29 April 2010 (early am)

Workout notes (yesterday): 2200 yard swim; 500 warm up (pull), 5 x (100 free, 100 paddle, 100 fins), 100 back pull, 4 x 25 fly).

noon: 3.2 miles in 47:10 (painless at the end).

Injury notes: forgot to take naproxyn; some pain last night (brief), then the knee was hot when I woke up.

Today’s workout (so far) Bradley Park walk (4.2 hilly miles): 56:33; last 1.0x mile was 13:24. Slow: sure, but better than the 1:04 it took last week. Yes, the knee was slightly “thick” but rain is on the way. It comes with the territory.
But this is the first walk that “felt” almost like a valid training walk.

Sanity notes: retard neighbor was hammering nails starting at about 4 am; this dimwit is retired. The semester is all but over and now excuses and panicked remedial students are starting up; I’ll be happy when I never have to see this group again.

Math research notes: I finished the notes for my paper some time ago; but a colleague found a similar paper that used similar ideas…which was printed 55 years ago!!! Oh well; at least my idea was correct and there is still something we can do, and I have something that I can send out.

Science Water has been found on an asteroid:

Scientists have found lots of life-essential water — frozen as ice — in an unexpected place in our solar system: an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.

The discovery of significant asteroid ice has several consequences. It could help explain where early Earth first got its water. It makes asteroids more attractive to explore, dovetailing with President Barack Obama’s announcement earlier this month that astronauts should visit an asteroid. And it even muddies the definition between comets and asteroids, potentially triggering a Pluto-like scientific spat over what to call these solar system bodies.

This asteroid has an extensive but thin frosty coating. It is likely replenished by an extensive reservoir of frozen water deep inside rock once thought to be dry and desolate, scientists report in two studies in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Two teams of scientists used a NASA telescope in Hawaii to look at an asteroid called 24 Themis, one of the bigger rocks in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They examined light waves bouncing off the rock and found the distinct chemical signature of ice, said University of Central Florida astronomy professor Humberto Campins, lead author of one of the studies.

Astronomers have long theorized that hydrogen and oxygen and bits of water locked in clay are in asteroids, but this is the first solid evidence. And what they found on 24 Themis, a rock more than 100 miles wide with temperatures around 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, was more than they ever expected. About a third of the rock seemed to be covered in frost.

Furthermore, scientists didn’t just find ice; they found organic molecules, similar to what may have started life on Earth, Campins said.

“This asteroid holds clues to our past and how the solar system and water on Earth may have originated and it also has clues to our future with exploration of near-Earth asteroids,” Campins told The Associated Press.

Education

This article has got me to wondering what my “course curve” will look like:

Now I’m wondering why, as it seems 35% of students in the other sections of this class get A’s. 35%! 30% receive B’s, 20% C’s, 10% D’s and 5% F’s. Does this sound like a class that students are not succeeding in? When did we stop looking at the bell curve head-on? When did we decide to tip it on its side? Does anyone’s gradebook resemble a normal distribution, where A’s are given to “above average” students, and “above average” actually occures above the actual “average”?

Good question. Perhaps it happened when colleges became more “consumer oriented”?

This response to a professor complaining about plagiarism was interesting:

Hometown Haley’s proffie sounds like a big crybaby. Don’t you get it? It’s us vs. them, always. Haley didn’t cry big crocodile tears because she didn’t think she DISAPPOINTED you. Get. Ovah. Yerself. (She’s from the same high school? Start a Facebook page together.)

She (either legitimately or not) felt like she couldn’t do the work, so she got help. Modern students don’t think of plagiarism as cheating. It’s cut and paste, Grandad. The info they need to pass is right out there on Wikipedia or 123Essays.Com, and they just snatch it up.

She wasn’t trying to break your heart. She was trying to avoid any heavy lifting in order to pass your sucker course.