Wasn’t going to Post Much But…9 November 09 pm

Workout Notes I didn’t swim this morning; the lifeguard showed up but no one got there to unlock the pool. Grrr…. so I swam over lunch instead (2650 yards, or 1.5 miles)

500 warm up 8:30, 500 drill/swim, 1000 in 16:17 (4:00, 8:04, 12:08); died in the last 250, but this was my fastest since September 13, 2008, (2 seconds faster than a month and a half ago) and my third fastest since March 2006.

I was angry and revved up.

Posts:
Football: this past Navy-ND game:

Academia: math professors usually don’t have to deal with the know-it-alls

We do have to deal with the “know nothings” in the public at times:

Government watchdogs are blasting taxpayer-funded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that send college professors on free vacations and pay for programs on topics like the “cultural significance of the circus poster” — just a few items on an eye-popping list of questionable NEH projects.

As if the life of a college professor weren’t easy enough, millions of taxpayer dollars are going to fund monthlong vacations for sightseeing scholars in Europe and South America, part of the $144 million budget provided for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“easy enough”??? Ok, go out there and earn a Ph. D. if it is so easy. Don’t worry; you won’t be able to.

Here are of the projects that they deem unworthy of being funded:

$725,000 to produce a two-hour documentary on the history of American whaling.

[...]

# $130,000 for 16 professors to study the “truth and meaning” of life according to Aristotle
# $50,000 to build a computer model of an ancient city in Pakistan complete with “animated and interactive ‘inhabitants’”

[...]

$199,000 to send 25 professors to Barcelona for a month to study interactions among Christians, Muslims and Jews in old Europe

[...]

# $600,000 for a movie about starvation in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s
# $511,000 for a documentary about an interracial medical team in the South

Let’s see: whaling (a big current environmental issue), meaning of life (mental health implications), computer model to study ancient history, and interracial teams aren’t worthy of study? A period of famine (brought upon by bad policy and bad science) isn’t worthy of study? Studying how Muslims, Christians and Jews get along isn’t worthy of study IN THIS DAY AND AGE???

Yes, I am a college professor but I teach mathematics and my research is in that area (some quotes in science articles). But the math/science/engineering fields, while valuable, are hardly the only ones worthy of study and funding.

Speaking of know-nothing ignorance, we see some of that in a British newspaper: somehow, evolution leads to a decline of morality:

Whoever Dennis Sewell is, he has, as the Brits say, “gone badly wrong.” Check out what seems to be a precis of his book, The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics, in the online Times of London. The paper has published an article that, in essence, holds Darwin responsible for not only the Columbine massacres and the Nazi Holocaust, but also the decline of morality in today’s world.

After a perfunctory nod to Darwin Year, Sewell gets down to it:

Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Jerry Coyne responds appropriately:

I hadn’t realized that Darwinism was a “world-view.” Silly me — all along I thought it was just a theory meant to explain the development and diversity of life.

Shame on the Times for publishing tripe like this. I’d expect to see this flatulence in a creationist pamphlet, but not in a reputable newspaper. Fortunately, the Times readers are taking Sewell apart in the comments section.

One addition to what Coyne said: I frequently see this sort of flatulence at Fox News.

Politics

I’ve mentioned that Republicans often have a revisionist view of Ronald Reagan. Well, it appears that some of my political friends have revisionist views of FDR, as The Edge of the America West points out:

Steve Benen, in the course of making an argument that most of his commenters don’t want to hear, overstates FDR’s intentions with the Social Security Act.

Roosevelt, the towering political figure of the 20th century, with an electoral mandate, a Democratic Congress, and the stench of a failed Republican president fresh on the nation’s mind, had to take what he could get on Social Security, which was far less than what he wanted.

Now, in a perfect world, a unicorn or magic pony of some kind would have written a history of the Great Depression and the New Deal that corrected this gentle myth in a short, introductory fash–OMIGOD! LOOKEE HERE!

Surf to the link to see the evidence.

Health Care Reform
Paul Krugman sees the passage of the House Bill as an impressive achievement. I agree. However many are squawking about the limitations against insurance which covers abortion. I tut-tutted the ideas that this might hurt the Democrats with women as I figured that those backing these restrictions were anti-choice Representatives from anti-choice districts.

Nate Silver proves that my conjecture was wrong; many “pro-choice” Democrats voted for these restrictions.

Wingnuts and Political Humor

Paul Krugman wonders why “Nazi” has become the slur-de-jour from the wingnuts instead of “Commie”.

The Onion: just read:

Claiming that the president was preying on the public’s fear of contracting a fatal disease last week when he declared the H1N1 virus a national emergency, Republican leaders announced Wednesday that they were officially endorsing the swine flu. “Thousands of Americans—hardworking ordinary Americans like you and me—already have H1N1,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said during a press conference. “Now Obama wants to take that away from us. Ask yourself: Do you want the federal government making these kinds of health care decisions for you and your family?”

Yes, this is parody. But it reads believable, doesn’t it?

Speaking of “close to being true parody”:

A Zogby poll of 1,542 American grandparents published Monday found that grandsons were described as “very” to “extremely” talented by 1,542 of the respondents. “Participants in the poll were emphatic in their descriptions of the talents of grandsons in fields as diverse as advertising and sales, choral performance, baseball, talking, crawling, making their beds, video games, and instructing their elders on proper cell-phone use,” pollster Tom Waterton said. “In addition, an overwhelming percentage of grandchildren were described as outgoing, sharp, and looking just like Uncle Andy, you remember Uncle Andy, he was always up to something, too bad he passed so young, he would have loved the grandchild in question.” Sources at Zogby admitted that the survey was incomplete, as several hundred pollsters are still unable to get their assigned grandparents off the phone

I joke that our problem students must not have had parents and grandparents since every parent will gush about how “awesome”, “amazing” and “smart” their kids are….