No Go For Farmdale…

I am going swimming and will try to get to the course and take some photos.

Here is what I think is bothering me.

Posts

Jerry Coyne’s book is discussed at Sandwalk. Here you can see the differences in point of view (the effects of the mechanisms of evolution)

President Obama addresses us on Health Care Reform: takes on the health insurance industry.

College Cross Country

I helped out at a college cross country meet. Unfortunately, my leg started to ache at the end (standing around in the cold I think); we’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

No, I didn’t take these photos and these weren’t from today’s meet.

Waiting for the start (I was a clock operator)

Ready to rumble!

16 October 09 (am)

Workout notes 2000 yard swim; 500 warm up, 250 drill/swim, 5 x 200 on the 3:30 (3:19, 17, 17, 17, 15), 250 off stroke cool down. The shoulder didn’t like fly; I think that is where I dinged it. So for a while, I’ll do fly with fins when I do it at all.

Ultras

I’ve signed up for the Farmdale 32 mile ultra tomorrow; the course will be a complete sea of mud. Frankly, given the state of my lower hamstring/upper calf, my chances of finishing are remote. But I can do one loop and declare myself to have been in the 8 miler, though I am going to bring gear as if I will attempt to finish it all.

The time limit is 9 hours which means that walking it all will be all but impossible, given the mud.

Does this bottle make my butt look big? That was from 2007 where I was second to last overall and dead last among the males (walked the 33 mile course the whole way).

Obama Asked “Why Do People Hate You?” By Fourth Grader (VIDEO)

Note: the President is right; lots of people like him.

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(click photo for larger version)

As you can see, his “poll of polls” approval ratings is about 52 percent.

(link to Real Clear Politics)

A Note on Racism in the South

Many were shocked by this:

Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace in Tangipahoa Parish, has refused to issue a marriage license to Beth Humphrey and Terrence McKay because he says these marriages don’t last long and he’s concerned for any potential children they may have.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

The couple says they’ll consult with the US Department of Justice about filing a discrimination suit. If these marriages were not permitted, one has to wonder who would be president of the United States right now.

Anyone who has lived in the south wouldn’t be shocked. The last two states to remove the ban on interracial marriage (which was not enforceable) were South Carolina (1998) and Alabama (2000).

In 1998, only 62 percent of those in South Carolina said “yes” to removing the ban:

Alabama became the last state with such language in its organic law in 1998 when South Carolina voters approved a measure to remove similar wording from their state’s constitution. In South Carolina, about 62 percent of voters favored lifting the ban.

In 2000 in Alabama, it was 60 percent.

Don’t tell me that this part of the country doesn’t have BIG problem with race, and don’t tell me that much of the heated rhetoric directed at President Obama is not affected by his race.

Hey Republicans, This is Class…

Of course, Republicans will probably criticize the President for this too.

Maddow confronts Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips, pt. 1/2 – Daily Kos TV (beta)

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Maddow confronts Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips, pt. 2/2 – Daily Kos TV (beta)

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15 October 2009

Workout notes 4 miles on the Riverplex stepper/elliptical; this took about 33 minutes and I quit at the correct time. Then yoga with Ms. Vickie.

Posts

Surprised? Wingnuts are taking one of Robert Reich’s academic lectures out of context so as to cast health care reform plans as having “death panels”.

Economy: Paul Krugman notes that many of the economic troubles started when the “best and brightest” economics graduate students went to Wall Street instead of academia. Note: he is a very bright guy himself so this is hardly an anti-intellectual screed.

Science: where did your ear bones come from? Believe it or not: your jaw.

Republicans again: double standard? They are fine with Aaron Schock’s ab shots but not so much with Meghan McCan’s “sort of” boob shot. Leave it to Billy Dennis to find some excuse to show a boob shot. (no, I am NOT complaining!)

Racist Idiot: a Justice of the Peace in Louisiana “is not a racist” but refuses to marry interracial couples. Note: it is a Republican that drew my attention to this article. Kudos to him!

14 October 09 (pm)

Injury update: forgot to take NSAIDs today; that is an excellent sign.

Science: sometimes ideas that are widely held ARE challenged; this is how.

General relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity and spacetime, has been pretty successful over the years. It’s passed numerous tests in the Solar System, scored a Nobel-worthy victory with the binary pulsar, and gets the right answer even when extrapolated back to the first one second after the Big Bang. But no scientific theory is sacred. Even though GR is both aesthetically compelling and an unquestioned empirical success, it’s our job as scientists to keep probing it in different ways. Especially when it comes to astrophysics, where we need dark matter and dark energy to explain what we see, it makes sense to put Einstein to the most stringent tests we can devise.

So here is a new such test, courtesy of Rachel Bean of Cornell. She combines a suite of cosmological data, especially measurements of weak gravitational lensing from the Hubble Space Telescope, to see whether GR correctly describes the behavior of large-scale structure in the universe. And the surprising thing is — it doesn’t. At the 98% confidence level, Rachel finds that general relativity is inconsistent with the data. I’m not sure why we haven’t been reading about this in the science media or even on other blogs — it’s certainly a newsworthy result. Admittedly, the smart money is still that there is some tricky thing that hasn’t yet been noticed and Einstein will eventually come through the victor, but this is serious work by a respected cosmologist. Either the result is wrong, and we should be working hard to find out why, or it’s right, and we’re on the cusp of a revolution.

The article goes on to talk about the different kinds of curvature (curvature due to curved space and curved time) and shows a graph of the data which shows an unexpected peak.

But the bigger point is that this challenge is going through the peer review process; that is something that crackpots and the crackpot enablers will never understand in 1,000,000 years.

Political Cooperation: Senator Kerry and Graham on Energy:

However, we refuse to accept the argument that the United States cannot lead the world in addressing global climate change. We are also convinced that we have found both a framework for climate legislation to pass Congress and the blueprint for a clean-energy future that will revitalize our economy, protect current jobs and create new ones, safeguard our national security and reduce pollution.

Our partnership represents a fresh attempt to find consensus that adheres to our core principles and leads to both a climate change solution and energy independence. It begins now, not months from now — with a road to 60 votes in the Senate.

It’s true that we come from different parts of the country and represent different constituencies and that we supported different presidential candidates in 2008. We even have different accents. But we speak with one voice in saying that the best way to make America stronger is to work together to address an urgent crisis facing the world.

This process requires honest give-and-take and genuine bipartisanship. In that spirit, we have come together to put forward proposals that address legitimate concerns among Democrats and Republicans and the other constituencies with stakes in this legislation. We’re looking for a new beginning, informed by the work of our colleagues and legislation that is already before Congress.

First, we agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security. That is why we are advocating aggressive reductions in our emissions of the carbon gases that cause climate change. We will minimize the impact on major emitters through a market-based system that will provide both flexibility and time for big polluters to come into compliance without hindering global competitiveness or driving more jobs overseas.[...]

Failure to act comes with another cost. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.

The message to those who have stalled for years is clear: killing a Senate bill is not success; indeed, given the threat of agency regulation, those who have been content to make the legislative process grind to a halt would later come running to Congress in a panic to secure the kinds of incentives and investments we can pass today. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action.

We are confident that a legitimate bipartisan effort can put America back in the lead again and can empower our negotiators to sit down at the table in Copenhagen in December and insist that the rest of the world join us in producing a new international agreement on global warming. That way, we will pass on to future generations a strong economy, a clean environment and an energy-independent nation.

Airline Pilots and Pay: this post by Michael Moore alerted me to the problem; there was also a New York Times article about what has happened to an established pilot. I honestly didn’t know this; I thought that pilots made a ton of money.

Politics Bradley graduate Jim Ascot is running for the IL-7 US House position.