13 December 2009 (I)

Workout notes I didn’t feel like getting to the Riverplex at 7 am so I decided to get to the Markin Center (university gym) at 9 instead. I lifted weights for about half an hour and then did 5 miles on the AMT (59 minutes) and then 5 more on the elliptical (55 minutes).

My legs were heavy but the workout didn’t aggravate the injury.

Weights: I was astonished at how weak I was. I did 2 sets of 10 on the benchpress with 135, 2 sets of 7 with 135 on the partial squat (didn’t quite get to parallel), 2 sets of lat pull downs (140 is too much, 120 is right), a couple sets of 4 pull ups, 2 sets 10 of dumbbell bench presses (40, then 50), 2 sets of 7 military press (30, then 35), 2 sets of 10 with curls (25 pounds).

Note: I tried some leg presses but had injury pain upon straightening the leg the whole way; THAT is the crux of the injury.

Other posts

Feminism...and plastic surgery?

During the Senate’s debates over who should bear the cost of the nearly $900 billion healthcare bill, there emerged a surprising suggestion: plastic surgery patients. A proposed tax, dubbed the “Bo-Tax” after the wrinkle-reducing injections, would add a 5 percent additional charge to elective cosmetic procedures. The tax could help raise $6 billion over the next ten years to offset the cost of health reform. It was included in the original healthcare bill the Senate considered, and it is likely to make it into the modified bill, when the details of the newly brokered Senate compromise are finally announced. Apparently breast enhancements and liposuction can be channeled to benefit the public good. [...]

Ok, the plastic surgeons are fighting this. No surprise there. But…the National Organization of Women (NOW) is fighting this too!

These harsh economic times, however, call for a different ideology. Or so says Terry O’Neill, NOW’s new president. Middle-aged women are struggling to compete in the job market, and cosmetic surgery can help them appeal to employers. “They have to find work,” she told the New York Times. “And they are going for Botox or going for eye work, because the fact is we live in a society that punishes women for getting older.”

NOW has not taken to the streets to campaign for affordable access to face-lifts, and it is unlikely that the group will do so. But by framing it as a women’s issue, NOW’s president has given cosmetic surgery giants like Allergan, which makes Botox, a social grievance and one of its strongest arguments. Where companies and plastic surgeons might have only been able to whine to Congress about lost profits, they can now claim they are campaigning against a tax that unjustly targets women. The Bo-Tax, Allergan’s spokeswoman explained to me without detectable irony, is about “a woman’s right to choose.”

Ok…sure…

The real issue here is not whether women should have the choice to get plastic surgery. It is not a ban on plastic surgery that has been proposed, only an excise tax. What is of greater concern is that the leader of the most prominent feminist organization in the US could speak out on a topic of such minor concern when there are so many feminist issues at stake in the healthcare debate, like reproductive rights and insurance coverage of mammograms. Botox should not be further from feminists’ minds. Aligning feminism with the cause to keep plastic surgery costs low reinforces the notion that feminism is a movement for white, middle-aged, middle-class women. Feminism has needed to lose that label for more than a century.

Religion: here is a non-argument against the existence of a deity.

I’ve never understood arguments of the following type: there is no god because this or that evil exists.

Why is that an argument against the existence of a deity? The deity of the Jewish/Christian Bible not only permitted evil, it actively took part in it! Example: read the Book of Joshua. That deity killed innocents by the truckload without an ounce of remorse. Why would this deity treat modern humans of any group any better?

I don’t believe because there is simply no evidence for a deity; the existence or non-existence of evil has nothing to do with it.

12 December 09

Workout notes Forrest Park Nature Center: three 3.5 mile loops: 1:07, 1:11, 1:14. Mostly snow covered; some ice; a few brief dry patches.
During the second lap I had some calf pain; the slippery parts probably aggravated it. I also had two interesting slips (once on ice); in each case I caught myself with one arm behind me and never hit the ground.

I saw three HUGE wild turkeys and three younger deer; the deer here are far less afraid of people than the McNaughton deer.

Ultras: this one in mid May looks interesting: they feature a 48, 24, 12 and 6 hour. It is in New Jersey.

Humor You are a heterosexual male and you open a classroom door to see two “hot” females “going at it”. What do you do? Not this.

Posts

Mathematics The New York Times reviews a book on Grigori Perelman:

In 1904 the French mathematician Henri Poincaré made a conjecture about three-­dimensional space that may help to explain the shape of the universe. Although it was crucial to the growth of the field of topology, Poincaré’s conjecture resisted proof for a century. When a Boston philanthropist announced a million-dollar prize for its solution in 2000 it was unclear whether he would ever have to pay.

Then, in 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a terse paper to an online archive. In the course of tackling a broader problem, Perelman seemed to have miraculously swept away the remaining obstacles to proving the Poincaré conjecture. Soon the mathematical rumor mill was buzzing. The proof seemed genuine, but word was that Perelman had no plans to publish it.

This was only the beginning of the weirdness. After a brief trip to the United States with his mother in tow, Perelman retreated to St. Petersburg and ceased communication with all but a few colleagues vetting his work. He declined the Fields Medal, a gesture equivalent to snubbing the Nobel committee. He then resigned from the Steklov Institute in 2005 with a letter that read, “I have been disappointed in mathematics and I want to try something else.”

The book is PERFECT RIGOR: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century by Masha Gessen. I know what I’ll ask Santa for.

Higher Dimensional Mathematics

Yes, there is another toy for math geeks:

String theorists say we may live in a 10-dimensional universe, with six of those dimensions rolled up so tightly that we can never see them. So how can you possibly visualize six-dimensional space? This year’s top gift for science geeks can help.

The 2009 geek-gift competition resulted in a repeat (geek-peat?) of last year’s outcome: Andrew Meeusen of Mesa, Ariz., received the most votes once again, this time for suggesting the Calabi-Yau manifold crystal.

Bathsheba Grossman creates the crystals from glass and offers them on her Web site for $72. They’re also available for $89.95 from Edmund Scientific.

So… what the heck is a Calabi-Yau manifold?

Surf to the link to find out. Note: by “manifold” mathematicians mean a space that “looks like” ; that is, an extremely nearsighted creature living in that space wouldn’t be able to distinguish it (in terms of topology) from regular n-space by a local experiment. Example: a sphere and a torus are examples of two dimensional manifolds; the local structure is indistinguishable from the local structure of a plane. It is possible to do two dimensional calculus on them (e. g., a flux integral is an example of such a calculus operation).

More Science: here is an article about “triple zero” German houses: the house leaks very little energy (“zero waste of energy”), is made from recycled materials (“zero waste of resources”) and actually creates more energy than it consumes (“zero energy consumption”).

Even More Science There is no “climate change scandal”, no matter how much the crackpots wish that there were:

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

True, some of the emails show many of the scientists to be cantankerous, overly political, slightly mysterious, or in some cases, downright childish. Nevertheless, the theory that man-made activities are causing Global Warming remains intact, despite the whining of Conservatives.

In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, longtime opponents of mainstream climate science have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen international climate talks. They cited a “culture of corruption” that the e-mails appeared to show.

That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible. (bold mine, not the article’s)

One of the main emails that the Conservatives have pointed to as evidence of a cover-up involves one scientist discussing a way to circumvent data gathered from studying tree rings. The Deniers have said this is some sort of “smoking gun” that proves definitively that Global Warming is just a hoax and that scientists are lying about their data.

When one looks closer though, the only hoax that’s being perpetrated on the American public is the idea that the scientists are actively trying to mislead people. An examination of this so-called “smoking gun” email bears this out.

One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages were posted online is from Jones. He says: “I’ve just completed Mike’s (Mann) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures after the 1950s weren’t as warm as scientists had determined.

The “trick” that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data which was misleading, Mann explained.

Anti Science Here is an article about a Pew Report on woo-woos and people who create their own theology.

Of course, this nonsense is not more nonsensical than believing that eating the flesh of a resurrected Jew will somehow grant one “eternal life” and that those who reject your superstitions will somehow be eternally tormented.

Again, I am NOT talking about holding the possibility of something beyond our universe and I am NOT talking about seeing religious myths as precious metaphors for life.

Justice Yes, women sometimes lie about being raped and sometimes men go to jail sans evidence.

Racists: The Southern Policy Law Center blog is following the trial of a neo-Nazi:

Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts told the jury this afternoon that his “blood ran cold” when he received an E-mail from white supremacist Bill White with his home address, telephone number and a reference to his wife.

When he clicked a link in the E-mail and saw that White had also published the information on the Internet, he realized it was now available to anyone who accessed White’s website, including potentially violent extremists who share White’s ideology. “It’s terrifying because it makes you vulnerable in a way you haven’t been before,” he said.

Pitts, who spoke with little emotion, spent nearly three hours on the stand during the second day of testimony at White’s federal trial. The former neo-Nazi leader is charged with threatening various people with whom he disagreed, including Pitts, a writer for The Miami Herald whose column is syndicated in some 250 newspapers. White was infuriated by a June 3 Pitts column taking white supremacists to task for their propaganda about a black-on-white murder case.

I should point out that I became aware when Bill White surfed to this blog and left a “form message” about this exchange with the Miami Herald editor.

Hence my interest in following this case.