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Watching Apple Health
The big story about the future of everyone's health and wellbeing this week seemed to involve Tuesday night's Presidential Debate, and as such there wasn't a lot of news about fitness technology for me to summarize here. Once upon a time, perhaps, Apple'
The Extra Mile
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is one of the best selling piece of educational software of all time. First released in 1987 by game developer Toolworks, the program offered interactive typing drills designed to improve the speed and accuracy of users' keyboard skills. The cover of the box featured Renée
Watched, But Not Optimized
On Tuesday, my Garmin said I slept 2 minutes. One problem (or rather, the first in a series of problems with this record): it was 8am, and I get up every morning at 6. I wasn't even in bed at 8, let alone asleep. (Indeed, I think I
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Lactate Meters and Labor Day Weekend
You can tell that folks are gearing up for the last week of summer, as marked – in the US, at least – by the "back-to-school" season. Things have been pretty quiet this week, save the steady drumbeat of marketing emails about Labor Day sales from every company from which
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Earlier this month, Virginia Sole-Smith, bestselling author of Fat Talk, published a podcast/essay titled "Nobody Cares About Your 'Health and Fitness' Journey." I'm not a premium subscriber to her Burnt Toast newsletter, I confess, so I couldn't listen or read; and
What Computers Cannot Do (for Health and Fitness)
Happy Friday! What's good? Here are some of the latest stories about the intersection of health and fitness and technology (and money). Speaking of money, I'm, like, 20 years late to the game, but I just started reading Michael Lewis's Moneyball, in part because
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Cooling Technologies, "Cool" Technologies, and Not At All Cool Technologies
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling that end-of-summer, post-Olympics melancholy this week, so this will be a fairly short one. (Shorter than Monday’s massive missive, at least.) I'd say I'm feeling a bit resentful that I'm having
Teaching Machines (for Bodies, Not Brains)
Many histories of education technology start with the hornbook, a fifteenth century invention that, according to Bill Ferster, "married pedagogy and content knowledge into a physical device" — a device that allowed students to learn their letters (without tearing up or writing in an actual book, I guess). Of
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An author I very much admire complained on Facebook recently that the Olympics are an example of "scarcity economics" – only one gold medal so we don't celebrate everyone's immense talent. The Games – all manner of sports contests, she said – are closely bound up in