Overslept…sort of

Workout notes Since the pool is closed, I am only running, walking and swimming. Since I have the 12 hour coming up in less than 2 weeks (sent in my application), I am cutting back, so it will be one of those 30 minute runs, walk of equal distance type of things today. Hence the sleep-in, which is the best part of a taper!

Update: finished; 3 mile run (to the West Peoria Cemetery), 3 mile walk. The walk was rather slow.

Random Observations:

People are still trying to figure out how Bush won in 2004, and what it might mean for the 2008 campaign. The following New Republic article makes an interesting conjecture (I’ve posted only a few snippets; the whole article is much longer but is an interesting read)

In June 2004, I went door to door in a white, working- class neighborhood of Martinsburg, West Virginia, a small blue-collar town in decline. There, I found voters disillusioned with both the Iraq war and the flagging economy. But, when I returned five months later– the Sunday before the election–I had difficulty digging up anyone who didn’t plan to vote for George W. Bush. As far as I could tell, Martinsburg voters were backing him for two reasons: first, because he opposed gay marriage and abortion (”There are two gays around the corner who are voting for Kerry,” one fellow, with a Bush sign in his yard, advised me scornfully from his stoop); and, second, because he was leading the war on terrorism (”I feel more safe with Bush in there,” an elderly disabled man explained). There was still grumbling over the war, the economy, and other topics–the same elderly man who praised Bush for making him feel safe also bemoaned America’s lack of universal health insurance–but these issues were eclipsed by the threat of gay weddings and terrorist attacks.

Illustration by Todd SlaterBush carried West Virginia and won the election partly because he ran a better campaign than John Kerry. But that wasn’t the only reason. There was something odd about the support for Bush in places like West Virginia. Unlike voters in New York City, voters in Martinsburg had little to fear from terrorist attacks; yet they backed Bush, while New Yorkers voted for Kerry. If gay marriage were legalized, Martinsburg would be unlikely to host massive numbers of same-sex weddings; yet voters I talked to were haunted by the specter of gay marriage.

Some pundits have tried to explain away this mystery by arguing that Bush backers voted for their values rather than their interests. But this explanation is unsatisfying, since many of those voters didn’t opt for “family values” in 1992 and 1996, when the country elected a well-known philanderer as president.

In fact, many political scientists can’t begin to explain what took place in West Virginia in 2004.

[...]
In The Denial of Death, Becker tried to explain how fear of one’s own demise lies at the center of human endeavor. “Man’s anxiety,” Becker wrote, “results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation.” Becker described how human beings defend themselves against this fundamental anxiety by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own.

Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczyn- ski first presented a summary of Becker’s ideas at the Society for Experimental Social Psychology in 1984. As they talked, the three later wrote, “well-known psychologists jostled each other vigorously to escape.” Afterwards, they submitted their take on Becker to The American Psychologist and were peremptorily turned down. “I have no doubt that these ideas are of absolutely no interest to any psychologist, alive or dead,” the journal’s reviewer replied. Later, the journal’s editor told the three psychologists that, if they wanted to be taken seriously in their profession, they would have to find ways to test their ideas experimentally. And that’s what they proceeded to do.

Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes “worldview defense”–their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger–they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; the other required them to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something. [...]

They then explored whether Bush’s popularity in the years after September 11 stemmed in part from Americans’ need for a charismatic figure who could help them overcome these thoughts. Bush’s appeal, the psychologists speculated, lay “in his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God’s will to rid the world of evil.’” In 2002, the psychologists, aided by two colleagues, conducted an experiment at Brooklyn College that showed that mortality reminders dramatically enhanced the appeal of a hypothetical candidate who told voters, “You are not just an ordinary citizen: You are part of a special state and a special nation.”

Next, they began testing Bush’s appeal directly. In October 2003, the three scholars, together with five colleagues, assembled 97 undergraduates at Rutgers to participate in what the students thought was a study of the relationship between personality and politics. One group was given the mortality exercises. The other wasn’t. They then read an essay expressing a “highly favorable opinion of the measures taken by President Bush with regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict.” It read, in part:

Personally I endorse the actions of President Bush and the members of his administration who have taken bold action in Iraq. I appreciate our President’s wisdom regarding the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power and his Homeland Security Policy is a source of great comfort to me. … We need to stand behind our President and not be distracted by citizens who are less than patriotic. Ever since the attack on our country on September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush has been a source of strength and inspiration to us all.

This was not the kind of statement that would appeal to most Rutgers undergraduates, and indeed, on average, members of the control group rated it unfavorably. But those who did the mortality exercises on balance favored the statement. In February 2004, the psychologists repeated the experiment, but this time they used September 11 cues. They had one group of students write down the emotions that September 11 aroused in them and describe what happened on that day. They got the same results as before: On average, those in the September 11 group approved of the statement, while those who didn’t do the exercises disapproved. Based on political questionnaires they had the students fill out, they also found that the September 11 and mortality exercises “increased both conservatives’ and liberals’ liking for Bush.”
[...]

It turns out that Dunlap and Jackie got the gist of this article some time ago:

Politics: Liberals are better read than conservatives. Hardly a news flash.

Liberals read more than conservatives, and the head of the book publishing industry’s trade group thinks she knows why.

“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,’” Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”

Hey wait, weren’t Limbaugh’s and Coulter’s books best sellers? That is, if you could call those things books.

Science Anthropology.net has a nice blurb about the importance of pronouns; using these helps the brain continue with its train of thought. I’ll just ignore the sexist cartoon with the article! (even if it does have a kernel of truth to it…)

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub: has a nice article about “what is crackpot science, and what is truly innovative science?

I can give the quick answer right here: Einstein came up with four very highly original papers in 1905, even though he only had an undergraduate degree at the time. They were on the Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, the size of molecules (remember that the atomic model wasn’t even established at that time), and Special Relativity. These WERE revolutionary.

But, when he wrote these, he submitted them to one of the finest peer reviewed journal (and they were accepted) and, while writing them, he displayed a deep understanding of the current scientific thought of that time, and in fact, built upon it.

Yoga for NRA Members Read the post; I just about blew coffee all over my keyboard.

From the article: