20 September 09

Workout notes I finished my workout with some yoga and racewalking drills; nothing hurt though both calves were tight. I started it by doing 3100 yards of swimming: 10 x (25 free, 25 back), 10 x (25 drill, 25 swim) (no fins), 10 x (25 drill, 25 swim) (fins), 10 x 50 free on 1 (form; 46, then the rest were 47-48). I was going to try 1000 but wasn’t into it.

Then a swim babe was in the next lane and she made an effort to catch me on some of the 50s, so I thought “I’ll give her a head start and keep going until I lap her”. So I did; I caught up to her rather quickly; the 250s were 4:04, 8:08, and I lapped her 12 laps (600 yards into it). So I kept going: 12:15 and then 16:24 at 1000. I was tired and though I was gaining on her again I wasn’t quite in position to lap her a second time.

Then I cooled down, did some yoga on my own, etc.

This was my fastest 1000 since December 17, 2008.

Note: tug behind my knee wasn’t there, but both calves felt tight.

Other stuff
Science: this article about the sex areas of our brains were interesting. We humans are complicated animals.

The start of the article (on how a woman’s brain tumor was discovered; she was having strong sexual experiences that were mental in origin) is fascinating. They go on to describe an experiment where MRIs of brains were taken as people viewed others in swimsuits; if the person in the swimsuit was attractive the brain showed a different pattern.

Speaking of science: Jerry Coyne goes off on someone who evidently doesn’t understand what scientists actually do with their time.

And then Wood adds a footnote:

We don’t read in order to benefit in this way from fiction. We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on — because it is alive and we are alive. It is amusing to watch evolutionary biology tie itself up in circularities when trying to answer the question, ‘why do humans spend so much time reading fiction when this yields no obvious evolutionary benefits?’ The answer tend either to be utilitarian — we read in order to find out about our fellow citizens, and this has a Darwinian utility — or circular: we read because fiction pushes certain ‘pleasure buttons.’

Well, the first part is fine, but really, Professor Wood, we evolutionary biologists hardly tie ourselves up in knots about this question. Although I’m a professional in the field, I have never encountered a discussion of the adaptive significance of reading fiction, even from those evolutionary psychologists who love to masticate ideas like this. No respectable evolutionist would bother with the question, “What was the adaptive value of ‘novel-reading’ genes?” In contrast, Wood implies that this kind of story-telling is a major preoccupation of our field. Perhaps he’ll supply us with an extensive list of evolutionary studies of fiction-reading.

Reading is a recent innovation: it appeared about 5000 years ago, 0.07% of the time since we branched off from the lineage that lead to our closest living relatives. Fiction is even younger: many regard the first novel as The Tale of Genji, written about a millenium ago.

That’s not enough time for a “fiction-reading module” to evolve.

Lesson to self: never, never “call out” smart people.

In all honesty, most of us make unwarranted assumptions about what other professionals do in their field; that is why I like having academic friends in many disciplines and why I enjoy reading their blogs. Also, if something sounds weird to me, I ASK before making an assumption.

Politics Rick Perry says that Texas isn’t in a recession.

Essay: Frank Rich made me think here:

Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.

Time put Beck on its cover this week. Man of the Year may not be far behind. Beck is not, as many liberals assume, merely the latest incarnation of Rush Limbaugh. He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents — and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts. [...]

eck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

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