Lab Log

I started doing Zetamac just to exercise my brain.

My mother used to take me to abacus classes when I was a kid (back in Ahmedabad, circa 2006–2008ish?), so mental arithmetic has been around for a long time.

These days I'm mostly interested in consistency rather than chasing a single huge score.

I've kept the data because it's fun.

I've always liked behavioral economics, partly because I enjoy seeing ideas from books show up in completely ordinary situations.

After reading work by legends like Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, Angela Duckworth, Daniel Kahneman, I started noticing how often people seem to prefer round numbers.

Then I noticed that I was doing the same thing at the gym.

I compared round-number workout times with non-round ones and found that the round-number sessions tended to give me less “buffer” before the next commitment.

The interesting part wasn't really the result.

It was that a behavior I'd read about in books also seemed to appear in my own life.

And, admittedly, I started using round numbers strategically because they gave me a little more buffer, a small “nudge” which I used to get myself more time, so to speak.

Cass Sunstein later liked my post about it, which was a nice bit of validation.

Footnote: tbh, I was disproportionately excited about this.

Leg day is still the most excruciating entry in my personal dataset.

I originally looked at this because everyone says leg day is harder, and after enough Bulgarian split squats I decided that “everyone” deserved some empirical support.

I compared heart-rate patterns between leg and non-leg gym sessions.

The result was pretty straightforward: leg-day sessions were more challenging.

No regression discontinuity. No Bayesian hierarchical model.

Just two columns of numbers and a conclusion I was hoping to reach.

I had a lot of longitudinal exercise data sitting around, but a spreadsheet isn't exactly the most exciting way to look at several hours of exercising.

I wanted to turn it into something that felt more like a Nike ad: good music, visual storytelling, and a sense of movement.

So I made a video.

The underlying data is pretty mundane.

That is partly why I like the project.

There's something satisfying about taking a boring time series and making it feel like a story.

During the final semester of university, I spent a lot of time thinking about how much of college I'd missed.

I'd spent roughly two and a half years at home rather than actually having the college experience I had imagined.

When I finally got to spend time back on the university campus, I loved spending time at the football pitch, especially the smell of the grass. So I started taking a picture of it every time I visited in order to document it.

Mostly I just wanted to see the resulting timelapse.

Looking back at it now, it feels nostalgic in a way I hadn't really anticipated when I started.

I even wrote a poem about it. I'll put that here eventually.