A Quiz and a Fowl Palin Post

Workout notes 4000 yard swim; 30 x 100 on the 2 (5 warm up, 5 fist, 20 (25 drill, 75 swim), drills were front, sfs (missed the last one due to laziness,), catch-up, 3g), 5 x (fly/free/fly/free) on 2 (about 1:40, fastest 1:37, with fins), on the 2, then the usual paddle/free cool down.

Once again I didn’t feel like waking up and I had to kick myself to get to the pool. It was 15 F outside.
The pool water was way too warm (“people soup” warm, as one other swimmer says) and I am not sure that I did myself any good, training wise.

But in all, I still enjoyed the swim itself, ONCE I GOT IN THE WATER.

Political Entertainment

Election Predictions: I had called it 378-160 for Obama, giving Obama Montana and Missouri (barely missed MO by a stinking 3500 votes or so). I also didn’t give O the 2nd Congressional district in Nebraska. You can see the total results of the DemConWatch contest here. The person who did the best still didn’t get every state correct; he had flopped Missouri and Indiana.

Yet Another Chance to Show Off by Taking an Online Quiz DemConWatch has another quiz contest that you can take here. It is 33 questions and takes about 5 minutes of time.

I didn’t do all that well, for a liberal: only 32 of 33 correct.

You answered 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97 %

Average score for this quiz during November: 77.2%
Average score since November 20, 2008: 77.2%

You can take the quiz as often as you like, however, your score will only count once toward the monthly average.

If you have any comments or questions about the quiz, please email americancivicliteracy@isi.org.

You can consult the following table to see how citizens and elected officials scored on each question.

Not too surprisingly, the snowflakes (college students) did miserably:

Before you begin, here’s the background:The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has run an annual survey to determine how well college students know civics. This year, they expanded their base to include just plain random American adults. In general, people know squat. To wit: 71% FAILED. The average score was 49% of the 33 questions asked.

More humor From The Fail Blog

see more pwn and owned pictures

This is just too funny….

More intentional humor

Some unintentional humor

Oh Noes, Obama is going to do away with talk radio! (well, not really) But yep, the moronic right wing is living in fear of this.

Guess what? Loud, rabid right wing talk radio is a good thing for liberals! All you people do is to display your utter ignorance and stupidity for all to see. So keep it up, morons!

Normally I’d say that when you are moving your mouth, you aren’t learning anything. But my guess is that most of the talk-radio crowd is incapable of reading above a 6′th grade level anyway; hence they really aren’t harming themselves when they spend their time ranting on the airwaves. They sure as heck aren’t helping conservatism.

More unintentional Right Wing Humor
Yes, governors often give a turkey a pardon. Yes, Sarah Palin often spouts gibberish when she talks; nothing new here. Yes, millions of us (myself included) eat turkey, and yes that means that we have to kill turkeys. But, well, as far as images go, it is probably not good form to speak of a “fun” activity while the turkey is being slaughtered behind you as you speak.

(hat tip: O’Brien’s Briar Patch)

I call this a “politician’s handler fail”.
Update: the Countdown version of this video says that she was aware of the background.

Health Obesity issues: did you know that

You are what you eat, and so are your progeny and, perhaps, your progeny’s progeny — at least, if you’re a mouse. According to research presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s 38th annual meeting in Washington DC held from 15–19 November, mice fed on a high-fat diet throughout their pregnancies and suckling had offspring that were larger than normal — a trait that was also passed on to their offspring’s offspring. It is the first time that a gestating mother’s diet has been shown to confer this trait on to two consecutive generations.

This is very interesting indeed; I wonder if this applies to humans or to other animals.

Delightful Evening

This evening I got to see Greg Landsburg of Brown University give a presentation on the Large Hadron Collider. Professor Landsburg is featured in this article which rebuts the notion that the LHC could produce an earth swallowing black hole.

On a side note, Landsburg reminded us that the radius of the circle is so big because a high curvature would lead to the accelerated particles (protons) emitting synchrotron radiation thereby losing precious energy. I knew that this radiation is emitted due to angular acceleration and that this doesn’t get emitted during linear acceleration, but I don’t know why that is the case. One of the physicists told me that the reason is deeper that it might first appear and that I shouldn’t be embarrassed that I didn’t know why off of the top of my head.

I thought it was because I was asleep during my sophomore physics class!

Speaking of deep philosophical questions, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub links to an interesting article where some basic philosophical questions are thrown out.
Here is one (there are several others):

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

Religion Friendly Atheist wonders if we should cooperate with other religious activists.

That is a good question. I can say that several years ago, when I was more agnostic, I attended a Unitarian Church and kind of thought like this:

(note the “e” from the Einstein energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light equation)

But as the years have passed, I admit that I am more like this now-a-days:

I see religious myths as things that might be helpful (in the way that, say, yoga is helpful to the mind and to the body) but not much more than that; I don’t see any “truth” there.

(these stickers come from the linked article).

Politics Kos talks about how many of us feel about Lieberman being allowed to keep his committee chair: