The New Road

Yeah, the BMI thing is inaccurate. It says my percentage is 22, which...it's not. Sadly, it's like...27-28. So yeah. You look great by the way! I'm impressed. =)

Thanks.

Though I have to say 22 sounds about right for you. But, I suppose that brings up the question of what is right. So I looked at the Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index

And found this interesting section:

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Individuals who are not sedentary - especially athletes - as well as children, the elderly, the infirm, and individuals who are naturally endomorphic or ectomorphic (i.e., people who don't have a medium frame) are ill-fitted to assessment using the BMI. Or to state the problem more accurately, the BMI measurements at which these people may be underweight, overweight or obese are different from for sedentary mesomorphs whose ages are between about 20 and 70.

In athletes, the problem is that muscle is denser than fat. Most professional athletes are "overweight" or "obese" according to their BMI[6] - unless the number at which they are considered "overweight" or "obese" is adjusted upward. In children and the elderly, differences in bone density and, thus, in the proportion of bone to total weight can mean the number at which these people are considered underweight should be adjusted downward.

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I wouldn't consider myself an athlete, but I do have a big frame. And going back to that experience with the doctor who said I was overweight at 180, I think he was nuts and bordering on malpractice. If I'd taken his advice and lost more weight I would probably be dead.

I should post a picture sometime of my driver's license which was taken at 180. I was really gaunt then. Disturbingly so. I remember coming back from Australia and having friends ask me if I was ok. I was an unhealthy level of thin. And somehow I still was considered almost overweight on the BMI.

So it's really a question of what suites you best and what you feel comfortable with. As long as you can do what you want to do and still have some energy left, you are probably ok.

* totally off topic *
Hi Jack, I just read your microformats piece at IBM developerWx. I typed quite a lengthy response (below) only realising after posting that it wasn't regular comments, just site-wide feedback. Which prompted me to hunt down your blog. Which I'm very pleased to have found - especially re. your projects. Sorry about not mentioning swimming :-)

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re. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-microformats/

Great to see the piece! I agree entirely about the genius of microformats.

Couple of niggles:
Your comments on the Semantic Web, while I suppose are valid are a little misleading. To say the Semantic Web hasn't taken off sounds rather final. In reality the technologies have come on in leaps and bounds, and the level of deployment is becoming increasingly significant. It's not something that can happen overnight. More to the point, your statements give the impression that microformats are somehow an alternative to Semantic Web technologies. But Dan Connolly and others have been talking about RDF data in HTML since at least 2000, very much anticipating microformats. Microformats are exceedingly SemWeb-friendly. Ok, the official serialization of RDF is RDF/XML, not HTML. But that's a minor point - the important thing in RDF is the data model. Microformat documents can be interpreted as RDF, in fact a neat trick has been developed for doing this automatically (GRDDL). Microformats answer the question of how to get data onto the Web, but not where you get the data from or what you do with it. Semantic Web technologies offer a consistent model through which this kind of data can be processed.

The other niggle is a very minor one, but underneath it I believe there is an important point. Microformats use *HTML* class names, there isn't necessarily any relation to CSS. According to the HTML 4.01 spec the semantics of the class attribute is style free: "the element may be said to belong to these classes". It suggests two roles for class attributes: As a style sheet selector; for general purpose processing by user agents. CSS obviously follows the former role, microformats the latter. The significance is that microformats aren't just an hacky reuse of styling stuff, they're actually using HTML *as designed*.

Thanks for the feedback. I certainly appreciate it, especially given the lengths gone to give it. ;-)

On your first point. I think technology wise, the underpinnings for the semantic web are there. The problem is correct adoption of those standards. It doesn't seem wide spread. A lot of the RSS/RDF I see is invalid or out of date. So while I think the fundamentals are there, it seems that the only web format people really care about is (X)HTML.

On your second point, I still think of it as a hack, since it's not the ideal way to do it. If someone were to ask you to save some data in a structured format, would your first answer be XML, or would it be a microformat?

And I suppose to defend it a little bit further, I look at this type of hack, which is very clever, as a positive thing. Sort of the O'Reilly use of the word 'hack' as opposed to what you might hear in the context of a code review. ;-)

All that being said, if you come back to me and say, 'instead of this statement I would say something like this, which is still very clear just more accurate' I would change the article. I'm not here to pop the bubble of the semantic web or microformats. I think both are very important and the article is meant to get people interested in both.