs and I was wondering if I could affect these files so that  they don't show up. Through much trial and error, I figured out a couple  of ways to fool the system (see if this  returns any results). I'd rather not say exactly how it's done, because  it could cause some trouble and this post would be much too long, but  as I was doing these spectral band experiments, I found you could have  two or three narrow bands that were barely audible but still contained  enough points to ID the track. Once I figured out how to make the  results of a popular track come up blank, I could then overlay these  easily-ID'd-but-barely-audible spectral bands on the base track so that  the results would come back as a positive hit of the hidden spectral  information. So, in theory, I could upload this file of Mary Jane Girls "In My House" and Youtube's software will ID it as my track Osborne "Wait a Minute"  and I'd collect royalties on the number of plays until someone happens  to notice. Since this ID process is left up to software, it could take a  while before anyone caught on. (TO)Quick Links:During the 1970s the Kingdom of Bhutan made a set of postage stamps that could be played on a turntable (TO)I've  used portable military PCs for decades. If you're only familiar with  busting out a MacBook at the local cafe it might surprise you how wild things can get. (TO)This is a bootleg label, but what's uploaded here are all important experimental electronic releases. All were uploaded this month so start listening before the copyright takedowns begin. (TO)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Todd (TO)Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy  (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this  edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it  for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting - The Hidden Noise Edition

Todd Osborn (TO) is a candidate for WITI’s most interesting man in the world award. He was an Air Force Airman based in Okinawa, speaks Japanese, and is an in-demand DJ and producer (check his superb track Hold Up, here, dub remixed by Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard). He’s also a rare bourbon connaisseur, fixes and flies planes, has fabricated a video game kiosk out of hospital equipment and owns an actual hovercraft. Check the store he runs with his son, Technical Equipment Supply -Colin (CJN) Todd here. What does a power strip or uninterruptible power supply (UPS) offering “surge protection” mean to you? You see these products in the aisles of Home Depot and Walmart with packaging proudly proclaiming 2,000 joules of protection and you’re left to assume that means everything is safe from here on out. But most people don’t know the difference between a joule, amp, or a watt and assume any protection above zero must be what they need. Manufacturers leave this copy ambiguous, safe in their ability to market what is often a glorified extension cord at a premium price. That’s not to say well-made surge protectors don’t have their place in a home. But that place is about extending the life of your electronics, not protecting a catastrophic surge. That’s because every time your fridge or AC kicks on (or fluctuations from your power company happen) they can cause small surges that will wear on everything plugged in around your home and can cause failure over time. So, sensitive electronics plugged into a surge strip can suppress these tiny anomalies.Why is this interesting?When you're shopping for surge protection, I'd wager that the issues I mentioned are not the first ones on your mind. In fact, many people do not realize those tiny transients are even happening. The scenario the average consumer envisions is a lightning strike-level surge that could destroy equipment in one go or start a fire. But that's not what these strips are intended for. A typical lightning strike will be 30,000 amps and hundreds of thousands of joules (billions in a direct hit!). Now, the actual voltage will be near zero unless something tries to hinder its path. Lightning can only be redirected because any attempt to “block” it will result in a voltage increase and blow through anything on its search for earth ground. (Here’s a quick primer on ground to get you acquainted with the terminology.)So, if there's a strike near your home and you've constructed a good path, then it will harmlessly dissipate. But if any resistance is met, the amps will turn into destructive volts and result in appliances getting destroyed, power strip “protectors” catching fire, and even structural home damage. This is also the idea behind lightning rods, which is a direct anode into the ground to bypass traveling through your structure. Wood is a bad conductor of electricity, so the voltage goes up and damages the building on its way to earth ground. The surge can travel through your wiring destroying your electronics while searching for an earth ground. It can even jump to well-grounded copper water pipes under the right conditions. By the time this huge surge encounters your little protector power strip, it's already too far from earth ground and too near your electronics. Your protector strip will try to kick in by triggering the fuse and “valve” that redirects from the hot wire to your outlet ground. This works fine on a small scale but the grounds in your wall outlets are for human safety, not for your appliances. So now this huge spike is directed back to your breaker box and to all your other outlets. For this amount of energy to dissipate safely, you need a low impedance solution before it even makes it to your equipment. That’s why many buildings (but not many homes) have a single-point earth ground right at the point of entry—directly before or after the service box—with a 10-foot grounding anode. The residential equivalent is known as a whole house surge suppressor and can be added to a home for less than $200. They are rated for 60,000 amps minimum and available at any big box store or online. In the event of a huge surge, the energy will be redirected before it even enters your home, absorbed harmlessly by the earth, and all appliances will be protected.A great power strip surge suppressor has its place in protecting today's sensitive electronics from small transients, but be sure you're using them for the right application and not relying on them for an incident it won't be able to handle. (TO)Photo of the day: A view we miss: morning at the Park Hyatt Tokyo Gym. Sending our best to our friends there. (CJN)Quick Links:A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1990s (NRB)Short-Termism Hasn't Hurt Companies Long Term (NRB)Was just recently reminded of this fun episode of Bowery Boys, the NYC history podcast: Park Slope and the Story of Brownstone Brooklyn (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Todd (TO)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).