Ultramarathons ……

There is way too much truth here:

Fall 2009 Day One

Classes start (for me) in 55 minutes. 2 mile walk, 2200 yard swim, 3 mile walk. Right leg: behind the knee is yapping (rain on the way?) The swim went fine.

Note to self: do the Achilles exercises; I need those when I run.

Tonight: yoga with Ms. Vickie (partner yoga).

Science Science is often stranger than science fiction: there is a newly discovered bizarre animal that lives on the ocean floor in deep waters; evidently it hasn’t changed much in hundreds of millions of years.

Politics
Thank you Senator McCain.

Frogs
Evidently traffic noise is interfering with froggie love!

Frogs in the Australian metropolis of Melbourne are having trouble getting together to mate, and the culprit is traffic noise, according to Kirsten Parris, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne. One species of frog is even changing the pitch of its love song to be heard above the roar of the road, she reported on 20 August at the International Congress of Ecology in Brisbane, Australia.

Parris visited many urban ponds and pools inhabited by frogs, measuring traffic noise, which is, unfortunately, at the same low frequencies as many frog mating calls. For a frog such as the onomatopoeic ‘pobblebonk’ (Limnodynastes dumerilii), she found that a call that could originally be heard by a female 800 metres away may only carry 98 metres above 60 decibels of traffic noise, an average value for Melbourne.

She has also discovered that the southern brown tree frog (Litoria ewingii) seems to be compensating for the traffic noise by increasing the pitch of its calls1 (listen to before and after calls).

Parris suggests that installing noise barriers at strategic points around a road could help urban frogs to hear each other. Creating habitats where they thrive — such as ponds with sloping rather than steep sides — would also make sense, she adds. “Cities provide some of the last habitat for a range of frog species around the world. So if we only worry about conserving frogs and their habitats outside cities, some of these frogs may well go extinct.”

“Some frog species,” she says, “are very sensitive to environmental changes”, but “others are quite adaptable and can persist in urban habitats if we gave them a bit of help”.

Ted Kennedy: RIP

25 August 09 (pm)

Workout notes Public track meet; warmed up 2 miles, ran 1600 in 6:54 (1:40, 1:41, 1:44, 1:50). I didn’t push hard enough during the last lap, but this was my best “flat” mile of the year and my 800 meter split was only 3 seconds slower than my 800 meter race two weeks ago.

But then I had no time between the conclusion of this and the 5000 meter; that was a disaster: 9:46, 9:37, 9:14, 1:05. I actually had to walk twice during the first mile; I couldn’t catch my breath! By the start of the 3rd mile I felt better and was able to pick it up somewhat during the last 800.

Other stuff

Ok….

Michelle Bachman: “prayer and fasting will defeat health care reform”.

I wonder if her and her followers would consider fasting for a very, very, very long time?

Town halls: isn’t it a bit hypocritical for old people to whine about socialism when they are being supported by it?

Politics
Will Dick Durbin be the new Senate Majority Leader soon? Harry Reid is in trouble.

Back to Religious crackpottery: For a time the Illinois Family Institute was considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be an anti-gay hate group. They are off the list for now…and Mike Huckabee will be speaking to them.

Education: do we undervalue it in the US because it comes too easily?