Rocket Run 5K 2009: Reality

It was cool and breezy; perfect for this time of year. Nevertheless, as I warmed up my legs felt heavy; warming up took a while.

Still mile 1 came at 7:34; but this was partially wind aided and downhill. Still, the fantasy felt good and I aimed to catch the big pack ahead of me.

I never did. As we gained back the elevation and turned into the wind, reality set in: 8:02 or 15:36. Breaking 24 wasn’t going to happen and sub 25 wasn’t assured.

In the last stretch the pack ahead of me started to pull away and I could do little about it; I did pass one young man who was throwing up though.

You have two uphills just prior to the finish and I saw the clock at 24:2x and I had to pick it up; I wanted an “official sub 25″ but didn’t get it; I had to settle for a “watch” sub 25.

Interestingly enough, my place at the end of 1 mile was my place in the race, save the one sick young man. I was running in “never never” land between two large packs.

Analysis: when I was running those low 24s, I was also running a couple of 7-8 mile runs a week plus a weekend race and I haven’t done that in a while For now, running will be a way of getting an aerobic workout while I work on my walking technique.

Yes, one can walk hard enough to get out of breath, but when I do that my technique just turns to trash.

Healthcare Saturday 18 July 09

Note: I had a link to something; it turned out to be a hoax and it was therefore deleted.

The Congressional Budge Office PDF report is here; this is legitimate.

Yes, you’ll hear lots of stuff from the other side.

So, just ask yourself a simple question: just what have they been right about, ever? How about: what have they been right about during the previous administration? Listen.

Health Care Friday

Paul Krugman is too subtle. Please, tell us what you really think.

Actually, 1 2007 proposal by one of those 6 might actually provide meaningful reform; it has the support of some Republicans too.

Note that the Republicans are trotting out the CBO report which predicts that the current plan will NOT reduce health care costs. Too bad that they didn’t pay attention to the same office previously.

Virginia GOP candidate raises specter of civil war: “We may very well be called to pledge our lives” to defeat Obama – Daily Kos TV (beta)

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Typical Republican!

“Tyranny” means “we lost the last election”.

A micro mention…

I am pathetic…I’ll take whatever “fame” I can get.

White Men Can’t Judge – Sotomayor: Judgment Days | The Daily Show; today’s GOP

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Pat Buchanan: noisily ignorant of the basic facts.

Republican web game: pornographic and has links to anti-Semitic books. Hat tip: Rose.

Republicans: Obama’s birth certificate remains an issue with them.

Life is good.

17 July 09 (am)

Workout notes I’ll do something akin to a glorified warm up followed by stretching; perhaps 2-4 miles. It is too pretty to NOT get outside a bit.

Update: 3 miles of recovery walking, push-ups (50, 30, 20), stretching, toe raises. Pretty day!

Articles

Science, Evolution and Nature Here is an article that suggests that “politeness” (e. g., turn taking) evolved way before humans did. What is especially interesting to me is that this sort of strategy would tend to evolve into behavior for game theoretic reasons.

Taking turns isn’t just a nice idea. It may be as much a part of the theory of evolution as survival of the fittest – at least that’s the conclusion that British researchers reached after running a genetic simulation through thousands of generations of evolutionary change.

Turn-taking behavior seem to come naturally to humans, whether it’s standing in line or deciding who’s going to do the dishes tonight. But such behavior has been observed in a wide variety of other species as well: Chimps take turns grooming each other, for example, and penguins take turns minding their eggs.

“It is far from obvious how turn-taking evolved without language or insight in animals shaped by natural selection to pursue their individual self-interests,” University of Leicester psychologist Andrew Colman said last week in a news release about the research.

Colman and a university colleague of his, Lindsay Browning, looked into the evolution of politeness for a paper published in the September issue of the journal Evolutionary Ecology Research – not by studying actual monkeys, penguins or line-standers, but by setting up a series of genetic simulations where they could dictate the rules of the evolutionary game.

The experiment was as much an exercise in game theory as in evolutionary biology. Colman and Browning programmed a computer to play a variety of games in which the payoff varied depending on whether the simulated players made the same or different choices.

Climate Change: may have direct political effects. Right now, enemies Pakistan and India have worked out a water sharing scheme; it has worked for 50 plus years. But climate change may well change the water balance (much of the water comes from seasonal melt).

1960, India and Pakistan agreed to divide the six tributaries that form the Indus River. India claimed the three eastern branches, which flow through Punjab. The water in the other three, which pass through Jammu and Kashmir, became Pakistan’s. The countries set a cap on how much land Kashmir could irrigate and agreed to strict regulations on how and where water could be stored. The resulting Indus Waters Treaty has survived three wars and nearly 50 years. It’s often cited as an example of how resource scarcity can lead to cooperation rather than conflict.

But the treaty’s success depends on the maintenance of a status quo that will be disrupted as the world warms. Traditionally, Kashmir’s waters have been naturally regulated by the glaciers in the Himalayas. Precipitation freezes during the coldest months and then melts during the agricultural season. But if global warming continues at its current rate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates, the glaciers could be mostly gone from the mountains by 2035. Water that once flowed for the planting will flush away in winter floods.

Health Care Alan Colmes talks about the Republican public relations strategy; look for the same old buzzwards. Of course, detractors aren’t above feeding false information.

Kevin Drum does a righteous smackdown of Bryan Caplan for arguing that we should oppose the House health reform bill because it would raise taxes in the midst of a recession. As Kevin points out, the provisions wouldn’t take effect for several years; it takes real chutzpah, given that obvious point, for Caplan to accuse me of being disingenuous. [...]

What’s striking here is the cynicism. Feldstein, in particular, is surely a good enough economist to know better. But he and Caplan and others are prepared to grab any argument they can to block progressive reform.

But things might be looking up; even the American Medical Association has backed the House version of the health care bill?

So, what are the Republicans really afraid of? Here is a punchy, amusing cartoon.

World Politics
President Obama is reasonably popular in the world as a whole even though, when it comes to world strategy, our policies aren’t all that different NOW than they were when President Bush was still in office.

No, I am NOT making an “Obama = Bush” argument; for example I doubt that President Obama would have invaded Iraq. But what I am saying that, when it comes to dealing with the world, tone matters. Showing a bit of humility and explaining why we are doing what we are doing and admitting that we are sometimes wrong matters; this “we are going to this, god told me to do this and you are either with us or against us” doesn’t win any friends.

Sure, there are some who don’t like President Obama’s tone, but most Americans voted for what President Obama is bringing in terms of tone.

Racism and the Old GOP

Last night, Rachel Maddow had on Pat Buchanan; he is livid over Judge Sotomayor.

Note how he comes off issue (oh yes, Mr. Buchanan, the grade inflation that you are referring to is very real…TODAY…things were different when Judge Sotomayor was in college)

Disclaimer: I benefited from affirmative action to get into college. But, in my graduating class, my academic rank was 269 out of 969 at the United States Naval Academy; (I had a relatively weak first year where I was slightly below the median). So, no greatness for me, but I wasn’t the bottom of the barrel either, and I did go on to earn a Ph. D. in mathematics and publish research (including half of my thesis).

16 July 09 (am)

I am drinking my coffee and getting ready to go to yoga; afterward I’ll walk about 5 miles. I know where my redwinged blackbird friend is and am ready for him.

Update Yoga, then 2 miles on the track in 24:22 (drills, warm up); then 2-1 outside (.5 mile out and back then the Michael Bridge course; total was about 52 minutes) for a total of 6 miles.

PM: Jubilee State Park with Olivia; about 90 minutes worth (4-5 miles)

Science ID/creationists point out that Thomas Jefferson was a creationist. Sure, though Origin of Species was published in 1859. These people are idiots.

Science and the internet: Bill Gates is publishing Feynman’s lecture notes.

Politics: We have a Democrat who has declared for 2010 to run against Aaron Schock (IL-18). Good luck.

Walking: What I am after.

Me, walking at my PR pace in 2003 (30:42 for the 5K, or a 9:54 mpm pace)

Now compare my form to that of the two walkers here: the fast one on the outside or the slower one on the inside:

Now which do I resemble more?

15 July PM

Workout notes A hot sticky walk with Olivia along the rivertrail. The red wing blackbird has started to perch on the other side of the trail so as to build up more momentum for it’s dive bombing.

Note: check out this page and scroll all of the way down to see a blackbird attack.

This isn’t me, but this is what they do.

Science and Religion: here is an interesting essay from Cosmic Variance

Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let’s ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? Or, to make it slightly more empirical, was the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision within one percent of the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision?

This isn’t supposed to be a trick question; I don’t have any special knowledge or theories about the interior of Alpha Centauri that you don’t have. The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved. [...]

Now let’s turn to a closely analogous question. There is some historical evidence that, about two thousand years ago in Galilee, a person named Jesus was born to a woman named Mary, and later grew up to be a messianic leader and was eventually crucified by the Romans. (Unruly bloke, by the way — tended to be pretty doctrinaire about the number of paths to salvation, and prone to throwing moneychangers out of temples. Not very “accommodating,” if you will.) The question is: how did Mary get pregnant?

One approach would be to say: we just don’t know. We weren’t there, don’t have any reliable data, etc. Should just be quiet.

The scientific approach is very different. We have two theories. One theory is that Mary was a virgin; she had never had sex before becoming pregnant, or encountered sperm in any way. Her pregnancy was a miraculous event, carried out through the intervention of the Holy Ghost, a spiritual manifestation of a triune God. The other theory is that Mary got pregnant through relatively conventional channels, with the help of (one presumes) her husband. According to this theory, claims to the contrary in early (although not contemporary) literature are, simply, erroneous.

There’s no question that these two theories can be judged scientifically. One is conceptually very simple; all it requires is that some ancient texts be mistaken, which we know happens all the time, even with texts that are considerably less ancient and considerably better corroborated. The other is conceptually horrible; it posits an isolated and unpredictable deviation from otherwise universal rules, and invokes a set of vaguely-defined spiritual categories along the way. By all of the standards that scientists have used for hundreds of years, the answer is clear: the sex-and-lies theory is enormously more compelling than the virgin-birth theory.

The same thing is true for various other sorts of miraculous events, [...]

BINGO. That is what irritates me about religion; all too many say “we must suspend judgment” if the claim is at all religious. Nonsense. Most of what we know comes from the fact that we assume that the laws of nature are working properly (even if we have an incomplete understanding of them).

When you go to the basement and look at a pool of water on the floor and observe a pipe joint that has a tiny bit of green on it that is right above the pool of water, you don’t say “I don’t know what happened; maybe a devil formed this water pool out of nothing”, do you?

Politics The House has released the details of its proposed health care plan. Robert Reich prepares us for the onslaught:

Don’t believe critics who say the surtax will harm small business. According to the Center for Tax Justice, it would hit only five percent of small business owners — realistically defined as taxpayers for whom small business income makes up at least half of their adjusted gross income (from schedule C businesses, partnerships, family farms, and Subchapter S corporations).

Besides, only the profits of a small business would be taxed. The owner of a small business deducts money paid to employees as compensation, as well as operating costs. So, for example, a couple whose income comes entirely from a small business would have to earn more than $350,000 in business profits — after paying all their expenses, including salaries — before the surcharge would affect them at all. And if they earned more, the surcharge wouldn’t reduce their incentive to hire more employees because they pay employees with pre-tax income. And not even purchases of equipment to expand business operations would be affected because most small business owners can write off up to $250,000 of the costs of such equipment immediately.

A surtax is easy to administer. And the whole idea is easy to understand. Tax the wealthy to keep everyone healthy. Not even a bad bumper sticker.

The key is to get a few of the “blue dogs” aboard.

Republicans

Their own words. Note the utter lack of proof of the charges: