Schierer Space

Another heat wave (about 48F) hit Caz today, so I put Nate on his little plastic car and turned him loose. Of course watching him wandering around exploring was great fun. The cats were out also, and kept sort-of orbiting him like comets… swooping in close to rub against his leg then running off across the yard. They usually do that to me when I’m out in the yard, but now they seemed to be in a complex pattern between the two of us. Kind of neat to see them treating him like family… and not just a screaming thing to avoid.

Of course, I took the opportunity to practice with my 50mm on multiple moving targets. I’ve put up a couple of my favorites from the bunch, and a few others from the last few days.

Enjoy.

I like this shot because Nate seems to be moving at a high rate of speed… sort of bracing into the wind.

Later on in the day, when he was just about finished. He drove right up to my legs and pulled at my pant legs (I think he wanted up).

As I’ve mentioned previously, occasionally our company fitness center posts “Factoids” which contain reasonably obscure health related statistics. This months includes:

If a 175 pound man climbs 8 flights of normal stairs per day, he will burn the equivalent of 4 days of food per year.

I think we’re supposed to think “Wow! Stair climbing can really burn calories! No more elevators for me!*” Unfortunately, most of us are engineers so we begin to examine the statistics at face value. Something like, 4 days per year is a little more than 1% (4/365.25). So 8 flights of stairs, per day, for 365(.25) days a year lets us burn off the calories from 1% of the year. Dividing through by the year leaves climbing 8 flights of stairs is equivalent to 1% of that mystical 175 pound man’s average daily caloric intake. So we could get basically the same result by leaving 5 French fries** or 37 peas** on the plate at the end of our average meal.

A reference to the (originally uncited) source of the statistic can be found in this medicalnewstoday.com article.