The last time I was at the gym walking on the treadmill, I looked around and saw dozens of people sweating away, running, climbing stairs and pedaling bikes, all under the bright lights and cooling air conditioner breeze. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great to turn all this sweat energy into electricity that could power the gym and maybe return something to the grid?

We could turn gyms into power plants. You pay the gym and they sell your sweat-generated electricity to the power grid. I wasn’t  the first person to have this brilliant idea. There are now dozens of gyms around the US that have implemented this idea and a number of vendors who supply modifications to existing gym equipment that convert your sweat into electricity.

But, the value is not in the electricity generated, it’s in the idea behind it. Just put in the numbers.

You can buy from the Bicycle Sports Shop, among others, a sensor that will measure the power you expend in riding a bike. They offer a handy table with a few numbers for the typical power that a human can generate.

Two numbers are of interest. The peak power is the average power over a 1 minute interval of sprinting. The functional threshold is the average power that can be sustained over a 1 hour period. These are power per kilogram of body weight. You take your weight in pounds and divide by 2.2 to get your weight in kilograms.

Suppose you weight 220 pounds. This is 100 kg. A trained athlete can generate about 6 watts/kg x 100 ~ 600 watts over an hour. One of us mere mortals could generate about 200 watts, or about 0.2 kilowatts of power. For reference, this is about 1/4 horsepower.

Energy costs around the US vary but a reasonable starting place is about $0.1 per kW-hour, or 1 cent per 100 watt-hours of energy.

This means that a person working out might be able to generate about 200 watt-hours of energy in an hour of hard and steady workout at the value of 2 cents. If you have a room of 50 people all sweating for an hour, the value generated would be about $1.

This revenue stream is just not a viable business plan. However, if you had a choice between going to two different clubs, one that you just sweated at, and one at which you sweated, but knew that each drop of precious sweat generated some, even tiny amount of electricity that was put to good use, which club would you want to go to?

When competition between gyms becomes more fierce, small differentiators can be large deciding factors. I think the clubs that offer to turn your sweat into generated electricity will become more popular, even though the amount of electricity generated is trivial. It would be about enough to power the LCD screen of the TV you watch.

The ROI for a gym is not in the revenue generated by the electricity generated, but in the additional number of user who would be attracted to sign up if they knew their energy was being put to good use.

In addition, an exercise machine set up to generate electrical power is also instrumented to display the power generated. This is yet another metric that you can use for feedback to help you feel better about your workout.

And after all, isn’t a large part of working out about feeling better about yourself?

Electrical power generating gyms will not become the power plants of the Matrix anytime soon, but they will make you feel a little better.

I was invited to talk to a group of six-graders on what influenced me when I was their age, to launch me on the path I followed through life. This gave me an excuse to reflect on what stands out now as important then.

In hindsight, I think there were three things: I had a few simple toys which created an itch to know why, the space program and science fiction books and shows.

My mother used to sew a lot. She had this small but powerful magnet she would use to pick up pins. I was fascinated by it. I noticed it would pick up some pins, but not others. Why? How did it work?

She also had a magnifying glass she would use to check her sewing. I was drawn to how it was able to magnify objects. When I asked her, how did it work, she said it was special kind of glass, but I knew she didn’t have a clue.

I played with these two objects endlessly when I was nine years old. I wanted to know how and why they did their tricks.

Then my god father, Leo, who worked at Sperry Gyroscope, showed me a model gyroscope. Once spinning, it has got to be the most bizarre mechanical device ever. It behaves counter-intuitively. The spin axis of the rotor never moves, however the frame is rotated. If you push on the spinning axis, it rotates 90 degrees to the direction of motion. Why does it do this?

These three devices started me on my path to question and created that thirst to want to know why. It is an itch I am still scratching.

Then came the space program around this time. Some kids have posters of sports stars on their walls. I had pictures of astronauts, like Ed White, in a space walk, on my walls. I wrote away to NASA and got back 8 x 12 inch glossy photos of rocket launches, astronauts in space and space capsules parachuting to the ocean. I sat transfixed in seventh grade, watching the first man walk on the moon.

To this day, I still keep pictures of space ships on my wall.

The last important influence in my early years was a book my fifth grade teacher read us in class, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I was hooked on tesseracts and the possibility of warping space time to travel to the stars. 

This was quickly followed by Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel. It was the first science fiction book I can remember reading myself. I still remember the day I discovered the science fiction section of our local public library and pulled this book from the shelf.

I then proceeded to read every science fiction book in the library and many more since then.

I inhaled Star Trek and every other science fiction show and movie in the 1960’s and 1970’s in parallel with my science explorations. Even my first science fiction novel, Shadow Engineer, shows an influence in its themes from these two books.

When I look back now that I am 55, a successful physicist in the electronics industry, author of seven technical books and one science fiction book, I see that I have been trying to scratch that same itch to know why, that started when I was nine years old.

Thomas Greenslade wrote a very simple article for the Physics Teacher in March 2011 sharing a beautiful, wooded model from the L E Knott Apparatus Company which illustrates, at a glance, the principle that the area of a circle is really 1/2 x radius x circumference.

Just look at the circle above. It’s certainly not obvious to me that the area of that circle is 1/2 the radius x the circumference. How obscure a relationship.

Of course, knowing the formulas for the area of a circle and for its circumference in terms of its radius, we can verify this relationship. The area of a circle as p r^2, which is 1/2 x r x 2 p r. So the result using wooden models is exactly what we expect, but this wooden model kit does such a great job of showing in one visceral moment, the motivation for this simple relationship.

In this model, a circle is divided into 12 sections. When unwrapped, its clear each section is a triangle and the area of all the triangles is 1/2 the height, which is the radius x the width, which is the length of the circumference of the circle.

For a finite size section, this is only an approximation, as the shape of each wedge is not a perfect triangle, but has a curved edge. However, this is a great opportunity to exercise your imagination to see that as the number of sections increases and the wedge size decreases, the edge looks more and more flat and this becomes a better and better approximation.

So simple and beautiful a kit illustrates this very fundamental principle very well.

Experience an oasis of peace and calm communing with the butterflies, in the middle of one of the busiest airports in the world.

I travel to Asia periodically and usually pass through Changi Airport in Singapore either going or coming. In the normal hectic pace of airport travel, especially when most folks are suffering lack of sleep and jetlag, there is an opportunity to experience a tranquil moment, communing with butterflies

Built inside the international airport terminal is a butterfly park. After passing through an airlock door, you enter a small, carefully manicured jungle with flocks of butterflies swarming around, oblivious to you. How can you be stressed when you see the gentle flutter of a dozen butterflies? What a wonderful way of relieving a little travel stress in an otherwise densely packed hub of commerce.

Filed under: Life 201, Photo Journalism, Reporter's Notebook ]]> https://ericbogatin.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/a-moment-of-tranquility-in-the-singapore-changi-airport/feed/ 0 DrB IMG_1289 IMG_1296 IMG_1287 https://ericbogatin.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/fly-high-swim-deep/ https://ericbogatin.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/fly-high-swim-deep/#comments Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:20:31 +0000 Eric Bogatin https://ericbogatin.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/fly-high-swim-deep/ ]]>

The signature line of Curt Hillfon, Swedish artist, 1943-

“Whatever you do, do it well,” Curt Hillfon told me. “If you are a bird, fly high. If you are a fish, swim deep.”

This is how he explained the unique signature he signs on all of his paintings and prints.

I met Curt Hillfon on a visit to Sweden a few years ago, while visiting our friends Lars and Birget Gruden. Hillfon is a bit of a local celebrity near Lars and Birget’s home town. They took us on a tour of his studio where he and his students hung out.

For an artist who keeps his door open and welcomes visitors who interrupt with naive questions, Hillfon is remarkably friendly and patient. His English, while not very good, is much better than my Swedish. With Lars assisting in the translation, I asked him what his signature line meant.

He said that it is a reminder that whatever you do in life, you should do well. Look to the birds and the fish for inspiration. A bird can fly and a fish can swim. If you were a bird, you should learn to fly as high as you can. If you are a fish, you should learn to swim as deep as you can. You need to learn what the essences of your life is and do it well.

What a wonderful, simple message to remind yourself to live life to the fullest, “fly high, swim deep.”