Back From the Physical Therapist

Well the news: she says that I have no muscle weakness. She thinks that my pain is caused by an obstruction of some sort.

Remedy: NOTHING for a week, though I can swim with a pull-buoy. Of course, I’ll have to not push-off the wall; just do a series of pulling 25 yard reps. Hey, it is better than nothing.

Oh yes, I failed my first PT test: she wants me staying off of the stairs. So I was going to take the elevator up. I noticed that someone in a wheel chair, a smoker (faculty member) were waiting; now this pudgy undergraduate shows up. I couldn’t stomach waiting and riding up with such people so I took the stairs…

I’ll do it next time…when I can ride elevator alone.

1 April 2010

Workout notes Only yoga today. Last night my injury really hurt at first and then calmed down. It didn’t hurt the night before though; I wonder if yoga had anything to do with it.

I noticed that when I did “straddle legged forward bend” my right leg (the injured one) literally quivered.

Today I see the physical therapist.

Posts
Peoria, Racism
Last night Bradley University hosted a talk by Tim Wise. I’ll say more about it later; it was one of the best talks I’ve ever been to. It dealt with systematic racism but did so in a way that didn’t attack white people; it took the following kind of approach (my paraphrase, NOT a direct quote): “you want to be fair to everyone. However when you, say, walk into a room, do you notice how easily you moved around? Do you automatically think about the obstacles that someone who is wheelchair bound faces? Racism is the same way; we just don’t think of what life is like for, say, black people.”
I am going to have to read his books!

Education
This is an educational issue this day and age; people who have been diagnosed with “learning disabilities” often lobby for accommodations such as “extra test time”. That occurs even in the best universities. So my question: what is the line between normal human variation (e. g., I am no where near as smart as a Nobel Prize winner in physics) and a genuine “learning disability”? I wonder if brain science will provide an answer?

By the way, if you are reading this and have an honest answer, please leave a comment with recommended references; I really don’t know the answer here.

Science
Remember so-called “climate-gate” e-mail “scandal”? Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub points out that Great Brittan Parliament investigation revealed no wrongdoing by the climate scientists.

3-quarks daily Points us to an article that shows that even non-social animals (in this case, tortoises) can learn from watching each other. That is, the ability to learn is not necessarily associated with being social.

Politics
Remember the polls that show that the “rank and file” Republican holds absurd beliefs? (e. g., that the President is the anti-Christ). Well, there are some problems with the Harris poll. Of course, if you surf to the link that I provided, you’ll see people suggesting that the Republicans were merely venting instead of saying what they really thought; the Research 2000 poll isn’t so easily dismissed.

Anyway, watch this video

So Republican apologists, were these media figures merely venting anger?

31 March 2010 (evening)

Science
Check out this pretty photo of a water beaded dragonfly. At first, it looks like an elaborate piece of jewelry.

Here is a link to a lecture on evolution and why there is no evidence to suggest that we were “designed”.

Larry Moran celebrates a spectacular “intelligent design” FAIL.

Not all species of living things come in “male/female or “both”. Here is an example from olive trees.

Off shore drilling: here is a critical look at what President Obama is proposing. Yes, during the campaign he said that some limited off shore drilling would be in the mix. I admit that I don’t like this.

Education Here is a humorous but somewhat cynical look at undergraduate teaching (from a chemistry professor).

More on Jaime Escalante, who was depicted in the film Stand and Deliver:

Escalante would later say that Stand and Deliver was 90 percent truth, 10 percent drama. His biggest complaint was that the movie left the impression that his students, most of whom were struggling with multiplication tables, mastered calculus overnight.

Fact is, Escalante’s kids ate, slept and lived mathematics. They arrived an hour before school and stayed two, three hours after school. Escalante drilled them on Saturdays and made summer school mandatory. Some parents hated it, and they let Escalante know it.

Escalante’s remarkable success at Garfield High got lots of attention, not all of it good. In 1982, all 18 of his advanced math students passed the calculus AP (advanced placement) test, a college-level exam. The test maker accused the students of cheating, though, and Escalante accused the test maker of racism. The students retook the test and passed again with pretty high scores.

By 1991, 600 Garfield students were taking advanced placement exams, not just in math, but in other subjects, which was unheard of at the time. That year, though, Escalante resigned, in part because he was tired of the run-ins with fellow teachers who viewed him as a prima donna.

Years later, it pained Escalante to hear parents complain that Garfield’s math curriculum had been dumbed down. Still, he had fond memories of Garfield High and said he wanted to be “remembered as a teacher, picturing that potential everywhere.”

Social Brother peacemaker points out that the latest pedophilia scandal in the Catholic church is about CRIME and not about sin:

To add insult to injury, some people actually feel, or at least at one time felt, that priests were above reproach simply because of their occupation. No priest would ever abuse anyone. You couldn’t possibly get the job if your character was that immoral. We simply trusted the church to do the job of policing their own. To some, the whole affair is something for the church to handle. We view these acts as if they were nothing more than sins easily rectified with a rote recital of a rosary or something similarly trite.

But these aren’t sins. What we are talking about are crimes. And when we take into consideration that these were crimes against children, you damn skippy the law needs to get involved. If a priest is accused of assaulting someone then that priest may have committed a crime. And if a crime has been committed then there’s a chance that there were accomplices to that crime. No where else would we be willing to make the sin of leaving an accomplice to the crime determine the punishment of the main perpetrator of the crime.

Secular government must do its duty here.