Too Much Blogging!

Workout notes Yesterday, 5 mile walk, including 3 faster miles with Tracy (she ran). Today, 4 mile run (slow), yoga class, 4 mile walk back (ok).

The yoga class wasn’t that good; lots of “New Year’s Resolution” types there. Not only did they force the teacher to water down the class, but the teacher delayed the start of our class to accommodate late comers. So, I might drop this class for a while and come back if I am not disciplined enough to practice on my own. End workout notes.

Health and Fitness: Racewalker (and scientist) Tammy has some thoughts on weight loss and says what she thinks about those who would discourage people from trying. Note: she was once morbidly obese. Now she is very athletic and doesn’t carry a hint of extra weight.

Personal

I am back in Peoria, and I spent hours getting caught up on the internet.

Ok, some of that was fighting/discussing the primary race on the Daily Kos. More on that later, in another post.

But for now, some reading material. There are too many good blogs out there!

I’ll try to lay off still more discussion of the Obama-Clinton contest in this post but will instead gather my thoughts on a second post. I know that such discussion gets tiresome for those who aren’t political junkies.

Science

Alfred Wallace
Though Darwin got credit for coming up with the “natural selection” mechanism for evolution, Wallace discovered the concept independently. Here is a nice “birthday” article about him.

[...]The following law may be deduced from these facts:–Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

That law – which is known today as “Wallace’s Law” or the “Sarawak Law” – remains one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for biological evolution. New species, he pointed out, don’t appear randomly. They appear near things that look a hell of a lot like them. His paper was enough to inspire Charles Lyell, who had for years been one of the most vocal opponents of evolution, to start a series of private notebooks on the species question – and also put him in a very receptive frame of mind when Darwin confided his ideas about natural selection to him the following year. All in all, it wasn’t a bad day’s work for a youngish dude from a lower-middle class background, particularly given the social environment of the day.

Hat tip to Science Avenger.

Biosingularity (along with 3-quarks daily) is an excellent source of general interest articles.
Four key behaviors when, taken together, adds about 14 years to one’s lifespan. They are: not smoking, eating 5 servings of fruits/vegetables a day, exercising and having moderate alcohol intake. I do three of the 4 (I don’t drink)

[...] In order to examine the combined impact of changes in lifestyle, Kay-Tee Khaw and colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council used a health behaviour score that is easy to understand in order to assess the participants in the study (who were from Norfolk, United Kingdom). Between 1993 and 1997, 20,000 men and women between the ages of 45 and 79, none of whom had known cancer or heart or circulatory disease, completed a questionnaire that resulted in a score between 0 and 4. A point was awarded for each of the following: not currently smoking; not being physically inactive (physical inactivity was defined as having a sedentary job and not doing any recreational exercise); a moderate alcohol intake of 1-14 units a week (a unit is half a pint of beer or a glass of wine); and a blood vitamin C level consistent with eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day. Deaths among the participants were recorded unti l 2006.

After factoring in age, the results showed that over an average period of eleven years people with a score of 0 – i.e. those who did not undertake any of these healthy forms of behaviour – were four times more likely to have died than those who had scored 4 in the questionnaire. Furthermore, the researchers calculate that a person who has a health score of 0 has the same risk of dying as someone 14 years older who had scored 4 in the questionnaire (i.e. someone engaging in all four healthy forms of behaviour). This was independent of social class and body mass index. The study forms part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), conducted across ten European countries, the largest study of diet and health ever undertaken. [...]

Oatmeal: eating it IS, in fact, “The Right Thing To Do”.