Saturday 22 March 2008

I am getting ready to do a longer walk. Goal is 20 + miles.

Update It went ok; 2:18 for the first 10 of boredom (from the house), 1:02 to the end of the trail (included one extra gooseloop lap), 43 minute 3 mile segment (lost focus), then 35:26 uphill back (ok) for 4:39:37. I’ve done better and I’ve done worse. But this is the first “ultra type” workout I’ve had in a while. 20 more of these and I might be getting back into shape! The day: overcast. Air: cool, humid, some wind, but I wonder about the quality. We had “dirty rain” yesterday which made our cars look as if they had been driving on dirt roads.

For anyone whose car was parked outside Friday morning, it looked as if mud rained on it.

Like children running through a clean house with dirty shoes, anywhere and everywhere rain drops fell they left behind their filthy, little footsteps.

Matt Barnes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lincoln, says dirty rain is not uncommon.

Particles of dust, dirt and pollutants are always circulating high in the atmosphere. They cling to water droplets and fall with every rain, he explained.

“There’s always some particulate matter; it just so happens (Friday) was a little more than usual,” said Barnes, who fielded several reports of the dirty rain in and around Peoria.

There’s no fancy, scientific name for it. No Latin-phrased phenomenon at work here. For better or worse, labeling the tinted water “dirty rain” fit just fine with the meteorologist.

With the ground throughout Midwest still moist and saturated from previous rainfall, Barnes figured the residue left by Friday’s rain emanated from the south or southwest part of the country. [...]Despite having already washed several cars at the dealership that morning, employees were back at it Friday afternoon. “It was like mud,” Psinas said after having to use one car’s wipers just to see through its windshield. [...]

Humor/Political Social. Colbert interviews Samantha Power; he talks about her “monster remark” and her newest book.

It takes about 6-7 minutes and is worth watching; my guess is that her book will go on my reading list after I finish off my backlog.

Humor: Edward Current talks about Hell.

Graduate School Reading this really makes me appreciate my Ph. D. adviser. He was about as nice and non-abusive as they come.

Boxing: Once again, I stayed up too late watching Friday Night Fights. The three that I saw were very entertaining.
(Image hotlinked from Fight News)

The report on the bouts is here.

See the highlights here.

Longer reports can be found here and here

Unbeaten super middleweight prospect Aaron Pryor, Jr. (9-0, 6 KOs) survived some rocky moments to post a unanimous decision over Alphonso Williams (10-4, 8 KOs). Scores were 76-75, 77-74, 79-73. Pryor is the son of Hall of Fame junior welterweight champion Aaron “The Hawk” Pryor.

This bout was the first one that I saw. Whereas I agree with the overall decision, I can understand the last score at all. I had Pryor carrying 5 rounds and Williams, three, with one of Williams rounds being a 10-8. Pryor is 6′ 4″ whereas Williams is only 5′ 8″, and Pryor used his reach to his advantage (weight limit: 162). Early on, I thought that Williams had won one of the earlier rounds but mostly Pryor peppered Williams with right hands; Teddy Atlas said that Williams was attempting to slip punches by moving his head in the wrong direction. Ironically, things improved for Williams when he started to fight in a left handed style. But in the seventh round:

In the seventh, the 32-year old Williams, 162.5 lbs., came off the ropes with a perfect straight right-left hook combo that disconnected Pryor’s legs from his senses. Pryor stayed on his feet, barely, as Williams stalked him around the ring in pursuit of the kill. Slipping and grabbing, Pryor survived again as he had in the first. In the eighth, his legs back beneath him, Pryor managed to turn the tables, stunning Williams with a long right and left hook before cruising to the closing bell.

But it appeared that Williams, either due to fatigue, or due to being weary of Pryor’s right hand, didn’t pursue Pryor aggressively; to us Pryor looked ready to go.

In the second fight:

Undefeated jr lightweight Matt Remillard (14-0, 8 KOs) dropped veteran Jesus Salvador Perez (25-19, 14 KOs) in round one, but was forced to go the four round route to win by scores 40-35, 40-35, 39-36.

Perez is one of those “tough as nails” veterans who has lost a step and just a tad of quickness, but has enough toughness and savvy to test the up and comers.

The main event saw the underdog (from Austin, Texas) come from behind to give a hot prospect his first loss. Fight News writes:

In a colossal upset, The Contender’s Brian Vera (16-1, 10 KOs) scored a totally unexpected seventh round TKO over previously unbeaten middleweight prospect Andy Lee (15-1, 12 KOs) on Friday night before a shocked audience at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. Lee, who had been hyped as the future of the middleweight division, looked like he would have a short night when he dropped Vera in round one.

Teddy Atlas had said that Vera’s style was tailor made for Lee; though he started off the bout by “boxing” Vera resumed his straight forward attack. Lee scored early and often but Vera kept up the relentless pressure even as he fell behind in the scorecards. Vera did use his jab effectively, much to the surprise to Atlas.

Though Lee was ahead on points, Vera was doing damage. Boxing Scene writes:

A back and forth war was birthed in a second round controlled by his opponent. Vera stunned Lee with a right hand and followed it with jarring rights and lefts to carry the frame. He gave back the advantage in the third as Lee slammed home some sizzling left hand counters. The momentum would swing again in the fourth with Vera opening a cut over Lee’s right eye and settle into a fifth fought on largely even terms.

Each man was landing harsh leather and bringing the crowd to its feet.

Then came a savage sixth round.

Lee carried the frame, hurting Vera with numerous left hooks but never landed the finishing blow he needed. Breathing out of his mouth and unable to answer Vera’s pressure on the inside, Lee let it all hang out. Vera’s perseverance in the sixth foretold the future. He never fell, never failed to answer Lee’s fire with some of his own. Lee headed to the corner at the bell an exhausted man. He didn’t know yet that he was a beaten one.

Vera let him in on that knowledge early in the seventh, landing right hand after right hand that had Lee’s shoulders slumping, head snapping, and legs shaking as he struggled to survive. To Lee’s credit, he continued to punch back but his body wasn’t keeping up with his heart. Vera landed the telling blow at mid-ring, another flush right hand that sent blood and sweat flying. A left hand counter from Lee landed a split second before referee Tony Chiarantano leapt in to stop the fight in Vera’s favor.

It was a split second too late.

The pro-Lee crowd cascaded the ring with boos, unable to understand how a fighter still punching back could be stopped. According to the television announcers, Lee’s trainer, Emmanuel Steward, did not join their discontent. While it appeared a tad premature, the stoppage may have been the best result for the long term hopes of the 23-year old Lee who was taking a beating as the fight wore on.

It is true that Lee was attempting to punch back, but to me, it looked as if he were extending his arms almost as if by instinct; these were sort of aimless arm extensions rather than focused punches. Lee was bleeding heavily, one of his eyes was closing and he was getting hit repeatedly in the head with punishing shots. It appeared to me that fatigue kept Vera from landing the single haymaker that would have ended it beyond all doubt.

But was was beyond doubt (to me, anyway) is that this was going to be the last round of this fight and that Vera was going to win.

Well, it is almost time to get out there and do my walking.

So, I’ll leave you with probably the best last three rounds of a heavyweight championship that I’ve seen. Note: the judges (all 3) had the fight tied at the start of round 13.

The fight ended 143-142, 142-143, 143-142 Holmes.

Friday Potpourri 21 March 2008

Health-Obesity Being obese can make your biological cells less efficient and pollute your body with cellular waste products:

The machinery responsible for energy production in fat cells is working poorly as a result of obesity. Finnish research done at the University of Helsinki and the National Public Health Institute shows that this may aggravate and work to maintain the obese state in humans.

Studying rare cases of young (25 year old) identical twins with large differences in bodyweight a Finnish research group has shown that already in the very early stages of obesity, clear changes in the function of the cellular mitochondria can be observed. Mitochondria are responsible for the energy production in cells and their dysfunction may work to maintain and worsen obesity. Surprisingly, the genes most drastically affected by obesity were ones involved in the breakdown of a class of amino acids known as branched-chain amino acids. These changes in the obese twins were clearly associated with pre-diabetic changes in sugar metabolism and the action of the hormone insulin.

The research is published in the latest edition of the science journal PLoS-Medicine (published and freely available online 11th of March).

Along with all its associated ailments, obesity is an ever increasing health concern. While healthy eating habits and exercise are important, genes do play their own important part in the development of obesity. [...]
“Identical twins share all the same genes and almost always are also identical in weight. Studying identical twins that do differ in weight is the best approach we have to get at the mechanisms involved in the interplay between genes and environment that result in obesity”, explains research scientist Kirsi Pietiläinen from the department of Public Health at the University of Helsinki, Finland. [...]

The researchers identified that the fat cells of the obese twins contained fewer copies of the DNA located in mitochondria. This DNA contains the instructions for energy use by the cell. “If one were to compare this cellular power plant with a car engine, it could be said that the engine of the fat individual is less efficient”, Pietiläinen says. An inefficient mitochondrial engine can also put out toxic exhaust. A clear sign of inflammation was observed in the obese twins’ fat tissue –a sign of the poor health of the cells.

Another sign of dysfunction in the mitochondria was also the much decreased breakdown of these branched-chain amino acids. What makes this observation especially important is the fact that the decreased breakdown of these amino acids, and their resultant increased concentration in the blood, was directly associated with pre-diabetic changes, fattening of the liver and the excessive release of insulin by the pancreas.

How to be happy? Give!

From Science:

Giving Money does seem to buy some happiness–studies show that rich folks are a little more upbeat than the poor. But the wealth-happiness connection is weak, and economists struggle to explain why, for example, the U.S. population has not become happier as it has become more affluent. One possibility is that people simply don’t spend their extra money in ways that lead to lasting cheer. Social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, wanted to find out what kind of spending really does make people happy. So she and colleagues surveyed 109 UBC students. Not surprisingly, most said they would be happier with $20 in their pocket than they would with $5. They also said they’d rather spend the money on themselves than on someone else. Wrong move. When Dunn’s team gave 46 other students envelopes containing a either $5 bill or a $20 bill and told them how to spend it, those who shelled out on others (donating to charity or giving a gift) were happier at the end of the day than those who blew it on themselves (to pay a bill or indulge in a treat). [...]

Source article.

Science writing: how to write for the public and what not to do:

Ruth Cronje is a faculty member of the Scientific and Technical Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in Eau Claire, WI (USA). She has written a letter that was published in Science last week [Going Public with the Scientific Process]. Many of you will never get to read it but you should. It is wonderful. [...]

The idea of using framing strategies to communicate science to the public has recently been taken up in scientific forums (1, 2), the mainstream media (3), and the blogosphere (4, 5). Most participants in the framing science debate limit their notion of scientific information to scientific facts. However, confining science messages to just the facts interferes with public understanding of science as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between data and scientists’ reasoning about data. To communicate successfully, we should focus on scientific process by emphasizing two important elements of scientific rationality: skepticism and dynamicism (6, 7).

Scientists deliberately integrate skepticism into their procedures by trying to refute their own hypotheses, retaining them only when confronted with compelling evidence sought through carefully controlled procedures. Scientists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of science to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the facts of science (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in science. A fact doesn’t allow science communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make scientists more confident that their reasoning is correct.

Science is also dynamic; it is a cumulative enterprise that requires scientists to situate their instrumental activities and interpretations against the evidence that has come before and to alter them in light of new evidence. Insisting that new data be interpreted within the context of past and future data will ferret out and correct error over time, but it means that a fact cannot, by definition, be anything more than the (ephemeral and fallible) consensus of scientists at a given point in time. A “just the facts” strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from science. When scientists inform the public of “facts” (like the “fact” widely disseminated in the 1970s that all dietary fats are bad for us), and then that “fact” is refined or altered (now we’re told olive oil is good for us), the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal scientific refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence (8-10). Instead of sweeping uncertainty under the rug, science communicators should help the public understand the logical and systematic procedures by which scientists confront it.

The true majesty and promise of science lies in its systematic, logical, skeptical, and dynamic reasoning procedures. “Successful” science communication should not be regarded as any message that enlists public support for science. Rather, we should define “success” in scientific communication as achieving a public that celebrates scientific reasoning procedures.

Social/Political

What makes one a liberal? Here is one thing: conservatives seem to think that individuals (the little guy) do not deserve to be “bailed out” but that rich corporations (the big guys) do. Ok, it was simplistic on my part to say this; conservatives come in many “flavors” just as liberals (such as myself) do.

But check out Robert Reich’s post:

One day while sitting on a beach last summer I overheard a father tussle with his young son about whether the child was old enough to take out a small sailboat. The father finally relented. “Go ahead, but I’m not gonna save you,” he said, picking up his newspaper. A while later, the sailboat tipped over and the child began yelling for help, but father didn’t budge. When the kid sounded desperate I put down my book, walked over to the man, and delicately told him his son was in trouble. “That’s okay,” he said. “That boy’s gonna learn a lesson he’ll never forget.” I walked down the beach to notify a lifeguard, who promptly went into action.

Letting children bear the consequences of their risky behavior — what some parents call “tough love” — is equally applicable adults, and conservatives have made something of a fetish out of it. A few weeks ago, as George W. announced a paltry plan to help out a few of the millions of homeowners who got caught in the sub-prime loan mess, he reiterated the credo: “It’s not government’s job to bail out … those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could not afford.”

It’s true that people tend to be less cautious when they know they’ll be bailed out. Economists call this “moral hazard.” But even when they’re being reasonably careful, people cannot always assess risks accurately. Many of the mostly poor home buyers who got into trouble did NOT in fact know they couldn’t afford the mortgage payments they were signing on to. [...]

When it comes to risky behavior in the market, America has a double standard. We’re told that economic risk-taking as the key to entrepreneurial success, but when big entrepreneurs take big risks that fail it’s amazing how often they get bailed out. Indeed, the history of modern American business is littered with federal bailouts, loan guarantees, and no-questions-asked reorganizations. Some are well known, such as the Chrylser bailout of 1979, the savings and loan bailout of 1989, and the airline bailout of 2001. Most occur in the relative dark, such as the 1998 bailout of giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (courtesy of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan), the not infrequent bailouts of under-funded corporate pension plans by the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, price supports for big agribusinesses facing market downturns, or the current bailout of Wall Street being engineered by Ben Bernanke’s Fed. Behind every one of these bailouts are CEOs or financial executives who were rescued from their bad bets.

CEOs get away with stupid mistakes all the time. Some, like Robert Nardelli, the former CEO of Home Depot, drive their company’s stock low that their boards eventually oust them. But they leave with eye-popping going-away presents nonetheless. (Nardelli got several hundrd million dollars on his departure.) [...]

Church and State Service Academies: too cozy with fundamentalists and their movement? It looks that way at times; here is a case where the Air Force Academy paid some so-called “reformed terrorists” who, well, maybe weren’t what they said that they were.

The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists.

The three men were invited as part of a weeklong conference on terrorism organized by cadets at the academy’s Colorado Springs campus under the auspices of the political science department.

The three will be paid a total of $13,000 for their appearance, some of it from private donors, said Maj. Brett Ashworth, a spokesman for the academy.

The three were invited because “they offered a unique perspective from inside terrorism,” Major Ashworth said. The conference is to result in a report on methods to combat terrorism that will be sent to the Pentagon, members of Congress and other influential officials, he added.

Members of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group suing the federal government to combat what it calls creeping evangelism in the armed forces, said it was typical of the Air Force Academy to invite born-again Christians to address cadets on terrorism rather than experts who could teach students about the Middle East.

“This stuff going on at the academy today is part of the endemic evangelical infiltration that continues,” said David Antoon, a 1970 academy graduate and a foundation member.

The three men were invited to talk about being recruited and trained as terrorists, not religion, although one of them, Zak Anani, did tell students that converting to Christianity from Islam saved his life, said John Van Winkle, another spokesman for the academy. [...]
Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., heard Mr. Saleem speak last November at the college and said he thought the three were connected to several major Christian evangelical organizations.

“It was just an old time gospel hour — ‘Jesus can change your life, he changed mine,’ ” Mr. Howard said. “That is mixed in with ‘Watch out America, wake up America, the danger of Islam is here.’ ”

Mr. Howard said his doubts about their authenticity grew after stories like the Golan Heights saga as well as something on Mr. Saleem’s Web site along the lines that he was descended from the grand wazir of Islam. “The grand wazir of Islam is a nonsensical term,” Mr. Howard said. [...]

Hat tip to Recursivity.

Barack Obama, Race, Religion and the Right Wing.

The right wing weighs in on race matters. Some of the quotes there are pretty funny.

Obama’s Religion: why is it good for someone to be seen as believing in the standard superstitions? I guess that “it just is”:

Barack Obama delivered a truly brilliant and inspiring speech this week. There were a few things, however, that he did not and could not (and, indeed, should not) say:

He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with racism–and, indeed, religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid. As Christopher Hitchens observed in Slate months ago, one glance at the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ should have convinced anyone that Obama’s connection to Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. would be a problem at some point in this campaign. Why couldn’t Obama just cut his ties to his church and move on?

Well, among other inexpediencies, this might have put his faith in Jesus in question. After all, Reverend Wright was the man who brought him to the “foot of the cross.” Might the Senator from Illinois be unsure whether the Creator of the universe brought forth his only Son from the womb of a Galilean virgin, taught him the carpenter’s trade, and then had him crucified for our benefit? Few suspicions could be more damaging in American politics today.

The stultifying effect of religion is everywhere to be seen in the 2008 Presidential campaign. The faith of the candidates has been a constant concern in the Republican contest, of course–where John McCain, lacking the expected aura of born-again bamboozlement, has been struggling to entice some proper religious maniacs to his cause. He now finds himself in the compassionate embrace of Pastor John Hagee, a man who claims to know that a global war will soon precipitate the Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (problem solved). Prior to McCain’s ascendancy, we saw Governor Mitt Romney driven from the field by a Creationist yokel and his sectarian hordes. And this, despite the fact that the governor had been wearing consecrated Mormon underpants all the while, whose powers of protection are as yet unrecognized by Evangelicals.

Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography. Examples of well-behaved and comparatively atheistic societies like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark–which surpass us in terrestrial virtues like education, health, public generosity, per capita aid to the developing world, and low rates of violent crime and infant mortality–are of no interest to our electorate whatsoever. It is, of course, good to know that people like Reverend Wright occasionally do help the poor, feed the hungry, and care for the sick. But wouldn’t it be better to do these things for reasons that are not manifestly delusional? Can we care for one another without believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is now listening to our thoughts? [...]

Despite all that he does not and cannot say, Obama’s candidacy is genuinely thrilling: his heart is clearly in the right place; he is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the current occupant of the Oval Office; and he still stands a decent chance of becoming the next President of the United States. His election in November really would be a triumph of hope.

But Obama’s candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?

Sam Harris is the author “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” He can be reached at www.samharris.org