17 January 2009

It has warmed to a more seasonal (for us) 16 F ( -7 C); remember that is a 36 degree (F) increase from yesterday! (about 17 C)

Workout Notes
First, I participated in the Steve Foster Memorial Walk. (Steve is a friend of mine who died of pancreatic cancer in April, 2008 …)
This was a loosely organized “go your own distance on your own course” event; some stayed inside.

But Steve usually ran outdoors (I did his ICC loop with him a few times, even in snow). So I put on my hiking boots and trudged through the snow a bit; there were bits of runnable paths here and there. But I counted this as a 4 mile walk (12-13 minutes on the parts where you had some traction, a bit slower in others).

On the way back, Bob Corbett jogged about .25 miles with me; there were many others there.
I then said hi to a few people and then went to change into clothes for yoga.

I then took a yoga for runners class; Cathie taught it. That went fine.

Then I went the treadmill and ran a 4 mile workout; .5 mile easy (10 mpm); gradually raised the incline to 3 where I changed the speed from 9:50 to 9:30; I ran a mile at that incline, then dropped it to 1 and ran .25 miles at 9:50 to recover then increased the speed gradually to an 8:40 pace at the end of 4 miles (total time: 38:10).

Obligatory gym sights notes: (men and women)
a. One of the tri-babes was leaving to run trails with another tri-babe. She was wearing very tight, shiny spandex. That warmed me up a bit (the tri-babes have cuter physiques than the pure distance runners, I think).

b. There was this guy who was shadow boxing near the indoor track. When I went into the locker room; he was standing there shirtless. I am straight, but this guy had one of the most beautiful physiques I’ve ever seen; he had the definition of a slender person (you could see each of the smaller muscles that made up the bigger ones) but he also had a reasonable amount of bulk. But were you to face this guy in the ring, my guess is that you wouldn’t see much beauty!

When I faced guys (say, in wrestling) who had far less impressive physiques; well, let’s just say that I was whipped before the match even started.

c. When I was on the treadmill, this (20-30 something year old) woman came to get some equipment wipes; she had on tight spandex hip-hugger aerobic pants. The upper band of her underpants peeked above her pants waistband; they were the color of a dreamsicle (a type of orange popsicle which has vanilla ice cream inside)

Am I a compulsive overeater or what: I see a shapey woman’s underpants and I think of dreamsicles.

Other topics

This Leonard Pitts column caused some conversation between me and my wife and evidently in the blogosphere as well.

From Pitts:

As it happens, Eastwood was talking about a fellow for whom sensitivity is not a problem: Walt Kowalski, the retired Detroit auto worker he portrays in his latest film, Gran Torino. Kowalski is the unlikely hero of a tale of redemption and sacrifice — unlikely because he is a cantankerous cuss with a mouth full of bigotry and invective, a guy who has it in for the ”dagos,” the ”micks,” the ”hillbillies” and, most pointedly, the ‘’slopes” — i.e., the Hmong refugees, an influx of which has left his once white, working-class neighborhood unrecognizable.

In the years since he stopped acting opposite orangutans, Eastwood has become a fascinating filmmaker, willing like few others to confront the nettlesome gray areas of human existence. Gran Torino is a worthy addition to that canon, but for all the nettlesome grays it illuminates, the most nettlesome might be one it suggests only obliquely: the notion that we are drowning in our own sensitivity.

Here in the United States of the Aggrieved, there is no malady, mark, mannerism, mind-set or malformation too miscellaneous to have its own support group, along with a cadre of lobbyists and lawyers hyper-vigilant for any suggestion of mistreatment or actionable discrimination. Largely as a result, American English has become a morass of compound constructions and newly invented terminologies designed to leave no one out, give no one cause for offense. Sometimes you wonder if, in so radically revising the way we communicate, we have not compromised our ability to do so.

A few years ago, I showed one of my college classes an episode of All In the Family. The students were offended. Nor were they persuaded by my protestations that the show was: a) hilarious and b) a satire that condemned bigotry by making it ridiculous. They are children of a different era where you simply cannot say the things Archie Bunker did, even to ridicule them.

Some folks (like this blogger) are glad that many don’t see things like All In the Family as funny.

I suppose how one feels about things often reflects a combination of one’s own life experiences and of where one is right now. First, I’ll openly admit that people of Mexican heritage (e. g., myself) while being the targets of some of Archie Bunker’s slurs, have not had it nearly as hard as African Americans.

On the other hand, I am in a position to not be threatened by the likes for the fictional Mr. Bunker; I see him as someone who can be safely ridiculed and, aside from someone who makes bad votes, no threat to me; hence he is a safe target.

Wingnuts
The wingnuts continue to provide plenty of entertainment.

The leading lights of the right wing freak show (Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh) accuse Markos of having an unintelligible accent (he doesn’t, FWIW), and attacks the Democratic Party as the party of immigrants.

Which raises the question: what exactly is wrong with representing citizens who moved to the United States because they want to live in this great nation?

From the source:

COULTER: …What I think is interesting about Soros; and Marcos, whatever his name is, of Daily Kos; and Arianna Huffington are, you know, basically the three unofficial spokesmen of the Democratic Party and they all speak in foreign accents of their foreign upbringings. Can’t you wait a few generations? Let your grandkids do the America bashing, you know, not right away. You can barely understand them.

RUSH: Arianna, you need a translator.

COULTER: And George Soros!

RUSH: Yeah, him, too. I’ve never heard the Daily Kos guy speak.

COULTER: Yeah, he was brought up in someplace in Latin America. You can’t understand them. They speak in foreign accents. They represent the Democratic Party.

BTW, this is Markos Moulitsas:

Do you need a translator to understand him?

Of course, no conservative figures have accents, right?

Idiots.

Middle East:
The suffering in Gaza is very real.

This Al-Jazeera video (from Israeli televsion) drives this point home very bluntly:

Science The opinions of a whole group of people can indeed shape one’s own opinions; here is a study which shows this happening, even when the opinions of others aren’t necessarily those of one’s friends (or even really their opinions!)

Science and education I posted this blog post from a physics professor who was trying to give tips on applying to grad school.

Of course, there were some who took offense at what the professor said; scroll down to the comments.
Some people just don’t get it: the stronger graduate programs are designed to get someone to the level to which they can do independent, original research and contribute to their discipline.

1. Most people simply don’t have the natural ability to succeed at that level.

2. The vast, vast majority of people will not succeed if they lack the background in mathematics and science classes.

In short, it is reasonable for the applicants to have to prove that they belong in such a program.
After all, do you think that just everyone is, say, invited to training camp for an NBA (professional basketball) team? No; talent scouts search for people who have a bona-fide chance for success; others have to prove to the club that they aren’t wasting their time by letting them try out. Saying “hey, I love basketball; let me try out” is far from being enough!

Speaking of academia I found this to be the case: many students today have trouble reading.

I took your question to heart and this morning asked my 90 students to name ten world events from the past 500 years. I got 85 blank sheets of paper and five others with a mixture of Dwarf Fur (I’m translating that as Darfur) and AIDS and Viet Nam War. Next, out of curiosity I asked them how many hated to read. 80 hands went up; with answers to the question why ranging from time consuming to boring to stupid. Next I asked them why they would go to a four year activity (university) that centered around something that they hated so much. My example: I don’t like being shot at, so I am neither in law enforcement nor the military.

Here is what I have found: about 10-15 years ago, I had a few students who had trouble reading “application” questions on exams. They were almost always those who did poorly on the rest of the exam (which was more “straight computation”).

Now-a-days, even the students who do well on the computational parts of exams have trouble reading application questions.

My guess is that, yes, the internet, is part of the problem:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

And yes, I’ve been affected too. Therefore, I’ve made it a point to always be reading a book (I am working on two at the moment) and to always be reading at least one research (math) article. I’ve had difficulty concentrating and I need to work on that.

Some local opinion
Peoria Pundit has an interesting take on how media phrases things:

Consider the following paragraphs from an Associated Press article:

President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques by ordering the CIA to follow military rules for questioning prisoners, according to two U.S. officials familiar with drafts of the plans. Still under debate is whether to allow exceptions in extraordinary cases.

The proposal Obama is considering would require all CIA interrogators to follow conduct outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the officials said. The plans would also have the effect of shutting down secret “black site” prisons around the world where the CIA has questioned terror suspects — with all future interrogations taking place inside American military facilities.

The headline above this article: Sources: “Obama ready to ban harsh interrogations.”

Consider the words: “harsh interrogation.” This includes the practice of waterboarding. This includes the practice of shipping prisoners off to other countries, where they get the crap beaten out of them until they say something the interrogator wants to hear. [...]

Out here in the real world, we call that torture.

But the AP can’t call it that. That word is too judgmental for them. And the AP has to sell its services to news organizations headed, in some cases, buy people who have decided that George Bush is a great guy.

And that is the reason for the mainstream media practices “objective” journalism, to make it easier for news organization to sell their products to as many consumers as possible, regardless of ideology.

Hear, Hear!

Finally, a rant.
Remember the New York plane crash where the pilot managed to avoid populated areas by landing in a river and the passengers were promptly rescued?

Well, anytime such a thing happens, it is called a miracle. Yes, I know: by “miracle” many people mean an event that could have turned out to be a complete disaster but didn’t due to superb performance under pressure by lots of people, and yes, some plain old “good fortune”. There is nothing wrong with using that word in this manner; heck, I’ve found myself saying “if the Cowboys pull this out it will be a miracle” at a frigging football game!

But always, always, some woo (or lots of woos) start yapping about the “invisible hand” of some deity, and let’s just say that this grows old after a while. Hence, this diary.

While we are on this topic, I’d like to post a couple of videos; the first is of jet engines being tested to see if they will maintain power if they suck in a bird (don’t worry; they use dead birds) and the second is from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.