You know, forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it, performing (and repeating) the experiment, and comparing the results to the hypothesis to see whether it was disproved. Not consciously, anyway. Some might hypothesize that I do a lot of casual, subconscious science all the time, but I’m not sure how to design an experiment to test that hypothesis, or that any data I collected about myself would be valid.
My brain keeps … well, it’s like I have cravings, except rather than cravings for particular foods, they’re to design and perform a series of experiments, or to use experimental design to optimize systems… except I don’t usually have anything to optimize or clear hypothesis to test, and I just continue to go about my business. Which just makes me more frustrated next time the craving comes up.
Ooh, but I’ve been meaning to exercise. Maybe I can design a set of experiments to determine what exercise routine is best. Perhaps having to exercise to gather data for the experiments will be sufficient extra motivation to get/keep me going.
Let’s see. First I think I’ll need to determine what “best” means with regards to the exercise routines so that I can have something to judge any gathered data by. I’m pretty confident that the primary reason I want to begin exercising again is because I’m increasingly overweight and oversized. That my weight recently bounced up to 240lbs, that I had to purchase a new pair of slacks to wear to work on “VIP Days” because my ass/waist/thighs/belly are too big to close even one of my other pairs of slacks around and they punish dress code violations by sending employees home without pay, and that I’ve begun to feel somewhat embarrased by too often feeling like an extra-large-sized person in large-sized clothes (ie: with belly and man-boobs all too obvious). So perhaps we can examine 1) actual weight loss, 2) drop in body weight percentage as measured by my Tanita scale, and 3) reduction in actual waist size, and hope that all three will display correlation with each other. Or at least that at least one of them will show change in at least one of the experiments. I suppose that’ll be part of the hypothesis.
I’ll think about my variables and what I want to prove and how to design the experiments… Hopefully this will work to get me exercizing and satiate my science craving at the same time.
