Attitudes: mathematics and walking

Mathematics Last week, a friend of mine e-mailed me a paper. A problem that I tried to solve back in 1989 has finally been solved; it was the result of a lot of work by lots of smart people, and someone that I know (and like) finally solved the problem.

So the good: a nice person got it.
The bad: well, the effort it took to solve the problem was, well, out of reach for someone who makes a living teaching 12 hours of undergraduate, mostly lower division mathematics; much of it remedial. The people who made significant progress on the problem work in research positions.

Sure, they are smarter than I and their course loads often include a graduate class.

Yes, I have a job and many others don’t. But there is, well, a deep seated “sigh” and a bit of remorse that I didn’t do better (and land at least a research post-doctoral position).

I can’t do anything about that now, but I can quit blogging for today and get to work on a paper that I should send out in the next couple of weeks!

Walking
From time to time, people comment on runners (or walkers) who either greet or don’t greet others. So yesterday, I made it a point to see what I do. So here is the full truth:

In all cases I move well to the opposite side of the path/road and

1. If the person coming the other way is walking for exercise or running, I usually smile and nod…well maybe grimace if I am toward the end of a long workout.

2. If the person has a dog, I don’t even make eye contact; I really hug “my” side of the path/road.

3. Same if the person is pushing a stroller or if it is someone just strolling or, say, a couple holding hands. I look away and down and don’t make eye contact.

I am not seeking approval of how I react; I am merely making a report. I don’t know if this is a “big city” habit (“mind your own frigging business!”) or it is because I am an introvert who doesn’t like people (except for those that I meet and get to know).

But there it is.

17 May 2010 (noonish)

Workout notes rainy weather. I walked 1 mile on the track (13:20), stretched, one 200 drill, 200 walk (12:40), 1 mile on the treadmill gradually moving up to elevation 7 and holding it for 3 minutes and moving back down (13:55). Then 2200 yards of swimming: 250 free (slow!), 250 pull, 5 x (25 drill, 25 swim) fins, (3g), 5 x 50 on 1 free, 5 x (25 drill, 25 swim (3g, fins)), 5 x 50 free (25 fist) on 1, 5 x (alt 25 side, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free), 3 x 50 back (pull), 50 free.

Note: my head position makes a difference on how much pressure there is on my shoulder. I need to focus on a neutral head (e. g., NOT look up but rather look down).

Posts
Sean Carrol makes a point about non-normalized probability with this delightful little example:

An eccentric benefactor holds two envelopes, and explains to you that they each contain money; one has two times as much cash as the other one. You are encouraged to open one, and you find $4,000 inside. Now your benefactor — who is a bit eccentric, remember — offers you a deal: you can either keep the $4,000, or you can trade for the other envelope. Which do you choose?

If you do the usual “expected value” calculation, then your strategy should not matter no matter how much money you see in the envelope and how big of the factor there is between the two envelopes (e. g., one envelope might contain, say, 1,000 times more money than the other).

But now suppose the factor is that one envelope has, say, 1000 times more money than the other and you open your envelope and see 2 dollars. Of course, you’d switch. On the other hand, if your envelope had 10,000 dollars in it, then of course you wouldn’t. The real life complication is that there is a realistic upper bound in how much could be in the envelope and if you discover that your envelope contains something near that upper bound, then you won’t switch.

In short, the “real life” problem is really a conditional probability problem: “what is the probability that my envelope contains the larger amount given that the upper bound is roughly X dollars”.

Sandwalk: check out his “visitors to this blog globe”.

Science

This is a long nosed tree frog; see more newly discovered species from Indonesian New Guinea here.

Jerry Coyne shows us a HUGE oarfish.

Nature: Celtic Rose took some coastline shots which show some spectacular natural beauty (scroll down just a bit to see the slideshow).

Absurdities that Mindless Religion can lead you to:

In 2002, 15 young girls burned to death in a school fire because firemen were not allowed by their religion to enter and rescue females who might not be covered head-to-toe in concealing clothing. In fact, religious police had actively hindered the escape of the girls, with reports that they were hitting them and pushing them back into the building, because they were trying to run out without putting their head coverings on first.

Now, in 2010, the religious ministry has given orders to the religious police to allow even male rescue workers to enter girls’ schools in an emergency.

Wow. So it only took them 8 years to figure out that maybe lives are more important than modesty.

17 May 2010 (am)

I am taking a lazy morning; I’ll walk, swim lightly and lift (lightly) in a few minutes.

Injury slight leg ache just prior to waking up; it went away very quickly. Shoulder: feel it; the impingement has given me tendonitis. Rotator cuff, shoulder friendly workouts, light swimming should be ok for a while.

Posts: A friend of mine posted a video of what racewalking technique looks like:

Note: she walks sub 29 minute 5K’s in judged races and 4:3X marathons (also judged). If you slow it down you see that she really doesn’t leave the ground; note that her head doesn’t “bob” up and down the way that a runner’s does.

My turn over is much, much, much slower and I don’t keep the knee of my support leg straight (right now anyway).

Legal Satyricon This is commentary on a series of 4 youtube videos; the latter two show a grossly misinformed public; the first shows what happens when one group thinks that it is entitled to have veto power over what is seen and the second shows the result of poor judgment. Surf to the site for what promises to be a lively discussion.

Muslims in Sweeden thinking that they should have veto power over what others see.

Note the comment: “had you stopped the video this wouldn’t have happened” (about 4:50 into it). This is the classic “heckler’s veto”: don’t allow this else others might misbehave.

Yep: first grade girls, being egged on by their parents!

Tea party ignorance.

Obama supporter ignorance (Detroit; this happened in Detroit and was lampooned by Rush Limbaugh)

Randazza pointed us to Glenn Beck ignorance; this is hilarious:

Science Jerry Coyne points us to a debate on evolutionary “group selection”. I’ll have to watch these sometime this week.

He also commented on a recent article about modern life and how it had a single origin:

If you’ve studied biology at all, you’ll know that the genetic code—the triplet sequence of DNA (and RNA) that codes for the amino acids of proteins—is virtually identical across all species. There are 64 triplet codons coding for around 20 amino acids (as well as protein-terminating “stop positions”), and the correspondence between the code and the amino acid is nearly identical across animals, plants, and bacteria. There are a few exceptions to this, but they are minor: no species deviates from the code by more than a few amino acids, though some mitochondrial DNA deviates by as many as 8 codons. You can find a list of these deviations (last updated in 2008) at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH.

Although we can’t attach numbers to the likelihood that the “universal code” reflects a single rather than a multiple origin of life (that would require a model of how the code might have evolved), only a moron or a creationist would deny that this similarity reflects a single origin. There are simply too many genes involved in producing the code and turning it into proteins to think that the code’s universality merely reflects evolutionary convergence in lineages that originated independently. The universality results from ancestry, not coincidence.

16 May 2010 (pm)

Education A professor admits to grade inflation. Great. If there is any justice, if this person ever gets sick and needs surgery, his surgeon will have been someone who was undeservedly given grades because he/she was a nice person.

How I do it? I make up a scheme, and then assign course grades by the numbers I see on the spreadsheet; I deliberately hide the names. So what a student gets, they have earned according to the numbers.

Politics Paul Krugman:

If Democrats hold the House, which is still a big if but is starting to look possible, the 111th Congress — and, yes, Obama’s first two years — will go down in history as an epic success.

He also has some words for the climate change deniers:

So, via Joe Romm, the NASA-GISS data show that the past 12 months were the hottest 12-month period on record. Here’s my plot of the temperature anomaly — the difference, in hundredths of a degree centigrade, from the average over 1951-80: [...]

Any statistical fix, like looking at multi-year averages, would just confirm that the temperature trend is up.

Now, I’m sure that the climate deniers will find a way to ignore the latest facts. But I’m not sure what that way will be.

Religion: Richard Dawkins on schools of thought: