31 March 2010

Workout notes
Weights: I did “super sets” meaning that I went through my routine mixing the exercises with little rest in between: barbell bench press (10 x 135, 9 x 170, 5 x 175), dumbbell military (10 x 45) dumbbell curl (10 x 25, 2 sets), pull ups (2 sets of 7), abs (yoga leg lifts, 2 sets of 30, vertical crunches, 2 sets of 20), barbell military (10 x 85, 6 x 85), incline bench (2 sets of 5 x 135), pull downs (2 sets of 10 x 120), yoga head stand (5 minutes).
Swimming 2200 yards, 1000 in 17:47 (easy, first 500 was 9:02), 10 x (25 free, 25 back) on 1:05, 5 x 100 (25 fly, 25 back, 25 fly, 25 free with fins) on the 2:00, 200 cool down. This was routine.

Injury: no leg ache last night; I made sure that the sheets were NOT tucked into the end of the bed.

Science
Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Part Four opens with Chapter Twelve, “Black Holes: The Ends of Time.”

Excerpt:

Unlike boxes full of atoms, we can’t make black holes with the same size but different masses. The size of a black hole is characterized by the “Schwarzschild radius,” which is precisely proportional to its mass. If you know the mass, you know the size; contrariwise, if you have a box of fixed size, there is a maximum mass black hole you can possibly fit into it. But if the entropy of the black hole is proportional to the area of its event horizon, that means there is a maximum amount of entropy you can possibly fit into a region of some fixed size, which is achieved by a black hole of that size.

That’s a remarkable fact. It represents a dramatic difference in the behavior of entropy once gravity becomes important. In a hypothetical world in which there was no such thing as gravity, we could squeeze as much entropy as we wanted into any given region; but gravity stops us from doing that.

It’s not surprising to find a chapter about black holes in a book that talks about relativity and cosmology and all that. But the point here is obviously a slightly different one than usual: we care about the entropy of the black hole, not the gruesome story of what happens if you fall into the singularity.

Surf to the link to read the discussion. Note that the holographic principle is brought up. I don’t understand it, but it seems to be saying that information about the universe can be obtained by some sort of a projection of the volume onto a 2 dimensional surface (leaf of a foliation?)

Overeating: can have a drug like effect, especially if the foods are loaded with sugar and salt. Read the Scientific American article here.

Catholic Church Pedophilia Scandal Christopher Hitchens has an article in Slate magazine:

[...]Almost every episode in this horror show has involved small children being seduced and molested in the confessional itself. To take the most heart-rending cases to have emerged recently, namely the torment of deaf children in the church-run schools in Wisconsin and Verona, Italy, it is impossible to miss the calculated manner in which the predators used the authority of the confessional in order to get their way. And again the identical pattern repeats itself: Compassion is to be shown only to the criminals. Ratzinger’s own fellow clergy in Wisconsin wrote to him urgently—by this time he was a cardinal in Rome, supervising the global Catholic cover-up of rape and torture—beseeching him to remove the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who had comprehensively wrecked the lives of as many as 200 children who could not communicate their misery except in sign language. And no response was forthcoming until Father Murphy himself appealed to Ratzinger for mercy—and was granted it.

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