How many calories are you burning?

Want to know how many calories you are burning for your sports or activities? You can check out a calorie counter.

It's not completely accurate, because it doesn't account for various things like your body composition (how much of you is made up of muscle and bones and how much of you is made up of stuff that jiggles), base metabolism, athletic conditioning, gender, intensity, and all that, but it's a good start. Figure that the actual number of calories you burn probably depends on the intensity.

For example, the calculator says that a person on average would burn about 420 calories for an hour of competitive badminton (kudos to the calculator for differentiating between silly leisure badminton and competitive badminton). But I've seen data where one can burn 500 to 800 (for singles games) calories an hour.

So how do you figure out intensity without a fancypants heart rate monitor (like Polar)? You can use perceived exertion. Try chatting during exercise. If you can still chat, that's low exertion; chat with gasping, medium; cannot say a word, high; blacking out, that's way too much.

The website has a bunch of other calculators, so don't forget to scroll down and check them out.

Detecting bedbugs

How do you know if you have a bed bug infestation?

• You wake up with itchy welts that appear in a cluster or row of threes. That's their calling card. But don't freak out, yet it could be another insect. Also 1 in 3 folks are lucky enough to not have reactions to bed bug bites
• You see tiny black spots or rust staines on mattress seams, headboards, baseboards, or corners where walls meet. It looks kinda like moldy.
• They smell like rotting coconuts. 

The key to getting rid of bed bugs is detecting an infestation early and treating it before it spreads.