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.

Cold, wet rainy…yuck

Workout notes I’ll update when I finish. It is 40 F and raining…what else is new. It is supposed to rain over the next 3 days.

Other stuff I posted this on facebook:

I’ve heard others say stuff about my facebook friends. Here is what is going on:

1. I have lots of facebook friends who were Naval Academy classmates. These folks are overwhelmingly conservative Republicans; some care about politics; others don’t.

2. I have racewalking friends (all over the map in terms of geography, political and religious beliefs)

3. I have ultramarathon friends (people who run or walk distances longer than a marathon for fun). They too are all over the map geographically and politically and religiously)

4. Because I spend some time on political links, i’ve picked up political friends; mostly liberals/progressives/Democratic.

5. I’ve also spent time with the non-believer community (atheist, some agnostic, some liberal religion)

6. I have a few who knew me in Japan (Tachikawa Middle School, Yokota High School) and a few who knew me at Travis, and a couple who know me from mathematics.

7. Then of course, are the family, friends, and those who are politically active in Peoria. Most of these probably think that I am too noisy about sports, politics, etc.

So, don’t be surprised that many of my facebook friends disagree with me in many ways on many issues; I am a part of many communities. In 2004, after the Chicago Ultra, I had dinner with someone who was backing President Bush against Senator Kerry, and this was the weekend prior to the election! We had a nice time and even discussed politics. We were brought together by our love for endurance sports and both of us are big-time science supporters.

My friends range from the skinny to the fat, from the “athlete” to the “wouldn’t dream of taking the stairs if an elevator was available”, from the smoker to the health food consumer, from mainstream Republican, the Ron Paul supporter, to the mainstream Democrat to the Daily Kos lefty (myself included); I have true blue Bible believers, religious moderates and secular atheists (myself included).

I have friends who are best selling authors and those who write stuff that gets published but mostly goes unread (myself included).

And you know what? I love it that I have facebook friends of all types.

—————
the downside: unfortunately, there are those who simply don’t know jack about science who get their feelings hurt when crackpottery is dismissed out of hand (“hey, those scientists have been wrong before”).

Of course no group of people is perfect, but: the vaccines mostly work, diseases are cured, computers work, planes fly, rockets fly and, unfortunately, nuclear weapons explode. But the science works, and yes, the best scientists have the most control….as it should be.

But that sounds…well, so “unfair” to the uninitiated.

13 October 09

Today will be play-day with my wife (fall break at our university); this morning I swam 2000 yards (500 easy warm up in 9:06, then 3 x (5 x 25 drill/25 swim, 5 x 50 on the :55); the first two drill/swim sets I used fins.

sub-par, but I got it done in 40 minutes, and not a peep out of my shoulder.

Yoga, then 30 minutes (3.3 miles) on a Precor stepper machine (sort of a step/glide/elliptical trainer); no hamstring/calf pain.

Weight: crept up to 188; I don’t like that.

Posts

The Legal Satyricon defends Columbus Day (as a pro-Italian holiday); gets blistered in the comments. Heck, read it if you like “stir the pot to get a rise out of people” type of posts.

FiveThirtyEight.com (Nate Silver): discusses the waistlines of the sitting governors (as Corzine is using his opponent’s obesity against him) Note: Blagojevich was a very fit human being.

Answer: usually stinky running shorts. Surf to this post to see the question.

Why I miss running races

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on the Republicans

What Gives?

This will be a rant.

My conversations on facebook and on political blogs have shone a light on something: it seems that many people assign themselves expertise that they really don’t have.

Sometimes it is harmless: for example, how many of us have lamented the decision made by the head football coach of our favorite team?

True, the head coach has years and years of football experience, has years of coaching experience, has read the scouting reports, seen the films and knows his players (both their current emotional and physical condition) whereas the rest of us have watched the game for, what, some minutes to some hours?

But that is part of the fantasy that the leagues market; it is somewhat fun to “play coach” and to try to predict what they will attempt.

But I think that it is wise to keep in mind one’s own limitations.

But sometimes there is more harm in having unwarranted beliefs in one’s expertise. You see people going against all known scientific evidence and pushing for creationism to be taught “as a theory” in the science classroom. You see people taking crackpots as being mainstream and calling professional scientists “close minded” for dismissing long discredited hypothesis.

Note: science is like anything else. Those who have success get more fame and prestige, and that leads to, yes, more funding for research! How do we know that this works? Well, medicine, technology and science continuously advance, don’t they? Diseases that used to be fatal are now curable, computers work, etc.

There are those who are much better at it than others, and those “elite” make it to the top; it really is that simple.

But I digress.

We also see this “love of the mediocre” in politics; how many times have you heard someone be praised because they are average?

Perhaps I am in the minority, but I want talented people to lead the country! Sam Harris weighs in:

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages—and loses—both necessary and unnecessary wars.

He has more to say in this article.

One note: the noisy morons may well be unable to realize that they are morons.

12 October 09

AM: late workout as there are no classes: 35 minutes (3 miles) on the step gizmo; stopped at the correct time. Then 35 minutes (10 miles) on the bike; that was ok. Then a few minutes of weights (benchpress, lats).

Tomorrow I should swim a bit prior to yoga.

Posts The thought that health care reform might pass has caused health insurance company stock to fall. This is why they are now attacking.

Side note: religion and science. You’ve hard the statistics: 40 percent of all “working scientists” in the US believe in a “personal god” and only 7 percent of elite scientists do so. Here is the break down on those numbers.

11 October 09 (pm)

Rush Limbaugh: makes fun of uneducated, poor blacks; riles up his moronic listeners. He says that these poor, ignorant people are “Obama’s model citizens”. See what happens when you try to help someone?

Health care reform: your 9 month old breast fed baby might be “too fat” to be insured.

More Representative Grayson: “Republicans wish there would be a Nobel Prize for fear, a Nobel Prize for racism, a Nobel Prize for hatred; then they’d be in the running…”

If you think that this is divisive, remember the GOP members of Congress who compared the President to a fascist, who talked about death panels, social…ism and the like. What goes around comes around. I am conflicted, but then I was growing very tired of being a punching bag for conservatives and this man is definitely a change of pace.

Dog saves another dog…

Here is a link to the video with an English voice over; they say that both dogs were ok.

But what is the point? Clearly, this was altruistic behavior. Did the “heroic dog” believe in Jesus or belong to a church?

Altruistic behavior has nothing to do with deities.

NFL throwback uniforms

Game one: I didn’t see this, but Dallas pulled it out 26-20 against Kansas City. The Chiefs wore their old AFL “Texans” uniforms; they started off in Dallas but couldn’t compete with the Cowboys at first. Of course, they won their first Super Bowl (as the Chiefs) after the 1969 season, and the Cowboys didn’t win theirs until 2 years later.

I am currently watching the Broncos-Patriots game; it is in overtime tied at 17.

The hitting has been crisp even if the uniforms are horrific.

Quad Cities Marathon Photos

My report itself is here. My photos are here.

Just before the start:

At about mile 7

Close to mile 10

At about mile 12

Half way (about 2:34)

At about mile 20

About mile 24; I am hurting here.

Near the finish line