10 June 2009 (am)

My “fun” articles for the day:

Athletics Rest day, though I’ll walk with my group. I’ll have more to say about this later. But for now I’ll share a cool “running/racing/training pace” calculator and the following article about racewalking:

There’s a running gag in my family that goes like this: We’ll be driving through some neighborhood and come upon one of those women (it’s always a woman) power-walking down the sidewalk. You know the type: wildly exaggerated stride, arms pumping furiously, sometimes with a small weight in each hand.

“Dork walker!” one of my kids will cry out.

Sometimes it’s me who does that.

Okay, it’s usually me.

I think I might have to stop now. For I have met some walkers, and they make a pretty good argument about why I might be joining them in the not-too-distant future.

Not the dork, er, power walkers. No, these are racewalkers, and they believe that once word gets out to the nation’s more than 70 million baby boomers, their sport could become the Next Big Thing.

“I want racewalking to become for baby boomers in their 50s, 60s and 70s what jogging was for them in their 20s,” says Brent Bohlen, author of the new book “BoomerWalk: Why Baby Boomers Should Replace Running and Jogging With Racewalking.”

It’s hard to dispute Bohlen’s main point: Racewalking is low-impact. As we age, the sport is much easier on our backs, feet, ankles and knees than running. [...]

Well, I sometimes attempt to racewalk (and I’ll say more later) but no, racewalking will never be popular. The reason: it is far too technical to learn, and most people don’t want to work that hard to learn a fitness activity.

Evidence: witness the fitness swimmers in a pool; only a few swim properly; most do some sort of “not even close” breaststroke or just thrash around in the water. Or, check out softball: how many recreational fast pitch teams do you see? 40-50 years ago, it was mostly fast pitch, but fast pitch takes a long time to learn.

NBA The Magic shot a phenomenal percentage from the field and still needed two free throws with 0.5 seconds left to win 108-104; note that Kobe Bryant (normally a 90 percent free throw shooter in the playoffs) only went 5 of 10 from the line.

So the Lakers played hard and I see them winning the next game and closing it out in either 5 or 6 games.

Politics The conservatives are just making stuff up about President Obama. Here is a sample from Salon’s latest list:

Myth: Obama can’t function without a teleprompter, even uses it for answers at press conferences.

Who’s spreading it: Rush Limbaugh; TeleprompterPresident.com

What they believe: “Barack Obama’s use of teleprompters is becoming legendary. He doesn’t go anywhere without them and rarely, if ever, speaks without their assistance.” This has been a theme of Rush Limbaugh’s since early in the campaign last year. Sean Hannity has joked, rather ickily, on Fox News about whether Obama sleeps with the teleprompter between him and Michelle. Right-wing bloggers argue Obama is totally incompetent without the prompter and can’t speak off the cuff. The theory is widespread enough that a Web site has been devoted to it: TeleprompterPresident.com, which not only studiously collects Obama’s bloopers but also retails other preposterous Obama conspiracies. (Note the nice Photoshop job in this “picture” of Air Force One flying over New York City’s skyline.)

What is real: Presidents have been using teleprompters for more than 50 years, and notecards for even longer. It’s true that Obama uses the prompter, specifically, more than most of his predecessors. He uses them for casual announcements and the lead-ins to press briefings, and on the campaign trail last year, he even set his teleprompter up in the ring of a rodeo. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen recently started reading from Obama’s script, after an aide mixed up the two leaders’ speeches.

But charges that he is “incapable of forming his remarks and speeches without reading them verbatim,” or that he avoided one-on-one contact with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown because the teleprompter would have made it awkward, are insane. Obama has written two books, given hundreds of unscripted speeches and interviews on the campaign trail, and even now goes on in great detail, and great length, during question-and-answer sessions with voters, lawmakers and reporters.

“Whether he’s using notecards or a different method of reading his notes, I don’t think anybody cares,” a White House aide told Salon, after asking incredulously why this article was even being written. In fact, listening to Obama speak without notes, it’s tempting to think his advisors want him to use the teleprompter in part because it keeps him from getting too involved in what he’s talking about, rather than because he can’t speak without it. At his first prime time presidential press conference, his answers dragged on so long he had time for only a handful of questions. But the aide wouldn’t concede that his boss is — left to his own devices — a little wordy.

I emphasized this because if I try to lecture without notes, I often get too involved with a nuance and end up getting undisciplined. Believe me, I know enough calculus to teach it without notes.

Back to the Salon article: there is much more there, including the “Obama is a fascist”, “Obama is a socialist”, claims, etc.

Why the Republicans are being crazy: Obama’s approval ratings are still good. Evidently people know that the previous messes took a while to build up to and we’ll have to spend time digging ourselves out.

Of course, one Republican teased me about Obama talking more about Jesus than Bush did.

I can’t say that this is my favorite aspect of him. But I really don’t mind someone using a religious figure as a good example and that is what President Obama appears to be doing (“in the best that your religious tradition has to offer, you are told to feed the hungry, cure the sick, etc.”). On the other hand, President Bush said that he had conversations with his deity and that he was told to invade this country, etc.

That is a huge difference.

Security It is probably not a good idea to enlist the help of children to “spot terrorists”.

Global warming has affected the acidity levels of the oceans thereby endangering valuable sea based resources.

Religion and Science: read a back and forth over the interplay between a naturalistic philosophy and science. Yes, atheist scientists often debate this topic among themselves.

Religion, Atheism, Morals: Religion doesn’t solve the “what is moral” problem.

Evidence: for one example, read the Bible. It is full of horrific divinely sanctioned actions; stuff that is clearly immoral. So how do we KNOW that this stuff is immoral; after all it was the deity telling people to murder, kill innocents, take virgins, etc.

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