Icy Peoria and other topics

Workout notes 4000 yard swim; 500 warm up, 10 x (25 drill, 25 swim) with fins
200, 5 x 200 on the 3:30 (3:16-3:18 each), 10 x 100 on the 2 (1:37-38 each, last one 1:39), 500 fins (100 back, 100 side, 100 back, 200 fly), 100 paddle, 100 swim, 100 paddle.

It felt good to stroke it out just a bit and the shoulders felt fine.

Peoria It was one of those crappy “pre-winter” days, with the temperatures just below freezing and freezing rain/sleet/snow. The streets were slick in spots and there were lots of accidents.

I always curse myself for not writing a better thesis on days like this; I wonder why I live in this miserable semi-icebox.

Oh well; in 8 more years my financial obligations to my daughter will cease (first 4 years of undergraduate work should be done by then) and then I can quit my job and move somewhere warm.

Oh, did I tell you that I hate cold weather and snow?

Humor:

see more pwn and owned pictures

You didn’t know that this diet has such side effects, did you?

Football

Next week the Big Twelve has its “Losers to Texas” game: Missouri vs. Oklahoma
Just as a reminder:

Rice	W 52-10	9-3
Arkansas	W 52-10	5-7
at Colorado	W 38-14	5-7
at (1) Oklahoma	W 45-35	11-1
(11) Missouri	W 56-31	9-3
(7) Oklahoma State	W 28-24	9-3
at (6) Texas Tech	L 33-39	11-1
Baylor	W 45-21	4-8
at Kansas	W 35-7	7-5

Over this stretch, Texas played teams that went 70-38 and came within 1 second of escaping unscathed.

Oh well; no system is perfect.

Politics
If you think that I am hard on wingnuts, check this out:

The problem for conservatives is that they alienate people in direct proportion to how stridently conservative they sound and act. That’s because the conservative movement itself is motivated not by ideas but by emotions, and remarkably ugly ones at that. Neal Gabler explains:

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party’s presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. [...]

It (the rise of conservatism) is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party’s past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn’t run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn’t likely to be expunged any time soon.[...]

During the long nightmare of the Bush Error, I — like other liberals — would try to argue with wingers on their basis of what were supposed to be conservative ideas.[....]

When we, the liberals, asked questions

The answers were always an incoherent swirl of anger, submerged racism, attacks on straw men, class resentment and three-card-monte debate tricks.

Read the rest of the post; there is much more there.

Conservatives of this type are still making noise; for example, upon the election of Barack Obama, some morons in Arkansas replaced their US flag with the Confederate battle flag:

Faubus Motel in Huntsville, Arkansas was originally owned by Orval Fabus, a former Arkansas governor who fought to keep Little Rock Central High School segregated. In 1996, James and Linda Vandiver bought the place, and they have apparently decided to continue to honor all things bigoted, peckerwood, and backward-assed. To protest Obama’s election, they replaced the American flag with the Confederate flag. They claim that race aint got nothin to do with it.

Sure. You know, if there were any justice, these idiots would be disqualified from being able to have access to any modern inventions, including medicine.

But lest I tar all conservatives with the same brush, there are some Arkansas conservatives that do “get it”, at least on some issues:

If you look at his Wikipedia page, it becomes clear that Mike Huckabee is too pragmatic on economic issues for the Christianists. He is someone who as governor of Arkansas sought to find ways to solve the social problems that he faced, even to the extent of cutting deals with Democratic leaders rather that sticking rigidly to the lower-tax ideological script demanded by the Christianist leaders.

In late 1996, Huckabee campaigned for ballot Amendment 1, a plan to adjust property tax rules to make school funding more equal across the state, and Amendment 2, a constitutional amendment increasing the state sales tax 0.125 percent to improve the state’s park system and natural resources.
…
On April 1, 1999, Huckabee signed into law a three cent increase in tax on gasoline and a four cent increase on diesel. Attached to the bill was a bond issue to pay for highway construction.

Huckabee also seems to be genuinely progressive on race, concerned about the state of the environment, and interested in trying to improve the conditions of the poor.

Huckabee proclaimed 1997 as a year of racial reconciliation by saying “Let every one of us make it our priority to bring reconciliation, not so much that we can force it or legislate it, because we cannot, but that we begin in each of our own lives to purpose in our hearts that we will not harbor anger, hostility, prejudice, bigotry and racism toward any person.”

Huckabee signed legislation to create a health insurance program which extended coverage to children of lower-income families, to be funded in part by Medicaid, SCHIP, and a tobacco industry lawsuit settlement. The program, ARKids First, reduced the number of uninsured children to nine percent (compared with 12 percent for the nation) in 2003. Also in his first year as governor Huckabee signed a partial birth abortion ban and a $7.6 Million Smart Start program for primary school students to learn “the basic skills of reading, math, and character.”

Too bad that Governor Huckabee is still stuck with an 18′th century understanding of science (he is a creationist woo)

Science

More on aging

Researchers have uncovered what may be a universal cause of aging, one that applies to both single cell organisms such as yeast and multicellular organisms, including mammals. This is the first time that such an evolutionarily conserved aging mechanism has been identified between such diverse organisms.

The mechanism probably dates back more than one billion years. The study shows how DNA damage eventually leads to a breakdown in the cell’s ability to properly regulate which genes are switched on and off in particular settings.

Like our current financial crisis, the aging process might also be a product excessive deregulation.

Researchers have discovered that DNA damage decreases a cell’s ability to regulate which genes are turned on and off in particular settings. This mechanism, which applies both to fungus and to us, might represent a universal culprit for aging.

“This is the first potentially fundamental, root cause of aging that we’ve found,” says Harvard Medical School professor of pathology David Sinclair. “There may very well be others, but our finding that aging in a simple yeast cell is directly relevant to aging in mammals comes as a surprise.”

These findings appear in the November 28 issue of the journal Cell.

For some time, scientists have know that a group of genes called sirtuins are involved in the aging process. These genes, when stimulated by either the red-wine chemical resveratrol or caloric restriction, appear to have a positive effect on both aging and health.

Nearly a decade ago, Sinclair and colleagues in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab of Leonard Guarente found that a particular sirtuin in yeast affected the aging process in two specific ways—it helped regulate gene activity in cells and repair breaks in DNA. As DNA damage accumulated over time, however, the sirtuin became too distracted to properly regulate gene activity, and as a result, characteristics of aging set in.

“For ten years, this entire phenomenon in yeast was considered to be relevant only to yeast,” says Sinclair. “But we decided to test of this same process occurs in mammals.”

Philipp Oberdoerffer, a postdoctoral scientist in Sinclair’s Harvard Medical School lab, used a sophisticated microarray platform to probe the mammalian version of the yeast sirtuin gene in mouse cells. The results in mice corroborated what Sinclair, Guarente, and colleagues had found in yeast ten years earlier.

Oberdoerffer found that a primary function of sirtuin in the mammalian system was to oversee patterns of gene expression (which genes are switch on and which are switch off). While all genes are present in all cells, only a select few need to be active at any given time. If the wrong genes are switched on, this can harm the cell. (In a kidney cell, for example, all liver genes are present, but switched off. If these genes were to become active, that could damage the kidney.) As a protective measure, sirtuins guard genes that should be off and ensure that they remain silent. To do this, they help preserve the molecular packaging—called chromatin—that shrink-wraps these genes tight and keeps them idle.

The problem for the cell, however, is that the sirtuin has another important job. When DNA is damaged by UV light or free radicals, sirtuins act as volunteer emergency responders. They leave their genomic guardian posts and aid the DNA repair mechanism at the site of damage.

During this unguarded interval, the chromatin wrapping may start to unravel, and the genes that are meant to stay silent may in fact come to life. [...]

Don’t Even Ask Me

Don’t ask me how I found my way to this blog.

I know that there are times when I chuckle at this sign. And yes, this sign might well be applicable to the ultra successful person who wants a “trophy” spouse or who is tired of growing while their current spouse just sits, stagnates and spreads.

But this is utterly irrelevant to me: having a different spouse (or none at all) would not lead me to solving that next big math problem (less blogging and more research might help!) and nothing at all, save a brain transplant from Stephen Hawking, would lead me to that MIT or Cal-Berkeley job.

On one lighter note

(From here)

The interesting thing is that the definition of derivative is correct; it is, in fact, a more rigorous definition (provided one rigorously defines “best linear approximation”) than the one that most college calculus courses give to their freshmen.

Note: we often blur the distinction between “the derivative” (which is really the linear approximation of the function at a point) and “the derivative function” (which is really the gradient) in first year calculus classes.

First Snow Walk

Workout notes I woke up to the sights of our being dumped on by Mother Nature; we got a couple of inches of the obnoxious white stuff.

I was too stubborn to give into it so I went to the East Peoria bikepath (same place as yesterday’s race) and walked 10 miles.

The course was mostly covered with “loose packed” snow (shoe instep depth) but the rope chord from the trail gaiters (that goes under the shoe) worked with the trail shoes (Brooks Cascadias) to give me reasonable traction. The time for the 10 miles was 2:15 (1:08/1:07, 13:45 mpm pace), which is 15 minutes slower than last week (dry conditions) but, I am ashamed to say, faster than some of my training walks several months ago.

Mostly it snowed and the wind blew the entire time but I was determined to not give into it.

Football
I am interested in the demise of Notre Dame football. Frankly, they have been average since Lou Holtz left; this is a bit curious given the following fact: Notre Dame still has many players in the NFL:

PS to my last: Here is a list of players in the NFL by school:
(which rebuts the idea that ND is losing due to a lack of talent)

Per Espn – 9/14/2008

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/college?letter=m

Miami – 45

Georgia- 40 LSU- 40

FSU- 39 Michigan- 39

Ohio St-37 Tenn- 37

Texas – 35

USC – 33

Notre Dame – 32

Auburn, Cal, Florida, VT – 31

And yet check out their records against the following schools in the post-Holtz era:

Purdue: 7-5
Michigan: 5-5
Michigan State 3-9
USC 3-9
Boston College 3-7

Something more than a “lack of talent” is going on. It will be interesting to see what. I find it hard to believe that ND isn’t more competitive with Boston College, given that both schools have similar academic standards and missions.

Other stuff

Obesity and addiction to eating: The following diary is a Daily Kos diary, but it talks about food, obesity and food addiction.

Here is my response to this article.

Social: No, this video doesn’t shock me, but I am putting it here because it might make some conservative heads explode (libertarian conservatives: I am not talking about you.)

Really. In all seriousness, if homosexuals want to make themselves as miserable as the rest of us, why don’t we let them?

Hat tip: liberalsmustdie.

More social humor: this Maureen Dowd editorial is hilarious. It is satire about a newspaper outsourcing its staff and reporters to India:

Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags. [...]

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall. [...]

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

Read the rest; it is really funny.

More humor (professors will appreciate this) read these faculty smackdowns of the snowflakes!

Excuses smackdown.

Sample:

Chris: I had to go home for a couple of weeks, Dr. Schadenfrau; several people in the family died suddenly.

Dr. S: Several, you say? Suddenly, too? Has “Typhoid Mary” been in your hometown or are you from Bon Temps, LA? Oh wait, I know, you went home to embalm all of them, dig the graves, build the caskets, perform the service AND make the little sandwiches and punch for the wake? Of course, then you needed to go home for quite an extended period of time.

General Smackdown.

Makeup Mitchie: No, there are no opportunities for extra credit. Even if I didn’t think it would be horribly unfair to the students who actually learned the material, I don’t get paid enough to spend my time inventing and grading worky-work projects for you (and 40 other whiners) to do so that you can earn a passing grade, in a class where you haven’t learned enough to go on. You’d just fail the second half of the course next Spring anyway. I’ve spent about 100 hours this semester preparing, administering and grading opportunities for credit. They’re called “exams.” Oh, and they have an expiration date, and it’s way past.

Casual Carla: How sweet that you want to go home early and surprise your parents. (Won’t they be surprised, you missing three extra days of classes to extend your break.) And how thoughtful of you to let me know that you will therefore be missing both the Monday before *and* the Monday after Thanksgiving. Mmm, no, I don’t really feel like taking the time to email back with a list of what you will be missing. If you miss class, then it’s your responsibility to get notes from a classmate. School is in session, I have to be here, I’m teaching the class once and that’s it. Have a nice trip.

Tits McGee: Pull up your goddamn pants. We’re tired of your buttcrack. Actually, come to think, we’re tired of your boobs and your midriff too.

Science
Scientists and engineers have figured out a way to get electrical power from relatively slow currents:

The new device, which has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of a system of cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs.

As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity.

Cylinders arranged over a cubic metre of the sea or river bed in a flow of three knots can produce 51 watts. This is more efficient than similar-sized turbines or wave generators, and the amount of power produced can increase sharply if the flow is faster or if more cylinders are added.

A “field” of cylinders built on the sea bed over a 1km by 1.5km area, and the height of a two-storey house, with a flow of just three knots, could generate enough power for around 100,000 homes. Just a few of the cylinders, stacked in a short ladder, could power an anchored ship or a lighthouse.

Check out the rest of the article; note that this effect (on vertical objects in the rods) was noticed a long time ago; in fact, ocean engineers have to account for this effect when they build underwater structures.

Politics
A recent article in the Los Angeles Times Blog attempts to refute the conventional wisdom that Obama got most of his money from small donors. In fact the conventional wisdom isn’t too far off the mark.

Ever wonder who is that 20-30 percent that still approves of President Bush? Go here to find out. Frankly, I think that starting an unnecessary war always makes one a candidate for the “worst president in history” distinction; remember that the reason for going in was WMD, which weren’t there. Also, think about how the economy tanked under his watch.

But hey, there are still those who think that the universe is 6000 years old!

Yes, this blogger (who is often reasonable) might be right, and Obama might offer me a job in his administration (only 290,000 applicants to compete with!) and MIT might offer me a professorship in mathematics.

Religion and Superstition

Newsflash: thousands die in a clash between atheists and agnostics!

Well, not really. This is the real story.

Nevertheless, morons continue to blame atheism for societies woes.

Despite such abuse, I still believe in freedom of speech and freedom of debate: although it is clear that if the militant atheists had their way, there would be no space whatsoever for Christians or other believers in the public realm. That doesn’t mean, however, that I am not concerned about the effect of militant atheism. I am convinced that this injection of atheism into the culture is directly responsible for the increase in drug-abuse, in crime and, most specifically, in the five-fold increase in suicide that we have seen in these islands over the last 25 years.

A life without a spiritual sense of purpose, or the moral parameters set by the Ten Commandments — is a living hell.

Troubled and immature young persons, given a nihilistic message that there is no meaning to life — that we are just reasonably clever animals who evolved from a set of molluscs, quite by chance — are easily driven down the road to despair.

Fact: atheists commit fewer crimes (by proportion in the population) than believers.

If Lee’s parody were valid, one would expect the behavior of theists to be morally and ethically superior. Unfortunately, this is not the case. When one looks at prison incarceration, one sees Christians most represented, and atheists UNDERPERPRESENTED per capita (USA population has roughly 13% atheists, and yet prison population is 0.209% atheist: see http://holysmoke.org/prison.htm). Out of 74,731 prisoners, 156 are atheists; 62,594 are Christian; 5,435 are Muslim; 1,325 are Jewish. Given a conservative 10% of USA population being atheists, one would expect 7,473 atheists in prison: the data suggests that atheists commit fewer crimes than theists.

And less religious societies function better than more religious ones.

Bottom line: if a religion makes YOU feel better about yourself and helps YOU be a better human being: good for you.

But as far for those who would have us all be religious: bugger off.

And, forget his nonsense about belief in a higher power being hardwired into humans. Counter example: China.