Farewell to January 2009 (part I)

Workout notes I’ll probably run 10 miles, possibly after the yoga for runners class at 9; I’ll probably walk a bit prior to that. Or something.

Update Yoga with Ms. Vickie, then 6 mile run (54:30) on the treadmill; I did 3 miles of .25 at 7 mph, .25 at 6.5 mph. Then .75 miles of walking, then 3.25 miles of hill walking. It got me very sweaty.

Boxing
Last night I watched the IBF Junior Welterweight title fight between Juan Urango and Hermann Ngoudjo. Urango had previously held the title.

Urango’s constant barrage of heavy hooks was too much for Ngoudjo; Ngoudjo was knocked down twice in the third round (and evidently suffered a broken jaw). Urango went on to win a unanimous decision by scores of 118-108, 120-106, 116-110.

There were a couple of things that were unusual. First, Teddy Atlas had the fight much closer (he had Urango winning by 2 points) whereas I had it scored 118-109 (though I am just a fan with no expertise). In my mind, though Urango had no jab, he landed the far harder blows far more consistently, though I had Ngoudjo winning a few rounds.

The most unusual thing was that the 10′th round lasted over 5 minutes and 10 seconds!

Here is a report from Fight News as well as a photo gallery.

Here is ESPN’s report.

Another report on the fight is here.

President Obama’s Weekly Address.

At least one of our Senators is sticking up for us:

I just came across this, and my jaw hit the floor! Some of us on the fringes have been talking about the concept of a maximum wage for a while, but this is phenomenal timing!

Claire McCaskill this afternoon proposed a stunning bill that would limit Wall Street Execs who accept TARP funding to not making more than the president of the United States.

How about them apples?

* Tin hat mafia’s diary :: ::
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From Sam Stein at HuffPo

McCaskill took to the Senate floor on Friday to put an end to the surrealism. In a bill that came to the surprise of reporters, her colleagues, and the White House alike — there was no coordination with the Obama administration, she said — the Missouri Democrat called for compensation for employees of bailout recipients to be capped at $400,000 a year.

“They don’t get it,” McCaskill said on the floor. “These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses… What planet are these people on?”

What planet indeed. Think of it, if you take taxpayer money to prop up your corporation, you can’t make more in annual compensation than the president!

When asked about the bill:

MCCASKILL: I’ve been mad for a while, when first there was talk — even within weeks of when we passed the initial half of the TARP money, [there were] rumors about bonuses, the fact that too many of these guys were holding unto the jobs even though they were running these companies into the ground. Reality didn’t seem to be the order of the day. This culture, this idea, that these guys are entitled not just to their jobs but to excessive compensation, even when their companies were in moments of extinction because of the decisions they had made, just seemed unreal to me.

While I am not sure if this could be worked out to include incentive/bonus pay, I think that it is an important first step.

Politics
Democrats behaving badly

A Republican has a bit of fun at Charlie Rangel’s expense. The dig is deserved, but do we really have tax payer money to waste on stunts like this one? Here is the bill.

Tom Daschle Maybe there is a good reason for the hold up on his confirmation?

President Obama’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Tom Daschle, filed amended tax returns and paid more than $100,000 in back taxes on Jan. 2, administration officials said on Friday.

Mr. Daschle concluded that he owed the taxes for free use of a car and driver that had been provided to him by Leo Hindery Jr., the founder of a private equity firm known as InterMedia Advisors, the officials said.

Mr. Daschle was chairman of the firm’s advisory board. In a financial disclosure statement filed this month with the Office of Government Ethics, Mr. Daschle reported that he had received large amounts of income from InterMedia, including more than $2 million for consulting and $182,520 in the form of “company-provided transportation.”

The belated tax payments help explain delays in the confirmation of Mr. Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader who had been expected to win swift approval from the Senate. -NY Times

We’ve got to keep our noses extra clean!

Science Via PZ Myer’s blog:

Online courses on human anatomy

Mathematics and learning don’t take things like the number line for granted!

The ability to map numbers onto a line, a foundation of all mathematics, is universal, says a study published this week in the journal Science, but the form of this universal mapping is not linear but logarithmic. The findings illuminate both the nature and the limits of the human predisposition to measurement, a foundation for science, engineering, and much of our modern culture.

The research was conducted with the Munduruku, an Amazonian indigenous culture with a limited vocabulary of number words and spatial terms, little or no formal education, and little or no experience with maps, graphs, and rulers.

Munduruku adults and children spontaneously placed numbers on a line in a compressed, logarithmic function, such that smaller numbers appeared at greater spatial intervals. The study suggests that a propensity to relate numbers to space is universal, but that the mapping of successive integers and constant spatial intervals, as on a ruler, is culturally variable and linked in part to education.

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