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.

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