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!