Notes and comments

Workout notes 3550 swim; 500 warm up, 500 drill/swim (zoomers), 5 x 200 on the 4: 3:22, 3:18, 3:16, 3:16, 3:17, 5 x 100 on the 2: 1:37, 1:36, 1:36, 1:37, 1:38, 500 stroke, 500 (100 paddle, swim, paddle, swim, paddle) 50 free.

Then 42 minutes of running outside (just over 4 miles).

While swimming, I was next to a tri babe in a purple and black striped workout bikini; she was just kicking my butt.

Overall, I was pleased with the swim and “just got by” with the run.

Knoxville UU shooting update I am sorry to say that two people are dead. Evidently, the person who did the shooting was taking out his hatred of liberals:

The man suspected in the deadly church shooting in Knoxville stated in a letter that he hated the “liberal movement.”

The suspect, Jim Adkisson, faces murder charges and is being held $1 million bond, police said. Prosecutors said he was arraigned Sunday night.

Police have collected video cameras from people taping a children’s play at a church in Knoxville, Tenn., on Sunday.

They were looking for clues into why an apparent stranger at the church opened fire, killing two and wounding seven.

Five people remain hospitalized in critical and serious condition. Two others were treated and released.

Chief Sterling Owen said Monday that police found a four-page letter in the car of Adkisson, who was tackled and held by members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church after the Sunday morning attack.

Owen said Adkisson was apparently frustrated over being out of work and had a “stated hatred of the liberal movement.”

The church is known for advocating women’s and gay rights and founding an American Civil Liberties Union chapter.

Police said it appears that Adkisson had been plotting the attack on the church for at least a week.

Police reported that they found 76 shotgun shells at scene of the shooting, and that the 12-guage semiautomatic shotgun used had been purchased at a pawn shop about a month ago.

Ok, I wonder how the right wing pundits will spin this one; of course I am talking about those who blamed the Virginia Tech shootings on “the liberals”.

Evolution A nice article points out (or reminds us) that evolution is not an optimizing process; rather it is more of a “tinkering with what works” process.

f nothing else, it’s a handy expression. A kluge, Gary Marcus explains, is “a clumsy or inelegant – yet surprisingly effective – solution to a problem”; a piece of jerry-rigging, in other words. Nature is rife with them, the human body no less so, and it’s a wonder our brains can function in the modern world at all.

That, at any rate, is the burden of this cheerily blasphemous book, which succeeds in sticking it both to the intelligent design lobby and to some of evolution’s biggest cheerleaders.

Marcus’s major opponent here, though it is never named, is adaptationism – the supposition that any trait of any organism must be doing something useful or it wouldn’t be there.

“Natural selection tends to cause the selection of superlatively well engineered functional designs,” say John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, founders of evolutionary psychology. But if that’s so, Marcus asks, how come our memories are so bad?

You can search a computer database; you have to wait until your memory is jogged if you want to remember something in particular.

And why are our wills so weak? Pleasure is supposed to guide us for the good of our genes, but there’s nothing genetically beneficial about eating 65 ice-creams and getting diabetes.

Come to that, why are we so gullible? Why is our language so vague and ambiguous? Why are we so bad at sticking to plans, or keeping track of how we know what we know, or generally doing any of the things you’d hope to be able to do with a superlatively well-engineered brain?

Because it was a kluge. Evolution doesn’t, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. That’s why the retinas of vertebrates seem to be installed backwards, giving us all blind spots in the middle of our visual fields. Eyes like that do the job well enough, and there’s no way of flipping the retina while preserving decent vision across intermediate generations. So we’re stuck with them.

Still, this, to me, doesn’t refute those who claim that adaptation is the driving force; all “natural selection” requires is that the mutations give something better for the current environment that what is currently there. It doesn’t predict some sort of global optima at all!

more storms

We’ve had quite a few thunderstorms this month; nevertheless they should be just about past and I am getting ready to head to the pool.

So here are a couple of articles that I found interesting:

Why reason is so often resisted. From New Scientist Magazine.

Personally, points 2 and 3 (the fact that we don’t use reason most of the time and the fact that many try to use reason to lie to us) are very, very well taken.

Black Hole Wars: is information lost within black holes or not? This is a short article that discusses the issues. Those who like books like Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time will enjoy this short article.

Why I love nerd blogs…

On the blog Good Math, Bad Math there is a discussion on whether it is appropriate to teach multiplication as “repeat addition”.

If this seems like an idiotic question to you I ask the following:

1. What is

A better question: is exponentiation really just repeated multiplication? If so what is ?

But I digress.

I’ll give my opinion about the repeated addition later in this post.

But the comments to the Good Math, Bad Math article are a hoot! Check this one out:

If multiplication shouldn’t be taught as repeated addition, then we need to stop lying about factorials and just teach the gamma function up front. Let’s at least try for some consistency if we’re going to be absurd.

Oh and derive e starting from a differential equation instead of just waving our hands and pulling some random infinite series that happens to be interesting out of the air.

The question’s not whether they’re distinct concepts, the question’s whether you teach running before or after walking. Running isn’t just fast walking, after all–but that provides a pretty good starting point for figuring it out, no?

Yes, I will ignore the walking/running analogy.

But I love that comment and if you understand the remark about gamma functions and factorials, then you are probably the kind of person I would enjoy talking to! (even if you are a Republican who is supporting John McCain who goes to church and……)

My take on the question: yes, teaching multiplication as “repeated addition” is fine for grade school and for non-math types. Now math majors and minors should be more advanced than that, as should, say, physics majors.

Shooting at the Knoxville UU Church

Update: evidently local police have discovered a letter from the shooter which hints at motive. Yep: the gunman wanted to get at “the liberals”.

I’ll have to say more later; note that I was a UU at one time in my life.

As to why I don’t consider myself a UU at this time, refer to my comment on this topic at the Daily Kos:

said “was’ (0+ / 0-)

mostly, what happened is that I switched from distance running (e. g., 10K to marathons) which necessitated 15-20 mile runs on Sunday (which one CAN do prior to church) to distance walking (50K to 100 milers) which necessitated 4-6 hour walks on Sunday.

As I stayed away, I gravitated toward the Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris crowd (atheism) .

Yes, I like the people in the church, and yes, I know that atheists are welcome. But where I can respect the person that, say, believes in “healing crystals”, “dousing”, “tarot cards” and the like, I can’t say that I respect these beliefs. I see them as total and complete nonsense.

I suppose I am no longer interested in sermons that use post modernist nonsense and very bad science analogies.

So, I am at the point where I’ll go to services when I don’t have anything better to do, but I won’t make a special effort to get there.

Besides, my wife (who is still a church member) likes the services but not the coffee hour whereas coffee hour is by far my favorite part.

When liberals saw 9-11, we wondered how we could make the country safe. When conservatives saw 9-11, they saw an investment opportunity.

by onanyes on Sun Jul 27, 2008 at 01:21:55 PM PDT

[ Parent | Reply to This ]

*
I’m “there” often too. (0+ / 0-)

When they wax all poetic about Reki healers, etc, I roll my eyes and remind myself that anywhere else my atheist/humanist family would be shunned. Oh and I’m there on the post modernist Mary Moon silliness too. I’ve just finished reading all of Dawkins, including some of the heavy science early books (which were a tough read even for me with a PhD thesis in progress). Reading his works make the “spiritualism” that some UU’s want to persue seem down right childish.

But that was a digression. The interesting thing about this shooting is that the alleged gunman (who was wrestled to the ground by church members) “hated Christianity” and hated that he was required to go to church?

The man accused of a mass church shooting this morning was described by his Powell neighbors as a helpful and kind man, but one who had issues with Christianity.

Jim D. Adkisson, 58, has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, which killed one and injured eight others.

He is being held on $1 million bond.

“He had his own sense of belief about religion, that’s the impression I got of him,” said neighbor Karen Massey. “We were talking one day when my daughter graduated from Bible college, and I told him I was a Christian, then he almost turned angry.

“He seemed to get angry at that.”

According to Massey, Adkisson talked frequently about his parents who “made him go to church all his life … he was forced to do that.”

I admit that I am suspicious here: why would someone who hated Christianity attack a non-Christian church?

By the way, go to the article I liked to and check out the comments: it appears that some of the well intentioned comment makers simply don’t “get” that being called “non-Christian” is NOT an insult.

Not in the least! But let’s face it: in the highly anti-intellectual world that many Americans live in, being called non-Christian is an insult. Such stupidity ignorance is sad, but I am glad that I don’t normally socialize with people who think that way.

msnbc.com video: Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)

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Media: guess what? Yes, the media is tougher on Obama than on McCain.

Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.

Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.

But now there’s additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed — with particular venom — at three broadcast networks.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

Conservatives have been snarling about the grotesque disparity revealed by another study, the online Tyndall Report, which showed Obama receiving more than twice as much network air time as McCain in the last month and a half. Obama got 166 minutes of coverage in the seven weeks after the end of the primary season, compared with 67 minutes for McCain, according to longtime network-news observer Andrew Tyndall.

I wrote last week that the networks should do more to better balance the air time. But I also suggested that much of the attention to Obama was far from glowing.

That sounds about right to me: I wish that McCain’s repeated foreign policy gaffes were broadcast loud and wide. But were that to happen, the media wouldn’t get the perception of a horse race that they want.

That referred to an ABCNews.com posting asserting that McCain appeared to confuse Iraq and Afghanistan in a “Good Morning America” interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who asked whether the “the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent.”

McCain responded: “I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border.” The ABC posting added: “Iraq and Pakistan do not share a border. Afghanistan and Pakistan do.”

Unfortunately for McCain, that wasn’t an isolated slip. Among the other lapses:

• “Somalia” for “Sudan”: As recounted in a reporter’s pool report from McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus on June 30, the senator said while discussing Darfur, a region of Sudan: “How can we bring pressure on the government of Somalia?”

Senior adviser Mark Salter corrected him: “Sudan.”

• “Germany” for “Russia”: A YouTube clip from last year memorializes McCain referring to Vladimir Putin of Russia — following a trip to Germany — as “President Putin of Germany.”

• This spring, McCain said troops in Iraq were “down to pre-surge levels” when in fact there were 20,000 more troops than when the surge policy began.

• Also this spring, McCain twice appeared to mistake Sunnis and Shiites, two branches of Islam that split violently.

• In Phoenix earlier this month, McCain referred to Czechoslovakia, which has been divided since Jan. 1, 1993, into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. He also referred to Czechoslovakia during a debate in November and a radio show in April. [...]

Yes, people sometimes slip up when they talk; sometimes they say stuff that they really don’t mean to say. To me, the most serious mistakes were the one in which he said that Al Qeada was being trained in Iran (Al Qeada is a Sunni group, Iran is a Shiite country) and when he didn’t seem to understand that the Iranian executive leadership is split between an elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the kooky guy we frequently see) and an unelected Supreme Leader (Ali Khamenei) who controls the military and can declare war.

See Wikipedia

The Supreme Leader of Iran is responsible for the delineation and supervision of “the general policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran”. The Supreme Leader is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, controls the military intelligence and security operations; and has the only power to declare war. The heads of the judiciary, state radio and television networks, the commanders of the police and military forces and six of the twelve members of the Council of Guardians are appointed by the Supreme Leader. [...]

The Constitution defines the President as the highest state authority after the Supreme Leader. The President is elected by universal suffrage, by those 15 years old and older[1], for a term of four years. Presidential candidates must be approved by the Council of Guardians prior to running. The President is responsible for the implementation of the Constitution and for the exercise of executive powers, except for matters directly related to the Supreme Leader.

That is a serious error!