Feeling Feisty!

Paul Krugman I really love this guy:

Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about.

It goes like this: Person A says “Black is white” — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, “No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.”

And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending. [...]

Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)

Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.

I’d one more thing: many conservatives judge whether something is “right” or not if it fits their world view. Example: you can show a conservative reams of data which supports that “abstinence only” sex education programs don’t work. But they will support it anyway as it is “morally right” to them. You can say the same thing about health care reform; a public policy might actually end up giving more people insurance and end up being less of a drain on the economy. But some conservatives won’t support that policy anyway because, well, the policy is “morally wrong” (e. g., violates some virtue that they accept).

Frankly all of us are a bit that way (I think); after all, how many liberals would support a program that paid potential criminals not to steal, even if we could prove that such a program would save money via reduced security and reduced police costs?

But conservatives are a bit more driven by the desire to “keep order”.

Global Warming and Climate Change: here is Al Gore’s op-ed in the New York Times. Yes, I like him. If you think that he is worthy of ridicule, you can go “Dick Cheney” yourself.

Now to a snippet of Al Gore’s piece

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The bottom line: climate change is neither proved nor disproved by a few brief, local events. The important thing is the long term trend.

Religion Yes, religious groups should be able to meet on public college campuses. But if they can’t abide by the same non-discrimination rules that the other student groups have to adhere to, then they aren’t entitled to be funded by the public college funds:

“Religious groups on campus have a choice,” says Ethan Schulman, a lawyer representing the school. “If they want to be eligible to receive public funds and access to facilities, they cannot discriminate in selecting members and officers. If they wish to discriminate, they can continue to meet, but without the benefit of public funds and support.” [...]

Jesse Choper, a law professor at UC Berkeley, says that conflicting legal precedents are at work. In 2000, the Supreme Court decided that the Boy Scouts were within their rights to deny membership to homosexuals. However, Choper notes, “even if you have a First Amendment right to do something, it does not entitle you to funding to exercise your right.”

28 February 2010

Workout notes I didn’t feel that good when I woke up; in fact I slept for 30 extra minutes. Nevertheless I kicked myself out of bed and went to the pool.

Idea: swim long and gentle until I got sick of it, and then do enough to get 5500 total.

Result: 5500 yards in 1:35:47; 1:18 slower than my PB but my second fastest ever. Just because I am a numbers geek, I’ll list the splits of this swim and of my previous 3 attempts (note: the 1:36:23 WAS a PB when I did it)

17 Dec. 2009	1 Jan. 2010	17Jan. 2010	28 Feb. 2010
1:36:23	1:38:27	1:34:29	1:35:47
17:42 (+10)	17:52 (-2)	17:40 (+29)	17:33 (+8)
17:08 (-24)	17:36 (-18)	16:56 (-15)	17:11 (-14)
17:14 (-18)	17:45 (-9)	16:53 (-18)	17:14 (-11)
17:36 (+4)	17:48 (-6)	17:00 (-11)	17:26 (+1)
17:43 (+11)	18:02 (+8)	17:18 (+7)	17:32 (+7)
8:57 (+11)	9:22 (+25)	8:40 (+4)	8:49( +6)

Note: the + – numbers are how far off I was from my “average time per 1000″ for that particular swim; of course the last number is how far off I was from my “average 500″ on that swim. Note that I usually “fold” during my last 1500; I gained 22, 23, 11 and 13 seconds on that segment; my last 500 is especially bad, though that has improved on my last couple of trials.

Time per mile: today, 30:40 per mile; PB pace was 30:14 per mile. 30 minutes per mile, while slow for a good swimmer, is tough for me.

For more on my history:

Past 5K time trials and efforts:

3 March 2007, 1:36:49

6 April 2007, 1:36:51

August 17, 2008, 1:37:11

Big Shoulders 2008, 1:36:34 (also previous reports from 2006 and 2001)

Why didn’t I feel good when I woke up?
1. Too much soy milk yesterday.
2. I had some mild body aches; I then remembered yesterday’s weight lifting session which was more intense than usual.
3. I didn’t sleep that well; I stayed up too late watching the boxing matches.
(for the record, I had Jones being Bruceles 97-93 and Roman beaing Rosado 96-94, though this match was hard to score. Usually, the rounds went like this: first minute even, next 90 seconds, Roman would win and Rosado would close furiously and dominate the last 30 seconds; how does one score such a round? That is why it was a split decision (Rosado won).

Injury For the second night in a row, my calf/lower hamstring bothered me in the last 2-3 hours of my sleep. I am going to have to stretch it out before I sleep and to put a pillow under the back of my knee.

Best Exercise Scene in a Movie: Ever.

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