23 April 2010 am Part II

Workout notes
Injury: some leg ache at 4 am; this is reduced from a week ago but about where it comes these-a-days. Note: it is rainy so this might be the “same old, same old”. My right shoulder ached too but I think I know why.

The tender shoulder came right about the time I switched back from “pull buoy only” to “some without”. Normally, I streamline off of the wall and get momentum. AND, I have proper body position (hips up, near the surface of the water).

Lately, the “start from scratch” turns (no wall push off) has me dragging my hips; I note that when I use paddles my body position improves and the ache goes away.

Also I need to breathe more on my right side.

Today, I did 2200 yards but this included two 250 yard drill/swim sets with fins:

250 pull, 250 free
250 pull/fist, 5 x 50 swim
250 pull, 250 (front 25, 3g 25 with fins)
250 pull, 250 (3g, swim) with fins
100 back pull
4 x 25 paddle.

I do have to be careful.

Frogs:

Poor frog.

23 April 2010 (am)

Well, I had just a tiny bit of leg ache when I woke up and some shoulder ache last night (right); then again, it is wet and rainy. But, I’ll ease up on the swimming today and perhaps bring some fins (250 yards?) back into it and breathe on my right side). It will be “oh so gentle” today.

Fun You have to love it when a good looking woman says:

It’s a great conversation starter, gets my butt patted when I show up to have it applied and doesn’t get covered up by my hair. [...]

Follow the above link to see the photo. (Yes, I am quoting selectively)

Yesterday: my letter to the editor appeared.

Some readers are “letting me have it” (in their “mind”); here are some of the best “put downs” (65 comments in total):

69.5 million people —-along with donald duck and mickey mouse and anyone else Acorn could find. Alot of people wanted Hilter too.
[...]
Get real. 50% or more have jumped off Obama’s bandwagon. He couldn’t defeat me in an welection held today. This man doesn’t have a presidential bone in his body and his agenda for America is as nefarious as his mentor’s Saul Alinsky and Jeremiah Wright’s. He is in the process of getting government to take over all of America-Health care-Energy-Wall street. They want to tell us what we can earn and even what we can eat. Progressives are lunatics even by the very definition of the word. None of their agenda has or is working on any scale at any time in history yet they demand we keep trying it regardless of the consequences. America would prosper to the height of its glory if every preogressive in the country were shipped to Europe.

[...]
Attaining an education or being intelligent doesn’t give a person wisdom.

When 21% of the total population of a country is convinced to vote for someone, that gives said person the right to do whatever the heck they please? Apparently so, if we are to judge the actions of the last two presidents.
[...]

I can’t wait for 2012 and a new president. ( or should I say a REAL president who actually cares about this country).

[...]

Professing to know economics and medicine when you are a politician and attorney is not intelligence it is IGNORANCE.

[...]

I certainly wouldn’t ‘brag’ on 69.5 million, not even 20% of the total population. His ‘leadership’ will affect all, dragging them to perdition regardless of their desires. Education is just a stick used for measurement, the REAL worth of someone is their intellect, which is the marriage of their education with their experience with their morality with their integrity. Just based on the litany of broken promises made exclusively to gain votes tells me that the morality/integrity factor is lacking. And, what experience has Obama that doesn’t originate with public monies? Even his so-called private work was funded by the Govt. He has never held a job where a supervisor had to evaluate him. And don’t pewl about ‘voters’, they are sheeple in both Cook County & Illinois, & he has lost when running against a real opponent. The carpetbagger from Maryland & the old geezer from Arizona were not real choices, so Obama won by default. And just because he hides out in the White House doesn’t imply ‘hard work’. I’ve seen NO evidence to back up that, unless YOU call fundraising hard work.

[...]

Thanks for the laugh of the day Ollie. President Obama’s educational background is still being questioned (not attacked). You seem to have forgotten most of his academic records were sealed via executive order by ‘President Transparency’. As I’ve stated several times already- How embarrassing it would be that release of such records might show Bush is/was smarter academically. ‘Since when is being the president/editor of the Harvard Law Review a bad thing?’- When the title/position is unwarranted, undeserved, unearned… and reflective of affirmative action, political correctness, or symbolism.? The same as his Nobel Prize. No substantive contributions but a symbolic ‘A’ for effort/trying.

‘One, the president, prior to attending Harvard Law School, lived in other countries, traveled extensively and spent his first post-college years helping out poor people’. All starting with a liberal nutcase of a mother who would drag him across the world as a child for her own selfish persuits before dumping him off to her parents to raise (when he became too much of a burden). (‘Typical white’) grandparents who worked multiple jobs that allowed him the luxery to attend a private school. History has shown he has been given more opportunities and things because of what he is (a mulatto), as opposed to who he is and what he has earned on his own merits. Try reading the books he claims to have written sometime.

‘I like it that the president chose a Nobel Laureate in physics as head of the Department of Energy and the mapper of the human genome to run the National Institutes of Health’. That’s it? No mention of liking tax cheat Tim Geithner? Mao lover Anita Dunn? Van Jones, et al (friends, advisors, czars, and associates)?

Lastly Ollie, is this what you and your ilk REALLY want and voted for? People like ‘Peggy the Moocher’… ‘Obama is going to pay for my gas and mortgage’? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36x8rTb3jI&feature=related). Verily, all entitlements and no work ethic makes for a bankrupt country.

LilyBean- ‘… only real people voted…’. Yup, some ‘real people’ claiming to be voting more than once too. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZwng4omanI). It speaks volumes about your character and ethics… ‘by any means possible’… typical Obama supporter indeed.

[...]

what is even funnier is that if you don’t agree with Obama as president and what he is doing the you are being labeled a racist….hmmmm…makes me want to ask a question—-did everybody like bush? and then my reply would then be that if you didn’t then you are racist and didn’t like him because he was white—and to all you above posters–please say something nice about bush and then maybe we will say something nice about obama…..wait you only want nice things being said when your party is in control—HYPOCRITES

onanyes—-if more jobs are being created then why is unemployment still going up? (light bulb just went off) i know the answer—IT MEANS MORE PEOPLE ARE LOSING JOBS….DUH

and i would rather have a president who sometimes stumbles over words–which by the way so has your boy obama, than have a president who doesn’t even know how many states he is the president of!

[...]

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 31% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -10

That’s today, Thursday the 22nd. Any Democrat want to show me the new math where 31% is over half?

[...]

Ollie Nanyes , Atheist , free thinking Bradley professor of Mathematics it is really surprising you have a warm tingling feeling down your leg for Barry .

Of course, there was one interesting comment too:

Being Harvard educated is an issue but somehow being educated by Fox, Google or You Tube makes you an expert on almost any subject. Nice. It is certainly comforting to know that there are still many of the right leaning citizens of the Peoria area who will continue to be eligible or spawn recipients who are in the running to receive a Darwin Award.

22 April 2010 (pm)

Sports

I am not a baseball fan though I used to be one and I played (incompetently) many years ago. But, I admit that I’ve never seen this type of play at the plate before:

Health Care Reform

One of the many reasons we needed this bill: some companies will find an excuse to cancel your coverage if you get sick:

Shortly after they were diagnosed with breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. There was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. And there was Patricia Reilling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.

Neither of these women knew about the other. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders — more than any other health insurance company in the United States.

The women paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, neither had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women’s specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.

That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as “rescission,” for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.

Social: there are some big changes ahead for those who serve on submarines:

As of Dec. 31, smoking aboard the entire submarine fleet will be summarily banned — no small hardship for the estimated 35 to 40 percent of sailors who are nicotine addicts and can’t exactly step outside whenever they want a puff.

Barring intervention by Congress in the next few days, the Navy has also said it intends to let women join submarine crews by the end of 2011, a move that isn’t going over well with many active-duty and veteran members of the Silent Service, the stealthy nickname of the force.

On top of all that, the military is girding for another social revolution that might take some getting used to inside the cheek-to-jowl confines of submarines: allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the ranks.

“The Silent Service is right now very much a boys’ club,” said Joe Buff, a military commentator and the author of six pulp fiction thrillers involving submarine adventures. “They’re always bellyaching, and they always hate change. But I think the men are going to be better at all these changes than they’re willing to let on.” [...]

My two cents: my experience with submarines is limited; I did one patrol on the SSBN-622 (James Monroe) and on the SSN-674 (Trepang) My guess is that there will be some growing pains with this policy but it will work out in the end. Change is never easy.

Skepticism
James Randi attacks the woos and quackery:

Science One of my favorite scientists (Jerry Coyne) reviews Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show on Earth and an attempt at a book on evolution called What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini; the latter is what happens when a philosopher and a cognitive scientist attempt to write about a field that is not theirs. Here is part of the review:

One type lies within the bodies of living organisms. In a wonderful chapter called “History Written All Over Us,” Dawkins shows that animal anatomy is like a medieval palimpsest, carrying traces of our evolutionary ancestry. Human goose bumps, for instance, serve no function: they’re remnants of the muscles used by our mammalian ancestors–and our living relatives like cats–to erect their fur, making them warmer and giving enemies the illusion of greater size. Modern genome sequencing has also uncovered vestigial DNA: useless, broken genes that are functional in our relatives and presumably were too in our ancestors. Our own genome, for instance, harbors nonfunctional genes that, in our bird and reptile relatives, produce egg yolk. Embryology–the study of development–brings more proof to the table. The pharyngeal arches of the early, fishlike human embryo are derived directly from the gill arches of fish, though they go on to become, among other things, our larynx and eustachian tube.

Even more evidence for evolution comes from the “bad designs” of animals and plants, which, Dawkins observes, look nothing like de novo creations of an efficient celestial engineer. His favorite example–and mine–is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which runs from the brain to the larynx. In mammals it doesn’t take the direct route (a matter of a few inches) but makes a curiously long detour, running from the head to the heart, looping around the aorta and then doubling back up to the neck. In the giraffe, this detour involves traversing that enormous neck twice–adding about fifteen feet of superfluous nerve. Anyone who’s dissected an animal in biology class will surely agree with Dawkins’s conclusion: “the overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess! Not only would a designer never have made a mistake like that nervous detour; a decent designer would never have perpetuated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.”

Creationists often object to this sort of argument, saying that it’s not scientific but theological. God is inscrutable, they claim, so how could we possibly know how he would or would not design creatures? But this misses the point, for the “bad design” we see is precisely what we’d expect if evolution were true. The laryngeal nerve takes that long detour because, in our fishy ancestors, it was lined up behind a blood vessel, with both nerve and vessel servicing the gills. As the artery moved backward during its evolution to the mammalian aorta, the nerve was constrained to move behind it, although its target (the larynx, an evolutionary descendant of the gill arch) remained up in the neck. If you insist that such designs reflect God’s plan, then you must admit that his plan was to make things look as if they had evolved.

Finally, Dawkins provides evidence from a completely different realm: that of biogeography, the study of how plants and animals are distributed over the earth. Why do volcanic islands like Hawaii have plenty of unique plants, birds and insects (most resembling species from the nearest mainland) but no native amphibians, freshwater fish or land mammals? Such patterns defy explanation by any form of creationism. Instead, they bespeak long-distance migration of ancestors to newly formed islands, followed by the evolution of new species.

Surf to the link to read more.