19 January 2010: last day of freedom

Workout notes AM: yoga with Ms. Vickie. It was my first class in months. I just wasn’t doing yoga on my own. The irony is that if I take a yoga class, I end up doing mini-sessions on my own. But if I don’t, I end up not doing those mini-sessions.

I can run, walk, lift, swim and hike on my own. But to do yoga, I need an anchor of some sort. I am not sure as to why.

PM: 4000 yard swim over lunch; 500 warm up, 10 x 100 fist (played with the interval; it took me 18 minutes to do all of them), 3 x (5 x (25 drill, 75 free)): front, sfs, 3g. I was slow on these. Then 500 of fly practice (400 kicks with fins, 4 x 25 full stroke with no fins), 500 various cool down (paddles, side, etc.)
This wasn’t my best swim, but given Sunday’s success I’ll take it.

Posts
Mathematics Recursivity poses an excellent problem in probability:

Given a deck of 52 cards shuffled randomly — a deal — what is the probability that, somewhere in the deck, there is an Ace adjacent to a King?

The answer is surprising. Yes, it is harder than it looks.

Politics
You know that things look bad when a Democrat can’t win in Massachusetts, but that appears to be happening. Liberals are already making excuses and are coming up with “plan B” to pass health care reform (e. g. make the House swallow the Senate bill whole).

Point/Counter Point
David Brooks wrote an interesting column about Haiti:

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

Mr. Brooks goes on to question: “why was Haiti so poor to begin with” and wonders if well-intentioned efforts to help Haiti (BEFORE the earthquake hit) ended up hindering their progress. Note: it is beyond dispute that a richer nation wouldn’t have suffered so terribly (e. g. there would be better buildings to resist the quake, better roads between affected areas, etc.).

Of course, someone has to overreact to what Mr. Brooks said. Mr. Brooks never said to NOT give money to help out with disaster recovery. The question is: ok, after the disaster is over, what next?

This is a bit like “a smoker gets lung cancer”: sure, we should treat the afflicted smoker while realizing that it would probably be worth our while to ensure that fewer people smoke.