7 F in Peoria; an interesting ethical dilemma

Grumble….
Workout notes 4000 yards “just get it in”; the pool got crowded again. The dog-paddlers made their assault about 1 hour into it and I ended up splitting a lane with someone who wore a dive mask and snorkel who mostly splashed in place.

Nevertheless: 500 warm up, 20 x (25 drill, 75 free) on the 2 (somewhat slow), 5 x 100 fist on 2, then 10 x (25 fly, 75 free) on the 1:45 (fins).

I got it in. That was good enough for today. Note: my fin fly/free sets were faster than Wednesday’s as was my sfs/free set, but my front kick/free set was slower. It seems that I have only a set amount of energy to put into a workout and all I can really vary is the set in which I expend the energy. It is a bit like “whack a mole”; if one set is faster than the other is slower.

I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise.

Political Humor Check out this musical about Proposition 8 ( the California measure that sought to make gay marriage illegal). This is a two-fer: it IS funny and it offended the religious right!

But the religious right can be a source of humor themselves; they are “offering” their “expertise” on terrorism to the Obama administration. Right Wing watch responds:

While Obama is all for working with those who disagree with him and forging consensus, I fail to see what he could possibly learn from meeting with a gaggle of socially conservative, militantly anti-Islamic right-wing leaders such as Bauer, Hagee, Falwell, Weyrich, and Wildmon other than that he should hurry up and bomb Iran.

But more importantly, just when did the Religious Right decide that they were now experts on national security and foreign policy?

These morons have done absolutely nothing to justify their arrogance. They have NO accomplishments; none.

On a lesser level, “the believers” provide yet more entertainment.

From Jalopnik:

A speeding truck rammed a woman’s sedan at over 100 MPH on a Texas freeway last Friday. Why? According to the Archangel Gabriel/ Michael E. Schwab, a resident of Blooming Grove, Texas, the woman “was not driving like a Christian.” Schwab failed to explain what the woman had done to prompt the Lord’s wrath and investigators have since determined that she violated no traffic laws. She was driving North on highway 281 when Schwab struck the rear of her sedan. The impact spun both vehicles across the median before being brought to a halt by the barrier on the far side of the south bound lanes. Neither party was seriously injured by the accident, although both vehicles appear to be totaled.

Describing the accident, Lt. Kyle Coleman of the Bexar County Sheriff’s Department said, “He just said God said she wasn’t driving right, and she needed to be taken off the road.

Ok…now read what follows:

“God must have been with them, ’cause any other time, the severity of this crash, it would have been a fatal,” said Lt. Coleman.

Ok, let’s get this straight: this deity told someone to run someone else off the road, but yet protected both from harm?

I suppose this is what “Evolved and Rational” calls “lulz”?

Sports Humor
Right now there is some speculation as to which college football team is going to what bowl. Just for the fun of it, ESPN decided to resurrect some of the now defunct bowls (one of which I attended!) and to put teams in them. This is a “just for fun” exercise. Here is a typical “hypothetical match up”:

Raisin Bowl

History: The game was contested in Fresno, Calif., following the 1945-49 seasons. San Jose State won two of the five games.

Projected matchup: Tennessee (5-7) vs. Washington (0-11).

The skinny: Let’s settle the debate once and for all. Which once-proud program has shriveled the most this season?

Ouch! Of course, Tennessee plays in the SEC; I’d hate to see ND’s record were they to play that type of schedule this year.

But one has to be a real college football junkie to get this joke:

Salad Bowl

History: The game was contested in Phoenix following the 1947-51 seasons.

Projected matchup: Kansas (7-5) vs. Maryland (7-5).

The skinny: Not applicable.

Get the joke? SALAD bowl? “The skinny” is N/A?

If you don’t get the joke:
Kansas football coach
Maryland football coach

Not Really a Joke but for entertainment

You’ve heard of the Meyer’s Briggs personality test. I always score INTJ (as does Mano Singham) That is a typical score for science/mathematics nerds.

Well, you can now have your blog analyzed as well. I came out ISTP, which is completely off.

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

That is ok but

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people

Frankly, I DESPISE committee work.

and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

In fact, I am one of the most risk-adverse people out there.
Yes, I’ve done challenging things, but mostly the things I excel at are those in which you can see problems coming from a mile away. I can’t imagine anyone being a worse race car driver than I.

Issues
The economy: Robert Reich’s blog has had some excellent posts lately. First he argues that maybe, just maybe, we ought to be investing more in education and less in these bail-outs.

He then goes on to talk about the proposed auto bail out and points out that, while the bail out is being sold as a job saving measure, that the bail out will end up leading companies to streamline and, well, cut jobs! I suppose it is a “we had to cut these jobs in order to save them?”

Interestingly enough, I am finding myself agreeing with Michael Moore. That is, if we do some sort of bail out, we ought to just up and fire senior management and take the companies over.

Speaking of job loss Can you imagine being a top scientist and losing your job? Ok, that happens; but what happens when others build upon your work and end up winning a Nobel Prize?

California: It is always the efforts of unsung heroes that help the leaders win. And in the case of this year’s winners of Nobel Prize in Chemistry, there is such a not-so-acclaimed hero, namely Douglas C. Prasher, a driver in U.S, reported The New York Times.

Douglas C. Prasher’s almost two decades old study on a jellyfish gene gave a foundation to Roger Y. Tsien and Martin Chalfie for developing a revolutionary technique, which lights up the inner workings of living cells, winning them this years Nobel Price and $450,000 each.

Dr. Prasher had conducted a research on the Aequorea victoria jellyfish and discovered a jellyfish protein used in research, while he was at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts in the early 1990s. When Chalfie and Tsien had contacted Prasher asking about the jellyfish gene, which produces a fluorescent protein, Prasher had generously shared the gene with both of them.

Now driving a courtesy van for a car dealer in Huntsville, AL, to earn $10 an hour, Prasher said he was not bitter or jealous of this year’s winning chemistry Nobelists: Dr. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Chalfie of Columbia and Osamu Shimomura, the original discoverer of the jellyfish protein in 1961. [...]

But Tsien and Chalfie plan on flying Prasher out to Stockholm at their own expense and to personally praise him in their Nobel talk.

Note: Prasher is staying in Huntsville, Alabama for personal reasons; I am sure that he could find a job elsewhere.

And, well, I am not so sure that driving a van is worse than teaching some of the faux calculus classes that I am teaching.

3-quarks daily has some links to interesting stories: one talks about happiness and how it spreads in a kind of viral way thought social networks in a way that unhappiness does not. Hence, there is some correlation between having a large network of friends and being happy; it is almost as if you can “catch happiness” from them.

They have links to other articles as well:

It might be possible to resurrect the Neanderthals via their genome. This would enable us to study their capabilities. But what are the ethical issues involved?

Whoa there, says Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans.” Wade concedes that “there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species.”

Note the qualifiers: modern human DNA. Another human species. As this uncomfortable reality of the past becomes a future prospect—transitional creatures between human and nonhuman—the “human dignity” framework starts to look a bit shaky. George Church, a leading geneticist, suggests (in Wade’s paraphrase) that scientists could “modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee,” bringing it “close enough to that of Neanderthals, [with] the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.” No human clones or products involved. At least, no “modern” humans. This leaves the question of whether we’re entitled to mess around in the lab with “another human species.” But it’s hard to see how the bishops and other religious critics of biotechnology can plunge into this area, having drawn a tight moral line around our species.

Every serious scientist knows that we and other animals evolved from the same ancestors. The real question today is whether to put our DNA and theirs back together. Until now, that question has been raised in the form of human-animal hybrids made in labs for research. You can argue that these are somehow wrong because they’re newfangled and artificial. But what can you say about Neanderthals? They were made by nature, not industry. In fact, we’re the industrial villains who apparently wiped them out. They’re as natural as we are. [...]

Now let me be clear: I don’t care one bit what the Catholic Church has to say about this. Those *ssholes have done nothing except to keep their feet on the necks of every possible scientific advance. Their voice deserves less consideration than that given to a dog’s bark; at least the latter might alert one to an intruder.

But the issues is an interesting one nevertheless, and it shows the difficulty of answering the question “what makes a human a human”; heck, it shows that this very question an ill posed one.

Research on Obese Mice might show some human benefits From The Daily Galaxy

Harvard Medical School Researchers have used a single compound to increase the lifespan of obese mice, and found that the drug reversed nearly all of the changes in gene expression patterns found in mice on high calorie diets–some of which are associated with diabetes, heart disease, and other significant diseases related to obesity.

The research, led by investigators at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging, is the first time that the small molecule resveratrol has been shown to offer survival benefits in a mammal.

“Mice are much closer evolutionarily to humans than any previous model organism treated by this molecule, which offers hope that similar impacts might be seen in humans without negative side-effects,” says co-senior author David Sinclair, HMS associate professor of pathology, and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Labs for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging.

“After six months, resveratrol essentially prevented most of the negative effects of the high calorie diet in mice,” said Rafael de Cabo, Ph.D., the study’s other co-senior investigator from the National Institute on Aging’s Laboratory of Experimental Gerontology, Aging, Metabolism, and Nutrition Unit. “There is a lot of work ahead that will help us better understand resveratrol’s roles and the best applications for it.”

Resveratrol is found in red wines and produced by a variety of plants when put under stress. It was first discovered to have an anti-aging properties by Sinclair, other HMS researchers, and their colleagues in 2003 and reported in Nature. The 2003 study showed that yeast treated with resveratrol lived 60 percent longer. Since 2003, resveratrol has been shown to extend the lifespan of worms and flies by nearly 30 percent, and fish by almost 60 percent. It has also been shown to protect against Huntington’s disease in two different animal models (worms and mice).

Read the rest of the article. But this article talks about the link between undereating and longevity: eating small amounts actually activates an enzyme that promotes longevity! So overeating can be harmful not merely for the effects from the resultant obesity.