[tangentcity]

I was recently at a Quantified Self meeting in Amsterdam. I met the most fascinating bunch of people, but the chief insight came from hearing his friends give a tribute to the late Seth Roberts at the end of the seminar. The take-home lesson there is that you don't need to wait for results of complicated and expensive controlled clinical trials, but you can experiment on yourself, observe the results, and adjust accordingly. Myself, I have enjoyed wearing a Nike FuelBand, which did bring home the difference walking around talking to people during a day at the office makes in my general fitness (step count) and well-being (subjective). The Withings WiFi scale has been huge to track the effects of exercise and a Paleo diet. A normal scale would have told me that my weight hasn't changed in the 9 months I've changed those habits. The body impedance read from the Withings scale gives noisy but overall reliable body-fat data, and that shows me I've exchanged 10 lbs of fat for as much muscle. I've also noticed that a few days with less than about 5 hours of sleep will send my body fat creeping back up. Invaluable and extremely reinforcing in a positive way.