Dave Kil runs marathons. He has detailed records of all his workouts for the past year and a half. Recently, though, he started feeling that running was getting boring, and he wanted more variety in his workouts. So Dave helped create sensors that can monitor different activities passively, including cycling. He also added high-intensity training…
Tereza Nemessanyi started quantifying herself in a time of great loneliness, after both her parents had died and she was missing their advice. She asked her friends for advice, but she found it to be polite and not always honest. So she built an app, Honestly Now, to let people anonymously ask for and give…
Imagine a few dozen people walking, running, jumping, jiggling their legs up and down, and introducing themselves to each other while competing on two teams. This was the scene at a recent Silicon Valley QS meetup hosted by IDEO. In the video below, David Fetherstonhaugh explains the fun, called The Step Exchange Game. The game was designed…
As 2011 comes to a close, we wanted to post a snapshot of where Quantified Self is now and how we’ve grown in the past couple of years. Thanks and congratulations everyone! We look forward to another amazing year of sharing data, stories, experiments, and friendship together.
Buster Benson of Habit Labs likes to experiment with productivity, among other things. He uses RescueTime to see which apps and websites he spends the most time on each week. The winners are his text editor (for coding) and Gmail. In the video below, Buster talks about the ease of different kinds of tracking, from…
On September 11, Lindsay Meyer was hiking with a group of friends when she suddenly lost all hearing in one ear. In the video below, she compares her experience with the California medical system to her own independent investigation through Google searches and apps. Lindsay draws a startling conclusion about the relative time and cost…
Douglas Mason didn’t know who the Beatles were until he went to grad school. As a classically trained musician, he was blown away when he saw their unique chord choices. He started to investigate why the Beatles’ music sounded so good. Douglas created a shorthand musical notation to represent songs as strings and analyze things…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Dec 17, 2011
This is the sixth post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features intrepid self-quantifiers and their stories: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned? In Toolmaker Talks we hear from QS enablers, those observing this QS activity and developing self-quantifying tools: what needs have they observed?…
Here is another peek behind-the-scenes at Quantified Self Labs, explaining how we work and why we have so much fun. There are two basic principles we follow in a pretty hard-core way as we grow and nurture our community. They are tied tightly together, and make it really stress-free to do this QS work. These…
Catherine Hooper has been tracking how she spends every hour of every day for the past 3 years. Why? To make sure she is living by her priorities. She defines her priorities, turns them into actions, then schedules them. Each week, Catherine sits down with her calendar, looks at what she already has on her…
What We Are Reading Newsletter from Dec 11, 2011
Self-described hacker Fenn Lipkowitz gives a rich update to his lifelogging activities in the video below. Fenn created a detailed diary with start and stop times as a simple text file, generating a color-coded chart of daily activities. During his experimentation, Fenn began to read about the Life Extension Foundation and visited a site known as Longecity, a community of…
This is the fifth post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features intrepid self-quantifiers and their stories: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned? In Toolmaker Talks we hear from QS enablers, those observing this QS activity and developing self-quantifying tools: what needs have they observed?…
While other European countries have had Quantified Self meetups for a while till now we unfortunately had no Meetups in Germany. This has got to change. Therefore we’ll do something about it. Our first German meetup is going to be held in Berlin on the 17th of December in the c-base. The meetup groups for Munich and…
This is a post about labels. I’ve known for a while that I’m not “normal.” I experience the world differently from most other people I’ve met, but it took me many years to figure this out. I seem to be more sensitive to sensory input, be it visual or auditory or tactile. I also very…
I measure my arithmetic speed (how fast I do simple arithmetic problems, such as 3+ 4) daily. I assume it reflects overall brain function. I assume something that improves brain function will make me faster at arithmetic. Two years ago I discovered that butter — more precisely, substitution of butter for pork fat — made me…
This is the fourth post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features many stories by those conducting personal QS projects that are about: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned? In Toolmaker Talks we hear from those closely observing all this QS activity and developing appropriate tools: what…
There are many ways to experience a conference, especially one with so many inspiring overlapping sessions presented by attendees. My personal bias is towards mood tracking, so that’s mostly what I paid attention to this weekend, as well as meeting all the impressive quantifiers who came! If you want to look back over the conference,…
In the last session of the day, we had a few experimental talks on noticing how food changes physical condition. It was also an interesting series of talks that shows the importance of collecting our own subjective data to back up or refute the other technological data that we might also have access to. I…
