The Strava platform has a bunch of monthly challenges that makes things fun for users. For example, run 100, 200, or 300 km, or walk 50 km, or cycle numerous distances. These are great! However, I am surprised they are missing some that are not only beneficial for users, popular from science backings in at least Western culture, and just systematically to be comparable across activities. I have listed some below and hope Strava will add them as I don’t think they would be hard to add, considering there are already algorithms for some similar challenges in place, so it should just a matter of switching the limits. For other challenges, there is other data available from fitness apps that Strava takes into account for other calculations, like # of steps for average stride length calculations, so it’s a matter of the new data totals and a limit, or two changes, to existing algorithms, to create new challenges that would be fun and beneficial beyond fun for users!
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NAVA New American City Flags Survey Analysis Visualization
A few days ago, I shared a data visualization I did for the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) to support their international press release on a flag survey they did in late 2022. Today, I have the analytical one ready, intended more for research, or to find things to research and answer among the results.
NAVA New American City Flags Survey Results Visualization
A few days ago, the North American Vexillological Association (NAVA) released results from their New (since 2015) American City Flags Survey to media in the 312 cities who had flags in the survey. They also released the results to select other media outlets they have relationships with for decades. Supporting this news release was a data visualization I did to show the full results in an interactive way, including images of the flags discussed.
The Power of Giving Away Lottery Tickets
My #1 life philosophy is the best thing you can give someone, including yourself, is a chance. It applies well to general opportunities in life, as in having the trust, faith, and/or confidence in someone, including oneself, to do something, with success either expected or ignored, pending the goal. The philosophy holds true for understanding that the trust, faith, confidence, love, whatever you want to interpret as being shown by the person giving the chance, are far more valuable than anything money could buy, or other qualities shown. However, I’m going to test that money theory by getting my work colleagues lottery tickets for Asian New Year on February 12 (2021).
A Couple of Sleepy Resolutions
After having shared my Resolutions Planning Workbook yesterday, I thought I’d show an example of how I use it through a couple of resolutions I just committed to in 2021.
These resolutions are about sleep, both going towards getting what I deem to be enough sleep, but done in a consistent way rather than binging catch-up sleep periodically. The body can’t fully catch-up on shortage of sleep to get the same benefit as if the same amount of sleep had been spread out evenly. Lack of sleep on many days also means one can’t be as fully alert and present as if with good sleep, to bringing the same energy to things, all else being equal, to life, whether to activities and/or to other people. That energy is about as fundamental a thing as a person can bring to life to live it best, and sleep is, without doubt, the most effective way to fuel that, even more important than the equivalent food deprivation. That’s how important sleep is once you understand what the latest research tells you, and that’s why it’s worth two resolutions to me, with that goal of sufficient sleep (around 7 hours a night to minimize cognitive decline) consistently, being my number one goal of the 2020s. So with that background in mind, here are my notes for the two goals. I will make the headers of one goal red, and the other blue, to denote the difference.
Digital Citizen 