Some quick remarks

Obama in the Senate: I’ve listed how to actively check what he has done. Here is yet another list.

Personally, I liked his “google government” stuff and his Congo Bill; the later was his baby from start to finish.

John McCain Supporters

Sort of goes with the McCain Girls.

Sunshine Tuesday

Workout notes yoga, then 2000 yard swim. The swim went ok, though I did forget my combination to my lock. Grrrr….

That was plenty for today.

Humor Jackie and Dunlap lament that they don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore.

Politics

This is Elizabeth Kucinich.

Her husband introduced Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush.

Of course, the Constitution says that the President can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors; that is, if for the President committing a crime which is related to and abusive of their office.

Sure, I don’t like him, but the fact is that this country elected him, and I don’t see a specific act where someone can say “he violated law X right here”; then again I have no training in law.

I do know that impeachment is not some sort of parliamentary system where we can rid ourselves of mistakes by recalling a president that we regret electing, and this seems to smell like that.

How is the election going? It is way too early, but the election futures look good:

Barack Obama D 62.00 +0.200
John McCain R 35.20 -0.700

But, what is even more telling, check out this car commercial:

This is for an area on the outskirts of Dallas; a predominately white, Republican area! If Obama is considered to be a positive image here, well, McCain is in deep trouble.

Even better: check out the McCain girls!

I wonder if Obama is paying them to do this.

As I type this, I am listening to this Obama speech:

Obama is proposing yet another rebate from the government (stimulus check). I have to disagree with that, at least for those at our income level. I’d agree with that if the checks only went to the poor or lower middle class.

I like his college service plan.

If anyone thinks that his campaign is all about empty rhetoric, listen to this. It is full of specifics.

Science
What makes our brains work so well (relative to the other animals): the complexity of our synapses.

What keeps us from being more violent and angry? One big factor is a brain chemical called serotonin.

Molly Crockett at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues gave volunteers a drink that temporarily lowered their levels of serotonin, a brain ‘neurotransmitter’ linked to happy mood. They then had them play ‘the Ultimatum Game’, which involves accepting or rejecting offers of money. Those with lower serotonin levels showed increased retaliation to offers that they perceived to be unfair. “We’ve suspected for years that there’s a link between serotonin and impulsive aggression and emotional regulation,” says Crockett. “Until this study it wasn’t clear whether serotonin was playing a causal role.”

I wonder if fatigue (say, from an ultra) reduces one’s serotonin levels; I do know that there is a relation between these levels and chronic fatigue syndrome, but that is a different ball of wax.

Body odors: play a role in human relationships; certain odors can reveal certain health problems, and they can indicate other things.

It is fascinating to think that people detect complex, subtle chemical signals hidden in body odors without even noticing that they’re doing so. “Our brain is so sensitive to chemosignals from body odors that it can detect even
 minute genetically-based differences, which in turn guide our behavior,” says Johan N. Lundström, Ph.D., an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Lundström recently used PET scanning to show that body odors are processed by a neuronal network separate from that which processes common odors, and that people can accurately smell the difference between a stranger and a friend. The smell of a stranger’s body odor actually activated the area of the brain associated with fear and danger. This is perhaps a mechanism to ensure that it grabs our attention, Lundström said.

Other work from his lab has shown that women who are fertile are more sensitive to androstadienone, a social odor produced by men, than are nonfertile women. And research from other labs has shown that men preferred the underarm aroma of women who were ovulating (and fertile) compared to those who were menstruating (and less likely to be fertile). Furthermore, studies have revealed that people generally prefer the smells of those with immune genetic complexes different from their own, a useful mechanism for avoiding inbreeding.

These findings, along with others from the field of olfaction research, make it clear that we underestimate the sense of smell at our own risk. Olfaction is far more sophisticated than we give it credit. The course of our lives is probably far more swayed by body odors than we would ever imagine — or like to admit. We might even be masking body odor at our own risk. • 3 June 2008

Some Humor and Entertaining Rants

Just for the heck of it:

Friendly Atheist points us toward a blog post from paradise driver which provides signs on how to care for babies.

A sample (many more there):

Be prepared to blow your drink all over your keyboard!

Election rant:

I wonder what election inspection thinks of the polling group ARG?

Dick Bennett hates the fact that his outfit, ARG, is the least reputable of all the major pollsters. Their reputation is so bad that Real Clear Politics won’t even count them in their average. We’ve pointed out before how miserably wrong most of their polls have been. So it’s hard not to laugh when Bennett says something really stupid like this:

In North Carolina, for example, our final poll had Clinton at 42% and Obama at 50%, a margin of 8 percentage points. The final Zogby poll had Clinton at 37% and Obama at 51%, a 14 percentage-point margin. The final results were Clinton 42% and Obama 56%, a 14 percentage-point margin.

Based on his post, Mr. Blumenthal would argue that the Zogby poll was more accurate because it hit the 14 percentage-point margin.

I would argue, however, that hitting the Clinton number and missing the Obama number by 6 percentage points was more accurate than a poll that missed the Clinton number by 5 percentage points and missed the Obama number by 5 percentage points.

So we’re supposed to believe that 100% of the undecideds broke for Obama? Sure, [...]

The flailing of a desperate man who is always wrong – this is exactly what happened to Dick Morris, minus the hooker.

You’re nothing but a charlatan selling defective goods, Mr. Bennett; and your bias fell on the wrong side of the nomination race. Maybe you should ask Scott Rasmussen for job writing opinion columns – that’s how Morris manages to pay back all the money he owes to the IRS from his tax-evasion days.

Come on, EI, tell us how you really feel!

(note: I am half surprised that ARG didn’t have Gravel winning the nomination….that outfit was about as reliable as a horoscope.)

Political Humor

No, this isn’t intentional comedy. But clowns these characters remain.

Evolutionist Rant:

My goodness, I love Shalini…..

Gerry Rzeppa, a creationist loon, sent me an e-mail a while back about his short children’s book which he claims refutes Richard Dawkins’ arguments. Although I do not think that his book answers anything or makes any coherent points whatsoever, I am reproducing his first e-mail so that my readers could check it out for themselves:

Hello.
My name is Gerry Rzeppa and I’ve written a short children’s book in answer to the works of Richard Dawkins. Unlike his ponderous tomes, however, mine has lots of pictures, rhymes, and can be read, cover to cover, in ten minutes.
I’m offering the doctor $64,000 of my very own money if he will join me before a live audience to answer a single question about my little poem. I’ll read the story aloud and pose the mystery query. He’ll answer and walk away with the loot. Simple as that.
You can view the official challenge here:
www.rzeppa-vs-dawkins.com
And you can read my little story by clicking thru from the challenge site or going directly here:
www.someofthepartsbook.com
Thank you for your consideration.

We started exchanging a few e-mails, and I was amazed by the breathtaking stupidity and utter theistarded logic he soon started spewing. Here is a sampling:

You also say that “a key objection to the idea of God is that there is no evidence to show that such a deity exists.” No evidence? Do you think this email just happened? Or do you think these very words are evidence of something intelligent at the other end of the wire? Why or why not?

Regarding your slogan, “We have the fossils. We win.” Are you quite sure? I’ve seen a lot of fossils and I’ve never seen anything conclusive. Anything more than speculative, for that matter! Could you, perhaps, email me pictures of the fossils that show a clear metamorphosis between, say, a fish and a bird? No need to include all of the tens of thousands of intermediate forms, of course. But I’ll need to see a significant sampling before I’ll be ready to concede that “you win.”

A metamorphosis from a fish to a bird?! Now I’ve seen it all – until the next theistarded loon comes along, of course.

For all the huffing and puffing that this loon is doing claiming that he has answered Dawkins’ objections to the theistarded belief in an imaginary sky-daddy, he is hopelessly ignorant about the basic facts of evolutionary biology. Leaving aside the fact that my imaginary mentally retarded six-year-old half-brother could write better books than this loon, his statement shows us that most creationists don’t have the slightest clue as to what they are arguing about.

Oh, to be single and 25 years younger….;)

Etc.
Here is a good collection of rants; among these this is my favorite one. It described how I felt after the 2004 Presidential election.

Two other bits of “harsh humor”

We are doing Bin Laden’s work for him!

This is for a Chicago Law Firm that specializes in family law. Obviously this is aimed at wealthy folks; if most of us could have married people that looked like those photos, we would have! It is an established fact that most folks marry people of similar physical attractiveness.

But this ad kind of reminds me of this joke:

Finally: I admit that I back Obama and I don’t want to see McCain elected. But this is downright low.

(click on the link in the text to see their other two efforts)

Gosh, I didn’t think that Obama would stoop so low as to put these ladies up to this…

FANS: what went wrong

Ultra post: On the drive home, I had lots of time to mull over what went wrong and what went right.

The wrong stuff

1. Stuff I can’t control
a. I got the flu and missed 2 weeks of training and I needed 2 more weeks to get back up to speed.
b. I then got a head cold; 1 more week gone. So, that was 5 weeks total.
c. It was hot; heat is tough for me, and I wasn’t heat trained.

2. Stuff I could have controlled
a. When I felt my stomach go, I should have accepted that I had to walk at easy effort for couple of HOURS prior to being able to take stuff in. I was hydrated enough; problem is that whatever I took in wouldn’t have digested anyway. And I’ve proven that I can go at an easy pace sans food for up to 8 hours.

Instead I tried to eat a couple of slices of watermelon; that made me sick.

b. Attitude: I was whipped when I showed up for the race. I was undertrained and knew it. Still, the undertraining couldn’t be avoided but I needed to have a “I’ll get as many miles as possible attitude”.

c. See part b. My real goal was to “not get sick” and when I did, I was whipped. I could have looked for solutions to my nausea (e. g, waited until I threw up again and then got back out there). But I was defeated when I got sick.

Having a “fight for as many miles as possible” goal would have given me incentive to stick it out. It is never a good idea to have a “warm bed” as an option.

d. I was 10 pounds too heavy; I did my best ultra walking when I weighed 185. I came in at 195.

e. I can’t neglect heat training if I decide to target this race again.

f. I need to do at least 1 high intensity workout a week to get my stomach used to strain.

Stuff I did right

a. I averted the heat crisis with ice bags on the head and some orange at 2 hours into it.
b. Poweraid zero seemed to work well as a replacement drink.
c. Pacing was ok; I was happy with the first 45 miles of the race.