22 May 2009 Part II

Workout notes It was too sunny and pretty to stay inside, so I ran 3.5 miles at the Forrest Park Nature Center (41:33, which is actually slightly faster than average but 3 minutes off my best) then hiked 2.5 more miles as a cool down. I sure like that place. I’ve taken photos (at other times) which are available here.

Topics for the day

NBA:
The playoffs are exciting. Last night I watched the Lakers versus the Nuggets; this time the Nuggets won by 3 points.

Science

Climate Change Crock: once again, Republicans take the lead in spewing out nonsense:

Evolution

There was an exciting announcement: a 47 million year old fossil was discovered. Study of this fossil shows that it might be an ancestor of modern monkeys and primates.

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

Philip Gingerich, president-elect of the Paleontological Society in the U.S., has co-written a paper that will detail next week the latest fossil discovery in Public Library of Science, a peer-reviewed, online journal.

This was a big discovery. But unfortunately, it wasn’t publicized in a scientifically honest way:

This is too hyper and sensationalistic. Many scientists objected to this (example)

This tendency to sensationalize scientific discoveries is discussed here:

On Tuesday, the world met “Ida” — a 47-million-year-old primate fossil touted as a “REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING,” according to a press release. The media went berserk. Google News now lists more than 750 articles relating to little ol’ Darwinius masillae — and the search engine itself even changed the lettering on its logo yesterday. At a press conference earlier this week, the study’s lead author, Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo, variously called the fossil the holy grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology. Next week, a two-hour documentary will air on the History Channel — brazenly called “The Link” — and a book of the same name has already hit bookstores.

All this has led many to cry foul about how the finding — published Tuesday (May 19) in PLoS ONE — is being sold. The Scientist spoke with Matthew Nisbet, a communications specialist at American University in Washington, DC, who studies the intersections between science, media, and politics, to discuss how the promotion of this one discovery really has changed everything in the realm of science communications.

The Scientist: How unusual is this amount of media attention for a single study?

Matthew Nisbet: This single study may have gotten more attention across multiple media platforms than any study in recent history. You may have to go back to the announcement that Raelians had cloned a human child, or the cold fusion announcement back in the early 1990s [to find a comparable media response]. Those are in part unfair comparisons because neither one of those studies was peer reviewed. The big difference this time is that this study is peer reviewed in a major journal.

TS: Have the authors of this study crossed the line into overselling and hype?

MN: It’s a difficult balance in order to generate wider attention. You have to use language and metaphors that are non-traditional in how science is communicated. On the other hand, whether it’s a fossil find or a pharmaceutical drug, you don’t want to use metaphors that oversell the impact or promise of the discovery. The risk with that is that you undermine credibility and trust with the public.

Follow the link to read the rest.

Of course, more evidence (like this) will not shake loose any of the creationists from their positions; Edward Current has a humorous take on this:

Science, religion and society

Why are people so quick to assign “agency” to any noticed pattern anyway? (e. g., posit a reason for some observed pattern or order). The reason may well be evolutionary:

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agent­icity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agent­icity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Of course, the religious types continue to take shots at us.
We’ve talked about clerics calling atheists “less than fully human”. Well now, clerics are saying that atheism is the world’s greatest evil.

The outgoing Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, made a contribution at the end of Archbishop Vincent Nichols’ installation that was at once touching, funny, serious and extreme. He said, rather controversially perhaps, that a lack of faith is ‘the greatest of evils.’ He blamed atheism for war and destruction, and implied it was a greater evil even than sin itself. Read the report running as a page lead in today’s paper. Bess Twiston-Davies wrote a nice At Your Service for online.

Admittedly, he was criticized by other clerics from his own church. But there it is again: “belief” is considered an intrinsic good and a lack thereof is considered evil. That is what I call stupid.

While we are on this topic, I’d suggest reading this response by PZ Myers to an “atheists suck” editorial:

We witness many people who proudly declare that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, roughly 9,000 years after the domestication of dogs, 5,000 years after the founding of Jericho and contemporaneous with the invention of the plow. They cling to these beliefs despite contradictions with history, let alone physics, geology and biology, because they believe the Bible is a literal history and science text. We find much to ridicule in these peculiarly unreal ideas.

We live in a world where the majority of the population are quite convinced that they have a direct pipeline to an omnipotent, omniscient being who has told them exactly how to live and what is right and wrong, and has spelled out his divine will in holy books. Unfortunately, there are many holy books, and they all disagree with each other, and of all these multitudes claiming possession of such a potent source of information, we similarly see widespread disagreement. This god seems to be an exceptionally unreliable oracle — most of what he has supposedly said is wrong. We atheists do take glee in pointing out God’s lack of consistency, which I’m sure Allen finds irritating.

Contrary to Allen’s claim that we aren’t interested in criticizing the important elements of religious belief, we are: We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We’re pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does. It wouldn’t be a place almost entirely inimical to our existence, with a history that reveals our existence was a fortunate result of a long chain of accidents tuned by natural selection. Most of the arguments we’ve heard that try to reconcile god and science seem to make God a subtle, invisible, undetectable ghost who at best tickles the occasional subatomic particle when no one is looking. It seems rather obvious to us that if his works are undetectable, you have no grounds for telling us what he’s been up to.

On a related note I agree with Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s place) on something.

Politics
President Obama’s security speech:

See Dick Cheney’s speech torn apart here. Read a fact check of his speech here.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that’s considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were “legal” and produced information that “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the Al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information “was valuable in some instances” but that “there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

A top-secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that information gained from aggressive interrogations helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four top-secret Bush-era memos that the Justice Department released last month.

FBI Director Robert Muller told Vanity Fair magazine in December that he didn’t think the techniques disrupted any attacks. [...]

• Cheney said the Bush administration “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.”

The former vice president didn’t point out that Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahri, remain at large nearly eight years after 9/11 and that the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since the 2001 U.S.-led intervention, and Islamic extremists also have launched their most concerted attack yet on neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan.

• Cheney denied there was any connection between the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which he blamed on “a few sadistic guards … in violation of American law, military regulations and simple decency.”

However, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the approval of the techniques by senior Bush administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ’a few bad apples’ acting on their own,” said the report issued by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz. “The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.”
(3 of 5)

• Cheney said that “only detainees of the highest intelligence value” were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

He didn’t mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior Al Qaeda operative to be captured after 9/11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed’s alleged role in 9/11.

The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods “was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against Al Qaeda,” Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.

• Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.

Cheney made no mention of Al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, who’s known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002. While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, al-Libi provided false information about Iraq’s links with Al Qaeda, which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.

A state-run Libyan newspaper said al-Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail.

• Cheney accused Obama of “the selective release” of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging that Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove that information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.
(4 of 5)

“I’ve formally asked that (the information) be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained,” Cheney said. “Last week, that request was formally rejected.”

However, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said that it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting the release of materials that are the subject of lawsuits.

• Cheney said that only “ruthless enemies of this country” were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy Newspapers investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to U.S. officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

In addition, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005, that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri, from Macedonia in January 2004.

Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May 2004 and dumped on a remote road in Albania.

In January 2007, the German government issued arrest warrants for 13 alleged CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping Masri.

• Cheney slammed Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and criticized his effort to persuade other countries to accept some of the detainees.

The effort to shut down the facility, however, began during Bush’s second term, promoted by Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

“One of the things that would help a lot is, in the discussions that we have with the states of which they (detainees) are nationals, if we could get some of those countries to take them back,” Rice said in a Dec. 12, 2007, interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. “So we need help in closing Guantanamo.”
(5 of 5)

• Cheney said that, in assessing the security environment after 9/11, the Bush team had to take into account “dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.”

Cheney didn’t explicitly repeat the contention he made repeatedly in office: that Saddam cooperated with Al Qaeda, a linkage that U.S. intelligence officials and numerous official inquiries have rebutted repeatedly.

The late Iraqi dictator’s association with terrorists vacillated and was mostly aimed at quashing opponents and critics at home and abroad.

The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before 9/11 said Hussein’s regime “has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President (George H.W.) Bush in 1993 in Kuwait.”

A Pentagon study released last year, based on a review of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured after the U.S.-led invasion, concluded that although Hussein supported militant Palestinian groups — the late terrorist Abu Nidal found refuge in Baghdad, at least until Hussein had him killed — the Iraqi security services had no “direct operational link” with Al Qaeda. [...]

• Cheney said that “only detainees of the highest intelligence value” were subjected to the harsh interrogation techniques, and he cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

He didn’t mention Abu Zubaydah, the first senior Al Qaeda operative to be captured after 9/11. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee last week that his interrogation of Zubaydah using traditional methods elicited crucial information, including Mohammed’s alleged role in 9/11.

The decision to use the harsh interrogation methods “was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against Al Qaeda,” Soufan said. Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s point man in an internal fight to overhaul the Bush administration’s detention policies, joined Soufan in his criticism.

• Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.

Cheney made no mention of Al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, who’s known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whom the Bush administration secretly turned over to Egypt for interrogation in January 2002. While allegedly being tortured by Egyptian authorities, al-Libi provided false information about Iraq’s links with Al Qaeda, which the Bush administration used despite doubts expressed by the DIA.

A state-run Libyan newspaper said al-Libi committed suicide recently in a Libyan jail. [...]

This man is one evil bastard.

The politics of fear is seldom good for security:

This Week’s Terrorism Arrests

Four points. One: There was little danger of an actual terrorist attack:

Authorities said the four men have long been under investigation and there was little danger they could actually have carried out their plan, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported.

[...]

In their efforts to acquire weapons, the defendants dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants, a federal complaint said.

The investigation had been under way for about a year.

“They never got anywhere close to being able to do anything,” one official told NBC News. “Still, it’s good to have guys like this off the street.”

Of course, politicians are using this incident to peddle more fear:

“This was a very serious threat that could have cost many, many lives if it had gone through,” Representative Peter T. King, Republican from Long Island, said in an interview with WPIX-TV. “It would have been a horrible, damaging tragedy. There’s a real threat from homegrown terrorists and also from jailhouse converts.”

Two, they were caught by traditional investigation and intelligence. Not airport security. Not warrantless eavesdropping. But old fashioned investigation and intelligence. This is what works. This is what keeps us safe. Here’s an essay I wrote in 2004 that says exactly that.

The only effective way to deal with terrorists is through old-fashioned police and intelligence work — discovering plans before they’re implemented and then going after the plotters themselves.

Follow the link for the last two points.

Pure Evil.

21 May 2009 Mid Day Links

The Agnostic Atheist This whole article is worth reading:

When Thomas Huxley coined the term “agnostic” in 1869 he did it to make a point.

A member of the “Metaphysical Society”, a monthly discussion group of liberal churchmen, deists, Unitarians, positivists and the occasional atheist, Huxley found himself confronted with people who “were quite sure they had attained a certain ‘gnosis,’ – [who] had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence.”

Huxley was “quite sure” that he had not reached any such resolution and, indeed, “had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.” Looking for a term that would free him from such certainties – and from accusations of atheism and materialism that were regularly, if inaccurately, levelled at him – he coined the word agnostic.

Huxley’s neologism was not some arbitrary midway point between theism and atheism, as it has subsequently been treated. The “-theism” suffix is deliberately absent. [...]

And that points us to a difficulty with agnosticism. Attitudes are fine but they need to be about something. Adjectives need nouns. If Huxley was indeed an agnostic, he was an agnostic atheist, tending away from the divine but unwilling (so he claimed) to be too dogmatic about it.

Thus understood, we all need a dash of agnosticism – of appropriate intellectual reserve in the face of the big questions. The dogmatic alternative, familiar to us as “fundamentalism”, is neither appealing nor helpful.

But we should not imagine agnosticism is a complete and sufficient metaphysical position. The question is not simply whether you are an agnostic, but what kind of agnostic you are.

That is exactly where I am: I am an atheist in that I don’t believe in a deity, but I am agnostic in the sense that I don’t know if there is something beyond our understanding that is something like a universal spirit, governing force, etc.

I’ll phrase it this way, using the language of a statistical test. To me, the null hypothesis is that “there is no deity” and the alternative hypothesis is that there is one. I have yet to reject the null hypothesis.

It appears to me that many educated theists (who admit to at least having doubts) have the null hypothesis that their deity exists.

Those who aren’t agnostic at all (no doubts either way) don’t see the matter as being worthy of being tested at all.

(hat tip: Richard Dawkins)

Creationism. Check out their videos. Note how they misuse the word “evolutionist” when talking about astronomers and cosmologists (to them: “evolutionist” appears to mean “someone who thinks that it was done by natural means”). Note how they take “we don’t know how this happened” to mean “our god must have done it by supernatural means”.

Mathematics and society From the New York Times:

For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations? No. Bigger cities have more gas stations than smaller ones (of course), but not nearly in direct proportion to their size. The number of gas stations grows only in proportion to the 0.77 power of population. The crucial thing is that 0.77 is less than 1. This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

The same pattern holds for other measures of infrastructure. Whether you measure miles of roadway or length of electrical cables, you find that all of these also decrease, per person, as city size increases. And all show an exponent between 0.7 and 0.9.

Now comes the spooky part. The same law is true for living things. That is, if you mentally replace cities by organisms and city size by body weight, the mathematical pattern remains the same.

For example, suppose you measure how many calories a mouse burns per day, compared to an elephant. Both are mammals, so at the cellular level you might expect they shouldn’t be too different. And indeed, when the cells of 10 different mammalian species were grown outside their host organisms, in a laboratory tissue culture, they all displayed the same metabolic rate. It was as if they didn’t know where they’d come from; they had no genetic memory of how big their donor was.

But now consider the elephant or the mouse as an intact animal, a functioning agglomeration of billions of cells. Then, on a pound for pound basis, the cells of an elephant consume far less energy than those of a mouse. The relevant law of metabolism, called Kleiber’s law, states that the metabolic needs of a mammal grow in proportion to its body weight raised to the 0.74 power.

This 0.74 power is uncannily close to the 0.77 observed for the law governing gas stations in cities. Coincidence? Maybe, but probably not. There are theoretical grounds to expect a power close to 3/4. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and his colleagues Jim Brown and Brian Enquist have argued that a 3/4-power law is exactly what you’d expect if natural selection has evolved a transport system for conveying energy and nutrients as efficiently and rapidly as possible to all points of a three-dimensional body, using a fractal network built from a series of branching tubes — precisely the architecture seen in the circulatory system and the airways of the lung, and not too different from the roads and cables and pipes that keep a city alive.

Walking Form

Workout notes 8 mile walk over lunch time on the East Peoria trail; I slept in this morning. 52:42/49:40 (to the 4 mile mark on the pavement); sunny, breezy; some 2-1 from mile 1 onward. I was trying out a suggestion that I received.

The walking itself

I got some photos from the Rockford Marathon:

This last shot shows the knee “buckle” that gets me in trouble with racewalking judges; for this to be a legal walk the support leg has to be straight. Here, it is oh-so-slightly bent.

Here is the advice I got:

The problem is that as you settle your weight into your leading leg, you’re trying to use your quad to keep it straight instead of letting the clearing of your hips do it. As your leading heel hits the ground, you are right, not only is your leg straight, but it is straight in the correct manner – with your quad muscles relaxed. Now look in this picture:

Your quads are flexing. Now, sometime around the point of the stride that this picture shows, the quads are supposed to begin to flex some, but not as much as this, and I suspect it started a couple of frames earlier.

The fix involves your hips. You’re not letting the hip of the leading leg “clear” backwards as your weight settles. Therefore you have to tighten your quad to stay straight, which is pretty close to impossible to do consistently (and is inefficient in any case). Work on drills where you’re exaggerating front to back hip motion. It’s the motion of allowing your hips to go back and get out of the way (as opposed to the moving them forward part) that you need to work on. For the moment, forget the straightened leg and work on the hips.

I suspect you will find this hard to believe, but keeping your leg straight under your body is much easier than what you do, and if you can fix it, you’ll find that this whole walking thing is much easier The best ultrawalkers actually land with a bit of a bent leg (because the impact of hitting the ground with a straight leg can be tough on the body over 100 miles) and then straighten it under their body – the opposite of what you do. That Dutch guy who won Ultracentric in 2007 had it down perfectly.

- Ed Parrot

And these two bits:

The motion is easier to demonstrate than describe, though Ed did a good job of it. And I don’t think it comes naturally to all. If it did, any old 2:20 marathoner would be a world class walker. There’s an up and down component to the hips, along with a front to back, something like an elliptical orbit, though it’s more complicated because there’s rotation around the vertical axis of the body too. But seen from the side, there’s up and down and front to back. Now, better to have more forward motion than up and down, perhaps, but the up and down is related to the straight leg rule. The straight leg makes the hip higher in the vertical position, so the support leg’s hip is higher. It is proper for the unweighted, forward swinging leg to drive thru with a low hip, so the foot and knee are lower, not high like in running.

Ollie, I’ll show you some day.

Ray Sharp

Ed, Maryanne, Ollie,

I’ve worked with both Maryanne and Ollie and in both cases there are some issues with muscle/hip tightness, but there is also the problem of the neuromuscluar system being very heavily adapted to fast, non-racewalk walking. When someone does a lot of “hiking” miles it’s very difficult to just layer racewalking on top of it. Even when there are glimmers of good technique, with mileage/fatigue/speed, the walker always falls back on what they are used to. To really get the technique it almost always requires stopping the normal technique for a while and racewalking exclusively. This usualy will require lower mileage and possible slower paces (at first) and to most ultra-walkers this is unacceptable. So most modify their current technique, become somewhat more efficient, and continue on in this manner rather than making the committment to become “real” racewalkers. And that’s fine. As you know, Ed, using true racewalking technique for long distances (50k) isn’t easy! But you did a good job making the transition. So where’d you go? We miss you out there!

Dave McGovern

In short, someone who has my athletic limitations has to choose, and I choose to focus on the ultrawalking (e. g., unjudged or “B” judged (loss of contact only)) races of marathon distance or beyond.

Still, I’d like to take that tension out of my quad at the support phase; it sure would help me to conserve energy.

A Brief Rant…

I am avoiding cleaning my home office….so I’ll rant about politics.

The cycle of election politics

1. Republicans are in power; they wreck the economy.

2. The public gets disgusted and votes the Republicans out of power.

3. The Democrats come in and fix the economy; the public gets more prosperous.

4. The public starts to notice their tax bills; yeah they are better off but now those bills are higher than they’d like.

5. The Republicans “share” the public’s outrage; they promise to come in and cut taxes; they tell the public that they are going to quit giving their hard earned dollars to the undeserving miscreants (e. g., single moms, Blacks and Mexicans)

6. The public votes the Republicans back into power, forgetting point 1.

7. The Republicans get into power and promptly wreck the economy again; back to step 1.

Back to cleaning….

21 May 2009

Workout notes: yesterday 3000 yard swim (misfired a bit), then 4 miles of walking; 3 with the group.

Today: slept in; out to East Peoria in a bit.

NBA: Last night’s game was interesting; the Magic rallied from 16 down to win 107-106. James had 49 points and Cleveland hit a bizarre shot to end the first half (shot was from behind Orlando’s 3-point line!. Nevertheless the Magic battled back; Howard had 30 points and 13 rebounds.

Science

Yes, there is evidence to suggest that we have have eaten our neanderthal cousins.

What happened to the Neanderthals? Several theories exist: cannibalism by humans, climate change, competition with humans, hybridization with humans, or did a “Neanderthal-eat-Neanderthal world . . . spread a mad cow-like disease that weakened and reduced populations of the large Eurasian human,” or was it a combination of these factors? From the guardian.co.uk:

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a stuy in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace. [...]

But not every team member agrees. “One set of cut marks does not make a complete case for cannibalism,” said Francesco d’Errico, of the Institute of Prehistory in Bordeaux. It was also possible that the jawbone had been found by humans and its teeth used to make a necklace, he said.

Hmmm, I know that chimpanzees often fight and sometimes eat each other.

Science reporting Bad science reporting exasperates scientists, even when scientists themselves are responsible.

Republicans and science

Hmmm, if carbon dioxide is natural, it can’t be bad, right?

Here is an idea: put Rep. Barton in a room and pump it full of carbon dioxide.

20 May 2009 (am)

NBA Last night’s Nuggets-Lakers game was close; I expect the series to have lots of games like this one:

Ultra marathons This won’t be a race that I do; I don’t like traffic. But the photo spread and the race report are entertaining.

Science
Here is a case where a water filled glass bowl started a fire! You can probably guess how.

Animal camouflage Katydids mimic animal droppings.

Social It appears that over time, the criteria to receive a Medal of Honor has changed; now-a-days it appears that one has to have died in the line of duty to get one.

19 May (afternoon)

Professional I spent the better part of an afternoon refereeing 4.5 pages of an 8 page mathematics paper. I’ll remember this the next time I am tempted to write in a sloppy manner. The author is talking about interesting stuff, but his/her writing and notation are so sloppy and imprecise that I am tempted to blow the rest of it off.

Politics: FiveThirtyEight lays out why spending cuts aren’t always the wisest way to go:

Although it is extremely hard to cut existing programs, it is easier to avoid launching new ones. But much of the new spending proposed by the president is for public investments with high rates of return. Failure to make these investments will actually make us poorer. For instance, if the government borrowed a trillion dollars at 4 percent and invested the money in projects with an annual return of 7 percent, we’d actually be richer each year by $30 billion than if we hadn’t made those investments. And because investment in the public sphere has been neglected for decades, there are thousands of shovel-ready projects with extremely high rates of return.

A specific example: Because a handful of low-clearance bottlenecks currently make it impossible to ship double-decker cargo containers along the northeast rail corridor, these containers must be carried by trucks. The result is bumper-to-bumper truck traffic along I-95, which has diverted a growing volume of truck traffic 200 miles west onto I-81. According to one study, the cost of eliminating the rail bottlenecks would be $6 billion, and the benefits would be more than $12 billion, not even counting the value of reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Failure to make investments like that would not be a smart move.

Religion and society
There is an excellent “line by line” skeptic’s guide to the Bible here. Note: this wouldn’t be news for any “lay Bible scholar” who accepts modern Biblical scholarship (e. g., most educated mainstream Christians and Jews who are interested in the Bible) but it does expose the absurdity of literal interpretation and fundamentalism.

Spiritual Experiences This is a very interesting article on the brain chemistry of so-called “spiritual experiences” (e. g., what part of the brain is activated and how such activation can be induced by drugs).

Skeptics and rational leaning believers alike might find this interesting.

Why I despise superstition This is the harm that “faith” (faith that some deity intervenes in the material world) can cause:

A one-time friend of a mother accused of homicide for praying while her daughter died says the mother believed that people get sick because they are sinning.

Althea Wormgoor took the witness stand Tuesday in the second day of the trial of Leilani Neumann. She is charged with second-degree reckless homicide in her daughter Madeline’s March 23, 2008, death in rural Weston.

Wormgoor testified that just before the girl died, Neumann put her arms in the air in prayer and praised God for being able to heal diabetes and cancer and make the girl 10 times better in the future.

Wormgoor says Neumann prayed that God was going to show his power in healing the child.

Silly Facebook is cracking down on “fake” facebook accounts. The trouble is, they are throwing off some people that have honest accounts but “fake sounding” names.

Silly part II I sometimes make cracks (oh, bad pun) about checking out the spandex clad ladies at running and walking races. But at least I am not this bad: video is NSFW, though it shows no nudity. (for the curious, the video was shot at a road race and shows close up of female spandex wrapped rear ends and is set to music).

No, I didn’t take the video; I got there by looking for “fast walking” on youtube as, well, I am interested in walking fast.

19 May 2009 (morning)

Workout notes yoga, then 8 miles of easy running on the East Peoria trail (41:11 out, 37:33 back, to the 4 mile mark on the pavement). Beautiful day, breezy, cool. I felt better after the first 2 miles.

Snark and other things

Paul Krugman
Dr. Krugman had a couple of interesting posts. One was on health care; it may be the case that we might end up with a health care plan that is more similar to the one that Hillary Clinton was pushing for rather than the one that President Obama campaigned on. Obama had thought that if we could get costs down, people would want to buy into the insurance program. Many, myself included, thought that this would be an easier sell politically, though at the time I said that I was ambivalent on this issue, though I thought that Obama’s plan was more viable on political grounds. But evidently a plan that is more similar to the one that Clinton campaigned on appears to be closer to what we will end up with.

Dr. Krugman backed the Clinton plan, but is being classy about it:

Actually, I don’t care who gets credit, as long as we actually get universal health care.

But Dr. Krugman’s bite is reserved for the Republicans!

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? [...]

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

Now you know where I get my disdain and contempt for conservatism.

Scientists I hang around with mathematicians at work, but in my day to day life I encounter many non-technically inclined people. I don’t get along with them very well; it is almost as if I have to walk on egg shells around them.

Why? Well, this is the kind of discourse that I am comfortable with:

Yesterday, I tore into a reeking pile of creationist bogosity by Peter Heck. This morning, he sends me email.

Dr. Myers,

Someone sent me a nasty email that included a link to your blog. I found it a pretty thorough shallacking! Not that I’m opposed to that. If I put arguments out in front of people, [...]

This is a rather disingenuous reply; he wasn’t just shellacked, he was exposed as a dishonest fraud who knew nothing at all about the subject he was critiquing. I didn’t just criticize a few niggling errors in his article, I ripped it apart from stem to stern and pointed out that he was ignorant and unscholarly…and now he comes back and offers the feeble excuse that he had three biologists look it over? Who were these biologists, and why didn’t they point out that the article was nothing but a crudely hacked together raft of creationist fallacies?

[...]
When creationists argue that they believe in microevolution, but that macroevolution is dubious, they’ve got it backwards. Large scale historical change was confirmed and thoroughly documented in the 19th century! Darwin was a bridge, who explained how small scale, natural processes could produce the known variation between species, and the triumph of 20th century biology was to confirm and expand upon our understanding of how those changes occurred. Neither macro nor micro evolution are speculative. Neither one is lacking in evidence.

Heck was merely flaunting the tedious ignorance of creationists, which is no longer ever surprising. He was also making a dishonest pretense to knowledge, which is also not surprising, and is one reason to never, ever trust anyone who claims to be a creationist — it’s a synonym for lying, stupid fraud. I don’t even trust his letter. Does anyone really believe that he will regard the series of arguments he made in his article as “hacked up”? I would bet that he’ll be thumping the same old lies again next time he preaches in front of his fellow phonies.

I recommend reading the whole article; it describes how the swine flu is an example of evolution in action. But what I wanted to highlight was the clarity and the straight forwardness in the speech and writing of scientists. There is none of the phoniness and sugar coating that one often sees in non scientific circles.

Religion and Woos

Friendly Atheist found that this was amusing:

God did it. Gee, let me tell you when I’ll believe that “god did it”: if I were to go out and, say, win the New York Marathon, then I’ll believe that some deity did it.

But in all honesty, this doesn’t upset me. After all, I don’t give up an evening to watch Dwight Howard give a physics lecture. I enjoy watching him play basketball because he is very good at it. And yes, he has one of the most impressive physiques I’ve ever seen.

If you want to know what I find troubling, go here. I hold the Secretary of Defense of the United States to a much higher standard in this area.

Some leftist criticism of President Obama

Workout notes Yesterday 2200 yard swim; it was unremarkable and designed to kick out the soreness. I haven’t practiced enough fast walking to have NOT been sore after a hard effort marathon.

Today I’ll do some light jogging and maybe something with my yoga teacher? We’ll see.

Education
The Boston Globe is reporting that elementary school teachers in Massachusetts don’t have the basic skills in mathematics to be able to effectively teach it. Duh.

MALDEN – Nearly three-quarters of the aspiring elementary school teachers who took the state’s licensing exam this year failed the new math section, according to results being released today that focus on the subject for the first time.

Education leaders said the high failure rate reflects what they feared, that too many elementary classroom and special education teachers do not have a strong background in math and are in many ways responsible for poor student achievement in the subject, even in middle and high schools.

Elementary school teachers, including those in charge of first-grade classrooms, are considered the front line of math instruction, providing the building blocks of computation and mathematical reasoning that students must master before tackling algebra, trigonometry, and calculus later in their academic lives.

Previously, elementary school teachers could potentially receive a state license without answering a single math question correctly on the general curriculum exam. That’s because math was folded in with the other subjects – language arts, history, social science, science, and child development – to generate an overall score. Now math is scored separately as a subtest of that exam.

This is not a shock. But if you want to be amused, read some of the reader comments, such as this one:

As a retired elementary classroom teacher I can verify the results of these tests. Many elementary classroom teachers were weak math students when they were in school and want nothing to do with teaching math in their classrooms. All they want to do all day long is teach reading. Many are math phobics, avoiding it like the plague. Sadly, they then pass this mindset to some of their students.

It was almost comical. Every time we got a raise they’d all come running down to my room asking how much more money they would be making next year because they had no clue how to do percentages. NO CLUE! And they were certified teachers. Science was just as bad. They wanted nothing to do with it either. Now, if you think this is bad and Massachusetts is at the vanguard of public education in this country, imagine what the teachers from say, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. must belike.

The sad situation is that elementary education now attracts too many poor students. Yes, there are some good ones, but I don’t see them as being the majority.

That is the problem; I don’t see this as a “we aren’t preparing the teachers” problem but more of a “we are certifying teachers who lack the ability to learn the material” problem. We simply have to make teaching a more attractive job if we want to make progress, and I don’t see us as a society doing that.

Religious Labels
I was pointed to this post from the Richard Dawkins site:

Disagreement over the definition of atheist and agnostic has cluttered up various threads here, scattering confusion in its wake like a muckspreader in autumn.

The cause of the confusion is that atheists and theists have different definitions of the words agnostic and atheist, and adamantly refuse to accept the validity of each other’s definitions.

Here is a short form of the definitions from the two separate points of view.

Theist version: An atheist is certain there is no God, an agnostic is not certain.

Atheist version: An atheist believes there is no God, an agnostic doesn’t know.

The two versions are only subtly different, but a great deal of hot air has been expended on this difference. [...]

There is a reason why some theists define atheism in these terms. If they define atheists as being 100% certain of the non-existence of God, then they can claim that atheists hold their view as a faith position. This appears to make some theists more comfortable, it frames the debate in more familiar terms – a religious battle between competing faiths. Also, by widening the definition of agnostic as far as possible, I suspect that some theists feel more comfortable with the idea that these waverers may in due course return to the one true faith.

There are very few self-described atheists who conform to the theists’ definition of atheism. This is because the great majority of atheists have a scientific understanding of the world, and do not hold their atheism as a matter of faith, but rather through their understanding of the balance of evidence. They are aware that in principle some new piece of evidence might turn up tomorrow, and they leave themselves open to that possibility, no matter how unlikely they believe it to be.

Emphasis mine. True, technically, an agnostic is one who thinks that the existence of a deity is unknowable (e. g., the opposite of “gnostic”). And in my case, I reject a deity that interferes in world affairs (e. g. puts “god in the gaps”) and I deny any “singular miracles”; I have no idea if there is some grand “universal spirit” that somehow set it all up or put it into motion. To be honest, it would be kind of fun to believe in such a thing, but I have no evidence for it.

Poltics

Jesse Ventura, the voice of reason???

Liberal Criticism of Obama (and the Democrats)

Of course, President Obama is catching all sorts of flack from his base; one need only to surf to Daily Kos and take a glance. He is viewed as a “corporate sell-out”, “no different from Bush”, “closet Republican”, etc.

But there is more serious criticism of him.

Here is some criticism of him (or at least of his initial direction) on health care:

Many experts have long agreed that a so-called “single-payer” plan is the ideal, because competition among private insurers who pay health-care bills inevitably causes them to spend big bucks trying to find and market policies to healthy and younger people at relatively low risk of health problems while avoiding sicker and older people with higher risks (and rejecting those with pre-existing conditions altogether), and also contesting and litigating many claims. A single payer saves all this money and focuses on caring for sick people and preventing the healthy from becoming sick. The other advantage of a single payer is it can use its vast bargaining power to negotiate lower prices from pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and suppliers.

Not surprisingly, insurance and drug companies have been dead-set against a single payer for years. And they’ve so frightened the public into thinking that “single payer” means loss of choice of doctor (that’s wrong — many single payer plans in other nations allow choices of medical deliverers) that politicians no longer even mention it.
[...]

But now the Medicare-like option is being taken off the table. Insurance and drug companies have thrown their weight around the Senate. And, sadly, the White House — eager to get a bill enacted in 2009 rather than risk it during the mid-term election year of 2010 — is signaling it’s open to other approaches. What other approaches? One would create a public insurance plan run by multiple regional third-party administrators. In other words, the putative “public plan” would be broken into little pieces, none of which could exert much bargaining leverage on Big Pharma and Big Insurance. These pieces would also be so decentralized that the drug companies and private insurers could easily bully (or bribe) regional third-party administrators.

Another approach now being considered in the Senate would have states create their own insurance plans. That’s even worse: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are used to buying off state legislators and officials. They’d just continue their current practices.

A third option is to create a public plan that pays for itself and, according to the office of Senator Charles Schumer, who came up with it, “adheres to private-insurance rules.” But adhering to private insurance rules is exactly what the public plan is not supposed to do. How can it possibly discipline private insurers and get good deals from drug companies and medical providers if it adheres to the same rules that private insurers have wangled?

This isn’t a “they sky is falling” post but rather “I don’t like the direction that I am seeing” post.

We also have the debate on what to do with the people who authorized torture:

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