Friday, February 01, 2019

long-term learning

I've gotten enough better that I've started learning things that take more than a day, so here is the broken physicist guide to YouTube yoga (because you know I'm not going to a studio full of people wearing normal stuff like, I don't know, deodorant or something).
  • Screw around trying random "beginning yoga" videos that don't explain anything.
  • Find a lady who explains everything.
  • Practice doing one of her videos until you get the hang of it and can do it by yourself without cheating or shortening things until it's easier. (She points to the explanation video in this one, and I am too lazy to go back and find it.)
  • Find a video you can't actually do, but learn five minute segments over the course of ten days until you can sort of do half of it.
Thus I have gained strength and flexibility, which I was losing trying to ride in bad-for-me conditions.

The yoga thing came about because I haven't been doing so well outside with all the rain, and today it occurred to us that there is road construction upwind of us again. That realization led to a test of the air upwind of the construction site, in which one of us felt better, and one of us (me) did not. It may not have been a fair test because it was outside the mall. I will do a better test tomorrow when I have not invented a stupid reason to go to the mall just to get out of the house.

In related news, the broken physicist engineering contest for door design is now open. The situation is this: I need to pressurize the bedroom overnight. The air cleaner has to sit in the hall and blow air into the closed bedroom through the door somehow without damaging any woodwork or removing the actual door. I made a perfectly good nylon fabric door. It has a lovely flexible attachment for the air cleaner and a zipper so you can get in and out. The problem with it is that it has four pieces of 1x1 that slide into sleeves in the nylon and sit against the door frame and floor. Then when you get them all in their sleeves, you have to unscrew bolts on the ends of the top and bottom pieces to lengthen them and wedge everything together. We are tired of these two steps.

Once you've got it assembled, it's fine for a week until you have to wash it. It only takes five minutes to assemble or disassemble it, but we're just over it. I wanted to use spring-loaded curtain rods, but

You know what, I can try spring-loaded curtain rods if I want. The other one of us can fuss about it if it doesn't work, but I'm not listening to any fussing before I've tried it.

Good talk. :)