14 October 09 (am)

Workout notes 3 miles (34 minutes) on the first Precor, 1 mile (11 minutes) on another stepper. At the edge? The knee and hamstring didn’t hurt but I felt a “thereness”.

Then I swam 2000 yards: 500 (9:30!!!), 250 drill/swim (zoomers), 5 x 50 on 1 (47-48), 250 drill/swim (zoomers), 5 x 50 on 1 (48), 250 strokes (side, back, etc), 2 x 100 (1:38 each) on 2, 25 fly (gingerly!), 25 back.

The shoulder felt ok; I focused on breathing on my off side and was VERY careful.

Note: I wore my new trail shoes.

Posts

One reason I am feeling better: it is looking as if we are going to get some health care reform. No, it won’t be perfect, but it will help. It doesn’t hurt that the insurance companies are fighting like crazy to keep their obscene profits:

The health-insurance industry has finally revealed itself for what it is.

Background: The industry hates the idea that’s emerged from the Senate Finance Committee of lowering penalties on younger and healthier people who don’t buy insurance. Relying on an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurers say this means new enrollees will be older and less healthy — which will drive up costs. And, says the industry, these costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Proposed taxes on high-priced “Cadillac” policies will also be passed on to consumers. As a result, premiums will rise faster and higher than the government projects.

It’s an eleventh-hour bombshell.

But the bomb went off under the insurers. The only reason these costs can be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums is because there’s not enough competition among private insurers to force them to absorb the costs by becoming more efficient. Get it? Health insurers have just made the best argument yet about why a public insurance option is necessary.

Right now they run their markets and set their prices, and pass on any increased costs directly to consumers. That’s what they’re threatening to do if the legislation attempts to squeeze, even slightly, the colossal profits they plan to make off of thirty million new paying customers.

Ignore the conservatives; get that public option in!

Do you think that I am being to hard on the conservatives?

Well, I’ll say this: there ARE some smart conservatives; they run businesses, serve in the military (at all ranks including flag rank), and a few are scientists (very few, in terms of percentage).

But they are beholden to their loony base:

Any Republican that shows just the slightest bit of sanity is shouted down by the loons.

Of course, their organizations continue to lie.

Science: did you know that a mother’s cancer can infect their newborn?

A startling case in Japan has confirmed that pregnant women with cancer can pass the disease to their fetuses. These transmissions, normally blocked by the placenta, are rare, so the work likely won’t change how doctors screen or care for pregnant women. But scientists say the case could help illuminate how cancer foils the body’s immune system.

In early 2007, a 28-year-old Japanese woman gave birth to a girl. Thirty-six days later, the mother was hospitalized with vaginal bleeding, which became uncontrollable. Doctors diagnosed leukemia, and she soon died. The baby developed normally until age 11 months, when a huge tumor appeared in her cheek. A biopsy determined the cancer was not sarcoma–a cancer of certain connective tissues–but a leukemic tumor somehow trapped in the child’s cheek.

The doctors alerted cell biologist Mel Greaves of the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton Surrey, United Kingdom, who studies transmissible cancers. Scientists had suspected mother-to-fetus cancer in other cases with strong circumstantial evidence (especially with leukemia and melanoma, which both metastasize readily). But no one had done genetic tests to prove the cancer had grown from a single source and wasn’t just an unfortunate coincidence.

In their investigation, Greaves and colleagues discovered incipient cancer cells in routine blood samples taken from the child at birth, strongly suggesting that the transmission happened in utero. They also examined a DNA sequence unique in each case of leukemia, the BCR-ABL1 sequence. It was identical in mother and daughter. Finally, tests showed the child’s cancer cells were almost all maternal cells, with no genetic material from the father. This indicated that the transmission path was mother to fetus, not the reverse. The team lays out its evidence in a paper published online 12 October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greaves and colleagues also determined how cancer survived inside the fetus, whose immune system should have destroyed the mother’s cells. They found that the cancer cells were missing a large region from a stretch of the sixth human chromosome known as 6p, which produces surface markers that immune cells latch on to. In short, Greaves says, “the cancer succeeded because it was immunologically invisible.”

Science and Religion: Mano Singham is writing an interesting series; here is one bit of it:

One can sometimes use the consensus views of scientists about religion as evidence for some propositions about religion. As an example, suppose we take the new atheists’ statement that science and religion are incompatible. The basis of this claim is that advances in science have made the god hypothesis increasingly redundant, that there is simply no need to believe in the existence of such an entity, and to invoke it is to turn one’s back on methodological naturalism which is a foundational principle of modern science.

One consequence of this argument is that science as advanced even more, we would expect that the number of disbelieving scientists, especially those who are leaders in their fields and thus more intimately familiar with the frontiers of scientific research, should increase with time. As Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins said: “You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.”

As a result we might expect some circumstantial evidence in support of the claim that increasing depth of knowledge about science leads to greater disbelief. And there is. In medieval times or earlier there is no evidence that many scientists were disbelievers, unless they were keeping it secret. This is possible since death was a common punishment for heretics. But we have no way of really knowing the situation back then.

But with the enlightenment things began to change for the better. As Edward Larson and Larry Witham reported in a study published in Nature in 1998, at least in the 20th century there has been a steep drop from nearly 28% to 7% in the number of leading scientists who believe in a ‘personal god’, while the number of disbelievers and doubters rose from nearly 74% to 93%. If the numbers had gone the other way, that as science learned more and more about how the world worked that the number of religious scientists increased, then that would cast some doubt on the claim of the new atheists, although such data, depending as it does on people’s beliefs, can never be conclusive about the truth or falsity of any proposition.