Chilly Thursday

Wow, it seems as if fall is really here. The temperatures have dropped dramatically.

Topics for today:

Marathons: The Chicago 50mile/50K has introduced a USATF-certified marathon event for this year. They are doing this to help those who may have really wanted to complete a marathon at the Chicago Marathon but were unable to do so due to the heat or course closure.

My first reaction was “oh no, they are going to ruin a good event by giving up this well kept secret.”

But I love what is says on their webpage:

LAST MINUTE CHANGE!

Due to several requests, we have added a USAT&F Certified Marathon distance along with our 50 Mile and 50 Kilometer Ultramarathon races. The Marathon will start with the 50K runners at 8:30 AM 10/27/07 and will be another 3 loop course, ending back at the start/finish. Keep in mind that this is still an Ultra, meaning there will not be mile splits or some of the other amenities you may expect at a regular marathon. We will have a medal for the finishers but it will say Chicago Lakefront 50k. NO WHINERS PLEASE!

Emphasis mine, caps theirs.

Note: if you do the 50K, you are basically at the marathon point when you make your last turn-around.

Update: The New York Times has a nice article by Frank Shorter (gold in the 1972 Olympic Marathon, “silver” in the 1976 behind an East German on steriods). The article talks about what runners and race organizers can do if the race gets unusually hot. Hat tip to Matt from the Ultrarunning listserve. Here are some of his tips to runners (and walkers):

Strip down. At the expo before the Chicago race, I advised men to go shirtless and women to wear as little as possible in order to maximize the refrigeration effect of wind against sweaty skin. (Unfortunately, this time there would be no wind.) The elite runners have learned this. In Chicago, I would have gone shirtless, and explained to my sponsors later. [...]

Talk. Run at what I call a “conversational pace.” As long as you can carry on a normal conversation and don’t have to pause to get a breath, you’re getting enough oxygen. This is your only real protection against going over the edge to the point where your body has to recover, because in extreme conditions, you might discover that it can’t. [...]

Make clear to first-time marathoners what elite runners already know: in certain situations it’s important to back off from the gut feeling to exert yourself more and more just to maintain the pace.

[...]

If necessary, turn off the clock.

Though the last comment was addressed to the race organizers, runners and walkers can do this by simply ignoring their watch. You WILL slow down in extreme heat; it is best to just “go with the flow”.

Are you left brained or right brained? Take this little test to find out. (ok, this is more fun than anything else); it involves looking at a picture of a dancer and determining which way the dancer is spinning.

Look at this image:

Determine which way the dancer is spinning (clockwise or counter clockwise) and go to the link to see what this means. Yes, you can see this dancer spinning in different directions, though I had to blink my eyes a few times to be able to see her spin in different directions.

Hat tip to Kos at the Daily Kos.

Evolution of language and its relation to evolution of proteins.

Anthropology has a nice article on this:

Nature’s “Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language,” studies how grammatical rules change over time, a term the authors call regularization. The authors specifically studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Here’s a summary of what they concluded from the abstract,

“We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.”

I’ve bolded what I consider important because this conclusion has some tangents to protein evolution as well. Often proteins that are less vital are mutated much more frequently than vital proteins. It is remarkable to see the authors quantified a similar phenomenon in language evolution. [...]

Politics: Democrats are hearing about Gore, Gore, Gore. Examples here and here. Look: he ran a bad campaign in 2000 and managed to lose, ok, sort-of-lose, or, ok, tie and get cheated by the SCOTUS even though he was coming from an administration that approval ratings in the 60’s. Outrageously false smears were sticking to him like glue.

(examples: the “Al Gore claimed that he invented the internet smear” Al Gore “started it all with the cleanup of the Love Canal” smear. )

As one Kossak said: “I remember him as that piece of wood that stood next to the Big Dog for 8 years.”

What makes people think that things will be different now? This sure reminds me of the old chanting for the back up quarterback. Fans eventually come to find out that there is a reason the back-up is the back up.

Look: I like Al Gore; I enjoyed his film and think highly of him as an individual. But he stinks as a campaigner.

Just think of a debate between him and Fred Thompson. That would be a cure for insomnia.

Humor
My goodness, I just love Shalini. I’ve got a huge crush on her! Check out one of her latest posts (just read the title of it)

If they were any more stupid, they would not be able to breathe

From the lunatic nutjob cretins/theistards/liars/frauds/kooks at Answers in Genesis: [...]

Never mind what she was talking about; it was more of this “if you have a mind that enables you to doubt things, it is because my deity gave you that mind and ability” type of arguments.

From the Skip Jenkins Show:

Check out the photo: Voyeurism foiled again! No, I didn’t take this photo. But it is funny.