u/impendia

I'm a math teacher, and I'd love to get my hands on an inexpensive mechanical linear planimeter. I want to show it off to my students, and hopefully one of them will ask "Wow, how does that work?"

I found lots of used polar planimeters for sale online, cheaply, and in apparently good condition. I might get one of those, but they operate differently and wouldn't directly illustrate the cool math (Green's theorem) I have in mind.

From what I can tell after some googling, I seem to be out of luck. Any chance I'm mistaken about this?

As I learned from an old post here, Oura on the Web is still active for now, and it will allow you to download a spreadsheet:

https://cloud.ouraring.com/dashboard

Go to Trends, Download Data, Select All. You get a big spreadsheet with all the data your ring has tracked.

The in-app Advisor seems a little underpowered and math-phobic, but I uploaded the spreadsheet to the free version of Claude and it went to town. Scatterplots, correlation coefficients, autocorrelations, you name it.

Wish I'd learned this earlier! And if any Oura staff are reading this -- there is a message that Oura on the Web will be discontinued later this year, I'd be grateful if one way or another the ability to obtain a spreadsheet gets preserved.

In college and in my twenties, I stumbled across all sorts of interesting people and events, and I'd get invited to whatever random activities people around me wanted to do. A lot of these were memorable and great fun!

As I've gotten older, life has gotten quieter and more predictable. Most people around me seem to welcome this change, but I miss the randomness of my younger days. Any advice on how to seek this out?

Here is an example: I was traveling for work, and someone invited me to play badminton with him and a couple others. I think I've only tried badminton once, and it was like thirty years ago or something. But I figured what the hell, and joined in. It was a lot of fun!

I have a lot of experiences like this when I travel; when everyone is away from their usual routines, I guess it's easier. But I'd love to explore more and make more friends in the city where I actually live. Any suggestions?