Michelle Richmond

Gadgetry: Taking the Fitbit for a Spin

While looking for a pedometer, I came across the Fitbit. More sophisticated than your typical pedometer, the Fitbit, which you even wear while sleeping, is designed to measure your daily physical activity as well as the length and quality of your sleep. Does the Fitbit wireless trainer live up to the manufacturer’s claims?

Below, you’ll find the lowdown from the manufacturer’s website. But now that I’ve had a few weeks to use the fitbit, I’ll share my own thoughts, which are overwhelmingly positive.

What I love:

Simple to set up

easily readable display

tracks how long and how well you sleep!

battery lasts forever

Keeps track of the number of steps you’ve taken

Keeps track of the number of calories you’ve burned

Every time you walk by the base, your latest steps are downloaded to the website

Attractive, cleanly designed website which allows you to log your food, and shows calories burned vs. calories consumed. The food tracker also lists the percentage of your calories that come from protein, carbs, & fat

Cons:

It’s so tiny, it’s easy to lose. It needs some sort of tracker, like those keys you can find by clapping.

The base must be plugged into your computer in order to download information. The computer also must be used when charging. It’s a minor annoyance, but keeping my ibook on at all times took some getting used to.

Okay, here’s the manufacturer’s description.

“The Fitbit accurately tracks your calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled and sleep quality. The Fitbit contains a 3D motion sensor like the one found in the Nintendo Wii. The Fitbit tracks your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities.
You can wear the Fitbit on your waist, in your pocket or on undergarments. At night, you can wear the Fitbit clipped to the included wristband in order to track your sleep. Anytime you walk by the included wireless base station, data from your Fitbit is silently uploaded in the background to Fitbit.com.”

No false advertising there. It really is a genius little product, and now I have it on me at all times. Appendage, anyone?

Customer reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive, and it’s priced below cringe factor at the psychologically magic number of $99.95. Personally, I think it’s fascinating to know just how much I’m really sleeping, not to mention how little I’m really moving. I exercise almost daily, but when I’m not on the treadmill or doing ill-advised moves with the kettlebell, I’m generally sitting in front of my computer, writing, the ultimate in sedentary occupations. If anything, the fitbit has inspired me to walk around the block and down to the pool while plotting my new novel.

Note: I have not received any compensation from Fitbit for this review. I bought that bad boy on my own and have no personal or professional affiliation with the company or any of its employees.

Three Gorges Dam: On Culture and Forgetting

In 1998, while working in Beijing, I became fascinated by the Three Gorges Dam, a massive project to dam up Asia’s longest river. Envisioned by Sun Yat-Sen in 1919 as a symbol of Chinese power and finally completed nearly a century later, the dam that was heralded by the Chinese government not only as a major source of hydraulic power but also as as an unmatched feat of engineering. Yet the dam promised from the beginning be an environmental and cultural disaster on a nearly unheard-of scale. My research on the subject, along with a thought-provoking encounter with a Chinese geologist on a bus bound for Xian in the summer of my 28th year, inspired my first novel, Dream of the Blue Room. Published in 2003 and set against the backdrop of the Yangtze River during the dam’s construction, the novel centers not only on the narrator’s personal story, but also on the larger story of the dam and the massive erasure of personal and national narratives brought about by the flooding of hundreds of ancient cities. As the narrator travels down the river, she witnesses cities being abandoned, ancient structures giving way to the rising waters of the Yangtze.

At the time my novel was published, the dam had yet to be completed. Criticizing the dam was still unwise for Chinese citizens, who could face severe repercussions for speaking up about a project that had such widespread government support. But as early as 2007,the government run Xinhua News Agency reported that, if problems weren’t corrected, the dam could lead to environmental catastrophe. And this week, The Washington Post reports that the Chinese government is finally admitting its mistakes, as droughts and other disasters are now being blamed on the dam.

As the crisis has worsened in recent weeks, the spotlight has returned to the dam, releasing a torrent of pent-up blame on the project, not only for the drought but also for recent earthquakes, pollution and the hardship faced by the 1.4 million residents who have been relocated for its construction… As a result, in the past two weeks, the government has made rare admissions of mistakes with the project. The most dramatic came last month when the State Council, led by Premier Wen Jiabao, acknowledged “urgent problems,” in a statement intended to counter mounting public anger.

Novels are as much a record of the times we live in as they are a reflection of the author’s experiences in, and fears about, the world, an expression of the writer’s obsessions. Dream of the Blue Room was my first book-length foray into the subject of memory. A massive inundation of water, one of nature’s most powerful forces, threatens to destroy a nation’s collective memory. The Three Gorges as they appear in my novel no longer exist. Many of the towns mentioned in the book are now buried beneath a massive, stagnant lake, their inhabitants eking out an existence far away from the homes where their families lived for generations. The dam threatens the loss of memory on a massive scale. But it may also be the starting point of a new kind of oral history. When the physical things that define us are gone, what are we left with but story? Stories, after all, do not live in things. They live in the words we pass down from one generation to the next. This is not to say that a loss of place by human folly is acceptable, or justifiable. But erasure, sadly, is in our nature, as is the hubris that precedes it.

Green Apple’s Book vs. Kindle

The Green Apple Guys take on Kindle contracts, pacemaker problems, electric shock, bathtub readiness, and other burning issues in their awesomely fantastic youtube series, Book vs. Kindle. Round 2 features No One You Know.

The Persistence of Memory and the Neurological Origins of Fear

According to an article by Roger L. Clem and Richard L. Huganir published recently in Science Magazine, it is possible to erase fear memories.

When I saw the headline about “Fear Memory Erasure,” my interest was immediately piqued. The things that one obsesses over in private invariably make it into one’s books…which is to say, memory and forgetting were bound to worm their way into one of my books at some point.

Toward the end of The Year of Fog, Abby wishes that she could take a “forgetting pill,” because all of her familiar beloved places in San Francisco are tinged with the difficult memories of her search for Emma. She would like to forget the year that she has just endured, she would like to forget the intense emotions, and the fear, all of it. Because to remember a thing is to relive it, for better or worse.

As it turns out, selective forgetfulness isn’t just a fantasy. Here’s the abstract for the article:

Traumatic fear memories can be inhibited by behavioral therapy for humans, or by extinction training in rodent models, but are prone to recur. Under some conditions, however, these treatments generate a permanent effect on behavior, which suggests that emotional memory erasure has occurred. The neural basis for such disparate outcomes is unknown. We found that a central component of extinction-induced erasure is the synaptic removal of calcium-permeable amino-3-hydroxyl-5-methyl-4-isoxazole-propionate receptors (AMPARs) in the lateral amygdala. A transient up-regulation of this form of plasticity, which involves phosphorylation of the glutamate receptor 1 subunit of the AMPA receptor, defines a temporal window in which fear memory can be degraded by behavioral experience. These results reveal a molecular mechanism for fear erasure and the relative instability of recent memory.

It’s heady stuff, not particularly friendly to the untrained ear, and half of it went over my head; but one thing that stood out to me is the role of the amygdala (Abby delves into this small but powerful structure in the brain in her attempts to understand the complex workings of memory. I delved into it by visiting a neurologist, an odd and infinitely entertaining man with a glamor shot of himself in full medical regalia on the wall of his office, a man who sucked on Mentos during our entire visit, prior to pointing out the rascally amygdala on a model brain perched on his desk). The removal of a particular substance from the amygdala seems to be the key to the removal of fear and the “instability of recent memory.”