Snow day???

Workout Notes 2000 yard swim (500 warm up, 5 x (100 fly/back/fly/free with fins, 100 paddle), 10 x 50 free on the 1 (47-49, mostly 48 with no flip turns). Then 12.5 miles on the bike in 44 minutes. I tried to run but I got a weird pain right where the top of my right thigh meets the hip joint; it was a cramp/muscle burn type of thing. Racewalking was painless though so I walked an easy 3 miles on the track in 39:30.

Weather: snow. Classes were canceled (only the second time in my 17 years here….17 years????) but somehow the gym was open. Kudos to aquatics director Sue Wheeler who is the most dedicated park district official that I know.

Politics

I nice “cheerleading” diary on the debate is here. The polls show a race that is getting closer. Still, HRC has a huge name recognition advantage and that will mean something in a race where there hasn’t been as much campaigning in each state as there has been in the previous ones. Time will tell.

This was probably O’s best moment in the debate. Most on the Kos think that he won, but the polls at the Kos show O up 76-11. Other sides like MyDD are heavily pro-Clinton.

Speaking of Obama: Remember Paul Volcker, the famous “inflation fighter” that stopped the severe inflation that plagued Jimmy Carter’s administration (Carter appointed him, Reagan retained him, and under Reagan the policies paid off)? Well, Volcker endorsed Obama! Remember that though he was a Carter appointee, he was retained by President Reagan, and is not a liberal.

He also got the MoveOn.org endorsement, which, well, I don’t know how that will play in a Democratic primary. But it is better than an Ann Coulter “endorsement” that HRC got.

Science

Antropology.net has a couple of interesting articles. One is about humans and chimps; as species, we diverged about 5,000,000 years ago (despite what Mike Huckabee thinks!) but we share about 99% of our genes. So why are we as different as we are? Gene expression. I am not an expert nor do I even have minimal competence in this area. But if I understand this correctly: the genes are like a set of instructions, and “gene expression” are how those instructions are carried out. So, “genes aren’t everything”, so to speak. This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, as birds still have genetic instructions to grow teeth and birds still have instructions to grow reptile knees. (see Futuyma: Science on Trail: The Case for Evolution))

In another article they also discuss human music and violence and wonder if these aspects of us come from adaptation or “just are”.