2011-02-05

"Information Is Not Knowledge"

Way back in 1979, Frank Zappa released his epic Joe's Garage album, a 3-CD rock opera. Near the end, one of the characters expounds that "information is not knowledge." But still. Sometimes simply recording events as they occur lends such compelling insight into life that you can't help but question Zappa's hypothesis.

Case in point: the every-day statistics recorded by my friends the Kleparek brothers, David and Anton. There is nothing genius about their charts; they have simply recorded information about their lives in common home computer applications and presented the results graphically.

But what a story it tells! Here is David's body weight over the course of a year:


The big dip you see was a two-week fast he undertook.

Here is Anton's distance running log by month:


Feeling inspired by such a simple way to make life more interesting, I drew up a spreadsheet of my own, consisting of most of the biological statistics I can collect on a regular basis.

I'm going to have some fun with this. Over the coming months, my hope is to provide some charts, graphs, trends, numbers, and maybe even some hypothesis testing.

Stay tuned.

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