I didn’t mean to post much this afternoon….and yes I defend Sarah Palin

Workout notes I got to the pool at 7 am and did an interesting (for me) workout: 10 x 100 on the 2 (very slow, couldn’t get into it; times varied from 1:54 to 1:43 at the end). 5 x (25 front, 75 free) on the 2:05 (just under 2 each), 5 x (25 sfs, 75 free) on the 2:05, 5 x (25 3g, 75 free) on the 2 (1:50), 5 x (100 fist) on the 2 (1:48 or so), 5 x 100 (25 catch-up, 75 free) on the 2 (1:50), 5 x (25 fly, 75 free) on the 2 (high 1:40s), 5 x (25 free , 25 back, 50 free) on the 2 (tight), then 10 x 100 (alternate paddle/fins). It all took 1:50 to do (averaged on the 2).

Then I went upstairs and did a slow 12.5 miles (20 km) on the indoor bike; followed that with 3.3 miles (5.5 km) on the elliptical. So, this was a triathlon of sorts.

Observed in our gym: lots of people were talking about the upcoming Super Bowl; most here are cheering for the Colts though many said that part of them wouldn’t mind seeing the Saints win either.

My take: Give the points; the Colts should win “comfortably”.

Speaking of the Superbowl: the NFL is probably making a mistake here. Sure, if they make an exception for the churches to show the game on too large of a screen, then I can see them being sued by non-churches that want to do the same, etc. But what is the big deal about allowing a Super Bowl party, since the game is on “free television” anyway? In all honesty, I wouldn’t mind hearing from someone who has a good answer (e. g. an attorney) Hat tip: Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Education and social network sites A professor got his feelings hurt when he surfed to his student’s facebook site. Personally, I WANT to get away from them when I am not on campus and I am really not interested in what they think of me as a person. But other professors responded to this professor; responses ranged from “don’t snoop”, “why are you trying to be friends with them anyway”, etc.

Politics
Many of my political friends are laughing at this:

My take: “who cares”. Really. Example: I often use notes to lecture in my “business calculus” class. Do you think that I don’t know the material? Of course I do; I use notes to discipline myself; to keep myself on target. I have a tendency to get undisciplined and start going off on a topic that strikes my interest and the notes remind me to cover the relevant topics.

Hence I think that Governor Palin was doing much the same thing; there were certain things that she wanted to remind herself to say. No big deal.

Yes, I know: some conservatives *thought* that President Obama’s use of a teleprompter somehow masked the fact that he wasn’t smart or aware (note: he had no teleprompter when he exposed the emptiness of the Republican House members, but never mind that). But you know what? The people who thought that the President’s use of the teleprompter somehow showed that he was stupid are, well…stupid. They simply aren’t worth talking to; the simplest thing to do is to dismiss them as morons and move on.

Note: I still think that Governor Palin is a retard a hypocritical, cynical self-serving anti-intellectual who kisses up to Rush Limbaugh just like the rest of “them”:

Palin says Limbaugh meant to be “satirical” in using word “retards”

From the February 7 edition of Fox Broadcsting Co.’s Fox News Sunday:

CHRIS WALLACE (host): OK, but, Rush Limbaugh weighed in this week, and he said this: “Our politically correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards.”

PALIN: He was satirical in that –

WALLACE: Wait, let me finish. “I mean, these people, these liberal activists are kooks.” Should Rush Limbaugh apologize?

PALIN: They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was using satire to bring attention to what this politically correct –

WALLACE: But he used the “R” word.

PALIN: Using satire. Name-calling by anyone — I teach this to my children. You teach this to your children and your grandchildren, too. Name-calling by anyone, it’s just unnecessary. It just wastes time. Let’s speak to the issues and again, let’s move on.

WALLACE: But you know what some people are going to say, Governor, and have said. They say, look, when it’s their political adversary, Rahm Emanuel, she’s going to call him out — he’s indecent, apologize. But when it’s a political friend like Rush Limbaugh, oh, it’s satire.

PALIN: I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh call a group of people whom he did not agree with “f-ing retards,” and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, it’s been reported, did say that. There’s a big difference there.

Are you surprised? Frankly, I think that Mr. Limbaugh gets a “rush” out of getting cowardly right wing idiots politicians to kiss up to him.

Irony Sagacity notes that some denounce the stimulus money, and then scream to get some of it. Who knows; perhaps Governor Sanford wants to build new hiking trails?

More politics Tancredo’s idiotic speech to the tea-baggers resentment-fest reminded me of something. There are legitimate analysis of the 2008 election, and one of the best articles on it is here. Here is a sample of what you will find in this article:

The day after the election, Obama’s top pollster, Joel Benenson, declared, “what this election definitely says is that Democrats set out to compete in places where Republicans said it was impossible, and we won and redrew the map.” Beneson seems to suggest that the Obama campaign crafted a strategy that would be especially effective in “red” states such as Virginia, and that, as the term “redrew” implies, this strategy may have created a permanent shift. Whether the shift is permanent depends, of course, on what happens in future elections. But what about the idea that the Obama strategy was especially successful in states that had previously voted Republican?

The evidence does not support this claim. If we look at the 2008 electoral results, we find that Obama shifted the overall map in his favor: he did not redraw the boundaries by performing especially strongly in previously red states. More precisely, the economy shifted the whole terrain in the Democrats’ favor and Obama took advantage of this.

Consider how Obama did relative to John Kerry in 2004. Simply put, he did better in nearly every state. Even though we typically hear about the state-by-state battles that make up the election—Florida in 2000; Ohio in 2004—recent elections, including 2008, have each been dominated by a nationwide swing. Once we account for this national swing, the outcomes in most states were very close to the 2004 pattern. Despite the focus on battleground states, there were only small shifts attributable to state-level characteristics, as opposed to this national swing (for example, Obama did no better in states with poorer economies, whether measured by unemployment or home foreclosures). This fits the recent pattern: state-by-state election swings have generally been declining over the past few decades. The traditional red-blue map is much more stable from election to election than it used to be.

There is much more there, including the old stuff about “white working class voters”.

But the biggest lesson: what makes a state strongly “red” or “blue” is how the rich people vote; the poor mostly vote Democratic, regardless of where they live. See the state by state maps here.

Science Jerry Coyne gets on The New Scientist for publishing crackpot stuff. Yes, there are always people who don’t like the idea of “natural selection” regardless of how well established this is in science, how it shows up in things that we need vaccines for, etc. Sure, it isn’t the only mechanism for evolution, but it is a major one.

Now if you want to see how science ideas get discussed, read this post about dinosaur coloring. Check out this comment:

I have only one comment on the paper. At the end, the authors say this: “Thus, the first evidence for plumage color patterns in a feathered non-avian dinosaur suggests selection for signaling function may be as important as aerodynamics in the early evolution of feathers.” (The National Geographic website—see below—makes a similar suggestion.) It seems to me that neither signaling nor aerodynamics can explain the early origin of feathers, if for no other reason that you can’t select for colored feathers until you first have feathers, and because early feathers—the filamentous structures on some feathered dinos—could hardly have had an aerodynamic function. What seems more likely is that the origin of feathers involved some other selection pressure—perhaps a thermoregulatory one—and then those early feathers gave rise to the possibility that they could, via pigmentation, be used for intraspecific signaling. Then, later, they could be coopted for flight. In other words, flying and signaling are exaptations of a feature that originated for some other reason.

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