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.

22 April 2010 noon

Workout notes AM: hilly 3.4 mile walk (basically my 4.2 mile Bradley park hill loop minus the first flat mile portion).

Noon: rotator cuff exercises, ab work, 5:30 headstand, 2200 yard swim. 250 pull, 250 free, 500 of 50 pull fist, 50 free, 2 x (100 pull, 100 pull paddle, 100 free, 100 free paddle), 100 pull, 100 free (17:36), 100 pull back, 4 x 25 fly.

Again, restricted swim; no push-offs. I was feeling the “ding” oh so slightly; it did NOT wake me up last night.

Posts

22 April 2010: Letter to the Editor…

In the Peoria Journal Star

Some thoughts came to mind as I read Jim Bright’s April 17 Spotlight letter (“European model is far from ideal”) and the Journal Star’s coverage of Sarah Palin’s visit. In each piece, President Obama’s educational background was attacked. Since when is being the president/editor of the Harvard Law Review a bad thing?

Frankly, I like it that we have an intelligent, educated, and yes, well-traveled person as president of the United States. I want someone who is smarter, wiser and more successful than I to be running things. 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.

I’ll close with two final points:

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. It wasn’t as if he were born with a silver spoon in his mouth; he earned everything he got. It was the previous president who benefited from family connections.

Two, 69.5 million people voted for this president. We wanted the changes that he is bringing. The idea that many of us support these changes out of ignorance is absurd.

Ollie Nanyes

Peoria

Update: surf to the newspaper link; I am getting flamed by the Limbaugh-Beck crowd. That is fun!

21 April 2010: rough day (sort of)

No, my day was not as rough as this; not even close:

Officially retired from broadcasting last November, Bill has been off air for a few years now, and apparently his day to day routine involves the sort of pain and attempt at rehabilitation that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The description, from Walton as documented in the Union-Tribune piece, is not for the squeamish.

“There were four incisions, four 4-inch bolts, two titanium rods and a cage that holds it all together and spacers in between the vertebrae,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve had to go through, much more difficult than all my other surgeries combined. It’s come so far, the evolution of back surgery, and doctors constantly are improving.

“I can’t describe the pain. Think of being submerged in a tub of boiling acid with an electrified current running through it. That would be nothing. People who haven’t had that nerve pain can’t know. It’s debilitating, excruciating, unrelenting. I had to eat lying on the floor, flat on my stomach.”

The big hook on the column, the thing that’s got it passed around between the blogs and tossed around via email is that Walton did contemplate suicide during his most recent ordeal, wondering if a life spent in this much pain was worth living at all. Luckily for all of us, this frustration (that has to be the absolute weakest word to use, no?) only led to thoughts, nothing moreand luckily for Bill, there is a new type of spine surgery that enabled him to quickly return to his normal life.

Physically, aside from being a bit sleepy, I feel fine; my shoulder is oh-so-slightly achy but the knee feels great.

But this is drop day at the university and I am teaching two remedial sections of “almost calculus”. In this class I have students who literally struggle to find the area of a rectangle (yes, if a rectangle has length 3 and width 5, its area is…and they have to THINK to “remember” the formula). This should be natural for someone contemplating a calculus course.

This is not to say that one has to be good at mathematics to have a good life; note that the founder of Jet Blue didn’t do well in mathematics.

But it sort of sucks to have students put into a position where they are all but sure to fail, even if they try their best.

So, it is time for some post-work posts!

Francis Collins: smart, successful man….but sometimes…

Collins goes on to describe this view as “Theistic Evolution.” It could also be called the “New Creationism.”

I can think of six, perfectly scientific, questions that could be asked.

1. Is there any evidence of purposeful “fine tuning”?
2. Is there any evidence that humans were inevitable?
3. Is there any evidence of a Moral Law?
4. Is there any evidence of a soul?
5. Is there any evidence that humans have something called “free will” that other species lack?
6. Is there any evidence that such a personal God exists?

I think the answer to all six question is “no,” therefore, believing those things conflicts with science. They are supposed to part of the natural, observable, universe and they should all be detectable, if they exist.

Go ahead and surf to Sandwalk to see the video. Dr. Collins is a bit like the otherwise sharp person who is stuck on the Great Pumpkin. (Followers of the comic strip Peanuts should get the reference).

Democrats Why we keep cowering before the Republicans is difficult to understand.

Illinois: yes, we have some “birther” idiots in positions of power.

Republicans: it is easier for their leadership to lead them around because, well, (most of) the rank and file are rather ignorant. No, intelligent Republicans (yes, there are many), I am NOT talking about you.

21 April 2010 (am)

Workout notes
3.1 mile walk (W. Peoria); this time it took me about 43 minutes (clock time; no stopwatch); the last 1.1 or so took me 14 minutes. No pain though I am a bit stiff. I heard a great barred owl hooting its little heart out (near the W. Peoria golf course), a woodpecker banging away and a large raccoon going into someone’s yard.

I then got to the gym in time to do rotator cuff exercises (one person knew what I was doing) and then swam 2200 yards: (restricted: no push offs)
250 pull, 250 free
5 x (100 pull fist, 100 free of 25 fist, 25 free)
100 pull with paddles
100 free without
100 free with paddles
100 pull without
100 free
then 100 back (pull buoy),
4 x 25 fly (no buoy).
I got a weird “sensation” in the tip of my right shoulder; this swimming sans push-offs is rough. All of my yardage is swimming; the only drills are fist and catch-up.

Injury: no pain last night; I almost forgot my Naproxyn. That is a good thing.

Celtics-Heat
I thought “this might be pretty good” when it was 23-23 at the end of the first quarter. But the Heat played horribly during the second quarter and couldn’t hit a thing (even missed open shots) and were down 49-33 at the half. I had remembered that Boston came back from 14 down in the first game and figured that maybe the Heat would return the favor. Wrong.

It got up to a 69-36 lead in the 3′rd and ended up 106-77. Ray Allen hit 5 3-pointers in the 3′rd and Glen Davis filled in well for Kevin Garnett. I admit that I went to bed with 7 minutes to go.

(photos: from yahoo)

My prediction: the Heat win game 3. Why? If routs like this occur during a series between, say, a 1 seed and an 8 seed, well, one team is just a lot better than the other. But here we have seed 4 versus 5; hence the Heat aren’t as horrible as they looked and the Celtics aren’t as good (this year). I look for some payback, though I am pulling for the Celtics.

Is Senator Lindsey Graham Gay?

Some conservatives seem interested in finding out if Senator Lindsey Graham is gay or not.

Here is one way that they can find out:

(how any conservative cannot like Senator Graham is beyond me…)

20 April 2010 (am)

Workout notes Weights: bench press: 10 x 135, 10 x 160, 6 x 175 (weak), 4 x 185 (better).
Then mixed it up: 3 sets of pull ups (10), 2 sets of chins (8, 5)
Incline bench: 10 x 135, 7 x 145
Seated military 4 x 95, 4 x 95
dumbbell military: 10 x 45, 8 x 50
pull downs: 3 x (8 x 140) strict
Ab work: 2 rounds of:
yoga leg lifts (30)
leg raises (straight leg) 20
crunch machine 10 x 110
twist machine 10 x 110
crunches (bent knee) 20
then yoga head stand (4:52; lost balance with 8 seconds left)

Walking: 3.37 miles at 15 mpm (running time); West Peoria.
That was just enough to “feel it” in the affected area; going faster would have risked a regression.

Injury: felt it right about wake up time; very minor.

Posts
A science blogger (Mark Chu-Carroll) reflects on the privilege that he was born with. I find this part very interesting:

The underlying theme of people like the jerk who inspired this post is: “I made it by myself, without any help. So they should be able to make it by themselves, without any help either.”

But that’s bullshit, because none of us “made it by ourselves”. We’re the beneficiaries of the system we live in.

I grew up in a wealthy town in NJ. We didn’t consider ourselves wealthy – but by comparison to lots of other people, we really were. I went to a very good school system. We complained about it a lot: the textbooks were too old; the equipment in the science labs were too beaten up; the classes were too easy, and so on. [...]

I write this math blog for fun. How did I get the background to do it? I come from a highly educated family. They taught me to read before I even started preschool. I’d learned about statistics from my father when I was in third grade. I learned about algebra in sixth grade, even though my school didn’t teach it until 8th or 9th. I learned calculus in my freshman year in high school – even though my school didn’t teach it until a senior year AP class. I was learning this stuff long before the school taught it to me; and my parents made sure that they bought a house in a very expensive school district where there would be things like AP classes. My parents paid for me to go to college – which gave me the time to take courses not just because I needed them to graduate, but because they covered things that I wanted to learn, just for fun.

How could a person from a family that just managed to scrape by, who lived in a school system that couldn’t afford textbooks for the basic classes, much less the AP classes, how could they compete with me?

Well, my story is somewhat different. Neither of my parents made it past 6′th grade; they were dirt poor, depression era people while growing up. But my dad enlisted in the Air Force and my mom worked here and there to help out.

When I was growing up I had good schools (often funded by the Department of Defense), libraries (which my parents took me to..until I started to willingly go on my own).

I had access to gyms and started to run and lift weights when I was in the 8′th grade. I had little league teams. When I got sick or when I broke my ankle (and shin), I had military health care.

And yes, because I was Hispanic I benefited from getting attention from universities; I was admitted to The University of Texas, Rice, Yale, West Point and the Naval Academy. I went to the latter; though I had a rough start as a freshman (2.59 gpa), I recovered to finish 269/969, and my finish (and GRE scores) were enough to get me into the University of Texas Ph. D. program. I graduated from that and published chapter 1 of my dissertation in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society as a graduate student. So, while I was not MIT mathematics faculty material, I did ok and feel that I went as far as my talent would take me.

And this is one reason that I am a liberal: yes, I worked hard to take advantage of the opportunities that I had, but I had those opportunities. I want others to have those opportunities. Therefore I want others to have good schools and good health care and I am willing to spend tax money on that.

Sure, there will be individuals who fail due to lack of talent, lack of desire, or whatever. Sadly, people blow opportunities all of the time. But there will be many who will thrive if they get the chance.

Speaking of education
Rate your students points us to some obnoxiousness. I agree with part of the article: students should ask hard questions and come in for help; I couldn’t agree more with that. But here is what is wrong:
1. Students are NOT my boss; I don’t work for them. A high school degree and zero experience does NOT qualify them to be my boss. I work for the university. I AM responsible to them, but sometimes my job is to make them do what they don’t want to do. Learning is not fun 100 percent of the time; there is hard work, and yes, sometimes the work IS unpleasant. I see them as their mathematical “coach”.

2. Not all concepts can be “explained to a 5 year old”. Sometimes the mind has to grow to master the concept. And frankly…sometimes the student simply isn’t up to the task. For example, if one has a bunch of students with sub 20 ACT’s in a calculus class, most will be unsuccessful and only a few of the hardest workers will be able to scrape by with a “C” or, perhaps in rare cases, a “B”. And yes, some of the more difficult concepts can only be mastered with a ton of hard work.
Think of it as training to race a marathon. A good coach can help, but the body has to grow into the challenge and it does though only though a tremendous amount of hard work. Not everyone will be up to it for a variety of reasons. Mastering a difficult academic concept is similar.

Now people might think that my view is harsh. But there are harsher views out there (see the comments)

Elitism is defensible because a tiny fraction of brilliant people create vastly more wealth than middle-of-the-road college grads from schools nobody has heard of. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard before starting microsoft; Microsoft’s current CEO went to Harvard undergrad and dropped out of Stanford’s MBA program to join the upstart outfit. The founders of Google dropped out of their PhD program at Stanford to start the company. Massive quantities of true value will always be created by the incredibly intelligent, and they acquire elite pedigrees because of that genius – they don’t necessarily become successful (or stay successful) because they hit the jackpot and got into Princeton.

In contrast, we spend billions of dollars a year so that some shithead with a 22 ACT can talk about how much Chaucer “sucks” in his or her lit 101 class. This person, statistically, will not amount to anything. Yet we allow him or her to destroy value out of the belief that it’s good for the individual to go to college, despite it being a four-year binge of cheap beer, weight gain and regrettable sex that most people don’t need, don’t benefit from, and pay for the privilege of having. Suzy or Johnny could have had their point-and-click fungible cubicle-slave job without paying five figures to add a resume line or two. Instead, we require them to go to college because That Is What We Are Told To Do (TM), which in turn is devaluing our degrees, increasing our job competition and lowering net social efficiency.

(the comment maker is arguing that too many people go to college).
I am not quite as pessimistic as this; hard work, character and intellectual interest can make up for a lack of inherent ability. I’ve seen it done; it is relatively rare though. Besides, I have good memories of a couple of courses that I did not excel in (5′th semester Spanish: C, Chinese Politics, B). I am glad that I took those courses, even though I sucked. (my professors were pretty good…)

Politics Remember the PUMA’s (Party Unity My Ass): these were those who backed Hillary Clinton in the primary and then went over to McCain-Palin in the general. A couple of them took a trip from Chicago to see…Sarah Palin. At first, this reads like a “poe” post, but I think that they are serious.

Well, frankly, I am glad that we ran people like this out of our party. Sure, Hillary Clinton would have done a fine job as president, and had she won the nomination, I would have voted for her and even helped out her campaign. She was clearly superior to Senator McCain (IMHO).

But these disgruntled Clinton supporters are nuts; Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are both famous female politicians with political skill. That is where the similarity ends; Secretary Clinton is tough, smart, hard working, progressive and intellectual. Governor Palin is none of those things. But then again, every movement has their Ellen Jamesians.

19 April 2010: PM

Posts for the evening

Pat Condell (hat tip: Richard Dawkins)

By the way, what is a major cause for earthquakes? A cleric’s answer: promiscuous women:

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

This nutjob would fit right in with our fundies.

Speaking of ignorance: Tancredo wants to “send President Obama back to Kenya” and a minister wants to go to Washington while armed and “do what he was trained to do”. Ok, they took a shot at Senator Lindsey Graham too.

Sarah Palin: She wants out country to act….well, like the way that the British government acted when we had our real tea party.

Robert Reich: gets misquoted by Senate Minority leader McConnel.

Education A professor weighs in on the LSU case in which a professor’s class was taken away from her because she graded the first exam too harshly (so thought the administration)

19 April 2010 (am)

Workout notes 1.5 mile walk, rotator cuff exercises, then 2200 yards of swimming:
(no push offs)
250 pull, 250 free
5 x 50 fist pull, 5 x 25 fist, 25 free (all on the 1)
2 x (100 pull, 100 pull paddles, 100 free, 100 free paddles)
100 pull, 100 free
100 back (pull)
4 x 25 fly (no buoy).

Swimming without the wall push-offs is harder than I had imagined it to be. It is even harder than open water because you kill your momentum and start “from scratch” every 25 yards, with no gliding nor streamlining.

The walking is going ok.

Injury: it started to ache just as I was waking up (normal hour) but it was oh-so-slight.

Posts

The right wing goes nuts over the national day of prayer being ruled unconstitutional. Note: The President opposes this ruling where I approve of it.

Here is another place where I disagreed with the President…at first.

(hat tip: Friendly Atheist)

I applaud his long term approach and his idea to go to an asteroid:

Landing a man on the moon was a towering achievement. Now the president has given NASA an even harder job, one with a certain Hollywood quality: sending astronauts to an asteroid, a giant speeding rock, just 15 years from now.

Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers.

“It is really the hardest thing we can do,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.

Going to an asteroid could provide vital training for an eventual mission to Mars. It might help unlock the secrets of how our solar system formed. And it could give mankind the know-how to do something that has been accomplished only in the movies by a few square-jawed, squinty-eyed heroes: saving the Earth from a collision with a killer asteroid.

“You could be saving humankind. That’s worthy, isn’t it?” said Bill Nye, TV’s Science Guy and vice president of the Planetary Society.

President Barack Obama outlined NASA’s new path during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.

“By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space,” he said. “We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history.”

On the day the president announced the goal, a NASA task force of scientists, engineers and ex-astronauts was meeting in Boston to work on a plan to protect Earth from a cataclysmic collision with an asteroid or a comet.

Fun and nutrition

Nate Silver gives the low-down on the artery clogging fast food sandwiches.

The “winners”: Panara Chipotle wins the honors for chicken, and the Wendy’s triple baconburger wins the honors among the hamburgers.

He is Risen!!!

Really! And the Republicans are not happy about it…and probably some fundies aren’t either.