More Snow…Yuck!
Workout notes I slept in again; I didn’t get to the gym until 6:52.
Swim: 4000 yards; 500 slow warm up, then 6 x (5 x 100) all on the 2:00: (25 front, 75 free) (low 1:50s), (25 sfs, 75 free) (low 1:50s), (25 3g, 75 free) (1:45), (100 fist) (1:41-1:44), (25 catch up, 75 free) (1:46-49), (25 fly, 75 free) (1:48-1:49). Then 10 x 50 fins (50 fly, 50 back)
The pool was all but empty when I go there and then there were three waves of dog-paddlers. I found out that the only thing worse than “pregnant guys” in boxers are “pregnant guys” in speedos. 
Run 5K plus (33 minutes) on the treadmill; XC course (last incline was at 7). It was enough for a recovery day workout.
Then I did my calf exercises which are designed to keep my Achilles tendon healthy.
For example, in a separate study carried out at the University Hospital of Northern Sweden, researchers found that 12 weeks of heavy-load eccentric-calf-muscle training had a very positive effect on Achilles tendinosis (“Heavy-Load Eccentric Calf Muscle Training for the Treatment of Chronic Achilles Tendinosis”, The American Journal of Sports Medicine, Vol. 26, pp. 360-366, 1998). In this investigation, 15 athletes (12 men and three women) with a long duration of symptoms (18 months) of Achilles tendinosis were unable to engage in their normal running training because of tendinosis-related pain. The athletes had tried conventional treatments (rest, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications, changes of shoes, orthoses, physical therapy, and ordinary training programmes), to no avail. These 15 athletes were matched with a group of 15 similar athletes (11 men and four women) with the same diagnosis who underwent Achilles-tendon surgery instead of the heavy-duty eccentric training. All 30 individuals had the typical signs and symptoms of Achilles tendinosis, including thickened Achilles tendons, irregular tendon structure, disarray of the protein fibres within the tendon, separated tendon fibres, stiffness, and pain during running.
What the workouts involved
Two eccentric workouts were performed per day, seven days a week, for 12 weeks. Each workout consisted of three sets of 15 repetitions for two key exercises (to be described in a moment). Normal running training was permitted if it could be completed with only mild discomfort and no significant pain. The exercises proceeded as follows:
The athletes stood on their forefeet only (on both feet) close to the edge of a step, with the non-injured leg providing the force needed to rise up onto the forefeet. The non-injured leg was then lifted off the step, so that full body weight was supported only by the forefoot of the leg with the hurting Achilles tendon; the heel of the hurt leg was then slowly lowered until it came into position well behind and below the edge of the step (basically, the ankle moved from plantar flexion to dorsiflexion as the heel went down). This provided a strong eccentric contraction for the calf muscles attached to the damaged Achilles tendon, since they were contracting actively to slow the descent of the heel and yet were elongating as the heel dropped downward. No subsequent concentric loading of the calf muscles associated with the hurt Achilles tendon was carried out; the non-injured leg was used to provide the force necessary to return to the starting position.
For the first exercise (the first three sets of 15 reps), the injured leg was kept straight at the knee; during the second exercise (the next three sets of 15 reps), the injured leg was bent at the knee to activate the soleus muscle, which lies beneath the main calf muscle, the gastrocnemius. Possibly because there were just two exercises in the workout and because the exercises were straightforward to carry out, there were no drop-outs during the training period; all 15 athletes completed the 12-week programme.
An especially positive feature of this eccentric training was that it was progressive. When the athletes could perform the eccentric, loading exercise without experiencing pain or discomfort, they increased the load by adding weight placed in a backpack. If very high weights were needed, the athletes used a weight machine to increase the eccentric strain.
And the results?As it turned out, the eccentric training produced dramatically positive effects on both concentric and eccentric calf-muscle strength. Before the eccentric training was begun, the injured-side calf muscles had significantly lower concentric plantar-flexion strengths at 90º and 225º per second (12 and 18%, respectively) and significantly reduced eccentric plantar flexion strength (11%), compared with the non-injured-side calf muscles. After 12 weeks of training, however, the eccentric plantar-flexion strength and also the concentric plantar-flexion strengths at both speeds had improved considerably, and the there were no differences in strength between injured and non-injured sides. In contrast, the 15 athletes who underwent surgery were unable to bring their injured-side strength up to par with the injured side through the utilisation of conventional calf-muscle exercises and physical therapy, even after double the time period (24 weeks). Scores on the VAS were similarly positive. In the group which undertook eccentric calf-muscle training, the average VAS score was 81 before the 12-week training programme commenced but plummeted to a miserly 4.8 after the 12 weeks of daily work. All 15 individuals were able to resume their normal running training in a pain-free manner after 12 weeks of training. In the control group (consisting of the individuals who underwent surgery), VAS scores dropped from 72 to 21 over 24 weeks, but, as mentioned, strength in the injured-Achilles leg remained sub-par. [...]
Snow shoveling. At least it was mostly powder.
Yes, I checked the academic jobs in warm weather places. 
I have to admit that it is tough to be a consistent atheist during these times as I’d love to be able to call on some deity to condemn the weather gods while I shovel!
Then again, even Richard Dawkins admits to condemning his broken bicycle chain to eternal torture. 
Fantasy During winter, I like to fantasize about open water swims, such as this one.
Humor I have talked about Barbara’s stuffed frog “Froggy”. She tends to let things go right to her little green head.
Well, we got one of those “You are invited to the (public) Inauguration” certificates and of course Froggy thought it was special invitation just for her:
Groan….
More Humor Via Friendly Atheist
Middle East Events
Once again, among the blogs that I read, Mano Singham appears to be the voice of reason:
The rule in the US is that whenever the actions of the Israeli government are criticized, it must be immediately preceded or followed by equal or harsher criticism of the Palestinians. Otherwise one is deemed to be ‘not responsible’, or biased, or worse.
Moreover, the rule requires the opposite behavior when the parties are switched. Harsh criticism of Palestinian atrocities against Israelis need not be accompanied by a similar balancing act, such as pointing out equivalent or worse acts by Israel. In fact, attempting to do so immediately opens one up to criticism, the charge that one is ‘excusing’ the atrocity, or implying ‘moral equivalency’ between the two sides. [...]
I do not choose to follow that rule and will criticize actions that need to be criticized on their own merits without worrying about what motives may be imputed to me. Anyone who has read my writings will know that I think that tribal allegiances based racial, ethnic, religious, and national identities are not only stupid but even evil, and that the resultiing wanton harming of civilians that is a consequence of these allegiances is also an evil, whether done by al Qaeda, the US, Israel, the Palestinians, the Sri Lankan government, the Tamil Tigers, or whoever. Life is precious and ordinary people have the right, wherever they live, to be free of the fear of being the victims of political power plays.
The implication that ‘moral equivalency’ is necessarily a bad thing is another symptom of how these kinds of rules are internalized. It seems to imply that ‘our’ side because of our very nature, by virtue of who we are is morally superior to ‘their’ side. Hence ‘our’ actions can never be evil by definition, but must be due to mistakes or accidents or unavoidable events. Meanwhile ‘their’ actions, even if identical to ‘ours’, are intentionally evil, carried out with cruel deliberation. So again, by definition, there can never be moral equivalency between acts committed by ‘us’ and ‘them’, even if the acts themselves are identical. [...]
The kind of thinking decribed by Avnery illustrates the worst kind of tribalism, where we demand to be judged by the good intentions that we say lie behind our actions, while we judge ‘them’ by their actions alone and the intentions that we get to assign to them. To look at the actual acts and use the same standard of judgment for those committed by both sides is to commit the sin of moral equivalency.
The propaganda system can only work if we internalize the rules of discussion set by the dominant forces and follow them unthinkingly. It is encouraging that more and more people are breaking them.
Emphasis mine. He quotes someone else; the quote itself (which gives a version of history that the Nazis might have written had they won World War II) is interesting.
Also of interest is this article that 3-quarks daily alerts us to. It links us to an article written by an Arab in 1948! Here is part of it:
This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah, appeared in the United States six months before the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the article, King Abdullah disputes the mistaken view that Arab opposition to Zionism (and later the state of Israel) is because of longstanding religious or ethnic hatred. He notes that Jews and Muslims enjoyed a long history of peaceful coexistence in the Middle East, and that Jews have historically suffered far more at the hands of Christian Europe. Pointing to the tragedy of the holocaust that Jews suffered during World War II, the monarch asks why America and Europe are refusing to accept more than a token handful of Jewish immigrants and refugees. It is unfair, he argues, to make Palestine, which is innocent of anti-Semitism, pay for the crimes of Europe. King Abdullah also asks how Jews can claim a historic right to Palestine, when Arabs have been the overwhelming majority there for nearly 1300 uninterrupted years? The essay ends on an ominous note, warning of dire consequences if a peaceful solution cannot be found to protect the rights of the indigenous Arabs of Palestine.
“As the Arabs see the Jews”
His Majesty King Abdullah,
The American Magazine
November, 1947I am especially delighted to address an American audience, for the tragic problem of Palestine will never be solved without American understanding, American sympathy, American support.
So many billions of words have been written about Palestine—perhaps more than on any other subject in history—that I hesitate to add to them. Yet I am compelled to do so, for I am reluctantly convinced that the world in general, and America in particular, knows almost nothing of the true case for the Arabs.
We Arabs follow, perhaps far more than you think, the press of America. We are frankly disturbed to find that for every word printed on the Arab side, a thousand are printed on the Zionist side. [...]
Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.
We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.
Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?
Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous.
No people on earth have been less “anti-Semitic” than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West. Jews, themselves, will admit that never since the Great Dispersion did Jews develop so freely and reach such importance as in Spain when it was an Arab possession. With very minor exceptions, Jews have lived for many centuries in the Middle East, in complete peace and friendliness with their Arab neighbours.
Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and other Arab centres have always contained large and prosperous Jewish colonies. Until the Zionist invasion of Palestine began, these Jews received the most generous treatment—far, far better than in Christian Europe. Now, unhappily, for the first time in history, these Jews are beginning to feel the effects of Arab resistance to the Zionist assault. Most of them are as anxious as Arabs to stop it. Most of these Jews who have found happy homes among us resent, as we do, the coming of these strangers.
I was puzzled for a long time about the odd belief which apparently persists in America that Palestine has somehow “always been a Jewish land.” Recently an American I talked to cleared up this mystery. He pointed out that the only things most Americans know about Palestine are what they read in the Bible. It was a Jewish land in those days, they reason, and they assume it has always remained so.[...]
The article continues and is worth reading.
Note I am reading a book on the history of the US and the Middle East (Power, Faith, and Fantasy America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present by Michael Oren) and am to the period right up to and including the U. S. Civil War.
I am also reading a Peter Irons book called God on Trail; it studies several famous Church-State court cases.
Obama’s Cabinet Grilled…sort of.
First, the right wing hasn’t lost any time in making false statements about Obama:
On job-loss numbers, Fox’s Garrett changed the metric, falsely asserting Obama’s statement was untrue
Summary: Summary: On Special Report, Major Garrett falsely accused President-elect Obama of making an untrue assertion when Obama said that the 2.589 million jobs lost in 2008 were “the most since World War II.” In fact, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there has been no greater net job decline in any calendar year since the end of World War II than occurred in 2008. [...]
Garrett said of Obama’s comments: “Mr. Obama says the 2.6 million jobs lost last year was the worst since 1945. Is that true? No.” Garrett continued:
Last year’s job losses were the fifth worst since 1945. The key statistic is percentage of workforce laid off, meaning the number of layoffs as a percentage of the entire workforce. In 1945, 6.6 percent of workers lost their jobs. Last year, 1.9 percent lost their jobs. Are things bad now? Of course they are. As bad as 1945? No. And four years — four other years between then and now were much worse than what we’ve just gone through.
Rather than note that he was using a different index from Obama — percentage loss rather than net loss — Garrett simply accused Obama of a falsehood. In fact, data from the BLS, shown in the graph [1] below, confirm that the estimated net job loss for 2008, totaling 2.589 million jobs, was indeed the worst in absolute numbers since 1945, when 2.75 million jobs were lost:[...]
Ok.
And, of course, we have Dick Morris whining that Obama is going to stop the U. S. from torturing people:
President-elect Barack Obama’s new head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen, called the legal reasoning which gave the president broad powers to authorize “rough” interrogation of terrorists “shockingly flawed…bogus…outlandish.” She said it allowed “horrific acts” and demanded to know “Where is the outrage? The public outcry?” This is the person who will decide how to interrogate terrorists. If she errs on the side of weakening methods of questioning, there’s no chance her boss, Eric Holder the new Attorney General, will reverse her. He approved of the Clinton/Reno “wall” preventing intelligence from finding out what criminal investigators had found out and took the lead in pardoning the FALN terrorists.
What is Obama thinking? How could he weaken so dramatically our protections against terrorism? Doesn’t he realize that without warrantless FISA wiretaps we could never have uncovered the plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge (how could we have gotten a warrant for conversations about the bridge when we didn’t yet know that al Qaeda had it in its sights?) Has he forgotten that we only found the name of the operative who was tasked with destroying the bridge because we subjected Kahlid Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, to “rough” interrogation techniques? Does he really mean to leave us vulnerable to terrorist attacks?
Yes he does. Not because he is callous or fiendish, but because the new president seems to carry the thinking that animated the decisions of the Warren Court on defendant’s rights over into the battle against terror. [...]
Or maybe it is because Obama is listening to experts?
NEW YORK—Fifteen former interrogators and intelligence officials with more than 350 years collective field experience have declared that torture is an “unlawful, ineffective and counterproductive” way to gather intelligence, in a statement of principles released today.
The group of former interrogators and intelligence officials released a set of principles to guide effective interrogation practices at the conclusion of a meeting convened by Human Rights First last week in Washington. The meeting participants served with the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. military.
The principles are based on the interrogators and intelligence officials’ experiences of what works and what does not in the field. Interrogation techniques that do not resort to torture yield more complete and accurate intelligence, they say. The principles call for the creation of a well-defined single standard of conduct in interrogation and detention practices across all U.S. agencies. At stake is the loss of critical intelligence and time, as well as the United States’ reputation abroad and its credibility in demanding the humane treatment of captured Americans. [...]
Meanwhile, it looks as at least two of Obama’s top picks are doing well.
Hillary Clinton had a good afternoon.
At the opening of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings for the post of Secretary of State on Tuesday, the ranking Republican on theSenate Foreign Relations Committee offered a bit of perfunctory praise for the former first lady.
“President-elect Obama has boldly chosen the epitome of a big leaguer,” said Sen. Richard Lugar, who spoke of Clinton’s confirmation as a certainty. “Her qualifications for the post are remarkable… Her time in the Senate has given her a deep understanding of how United States foreign policy can be enriched… She is fully prepared to engage the world on a myriad of issues that urgently require attention.”
The sentiments may have been customary Senate pleasantries. But Clinton, over the course of several hours, proved the Indiana Republican correct. Her confirmation hearing was a tour de force, one that demonstrated not just her breadth of understanding of the policy issues, but the meticulous preparation that she has brought to most every political task in her career — and, likely soon, Foggy Bottom.
Pressed by her soon-to-be-former Senate colleagues, Clinton fielded questions on topics ranging from the impact of the Law of the Sea treaty on Alaska, to Russia’s purchase of a Serbian gas utility, to the piracy crisis off the coasts of Somalia.
“I’ve never seen anybody know so much about so much,” Chris Matthews, a sometimes-critical voice on the Clintons, would gush on Hardball later that day.
If Clinton’s performance was, as Matthews claimed, virtuoso, it was owed to hard, behind-the-scenes preparation. [...]
Stephen Chu had a good day as well:
It wasn’t exactly a love-fest, but the initial hearing, today, on Steven Chu’s soon-to-be-formal Energy Secretary nomination couldn’t have been more cordial.
Although senators can be a fairly imperious lot, members of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources were respectful — in most cases, downright deferential — towards the Nobel physicist that Barack Obama wants to head federal energy-research and -development enterprises.
Most senators at the hearing asked whether Chu would support a reinvigoration of the U.S. nuclear power industry. Yes, Chu said again and again — as long as work continues on how to cope long-term with nuclear wastes.
How about coal, which powers half of U.S. electricity? Yes, Chu would support continued use of coal — as long as work continues on limiting the release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants from conventional coal burning. Carbon sequestration and cap-and-trade emissions limits were mentioned repeatedly.
Only a couple senators actually showed any interest in research details. Among the few: Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.). She asked about the Helios program at the national facility Chu currently heads, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. According to the lab’s website, this renewable-fuels initiative has a heady goal: to “cut across divisions and programs in profound ways to produce transforming technologies in synthetic biology and nanotechnology.” It also seeks to “fuse our core strengths in biological, chemical, and physical sciences in the search for a sustainable carbon-neutral source of energy.”
No wonder Lincoln asked what, in practical terms, this venture actually involves.
Chu explained that the two-year-old program is striving to develop fourth-generation biofuels. To date, researchers at the lab have “trained” bacteria and yeast to take simple sugars and produce “not ethanol, but gasoline-like substitutes, diesel-fuel substitutes and jet [fuel] substitutes.” He says a cadre of “brilliant” scientists who had previously spent most of their careers in basic research is now “very focused on making this technology commercially viable.”
Asked about what type of plant material would be used — since Lincoln was hoping it might be grown in Arkansas — Chu perked up and chuckled: “Now we’re getting to science. I love this!” [...]
13 January 2009, Part II
It is cold (4 F) and more snow is on the way.
Here are some articles to take the pain of the weather away:
Science and Evolution: human hunting (and gathering) is driving evolution at a far more rapid rate than normal. Example: there is a type of caribou which is hunted; the bigger the antlers, the more that hunters desire it. Hence these animals are evolving smaller antlers.
Note that one of the “proposed strategies” for dealing with this is for hunters to act more like animal predators: prey on the young.
Global warming and climate change: Here is an article from Salon that talks about climate change. Here is the start to the article:
The more I write about global warming, the more I realize I share some things in common with the doubters and deniers who populate the blogosphere and the conservative movement. Like them, I am dubious about the process used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to write its reports. Like them, I am skeptical of the so-called consensus on climate science as reflected in the IPCC reports. Like them, I disagree with people who say “the science is settled.” But that’s where the agreement ends.
The science isn’t settled — it’s unsettling, and getting more so every year as the scientific community learns more about the catastrophic consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.
The big difference I have with the doubters is they believe the IPCC reports seriously overstate the impact of human emissions on the climate, whereas the actual observed climate data clearly show the reports dramatically understate the impact.
But I do think the scientific community, the progressive community, environmentalists and media are making a serious mistake by using the word “consensus” to describe the shared understanding scientists have about the ever-worsening impacts that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are having on this planet. When scientists and others say there is a consensus, many if not most people probably hear “consensus of opinion,” which can — and often is — dismissed out of hand. I’ve met lots of people like CNBC anchor Joe Kernen, who simply can’t believe that “as old as the planet is” that “puny, gnawing little humans” could possibly change the climate in “70 years.”
Well, Joe, it is more like 250 years, but yes, most of the damage to date was done in the last 70 years, and yes, as counterintuitive as it may seem, puny little humans are doing it, and it’s going to get much, much worse unless we act soon. Consensus of opinion is irrelevant to science because reality is often counterintuitive — just try studying quantum mechanics.
Fortunately Kernen wasn’t around when scientists were warning that puny little humans were destroying the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Otherwise we might never have banned chlorofluorocarbons in time.
Consensus of opinion is also dismissed as groupthink. In a December article ignorantly titled “The Science of Gore’s Nobel: What If Everyone Believes in Global Warmism Only Because Everyone Believes in Global Warmism?” Holman W. Jenkins Jr. of the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote:
What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged “consensus” arrived at their positions by counting heads?
It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn’t. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof. Many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses, especially well-funded hypotheses, they’ve chosen to believe.
Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.
How sad that the WSJ and CNBC have so little conception of what science really is, especially since scientific advances drive so much of the economy. If that’s what Jenkins thinks science is, one would assume he is equally skeptical of flossing, antibiotics and even boarding an airplane. [...]
Read the rest; but there is a reason I linked to this article. Read on and watch some of the videos at the end of this post.
Religion: this pastor rejects a new-age nice guy Jesus. To a degree, so do I: Jesus was a Jew who lived roughly 0-35 C. E.; his beliefs and his values would have appeared strange to us, and visa-versa.
This wingnut pastor takes it a bit further:
New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any “modern” interpretations of the Bible. Driscoll is adamantly not the “weepy worship dude” he associates with liberal and mainstream evangelical churches, “singing prom songs to a Jesus who is presented as a wuss who took a beating and spent a lot of time putting product in his long hair.”
. . .
What really grates is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”
With this hyper-masculine theology, it’s no surprise that Driscoll says women “must submit to their husbands, and they are forbidden from taking on preaching roles in the church.”
Some kick-butt videos from TED;
Calculus and architecture
Science and experiment: Karry Mullis. Yes, he won the Nobel Prize for his work on DNA (biochemistry). Yes, he is a climate change skeptic.
Murray Gell-Mann phyics truth and beauty. Yes, he won a Nobel for physics; he is the father of quark theory.
Paul Sereno on fossils and what we can learn on them. At the end he talks about a science program for “at risk” students.
Tuesday 13 January 2009
Workout notes 5 mile run 9:58, 9:33, 9:17, 9:15, 8:58 (47:03 for 40 laps of lane 3, which works out to 5.31 miles, or 8:52 mpm if one gets picky)
Yoga with Ms. Cathie. She is the the lady I took teacher training with; she talks a LOT (“yoga is this, yoga is that, blah, blah, blah”) in a soft, almost in a stereotypical yoga teacher’s lisp.
With her many poses can be named by starting with either: “star”, “moon” or “sun” and ends with either “fish”, “bird”, “flower” or “god/goddess” (12 combinations in all).
But her routine was fine and it got me stretched out; I especially like her warrior/triangle/pyramid series.
Then I did 3.4 miles on the treadmill (walking; 13 minute pace); I raised the incline steadily until I got it to level 5 at mile 1.5 and kept it there for 1 mile, then I gradually lowered it to 2. I enjoyed this part.
So overall I got a nice workout and was home just after 8.
Note: I have to watch my calf-Achilles tendon area; that is prone to getting strained when I increase my running mileage. I did my Achilles tendon exercises.
Other topics:
Some on the right wing are upset because they couldn’t get their commercial aired.
So I’ll present what you are missing right here:
These morons exist in some sort of alternative reality (evidence for the parallel universe theory? )
Oh, before you start getting all upset at poor old Norma-Jean (the author of the blog that I linked to), I’d suggest you google the phrase “Poe’s Law”.
Religion Mano Singham has a suggestion. If someone asks you why “you don’t believe in God”, he suggests asking them “why do YOU believe” and “why THAT god” and not some other!
He suggests that what we believe is mostly influenced by social forces (e. g., what our family and friends believe).
Do you notice something? Yep, each religion seems to dominate in a particular region, doesn’t it.
Now if you had a similar map for “views on the law of gravitation” or “views on the differentiability of functions”, you wouldn’t see such differences, would you? The laws of nature and mathematics work the same way everywhere.
What about nature worship? Yes, I’ve been awed by the beauty of a sunset; some of my fondest moments were seeing the sun come up as I continued on a long distance swim, walk or run.
I remember the breath taking view that I had when my friend Janet took me on the Pipeline trail just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.
I love the views of the Illinois River from Prospect avenue right here in Peoria (ok Peoria Heights).
Nevertheless, nature is what it is; many things die during the brutal winters (this is, in part, where Darwin got his ideas for Natural Selection). Animals eat each other alive.
And the creatures and animals of nature are NOT in harmony with one another:
This idea of nature’s harmonious balance has become not just the bedrock of environmental thought, but a driving force in policy and culture. It is the sentiment behind Henry David Thoreau’s dictum, [...]
Blah, blah blah…
According to the paleontologist Peter Ward, however, nothing could be further from the truth. In his view, the earth’s history makes clear that, left to run its course, life isn’t naturally nourishing – it’s poisonous. Rather than a supple system of checks and balances, he argues, the natural world is a doomsday device careening from one cataclysm to another. [...]
The story of life on earth, in Ward’s reckoning, is a long series of suicide attempts. Four of the five major mass extinctions since the rise of animals, Ward says, were caused not by meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, but by bacteria, and twice, he argues, the planet was transformed into a nearly total ball of ice thanks to the voracious appetites of plants. In other words, it’s not just human beings, with our chemical spills, nuclear arsenals, and tailpipe emissions, who are a menace. The main threat to life is life itself.“Life is toxic,” Ward says. “It’s life that’s causing all the damn problems.”
Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington and a scholar of the earth’s great extinctions, calls his model the Medea Hypothesis, after the mythological Greek sorceress who killed her own children. The name makes clear Ward’s ambition: To challenge and eventually replace the Gaia Hypothesis, the well-known 1970s scientific model that posits that every living thing on earth is part of a gargantuan, self-regulating super-organism.
[...]
Although Ward’s ideas have yet to reach a broad audience, some scientists are welcoming his portrait of a constantly off-kilter earth as a corrective to the gauzier precepts that have cast their spells on environmental philosophy and policy. Others, however, describe his hypothesis as simply Gaia’s dark twin, a model undermined by the same inclination to see one tendency as the whole story. Ward is open to the criticism that he’s taken things too far; what’s important, he believes, is weaning people from the idea that the earth works better without us. Even if Medea is an incomplete framework for viewing the natural world, it introduces a hardheadedness into environmental debates often driven by an unexamined idealism about Mother Nature. [...]
Yes, I do think that humans ought to be “good stewards of the earth”. But enough with this idea of “Mother Nature” and this Pollyannish notion that all will be well if we just let nature regulate itself.
Academia The readers of Rate Your Students go off on a whining professor.
Pornography Fail
(the pure of heart and squeamish ought not to read further)
Have you ever done anything stupid and ended up harming yourself?
(note: I once bit on a “cracker ball”….a encrusted cap that you can set off by throwing it against something hard….I had a package of candy in one pocket and a packet of cracker balls in another and was eating candy during a school play…. )
Well, have you ever had to have something extracted, as this British Vicar did? He had a potato stuck up his rectum…accident, he said.
Well, my guess is that you have done nothing as remotely as stupid as this:
THIS IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR FOR VIEWING AROUND OTHERS!
I call it “pornography fail”. If you are curious but don’t want to click: SPOILER ALERT I’ll describe what goes on in the video below.
Basically, the camera focuses on the pelvic region of this naked guy. He squats over a small glass jar and attempts to “swallow” the jar though his anus and into his rectum.
Mostly he succeeds; the jar makes it most of the way. But it is a glass jar.
That’s right; the pressure causes the jar to break; now we see this individual squatting, trying to extract the pieces of glass….yes they come out as does lots of blood.
That must have been one painful trip to the emergency room!
A Reflection on the Middle East Crisis
Some of my thoughts on the Middle East:
1. Religion is a big problem. True, I don’t buy this “Islam is a religion of peace” argument. But I don’t think that Judaism is a religion of peace either, and evidently neither do some Rabbis.
In fact, religion appears to be a way of a group of people to
a. whine to some deity because the want something and
b. rationalize their actions for obtaining that something. After all, their deity wants them to have it, right?
2. We are hearing the usual arguments that appear when a technologically and militarily strong group fights with a weaker group: the stronger group (and their apologists) complains that the weaker foe is being indiscriminate when they are in fact slaughtering large numbers of non-combatants all the while “trying” to avoid civilian casualties. This happens every time; the case is most often made by conservatives.
Here is what you need to know: conservatives tend to favor the status-quo and the status-quo favors the stronger group (duh).
I find this to be ironic in that Israel was, in part, founded on terrorism and that one of their Prime Ministers (Begin) was a big-time terrorist.
Of course, there is always the risk of being labeled as “anti-Semetic” when one criticizes Israel.
So let me be clear: I am not a fan of Hamas; frankly I am against much almost all of what they stand for.
For example, if they had their way and were in control of this country, they’d probably execute me for being an atheist.
But it is equally clear (to me, at least), that Israel has not treated the people in the Gaza strip fairly and that those people sure don’t have many options open to them at this moment.
12 January 2009: New Year’s Resolution
Workout notes 4000 yard swim followed by a 3 mile (plus) walk.
Swim: 500 (slow), 10 x (25 front, 25 free) fins, 5 x 100 (25 sfs, 75 free) 2:05, 5 x 100 (25 3g, 75 free), 5 x 100 fist (on 2), 10 x 50 (on 1), 5 x (25 fly, 75 free), alt 50 paddle/ 50 free.
The swim pretty much sucked.
Walk 24 laps: 38:03 (12:50, 12:36, 12:35); was ok.
Resolution: It is cold, more snow is on the way and the temperature is due to “drop like a rock”. Result: depression. So, what can I do about it, given that jobs are hard to come by and that I have one?
Well, I am going to strive to look for the opportunity in every situation rather than for what is bad.
Example: today, I thought “damn, I am stuck in this dinky stupid little pool.” Instead: “hey someone who swam the Big Shoulders in 1:14 trained here (22 minutes faster than I). “You have enough here to succeed if you have the right attitude.”
Example: “damn, this gym is full of old, pregnant men.” Instead: “hey at least that isn’t you…yet. That scale did show 4 pound up, didn’t it…not all of it is water weight.”
So, after this post, I am on my way to the office to get some research done.
Social: I thought that crap like this only happened in Peoria:
NYC Educator tells the story: Teachers, denied parking permits, park on the street — legally.
School day starts. City crews show up, post brand new “no parking signs.”
Cops show up. Cops ticket teachers’ cars.
$150 to park for the day.
I guess that stupidity and callousness is universal and not just limited to the wasteland that I currently inhabit.
Ooops….I suppose I broke my NYR already!
Science It appears that the black holes at the center of galaxies “came first” (though both the black holes and the galaxies co-evolved.
Reposted from:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090106-aas-black-holes-galaxies.html
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers may have solved a cosmic chicken-and-the-egg problem: Which came first — galaxies or the supermassive black holes in their cores?
For several years now, researchers have known that galaxies and black holes must have co-evolved, with budding galaxies feeding material to a growing black hole while the immense gravity of the black hole generated in its vicinity tremendous radiation that in turn powered star formation. But the scientists hadn’t pegged the starting point.
“It looks like black holes came first. The evidence is piling up,” said Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. Carilli presented his team’s findings here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Previous studies of nearby galaxies revealed an intriguing link between the masses of the black holes at their centers and the mass of the central “bulge” (a mass of tightly packed stars and gas) in the galaxies: The black hole’s mass is always about one one-thousandth the mass of the surrounding bulge.
The ratio is the same for galaxies of all ages and sizes, whether the central black hole is a few million or many billions of times the mass of our sun.
“This constant ratio indicates that the black hole and the bulge affect each others’ growth in some sort of interactive relationship,” said study team member Dominik Riechers of Caltech. “The big question has been whether one grows before the other or if they grow together, maintaining their mass ratio throughout the entire process.”
To help answer this question, Carilli, Riechers and the rest of their team used the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico and the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in France to peer back to near the beginning of the universe, thought to be 13.7 billion years ago, when the first galaxies were forming.
“We finally have been able to measure black-hole and bulge masses in several galaxies seen as they were in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and the evidence suggests that the constant ratio seen nearby may not hold in the early universe,” said study team member Fabian Walter of the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany. “The black holes in these young galaxies are much more massive compared to the bulges than those seen in the nearby universe.” [...]
Superstition: Mano Singham has a nice post about it:
I think we should declare 2009 the Year of Reason.
This should be the year when we make a concerted effort to wipe out superstitious and irrational beliefs of all kinds. This category includes not only religious beliefs but also absurd and divisive and harmful ideas such as that the people who share one’s own nationality and ethnicity are somehow better than those who don’t, and thus deserve greater allegiance and consideration.
Familiarity breeds false rationality. For many people, irrational beliefs are what other people hold, not their own. Their own irrational beliefs seem reasonable because they acquired them at a very young age when they tended to believe what the adults in their lives told them and they have rarely been asked why they believe. The power of myths is that it never even occurs to people to question the validity of ideas that they have always had and which everyone around them seems to share..
As I wrote earlier, in his book The God Delusion (p. 178), Richard Dawkins quotes the anthropologist Pascal Boyer who once over dinner at a Cambridge University college recounted the beliefs of the Fang people of Cameroon who believed that “witches have an extra internal animal-like organ that flies away at night and ruins other people’s crops or poisons their blood. It is also said that these witches sometimes assemble for huge banquets, where they will devour their victims and plan future attacks. Many will tell you that a friend of a friend actually saw witches flying over the village at night, sitting on a banana leaf and throwing magical darts at various unsuspecting victims.”
Bayer says he was dumbfounded when a Cambridge theologian turned to him and said “This is what makes anthropology so fascinating and so difficult too. You have to explain how people can believe such nonsense.” (italics on original)
Dawkins points out that the theologian, as a mainstream Christian, did not see any irony at all in referring to the Fang people’s beliefs as nonsense even while he himself believed many or all of the following beliefs:
* In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.
* The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus came back to life.
* The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.
* Forty days later, the fatherless man went to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily in to the sky.
* If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his ‘father’ (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.
* If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.
* The fatherless man’s virgin mother never died but ‘ascended’ bodily into heaven.
* Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), ‘become’ the body and blood of the fatherless man.Similar nonsense is believed by Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Scientologists, all of whom think that the beliefs held by people of other religions are not only wrong but even absurd, despite the fact that there is no difference at all in the evidentiary basis for all of them. All of them have exactly zero credible evidence in support and whose only basis for belief is that they are found in ancient texts of dubious authenticity.
I should point out that I attended a Unitarian Universalist Church where such Christian beliefs were laughed at. Instead we were supposed to respect other forms of nonsense, so long as it was the non-standard, non-traditional nonsense. Dismissing stuff such as healing crystals, “wymen’s way of knowing”, godesses, dousing, etc. was a sign of being “close minded”.
The Bible and Morality
Many still claim to get their morals from the Bible. Well, what does the Bible actually say?
The following is a very incomplete list but is nevertheless a valid list.
1. How do you determine if someone is guilty? Answer: gamble. We read from the Book of Joshua, Chapter 7:
2
Joshua next sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is near Bethel on its eastern side, with instructions to go up and reconnoiter the land. When they had explored Ai,
3
they returned to Joshua and advised, “Do not send all the people up; if only about two or three thousand go up, they can overcome Ai. The enemy there are few; you need not call for an effort from all the people.”
4
About three thousand of the people made the attack, but they were defeated by those at Ai,
5
who killed some thirty-six of them. They pressed them back across the clearing in front of the city gate till they broke ranks, and defeated them finally on the descent, so that the confidence of the people melted away like water.
6
Joshua, together with the elders of Israel, rent his garments and lay prostrate before the ark of the LORD until evening; and they threw dust on their heads.
7
“Alas, O Lord GOD,” Joshua prayed, “why did you ever allow this people to pass over the Jordan, delivering us into the power of the Amorites, that they might destroy us? Would that we had been content to dwell on the other side of the Jordan.
8
Pray, Lord, what can I say, now that Israel has turned its back to its enemies?
9
When the Canaanites and the other inhabitants of the land hear of it, they will close in around us and efface our name from the earth. What will you do for your great name?”
10
The LORD replied to Joshua: “Stand up. Why are you lying prostrate?
11
Israel has sinned: they have violated the covenant which I enjoined on them. They have stealthily taken goods subject to the ban, and have deceitfully put them in their baggage.
12
If the Israelites cannot stand up to their enemies, but must turn their back to them, it is because they are under the ban. I will not remain with you unless you remove from among you whoever has incurred the ban.[...]
14
In the morning you must present yourselves by tribes. The tribe which the LORD designates shall come forward by clans; the clan which the LORD designates shall come forward by families; the family which the LORD designates shall come forward one by one.
15
He who is designated as having incurred the ban shall be destroyed by fire, with all that is his, because he has violated the covenant of the LORD and has committed a shameful crime in Israel.”
16
1 Early the next morning Joshua had Israel come forward by tribes, and the tribe of Judah was designated.
17
Then he had the clans of Judah come forward, and the clan of Zerah was designated. He had the clan of Zerah come forward by families, and Zabdi was designated.
18
Finally he had that family come forward one by one, and Achan, son of Carmi, son of Zabdi, son of Zerah of the tribe of Judah, was designated.
“Designated”? This sounds a bit like The Lottery to me.
Read from Exodus 28:
30
4 In this breastpiece of decision you shall put the Urim and Thummim, that they may be over Aaron’s heart whenever he enters the presence of the LORD. Thus he shall always bear the decisions for the Israelites over his heart in the LORD’S presence.
Wow! CSI would have been a boring show. But just think: we could do away with all of that DNA evidence and just throw “sacred dice”!
So what happened?
2. You kill the whole family for the transgression of one.
19
Joshua said to Achan, “My son, give to the LORD, the God of Israel, glory and honor by telling me what you have done; do not hide it from me.”
20
Achan answered Joshua, “I have indeed sinned against the LORD, the God of Israel. This is what I have done:
21
Among the spoils, I saw a beautiful Babylonian mantle, two hundred shekels of silver, and a bar of gold fifty shekels in weight; in my greed I took them. They are now hidden in the ground inside my tent, with the silver underneath.”
22
The messengers whom Joshua sent hastened to the tent and found them hidden there, with the silver underneath.
23
They took them from the tent, brought them to Joshua and all the Israelites, and spread them out before the LORD.
24
Then Joshua and all Israel took Achan, son of Zerah, with the silver, the mantle, and the bar of gold, and with his sons and daughters, his ox, his ass and his sheep, his tent, and all his possessions, and led them off to the Valley of Achor.
25
Joshua said, “The LORD bring upon you today the misery with which you have afflicted us!” And all Israel stoned him to death
26
“him”? The KJV says “them”. A Jewish version has it:
And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the mantle, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had; and they brought them up unto the valley of Achor. 25 And Joshua said: ‘Why hast thou troubled us? the LORD shall trouble thee this day.’ And all Israel stoned him with stones; and they burned them with fire, and stoned them with stones
In short, the whole family was killed. We have better justice now-a-days.
What happened next?
3. Murder a whole town if they are on land that you want.
Read on (Joshua, Chapter 8)
The king of Ai saw this, and he and all his army came out very early in the morning to engage Israel in battle at the descent toward the Arabah, not knowing that there was an ambush behind the city.
15
Joshua and the main body of the Israelites fled in seeming defeat toward the desert,
16
till the last of the soldiers in the city had been called out to pursue them.
17
Since they were drawn away from the city, with every man engaged in this pursuit of Joshua and the Israelites, not a soldier remained in Ai (or Bethel), and the city was open and unprotected.
18
Then the LORD directed Joshua, “Stretch out the javelin in your hand toward Ai, for I will deliver it into your power.” Joshua stretched out the javelin in his hand toward the city,
19
and as soon as he did so, the men in ambush rose from their post, rushed in, captured the city, and immediately set it on fire.
20
By the time the men of Ai looked back, the smoke from the city was already sky-high. Escape in any direction was impossible, because the Israelites retreating toward the desert now turned on their pursuers;
21
for when Joshua and the main body of Israelites saw that the city had been taken from ambush and was going up in smoke, they struck back at the men of Ai.
22
Since those in the city came out to intercept them, the men of Ai were hemmed in by Israelites on either side, who cut them down without any fugitives or survivors
23
except the king, whom they took alive and brought to Joshua.
24
All the inhabitants of Ai who had pursued the Israelites into the desert were slain by the sword there in the open, down to the last man. Then all Israel returned and put to the sword those inside the city.
25
There fell that day a total of twelve thousand men and women, the entire population of Ai.
26
Joshua kept the javelin in his hand stretched out until he had fulfilled the doom on all the inhabitants of Ai.
You can read about the routine ethnic cleansings in later chapters; this is from Chapter 11:
1 When Jabin, king of Hazor, learned of this, he sent a message to Jobab, king of Madon, to the king of Shimron, to the king of Achshaph,
2
and to the northern kings in the mountain regions and in the Arabah near Chinneroth, in the foothills, and in Naphath-dor to the west.
3
These were Canaanites to the east and west, Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites and Jebusites in the mountain regions, and Hivites at the foot of Hermon in the land of Mizpah.
4
They came out with all their troops, an army numerous as the sands on the seashore, and with a multitude of horses and chariots.
5
2 All these kings joined forces and marched to the waters of Merom, where they encamped together to fight against Israel.
6
The LORD said to Joshua, “Do not fear them, for by this time tomorrow I will stretch them slain before Israel. You must hamstring their horses and burn their chariots.”
7
Joshua with his whole army came upon them at the waters of Merom in a surprise attack.
8
The LORD delivered them into the power of the Israelites, who defeated them and pursued them to Greater Sidon, to Misrephoth-maim, and eastward to the valley of Mizpeh. They struck them all down, leaving no survivors.
9
Joshua did to them as the LORD had commanded: he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots.
10
At that time Joshua, turning back, captured Hazor and slew its king with the sword; for Hazor formerly was the chief of all those kingdoms.
11
He also fulfilled the doom by putting every person there to the sword, till none was left alive. Hazor itself he burned.
12
Joshua thus captured all those kings with their cities and put them to the sword, fulfilling the doom on them, as Moses, the servant of the LORD, had commanded.
13
However, Israel did not destroy by fire any of the cities built on raised sites, except Hazor, which Joshua burned.
14
The Israelites took all the spoil and livestock of these cities as their booty; but the people they put to the sword, until they had exterminated the last of them, leaving none alive.
So there you have it: guilt by dice throwing, execution of an entire family, and mass murder.
But wait, there is more.
4. It is acceptable to offer your daughters up to be gang raped.
What happens when men come to your door and want to rape your male house guest? See Genesis 19:
Before they went to bed, all the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old–all the people to the last man–closed in on the house.
5
They called to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out to us that we may have intimacies with them.”
6
Lot went out to meet them at the entrance. When he had shut the door behind him,
7
he said, “I beg you, my brothers, not to do this wicked thing.
8
I have two daughters who have never had intercourse with men. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you please. But don’t do anything to these men, for you know they have come under the shelter of my roof.”
Offer to let the men rape your daughters!
But wait, there is more: What happens when you make a bet that you can’t cover? Let’s see what the Biblical hero Samson does (chapter 14)
5. Murder and stealing are an acceptable way to settle up gambling debts.
5
2 So Samson went down to Timnah with his father and mother. When they had come to the vineyards of Timnah, a young lion came roaring to meet him.
6
But the spirit of the LORD came upon Samson, and although he had no weapons, he tore the lion in pieces as one tears a kid.
7
However, on the journey to speak for the woman, he did not mention to his father or mother what he had done.
8
Later, when he returned to marry the woman who pleased him, he stepped aside to look at the remains of the lion and found a swarm of bees and honey in the lion’s carcass.
9
So he scooped the honey out into his palms and ate it as he went along. When he came to his father and mother, he gave them some to eat, without telling them that he had scooped the honey from the lion’s carcass.
10
His father also went down to the woman, and Samson gave a banquet there, since it was customary for the young men to do this.
11
3 When they met him, they brought thirty men to be his companions.
12
Samson said to them, “Let me propose a riddle to you. If within the seven days of the feast you solve it for me successfully, I will give you thirty linen tunics and thirty sets of garments.
13
But if you cannot answer it for me, you must give me thirty tunics and thirty sets of garments.” “Propose your riddle,” they responded; “we will listen to it.”
14
So he said to them,
“Out of the eater came forth food,
and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” After three
days’ failure to answer the riddle,
15
I agree; those who were stumped threatened the wife. But what happened when Samson had to pay up? How did he do it?
On the seventh day, before the sun set, the men of the city said to him,
“What is sweeter than honey,
and what is stronger than a lion?”
He replied to them,
“If you had not plowed with my heifer,
you would not have solved my riddle.”
19
The spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, where he killed thirty of their men and despoiled them; he gave their garments to those who had answered the riddle. Then he went off to his own family in anger,
So murder some people, steal their stuff, and pay off your debts!
Finally, what do you do with people who have “wrong” conceptions of God?
6. Kill people who worship other gods.
Let’s let Elijah answer: (Kings 18)
19
Now summon all Israel to me on Mount Carmel, as well as the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel’s table.”
20
So Ahab sent to all the Israelites and had the prophets assemble on Mount Carmel.
21
Elijah appealed to all the people and said, “How long will you straddle the issue? If the LORD is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him.” The people, however, did not answer him.
22
So Elijah said to the people, “I am the only surviving prophet of the LORD, and there are four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal.
23
Give us two young bulls. Let them choose one, cut it into pieces, and place it on the wood, but start no fire. I shall prepare the other and place it on the wood, but shall start no fire.
24
You shall call on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD. The God who answers with fire is God.” All the people answered, “Agreed!”
25
Elijah then said to the prophets of Baal, “Choose one young bull and prepare it first, for there are more of you. Call upon your gods, but do not start the fire.”
26
Taking the young bull that was turned over to them, they prepared it and called on Baal from morning to noon, saying, “Answer us, Baal!” But there was no sound, and no one answering. And they hopped around the altar they had prepared.
27
When it was noon, Elijah taunted them: “Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating, or may have retired, or may be on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”
28
They called out louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until blood gushed over them.
29
Noon passed and they remained in a prophetic state until the time for offering sacrifice. But there was not a sound; no one answered, and no one was listening.
30
Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come here to me.” When they had done so, he repaired the altar of the LORD which had been destroyed.
31
He took twelve stones, for the number of tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the LORD had said, “Your name shall be Israel.”
32
He built an altar in honor of the LORD with the stones, and made a trench around the altar large enough for two seahs of grain.
33
When he had arranged the wood, he cut up the young bull and laid it on the wood.
34
“Fill four jars with water,” he said, “and pour it over the holocaust and over the wood.” “Do it again,” he said, and they did it again. “Do it a third time,” he said, and they did it a third time.
35
The water flowed around the altar, and the trench was filled with the water.
36
At the time for offering sacrifice, the prophet Elijah came forward and said, “LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things by your command.
37
Answer me, LORD! Answer me, that this people may know that you, LORD, are God and that you have brought them back to their senses.”
38
The LORD’S fire came down and consumed the holocaust, wood, stones, and dust, and it lapped up the water in the trench.
39
Seeing this, all the people fell prostrate and said, “The LORD is God! The LORD is God!”
40
Then Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Let none of them escape!” They were seized, and Elijah had them brought down to the brook Kishon and there he slit their throats.
Note: in this account, “God” was causing a drought because Israel was worshiping this other God.
Now what do you do with indolent kids who make fun of older people? You send bears to tear them limb from limb!
7. Death is appropriate for someone who makes fun of a religious figure.
See 2 Kings, Chapter 2:
2:23 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.
2:24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.
Update So, is it a surprise when this happens:
I’ve been hiding from the horrible news in the Middle East, but this story induced me to poke my head out of my tortoise shell…so I can puke. A rabbi consulted his holy books to see what God had to say about the vicious violence going on right now, and you can guess what God’s word might be:
Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.
Barton Springs: warm thoughts in cold Peoria
I am watching the Philadelphia Eagles upset the New York Giants; currently it is 23-11 with just under 4 minutes left in the game.
The Eagle defense has just shut down the Giants; they stuffed two 4′th down plays and have intercepted Manning.
I am finding myself cheering for the Eagles because the Eagle quarterback, Donovan McNabb, had backed Barack Obama.
Of course that is a silly reason to cheer for a team; after all lots of athletes (especially African Americans) backed Obama.
Update: the Eagles won; that makes 3 out of 4 road teams to win, with the Steelers to meet the hot San Diego Chargers next.
Barton Springs Swimming (and pool) thoughts
I am just going to ramble about Barton Springs to take my mind off of the Peoria, IL winter weather.
Truth be told, it isn’t that bad (by Illinois Standards); we’ve had about an inch of snow and it is in the 20s; but two days ago we were basking in 75 degree temperatures and I had swam 2 outdoor miles in that “pool”
(for the uninitiated: this is an introduction; the swimming area is about 1/8′th of a mile (200 meters) long)
This shows most of the swimming area
Here is another angle.
Now my family thinks that I crazy to swim there as the spring fed water temperature is about 68 F year ’round.
No, I am not crazy. This guy is crazy; this is real cold water swimming.
Ram’s Swim in Antarctica was held on February 7th 2008 on the last day of the Antarctic summer at 70° latitude near an Indian Scientific station named Maitri. Ram and his team had to hike for 1½ hours through ice and rocks to reach the lake where he would attempt his swim. Ram found a lake with 1°C water while the air hovered around 0°C and he swam 1K.
When asked why he did it, Ram said, “Looking back, I am not sure why I did it, but hell, I am ready to do it again and even maybe try it over a longer distance. I have always been fascinated by the human mind and its ability to push the body far beyond its perceived physical limitations.” [...]
(photo from the linked story, which is interesting reading)
Note the background of the swimmer; that tells you what you need to know.
But I digress; besides the purpose of my post is supposed to make me warmer and not make me colder!
Besides, it isn’t as if I am a big open water swimmer anyway; while in Austin this last time, I did 4 runs and only 2 swims, and my idea of a “long” open water swim is a 5K in relatively calm fresh water. My best workouts would hardly be a warm up for a serious distance swimmer.
But I do love Barton Springs pool.
Way back in 1969, my Dad served a 1 year tour in Vietnam. My mom took me to Barton Springs just about every day during the summer; she’d read a book while I played in the pool; mostly I went off of the diving board.
Over and over again, I’d send my chubby little body off of the board and expect my mom to “judge” my “dives”.
Later in high school, and then while on leave from the Naval Academy, I’d swim a length or two (in a horrible crawl or a faux breast stroke) and then check out the young women in skimpy swim suits.
Yes, these photos all come from Barton Springs, but were not taken by me:
I still remember the day while on leave from Annapolis, I saw some young women doing yoga poses in such attire: (not taken at Barton Springs)
(the above pose was being done by a young woman in a tiny white bikini; I still remember it)
Of course, not all of the sights were that memorable. Some wear thong bikinis and whereas some are those you want to see in thongs, exchange students (male) from Africa, assorted gays and an occasional septuagenarian (my wife says that “thongs and Depends do NOT go together)
Eventually I worked up to doing a mile in a semi-respectable crawl.
Oddly enough I didn’t do much here when I was a student at the University of Texas; instead I ate myself up to 300 pounds.
But later as I took up running and then cross training, I started to swim there and to keep track of my times.
My paces were mostly 8:30 (all out) to 10 (dreadfully slow) per 1/4 mile (400 meter) out and back and I’ve done up to 3 miles (12 full laps) at a time. My fastest 2 miler there was just under 1:10 (done twice) and my fastest 3 was 1:49; my 5K in Lake Michigan was 13 minutes faster.
Why I love swimming there:
1. You don’t have to turn every 25 yards.
2. I actually enjoy seeing the various sights on the bottom of the pool; you do actually see various types of plants and fish.
3. It isn’t that crowded most of the time; the exception is around 7 am on summer weekends when you get lots of tri types in wetsuits. But if you start at 5 am you can get 2-3 miles of mostly open swimming. In the winter, it is usually not crowded at all.
4. I love swimming outdoors, especially when you can start at night and see the sun come up.
5. You have very easy and quick access to two different running/walking trails; there is the technical Barton Greenbelt Trail (shared with mountain bikers)
and the Town Lake Hike and Bike (10 miles loop; 8 of the miles are marked every quarter mile)
So when I was at peak fitness, I’ve done doubles of 1-2 miles of swimming followed by 4-14 miles of running.
6. See the bikini photos above. I admit that you see that mostly after “mostly lap swimming” hours are over, though I recently saw one bikini clad attractive lady doing stretches after a workout swim; she wasn’t worried about her hiked up suit.
11 January 2009
Workout notes It is snowing outside (lightly) and so I opted for the treadmill. I “ran” (sort of) 10 miles in 1:53:53; one should keep in mind that I have a manual model that you have to have at an incline in order to make it work.
Hence an “easy” pace on this treadmill is about 11:30 mpm; this would be like 10:30 mpm outside. On the other hand, one can walk a bit faster on this thing than one can walk outside; for some reason this treadmill “rewards” the pulling motion of walking and “penalizes” the “bouncing” motion of running.
In any event, I moved for just under 2 hours and got a workout.
Other topics It is possible to be an excellent scientist and/or mathematician but still descend into being a crackpot. Here are two sad cases:
Freeman Dyson is a well-known mathematician and physicist. Number theorists know him from his earliest papers on continued fractions and Diophantine approximation, but then he got seduced by theoretical physics and most of his subsequent work was in that field.
In his later years (Dyson is now 85), though, Dyson’s output has become increasingly cranky. He’s commented favorably about intelligent design; yet when I questioned him via e-mail, he admitted that he had not read any of the work of Michael Behe and William Dembski, the ID movement’s most prominent advocates.
Despite having no training in climatology, Dyson has sneered at the consensus of climate scientists about global warming. (The hallmark of the blowhard is to spout off in areas outside his competence.) Actual climate scientists, such as Michael Tobis, begged to disagree. Dyson used a review a review of two books on global warming, to cast doubt on the seriousness of the problem, and accused climate scientists of being contemptuous of those who disagree. Dyson’s maunderings were taken apart by the actual climate scientists at RealClimate. [...]
All this is in the past, so why should Dyson get a Blowhard nomination this month? It’s because of an article that recently appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Here is an excerpt:
“The mathematicians discovered the central mystery of computability, the conjecture represented by the statement P is not equal to NP. The conjecture asserts that there exist mathematical problems which can be quickly solved in individual cases but cannot be solved by a quick algorithm applicable to all cases. The most famous example of such a problem is the traveling salesman problem, which is to find the shortest route for a salesman visiting a set of cities, knowing the distance between each pair. All the experts believe that the conjecture is true, and that the traveling salesman problem is an example of a problem that is P but not NP. But nobody has even a glimmer of an idea how to prove it.”
This is not even close to correct. The distinction in P versus NP has nothing to do with being a problem being “quickly solved in individual cases”, but rather, that the answer can easily be verified once a small amount of extra information is provided. As stated, Dyson’s example of the traveling salesman problem is not even in NP, since he states it in the form of finding the shortest tour, as opposed to checking the existence of a tour of length less than a given bound. (If I give you a traveling salesman tour, nobody currently knows how to check in polynomial time that it is the shortest one.) And finally, he blows the punchline. The decision version of traveling salesman is known to be in NP, but most people believe it is not in P. Dyson got it backwards.
And we see something similar in physics:
Frank Tipler is a crackpot. At one point in his life, he did very good technical work in general relativity; he was the first to prove theorems that closed timelike curves could not be constructed in local regions of spacetime without either violating the weak energy condition or creating a singularity. But alas, since then he has pretty much gone off the deep end, and more recently has become known for arguments for Christianity based on fundamental physics. If you closely at those arguments (h/t wolfgang), you find things like this:
If life is to guide the entire universe, it must be co-extensive with the entire universe. We can say that life must have become OMNIPRESENT in the universe by the end of time. But the very act of guiding the universe to eliminate event horizons – an infinite number of nudges – causes the entropy and hence the complexity of the universe to increase without limit. Therefore, if life is to continue guiding the universe – which it must, if the laws of physics are to remain consistent – then the knowledge of the universe possessed by life must also increase without limit, becoming both perfect and infinite at the final singularity. Life must become OMNISCIENT at the final singularity. The collapse of the universe will have provided available energy, which goes to infinity as the final singularity is approached, and this available energy will have become entirely under life’s control. The rate of use of this available energy – power – will diverge to infinity as the final singularity is approached. In other words, life at the final singularity will have become OMNIPOTENT. The final singularity is not in time but outside of time. On the boundary of space and time, as described in detail by Hawking and Ellis [6]. So we can say that the final singularity – the Omega Point – is TRANSCENDANT to space, time and matter.
All of the signs of classic crackpottery are present; the vague and misplaced appeal to technical terminology, the spelling mistakes and capital letters, the random use of “must” and “therefore” when no actual argument has been given.
Oh boy. I suppose that there is a lesson for me there, given that I’ve never reached the point where I would actually have laurels to rest on.
Update: this is Dr. Tippler:
Academia Physics graduate school applications are down this year.
On the other hand, one of my professor friends got into a Ph. D. program precisely because of the TA pay and benefits; it turns out that he loved mathematics, published his thesis and went on to get a college teaching job. So, I suppose that you never know.
Science
From this article at the Daily Kos; it is worth a read. The article was about historical accounts of when this “guest star” appeared (1054 CE); remember that at that time, superstition was the official policy and not limited to a bunch of Biblical literalist crackpots and new-age woos.
Science A new, human made molecule has the power to self replicate.
A new molecule that performs the essential function of life – self-replication – could shed light on the origin of all living things.
If that wasn’t enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.
“Obviously what we’re trying to do is make a biology,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team’s molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function.
Joyce and colleague Tracey Lincoln made their chemical out of RNA because most researchers think early life stored information in this sister molecule to DNA. And unlike the stuff of our genomes, RNA molecules can catalyse chemical reactions.
“We’re trying to jump in at the last signpost we have back there in the early history of life,” Joyce says.
Rather than start with RNA enzymes – ribozymes – present in other organisms, Joyce’s team created its own molecule from scratch, called R3C. It performed a single function: stitching two shorter RNA molecules together to create a clone of itself.
Further lab tinkering made this molecule better at copying itself, but this is not the same as bringing it to life. It self-replicated to a point, but eventually clogged up in shapes that could no longer sew RNA pieces together. “It was a real dog,” Joyce says. [...]
Politics
Some are still angry at Obama because he picked the bigoted Rick Warren to give his invocation. Nevertheless, actions speak louder than words. Look at some of the families that Obama picked to be in his “whistle stop” inauguration tour:
The Washington Blade reports that “lesbian couple Lisa Hazirjian and her partner Michelle have been invited to join” President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden on their Whistle Stop train ride to the nation’s capital leading up to the inauguration. “Hazirjian, who is from Ohio, serves as an at-large board member of Equality Ohio, as a member of the Cleveland Stonewall Democrats and as a volunteer for Cleveland Families Count, an organization formed to defend the new domestic partner registry in the city.” Obama, who is supportive of civil unions, has said he is “not in favor of gay marriage.”
That is an excellent sign.
Peoria Peoria pundit reports on some of the change that is taking place at the Peoria Journal Star:
Jerry Klein is out at the Peoria Journal Star. Klein retired several years ago, but the respected columnist and arts writer continued to write a column for Sunday paper (although frequency had dropped recently). He was told today that this column was being dropped. How much money GateHouse is saving by dropping a less-than-weekly column, I don’t know.
To me, people like Jerry Klein represents exactly what I despise about Peoria. His columns rarely inform and his opinions are given without anything to back them up; he is a perfect example of what can happen to a human being that lives in an intellectually dead community and makes no effort to keep learning and growing.
On the other hand, if you want to know what is being talked about in the barbershop on Saturday mornings, well there you go.
My wife called Klein the “intellectual of the Dinette Set”; I see Klein as the archetype of the polyester/expanded waistband set.
IL-18: Aaron Schock is off to a running start; evidently pay discrimination is not that of a big deal to him.
About Blueollie
(click to go to whitehouse.gov)
President Obama’s address to the National Academy of Science.
President Obama takes on Republican questions.
(Yes, that is part of President O too….grumble…)
How well is President Obama doing at keeping his campaign promises? Here is an even handed running assessment.
This is my online diary. My facebook stuff is here.
I use this blog for the following purposes:
- To keep track of my training. I train for ultramarathons (I usually walk these) and sometimes do running races, bicycle rides and open water swims for variety. My best ultra accomplishment was walking 101 miles in 24 hours in 2004. There was a time when I could run a sub 40 minute 10K (did that once), but that was another lifetime ago; these a days
2427-28 minutes for a 5K would be more like it. I also have an off and on interest in yoga. - From time to time, I post what I am thinking about mathematically
- I often post links to science articles, especially articles about cosmology and evolution.
- I am very sympathetic to the “new atheist” movement, though some might consider me to be an agnostic. I reject any notion of a deity that interferes with physical events, but remain agnostic to the idea that there might be something “grand and wonderful” (Dawkins’ phrase) outside of our current spacetime continuum.
- I am a liberal Democrat who thinks that the current social atmosphere is tilted way too far toward the interests of big business, and I reject the idea that a “free market” cures all ills, though pure socialism doesn’t work either. I am also a believer in the freedom of speech, including speech that I might not like. Also, I’ve been involved (to a moderate degree) with political campaigns, ranging from City Council races up to Presidential races.
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Note about my blogroll: there are many types of blogs here; they range from humor, science, religion, politcs and endurance sports.-
Created by OnePlusYou Blog Roll Notes
As of March 20, 2010, I went through my longer blogroll and deleted links that no longer work. Be advised that some blogs have not been updated and others have been moved, but you can get to the new address via the old one. I've read and visited all of these sites at one time or another. However, I've decided to post a separate list of those blogs which I read regularly (some daily, others periodically).
My list of my regular reads HumorLink Dump
3 Quarks Daily Links to Interesting Articles.
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538.com Politics Analysis via Statistcs
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Sagacity: personal blog (Democratic)
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Science Avenger Pro-rationalism
Science (some of these deal with religious issues as well)
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PharyngulaEvolution, atheism, rationalism
AnthropologyAnthropology, human evolution
Why Evolution is True science, rationalism
Doctor Andy Science and medicine; some social issues, some endurance sports
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Rate Your Students Where professors blow off steam
Personal (endurance athletes)
Tammy Racewalker, up to marathon
Damon Ultrarunner
Wild Celtic Rose Artist and triathlete (photos)
Ray Racewalker, ultra walker
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Note: very rough language; not for the sensitive or for the easily offended:
Spandex
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