Foxy walk

Ok, I didn’t see a fox while walking, but I did see one while measuring the West Peoria Cemetery loop (which is just over the 1.3 miles that I thought it was)

(Image hotlinked from here)

It was a bit startled by my slow moving car; I stopped and we stared at each other. This was at about 3:15 pm.

Church/State: Richard Dawkins talks for 30 minutes; issues an atheist call to arms at a TED talk. This really sums up much of what is in his book.

Elections:

McCain’s temper: not just a rumor.

A recollection of Hillary Clinton at a political strategy meeting:

After spending much of the day doing the sorts of things that normal teacher/scholars do, I returned to the blogosphere to see a raging debate about who said what at the January 1995 meeting convened by the Clintons at Camp David to help them sort through the 1994 election debacle and help him prepare for the 1995 State of the Union Address. I was there (the only female intellectual-scholar invited), and the tenor of the discussion was one of the instances I was referring to last Saturday in my post on TPM (I also attended a late 1993 intellectuals’ dinner at the White House, where similar discussions occurred). The early 1995 meeting at Camp David was a many-hours-long seminar featuring about a dozen intellectuals plus a bunch of White House insiders, talking with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. It was a fascinating window into how the Clintons were coping with the massive health care debacle and Congressional election defeats of late 1994. [...]

But what is clear in both in my memory and my notes is that there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices — usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

I vividly remember at the time finding it impressive that Bill Clinton (NOT Hillary Clinton) showed real empathy for the ordinary people whose motives and supposedly misguided choices were under analysis. Ironically, just as Barber reported, Bill Clinton was the one who combined analysis and empathy, much as Obama himself did in his full San Francisco remarks.

I can’t say that I believe that HRC really is cold blooded; rather it appears to me that she is capable of compartmentalizing her emotion and logic; WJC and BHO are special in that they can combine both.

Humor

A nice reply to Pascal’s Wager.

Finally, some sun!

Central Illinois had some sun. I went to the East Peoria Trail and did my second 20 mile training walk of the weekend.

1:12, 1:10, 10:10, 1:09 for 4:42. Note that I had a wind at my back for the first and third segments, but that these segments were uphill. Photos of the course are here.

Though this was not a fast walk by any means, it was roughly at the same pace as yesterday’s 20, and that is a good sign. I had to kick myself into starting it though.

There were a few other people out there; The “Big Willi Style” was out there burning up the course with a training buddy.

I missed the USA Women’s Olympic Marathon trials; the results are here. Deena Kastor (the 2004 Olympic Games Bronze Medalist) won in 2:29.

BOSTON – A nearly insurmountable deficit could not deter American record holder Deena Kastor as she led fellow Californians Magdalena Lewy Boulet and Blake Russell onto the Olympic Team, Sunday at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Women’s Marathon.

With her American record personal best of 2:19:36 making her 12 minutes faster than the next-fastest Olympic Trials entrant, Kastor (Mammoth Lakes, Calif.) was a heavy favorite coming into Sunday’s race. But Lewy Boulet (Oakland, Calif.) ran far ahead of the pack for the first half of the race. Her lead at 14 miles was 1:55, but Kastor at that point truly began to pursue Lewy Boulet. A strong second half is what gave Kastor, also the American record holder at 10,000m and a two-time World Cross Country silver medalist, the Olympic bronze, and she again demonstrated strength and patience in Boston.

The 35-year-old Kastor began running mile splits of 5:30 to 5:34, quickly eating up Lewy Boulet’s lead. When the Olympic bronze medalist strode past Lewy Boulet 2:14:50 into the race, she increased her pace even further, to 5:29 per mile, as she added an Olympic Trials marathon title to her storied resume by crossing the finish line in 2:29:35.

Lewy Boulet, 34, made her first Olympic Team, finishing second in a personal-best time of 2:30:19. The native of Poland and mother to a nearly 3-year-old boy, Lewy Boulet’s time improved on her personal best of 2:30:50, which she ran in placing fifth at the 2004 Olympic Trials in St. Louis.

So, these runners finished 26.2 miles in about the time it took me to cover about 10.5 miles (ok, I was walking). My feelings aren’t that badly hurt.

Boys will be Boys…even when they are monkeys.

One of the few areas where it seems it is the liberals that cling to ideology rather than science is on the subject of the blank slate. This is, roughly, the notion that we are born without significant genetic differences of abilities or preference, and that therefore most of what we consider a person’s personality is formed by his environment.

Nowhere is this idealism clung to more fervently than in discussions of gender differences. In what seems a typical overcompensation from an era of unfair bigotry, where seemingly all differences in character between racial and gender groups were attributed to genetics, now the tendency is to dismiss any suggestion that genetics plays a role as sexism. Boys are said to prefer guns and girls barbies, not because they have a natural inclination to do so, but because of socialization that steers them in these directions.

However, it seems whenever good science is done on this subject the opposite is the case, and we have yet another example. This time the subjects weren’t human children, but rhesus monkeys.

“… a team of scientists led by Kim Wallen of the Yerkes national Primate Research Centre in Atlanta, Georgia decided to offer typical ‘male’ and ‘female’ toys to rhesus monkeys to see if preferences aligned with sex.

Much to their surprise, they did. The 11 male monkeys headed straight for the wheeled toys, such as dump trucks, leaving the plush toys more-or-less unmolested. The 23 females were more curious, and played with both.

‘They are not subject to advertising. They are not subject to parental encouragement, they are not subject to peer chastisement,’ said Wallen.

The results support an earlier study at Texas A&M University, with green vervet monkeys, which also showed a distinct preference among male monkeys for ‘masculine’ playthings.”

I disagree with Science Avenger’s first sentence though. Yes, there are some who cling to the “blank slate” philosophy, but most of the folks that I hang around don’t think that way, and yes, most of my friends are indeed liberal.

This Redstate Update deserves its own post