onebahamas.com - do Bahamian stuff, but online -

How I Created an iPhone Weight Loss App

neildogg — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:53:09 +0000

Around Thanksgiving of this year my company, BitMethod, released an iPhone App into the iTunes Store that takes a completely different approach to weight loss tracking and logging than any other tool I've used. I stumbled onto this idea completely by accident and I wanted to outline the history of how it happened since I find it interesting and I figure others might as well. Lite Weight is the child of a lot of different ideas and philosophies that I've enjoyed learning about over the course of my weight loss journey.

My first discovery, as I remember it, was The Hacker's Diet. Though I now believe that the idea of nutrition as a "Rubber Bag" is a limited view of nutrition, I really enjoyed the authors insights into weight tracking. To quickly summarize: even if you enter your weight in wearing the same clothes, at the same time every day, your weight can change a substantial amount. Dehydration and exercise can cause weight to fall, a big meal can leave extra weight in your belly, and both salt and carbohydrate intake can cause water retention. The author proposes that weight should be tracked using a moving average so that your actual weight can be approximated amid all those changes in the amount of water in your body. Many approaches are proposed in the book to do this weight charting, but I used the excellent site, Physics Diet, to use as my weight loss journal.

Quite a while after this, I stumbled over the book, The Overfed Head, though I'm going to skip over this for now, since it didn't play a part in Lite Weight until near the very end of development.

But the idea that really led to Lite Weight was gleaned from an article on how the web and weblog have changed writing. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT proposed that all one needs to do to lose weight is to draw a line from your current weight to a goal weight and plot your weight each day. If your weight is over the line, eat less and if your weight is under the line, eat as normal. This professor's name is Steve Ward and his diet is known as The Steve Ward Diet or The Bang-Bang Diet (bang-bang because of a type of controller that is either on or off based on some input)

Lite Weight didn't immediately pop into my head as soon as I had learned all of these ideas. Really, I don't know what ultimately led to the idea. It was probably while walking around downtown Des Moines or raking leaves in my yard. But I think the thought at the time was along the lines of "why can't I write a program that tells me how I should behave based on my weight loss history".

My early attempts at putting together some tool didn't make me very happy. I was still buying into the view of Steve Ward that some goal weight should be set to be reached at some goal date. It was great in terms of development because the math is really easy, but it sucked in a few ways:

Trying to set a goal is depressing
Getting off track of your goal is depressing
Having to push away your goal date is depressing

Realizing this caused the solution to emerge somewhat organically. The math would be much more complicated, but I decided that I can safely assume that if a user chose to use this tool that he or she wanted to lose weight. Without the goal weights, the App struck a chord in its simplicity. I was able to develop a tool that had a single input and could suggest a clear course of action.

You might be thinking that suggesting a clear course of action is just guesswork. When I started out, I had felt the same way. But my earlier decision to assume the user is trying to lose weight allows for some math that creates some very clear separation between the four states that I eventually adopted: Relax, Over, Under, and Gaining.

In terms of programming, the rest of the story is pretty boring. I decided to add a maintenance mode and came up with some more fun math for that, I made it pretty, I tweaked the code so that it acted as you would expect after Thanksgiving weekend, for example, and any other situations that can lead to odd weight fluctuations.

But back to The Overfed Head. One of the central ideas of the book is expressed in the term thintuition, coined by the author to explain the behavior that naturally thin people exhibit. Basically, some people stop and listen to their body to determine whether they're full or hungry, and lots of us don't. At this point, the application was almost done and running on my iPhone. I had been using it regularly and was beginning to notice how it was affecting me. By having a simple, clear explanation of what my body was doing, I couldn't make excuses for the decisions I had made. If I got feedback explaining that my weight was above what was expected, I usually knew why and it was typically related to my behavior the day before. Almost without thinking, I would eat less, giving myself a smaller serving of something, or not finishing food I wasn't hungry for. It wasn't until I was helping to write the text for the iTunes Store that I realized that the application was giving me that thintuition I had read about in The Overfed Head.

I'm really happy with the final product, which is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the iTunes Store for 99 cents. The ideas and contributions of a collection of people helped me hone my product and actually simplify it the more of them I used. Stop by the Lite Weight App Site to check out videos of our iPhone weight loss tracking app.

Nerd quote of the day!

Ash Stampede — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:34:17 +0000

friend: "hows ur finacee?"

Me:.....

"that statement is odd

"as I am sure I told you she leveled up to my wife"

The Problem with Absolute Truth

neildogg — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:20:55 +0000

One of the things I've been talking/thinking about for a while now is what role absolute truth plays in our lives. I've definitely grown accustomed to thinking more in shades of gray than black and white, while still holding the belief that there are many things that are absolutely true. In that spirit, one of the problems I've been seeing lately is people taking positions on extreme ends of this particular idea, and it's really made me lose a good deal of respect for them.

Here's the situation as I see it. On one end of this belief are people who see that we're becoming more tolerant and accepting of beliefs and ideas. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide that they should be making many of them more rigid, applying the idea of absolute truth to them. On the other end are people who see that we're closing our minds off from differing perspectives. As a reaction, they analyze their own personal beliefs and ideas, and decide they should be making many of them more fluid, even if many of these beliefs don't warrant it.

I got in an argument this last weekend that I probably shouldn't have gotten in. A series of mostly harmless statements ended up in someone telling me, in a tone I took to be extremely patronizing (though I guess some people will never understand that you're an adult), that you should always be early for everything. I don't disagree that in his experience being early has always been beneficial, but in my experience, I've seen people that didn't get hired for jobs because they came to their interview too early. My personal opinion is that you should be right on time.

Disclaimer: Part of the argument was that you can't always be "on time" for everything. An example would be going to the airport to catch a flight. I'm not an idiot, I understand that there are some things that require early attendance. The thing is, if you're "on time" in an extremely nit-picky, technical sense, you're going to miss your plane. So obviously "on time" for a plane, in order to catch that plane, involves adding padding to that time. It's why the airlines explicitly state the duration of time before your flight leaves you should be at the airport. The time your flight leaves, minus this duration, is "on time". If you're in a culture where being 10 minutes early is expected, then your appointment time, minus 10 minutes, is "on time".

Trying to parse this over the last week, one of the only ways I've figured out how to make sense of his viewpoint is how often in the past he's asserted absolute truth about ideas and beliefs that didn't deserve them (for example, that listening to music with a beat makes you want to have sex). I've heard him express distaste about how my generation plays fast and loose with how we think and act. At this point, I view his way of evaluating his beliefs to be on that one end of the extreme, where someone has taken a pretty trivial belief and declared it absolute truth because they're afraid of giving in to the "chaos" that they see in the grey areas.

All that it's done is made me more careful about deciding what I declare to be absolutely true. Congratulations to him if his worry was that I was too lax in my beliefs. He's managed to make me consider making many of my beliefs even less rigid, and he's lost a good deal of respect from me at the same time, all because he wants to believe that you should always be early.

Gas Out

somegirl — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:03:19 +0000

According to email forwards and facebook, this "Gas Out" scheduled for May 15th is brewing across America.

The plan, if you haven't heard, is to have everybody strike against buying gas that one day, so that gas stations, nationwide, will be withheld from the billions of dollars in income that they would typically receive in a day. This would be a big enough cut in income to send the message that America is sick of the $3.00 gallon of gas (though, ofcourse, not sick of our Escalades and Excursions built for two - two times as much gas, two parking spaces to fit one, and two person households that own them.)

Now, chances are, since I only fill up my tank every week and a half to two weeks, I wouldn't buy gas on May 15th anyway. I might even go out of my way to fill up on the 14th, if I see that I am running low, so I can give credit to the good intentions of the protesters.

Two fallacies though: First, it's not as if less gas is going to be purchased. I bet gas stations will double their income on the 14th from all the customers who want to make a statement the next day.

Second, their main validation for this protest and their argument for its effectiveness is that in 1997 this same method led to a 30 cent drop in gas prices overnight. Who remembers the gas strike last year? And probably the year before? How come those aren't used as examples? How come the only example of this working that can be conjured took place 10 years ago?
Hmm, something to think about..

I'm not trying to be a party-pooper here. Like I said, I am 99% sure I won't buy gas on the 15th. But I'm also not going way out of my way. Maybe I just don't have a vast enough understanding of economics, it just seems like there are better ways to protest, if that's really what you are intending to do. Like, maaaybe, protests that involve actual sacrifices and that have a cost to show how sincere you are about your statement.

Just a suggestion though...
I don't like rising gas prices, but neither do I have to pay $75 a tank, twice a week, to carry my little tikes to their yoga classes..

"Science" and Prejudice

neildogg — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:20:24 +0000

I just got done reading To Kill a Mockingbird. In case you haven't read it, it's mostly about the ugliness of overt racism all the way down to simple prejudice through innocence. At the same time, I began reading Don't Believe Everything You Think. Not a lot of it, mind you, but I got through the chapters on how we turn anecdotal evidence into proof. It's crazy how stuff in your life can suddenly tie together to help you figure stuff out.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have issues with reddit. I stopped in today again after a long break and read through a few pages of comments on various articles. This was the comment that inspired this post. Please take the time to read it, it's very short. It's unfortunate that the author didn't link to the studies he mentioned, but I've seen them first hand doing research for my Civil War class in college.

I think we need to remember that when we hear something that supports what we already believe (or want to believe), it's worth pausing and checking to see if it's really true or just the author(s) trying to massage unreliable data into something that seems true. You either hold an opinion on something, or you know the truth about it. You might get upset that you can't always definitively back up what you believe, but holding an opinion is much less dangerous than believing you know the truth.

Think about the racism surrounding the civil war. Those who held the opinion that blacks were inferior were ugly as it were, but those that claimed to prove it were even worse. The things I think are true or that you think are true, in just a few years from now, might prove how ugly we are as well.

Algorithm March

Ash Stampede — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:35:27 +0000

Algorithm March

Becoming what you hate

neildogg — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 01:17:33 +0000

At one time, I read Digg, then I started reading Reddit, now I read neither. I stopped reading Digg because the content getting filtered up didn't suit my tastes and I was lured into the recommendation feature of Reddit. I abandoned Reddit because it's overrun by hateful atheists.

Reddit has basically become a gathering of people dedicated to a single goal: pointing out how stupid and backwards everyone that doesn't read their site is (particularly the religious right). The following topics show up frequently:

God doesn't exist
Religious people are dumb sheep
The government is too religious
Evolution is right
The president is evil
People should just accept gay/women's rights
Police are bad

So, as quick gut check: everything that the users of Reddit condemn the "religious right" for spending so much time discussing, they do in almost exactly the same fashion. The only difference is that they have opposite viewpoints. It's this judgment fest about how they're right and their opponents are wrong. It's about how their education and knowledge makes them right.

What they're faulting the "simple people" (I'll use that term from now on) for is that their method for searching for truth is wrong, and theirs is right. It implies somehow that they've discovered the ultimate method for knowing what is true. I would guess that their source of ultimate truth is science? And yet science, by definition, makes no claim to absolute truth. Maybe it's math that's their source? Or logic? No matter. What I want to get at is that they feel the simple people of the world (I include myself) either don't know how to discover what is true, or have the wrong method for discovering what is true. And for the Christian, the source of truth is God.

And I need to take a tangent here. It's one of the reasons I believe in God, so it's a big one. I cannot see, in this world, a legitimate source of truth. There's no science, teacher, or form of logic that I can look toward and know that it is a source of truth. There is, to me, a giant gap. A source of truth has to speak to me, has to be somehow active in my life. Science can't do that, another human can't do that. I see all sorts of indicators that there is a source, but I don't see the source itself. It's why my source of truth is truth itself (in Godly form). And to claim that truth itself just exists, as just truth, cold and inanimate, is to take away its ability to influence anything else. It's why I used the word "source". It's why I believe there's a God.

Where it gets bad is for either side of the argument to believe that they know the ultimate method for discovering what is true. Neither side, regardless of their source of truth, should be able to claim that. And for one to look down on the other seems to be a matter of arrogance. If you understand that your method for discovering what is true is flawed (even if your source isn't) then you won't rag on each other so much.

But what's so bad about Reddit is that they should know better. They have a reference, they have source materials. They can see that there is a broken society of people who think they have it all figured out and are frequently totally wrong. It's reactionary, it's a mirror of what they see as being wrong. It's upsetting that a group of people who view themselves as very intelligent (and likely are very intelligent) can't see that.

Monkeys online

xenon — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:51:33 +0000

Due to popular demand, some of the photos from the monkey portion of the trip are up here, even though it's out of order. I will try to get some of the videos up too. Oh wait, here I got it to work. If you only click on one monkey video, make it this one. These are all okay too, I guess, but not as great as that one, in my opinion. Yep. The photos are going up slow due to a combination of 1 day weekends from Shift Swapping, Disgaea, and me finally enrolling in some Japanese lessons. Also, today, I finally got to play in those big Gundam pods. I went with a coworker, and got myself a GUndam card with my rank and score on it. Us and six other people at the arcade played together with people from other pods, presumably orbiting in space, on two teams, with headset voice chat. Although that was pretty much just used by the two of us for english. In other news, the other day I got on the train and sat down next to a girl with a sketchbook, who opened it up revealing tons of awesome drawings, then proceeded, in the 10 minutes that we on the train, to make another awesome drawing from scratch. It was really awesome. One of my particularly energetic kids in my kids classes last week for some reason decided to thoroughly coat his hand in saliva by licking it, for some reason, and of course looked super proud while doing it. He got less high fives after that. Hopefully I'll put up more pictures soon.

For those of you that watch American Idol

neildogg — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:59:37 +0000

I'm in love with Sarah Goldberg

Edit: Haha, I posted that halfway through her audition. Now that I'm all the way through, I love her even more.

Comic books, villans and superheros. Oh my!

Ash Stampede — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:32:17 +0000

I created another hero yesterday, I rather like him. His name is ryan and part of a game design that hopefully will be my third year project. Back in October I was approach to write a short story for a friend to do a comic book I kept asking him how many pages is short his response was20 is the max. I produced 14, this was not a correct number either as it was apperently too long as well. He is promosing to still create it when he has time. However i have already label him a liar and thus cannot believe the tale or ord will be told.

Never the less it has set forth the montion that perhaps I can write comic book stories so long as there is an artist. I am finding this "when i have time" thing effecting me as well. I have plan a epic three part or trilogy story to tell. A tale about a man named Dan. I had thought about how to over come this whole time management and perhaps i can do weekly publications online. If my artist friend agrees.

The downside to that is I would want it hosted on my own site which is money especially if it gets slashdotted or somthing. www.rice-boy.com is an example of a site i would want.

www.entervoid.com is cool, i might have told you(xenon) about it, people create characters and battle each other characters. The users then vote who wins, if the battle is in a void city tournament and the losere was killed in the comic the creater can never submit the character to battle again. They can use them in flashback or ghost form as a means for character development and as a plot devise.

Enter void allows for writers to ask for artist but i cant see that as a fruitful method to get attention. I was tempted to join the creative writing soceity but they were all lame.