Fun, Silliness and Hiking

Workout notes 4 mile hike at Jubilee (muddy in spots); rotator cuff exercises. Shoulders sore when I slept; they felt better during and after the hike. I went with my yoga teacher who roller bladed on the asphalt.

There were a couple of stretches of mud; mostly it was walkable single track:

And some grass:

There were toad tadpoles; some had developed enough to be “almost toads” (you can’t see these here)

This is Vickie who did about 11 miles of roller blade skating on the roads while I was out on the trail:

Last year, those jeans were snug. Now they are baggy.

Silliness:
Why is Barbara carrying her purse like that? Ans: her pants were a bit snug around the butt and I had a camera

10 June 2010-evening

I watched the Celtics-Lakers and followed the game here.

I mostly did math today though I did make a morning yoga class and I also walked at Jubilee Park in the afternoon while Vickie (yoga teacher) roller bladed.

I warmed up for 20 minutes, did some 1 on, 2 off and then did this loop 4 times on the 5: I don’t know how long it was but the time to do it was 3:20, 3:16, 3:15 and 3:03 (got into a rhythm); focus was on posture, rolling off of the foot and landing under neath my body.

Vickie made wise-cracks about my butt and how it swiveled. (pun intended). This was coming from a woman who repeatedly does yoga postures that involve bending over and sticking out one’s butt. Revenge will be sweet.

Celtics vs. Lakers Game 4: Celtics showing their age.

I am following the game here. Suffice it to say that Jon Berry got it right: The Celtic offense is pathetic.

Why?

We’ve never had problems like this at our university.

10 June 2010 (am)

Workout notes (yesterday)
AM: weights: pull ups (8 sets of 5, I focused on “not kicking” on the way up), 3 sets of rows (dumbbells), 3 sets of rows (machine) with 190, 3 sets of incline bench presses (140 x 7), 3 sets of dumbbell military presses (45 x 10 seated, 45 x 10 seated, 50 x 8 standing), lat pull downs (145 x 10, 3 sets, shoulder friendly grip), squats (Smith machine), 2 sets of 10 with 135 with toe raises, then machines (2 circuits): leg extensions (130 x 10), curls (130 x 10), push backs (butt) 8 x 150, 10 x 150, vertical leg lifts (hanging, 10), vertical crunches (20, 10, 10), twists (2 sets of 10 x 130 in each direction)

Prior to all that, regular rotator cuff then new routine from a book (1 set of 10 with the new stuff).

PM: walked with the group plus 1 mile on my own; 5 total. Note: the dummies spent 20 minutes with their captive audience.

Posts
Humor: this was called “yoga teacher fail” but I’d call it a big “win”.

Political Humor
Jon Stewart: points out that Glenn Beck routinely lies to his audience; here is some video proof (Beck says that the media “doesn’t show” what it showed).

This Modern World: this cartoon shows that President Obama has been centrist (at most) in many of his policies.

Religion (humor)

Just replace “Flying Spaghetti Monster” with some other deity and you’ll get the point.

Social Conditions Yes, some people end up losing their homes over unpaid water bills. But too many go deadbeat if there are no consequences to not paying a bill. Where is the appropriate balance?

Religion Stephen Hawking talks about religion and science. See the video here. He rejects the idea of a personal deity.

Food for thought This is a sobering collection of photos describing the Jews under Nazi Germany and those in Gaza under Israeli occupation. I don’t know what the solution is; frankly I have no love of the Islamic type governments (which are extremely repressive) but I don’t like seeing human beings treated poorly either.

What is Wrong with Ray Allen of the Celtics?

No surprise: Ray Allen had a horrible shooting night; he went 0-13 for all field goals and 0-8 for 3 point shots. So, he must be way off of his game, right?

Well, let’s examine his last three years with the Celtics: in field goals he hit 1402 out of 2999 attempts for a percentage of .467 and in 3 point field goals he it 524 out of 1337 for .392.

Now against the Lakers:

Field goals: game one: 3-8, game two: 11-20, game three: 0-13 for 14-41 for .341 (low)
3 points: game one: 0-2, game two: 8-11, game three: 0-8 for 8-21 or .381 (about right)

So where his overall percentage is down, his 3-point percentage is about what you’d expect, if one looks at ALL THREE GAMES together.

Celtics-Lakers Game III

Well, it started off well enough; Kevin Garnett made drives and alley-oop dunks to score the first 6 points of the game; then it was 12-5 Celtics as Rondo scored the next 6.

But then the Lakers took control and it is 26 -17 Lakers at the end of 1; No one other than Garnett can hit the broad side of a barn right now. This was a 21-5 spurt by the Lakers.

Phil Jackson called an early time out that turned it around.
Garnett has 10, Rondo 6, T. Allen 1. That’s it.

Boston is shooting 33 percent from the field.

It is now 37-24 with 7:14 to go; the Celtics got some stops but the offense is still offensive. Rondo is taking a rest and the Celtics look out of sorts. Field goal percentage: Lakers 52, Celtics 37. The Lakers are 10-12 from the line, Celtics 1-4. Nate Robinson has 5 points, but among the starters, only Garnett and Rondo have even scored.

2 on 1 break for the Celtics…Fischer draws the charge. 41-31 Lakers. Allen and Pierce still have 0.
Pierce hit a 3 but Perkins missed a lay-up.
Missed rebound; Bryant hustles…46-35 Lakers.

Right now, the Lakers are getting every roll.
52-40 at the half; the Celtics have gotten 0 roles.
Well, this is reminding me a bit of game 3 against Cleveland; the Celtics were 1-1 and got smoked at home.

54-47; Allen hit two free throws and Pierce hit a 3.

Oh goodness; Pierce was going well but has 4 fouls.
Allen missed an easy layup; he can’t hit anything.
The Celtics are playing awful but the Lakers went a bit cold too; 57-49.

Right now, Lakers: 43 percent; Celtics 36 percent.

But it is 62-55; it has been going between 7 and 9 points for a while.
ANOTHER Celtic shot rimmed out.
62-57 with 1:41 left in the half.
Another Bryant shot rims in.

The Celtics had cut it to 4; now it is 67-61 at the end of 3.
44 percent shooting for LA; 38 for Boston. The Lakers only had 15 3′rd quarter points but still the Celtics still can’t make shots.

4′th quarter; Celtics threw it away on the first possession. OMG, 5 fouls on Pierce.
67-63; two tough fouls on the Celtics.

Still, the Celtic D holds; 68-67 Lakers with 9:45 to go. The Celtics bench is stepping up big time:
22 points total with Davis having 8, T. Allen having 7, Robinson having 5.

72-70 with 7:20 to go. The refs are calling it tight.
74-70 with 5:40 to go…I think that the Celtics have gotten as close as they are going to get.

80-78 with 2:40…we need a stop!
No stop; Gasol with 2, 82-78 with 2:17 to go.
84-80; Bryant hit a shot after Garnett had cut it to 82-80; Garnett has 25.
1:29 to go…my guess is that the Lakers win this. Lakers ball…this one is over.
1:10 Celtics ball; 84-80 Lakers.
Allen, misses an open 3 AGAIN and the Celtics get burned on a lay up. This one is over.
Done. 87-80. Over.

The Celtics really played crappy today, at least the starters (other than Garnett who has played well).

87-82 after a Pierce drive.
Never mind…moving screen and Allen missed the lay-up. He is having a miserable game.
Laker free throw…rims in…what else. 89-82 with 23.8.

91-84 is how it ends.
(photos from yahoo)

8 June 2010

Workout notes
Yoga; we had a sub. She is younger (30′s?) and has the “new age yoga-lisp”; still I learned some things.
Then 6 miles of walking: Treadmill: 1 mile to warm up, then 1, 2, 3, 4, and then .6 miles at 5 (13:20 pace), then 1 mile moving between a 12 minute and a 13:20 pace (.1 at 13:20, .15 at 12), then 1 mile changing every .1 between a 12 and various paces down to 10:55.
Then rotator cuff exercises, then 2 “form” miles on the track; mile 1 I focused on posture and mile 2 “feet”.

Injury: the rotator cuff felt better yesterday and less achy at night.

Science Why are there fewer women at the elite level in science? This article sets up the question and will be the first in a series to explore the answer.

When Dr. Summers raised the issue to fellow economists and other researchers at a conference in 2005, his hypothesis was caricatured in the press as a revival of the old notion that “girls can’t do math.” But Dr. Summers said no such thing. He acknowledged that there were many talented female scientists and discussed ways to eliminate the social barriers they faced.

Yet even if all these social factors were eliminated, he hypothesized, the science faculty composition at an elite school like Harvard might still be skewed by a biological factor: the greater variability observed among men in intelligence test scores and various traits. Men and women might, on average, have equal mathematical ability, but there could still be disproportionately more men with very low or very high scores.

These extremes often don’t matter much because relatively few people are involved, leaving the bulk of men and women clustered around the middle. But a tenured physicist at a leading university, Dr. Summers suggested, might well need skills and traits found in only one person in 10,000: the top 0.01 percent of the population, a tiny group that would presumably include more men because it’s at the extreme right tail of the distribution curve.

“I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong,” Dr. Summers told the economists, expressing the hope that gender imbalances could be rectified simply by eliminating social barriers. But he added, “My guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.”

Dr. Summers was pilloried for even suggesting the idea, and the critics took up his challenge to refute the hypothesis. Some have claimed he was proved wrong by recent reports of girls closing the gender gap on math scores in the United States and other countries. But even if those reports (which have been disputed) are accurate, they involve closing the gap only for average math scores — not for the extreme scores that Dr. Summers was discussing.

Some scientists and advocates for gender equity have argued that the remaining gender gap in extreme scores is rapidly shrinking and will disappear. It was called “largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors” last year by two researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Janet S. Hyde and Janet E. Mertz. They noted evidence of the gap narrowing and concluded, “Thus, there is every reason to believe that it will continue to narrow in the future.”

But some of the evidence for the disappearing gender gap involved standardized tests that aren’t sufficiently difficult to make fine distinctions among the brighter students. These tests, like the annual ones required in American public schools, are limited by what’s called the ceiling effect: If you’re measuring people in a room with a six-foot ceiling, you can’t distinguish among the ones taller than six feet.

The upshot: those who have the talent to reach the truly elite levels (say, Academy of Science) are so rare is it difficult to measure them.

Other studies have shown that these differences in extreme test scores correlate with later achievements in science and academia. Even when you consider only members of an elite group like the top percentile of the seventh graders on the SAT math test, someone at the 99.9 level is more likely than someone at the 99.1 level to get a doctorate in science or to win tenure at a top university.

Of course, a high score on a test is hardly the only factor important for a successful career in science, and no one claims that the right-tail disparity is the sole reason for the relatively low number of female professors in math-oriented sciences. There are other potentially more important explanations, both biological and cultural, including possible social bias against women.

But before we accept Congress’s proclamation of bias, before we start re-educating scientists at workshops, it’s worth taking a hard look at the evidence of bias against female scientists. That will be the subject of another column.

Note: this has almost nothing to do with the students that I teach (not a one is at this level) nor does it have much to do with me; yes, I have an earned Ph. D. and have published in peer reviewed journals, but I am not even within an AU for being “elite”.

Is there life on Titan? Maybe, but there is no proof as of right now.

There has been a bit of an uproar the past day or so that scientists have found evidence of life on Saturn’s giant moon Titan. As soon as I saw the press release I knew this was going to be a problem. So let’s be clear:

First, have we found life on Titan? No.

Have we found evidence that there might be life on Titan? Sorta. The results are preliminary and not yet confirmed; in fact, some of the evidence is from computer modeling and has not been directly observed.

Bear in mind as well that evidence is not proof. Evidence just means an observation was made that is consistent with life on the moon, but doesn’t say much else. There are non-biological explanations for the observations as well.

Of course, speculation is running rampant, so much so that Chris McKay, an exobiologist who studies Titan, has released an article clearing things up.

In short, there are non-organic explanations for what was found…as well as organic ones. There is reason to suspect that life might be there: we have a “consistent with but not diagnostic of” situation.

Five years ago, McKay and other scientists pointed out that if methane-based life existed on Titan, it might be detectable through a surface depletion of ethane, hydrogen, and acetylene. New observations show that this is the case; there are lower amounts of these substances than the chemistry of Titan would indicate.

As McKay points out, “This is a still a long way from ‘evidence of life’. However, it is extremely interesting.”

Those are the basics. Go read McKay’s article for details. The point he makes is that the results are preliminary, may yet turn out to be wrong, if they’re right may have non-biological explanations, and we should not conclude biology is involved until we get a lot more evidence.

Animal camouflage Just enjoy the latest Conservation Report article on this!

Politics
The Israeli Knesset: and I thought that our right wing Republicans were bad!

The Obama campaign: campaigning for Obama was interesting at times. One time, my buddy was told by a potential voter “I am going to vote for the nigger”. What do you say to that, especially when you don’t want to hurt your candidate? Evidently we weren’t alone.

Speaking of the President This is a nice collection of photos, videos and stuff on the President.

Mano Singham Continues his readable series of posts on the Middle East and on the fallout from the Gaza Relief Flotilla incident.

Oh, I was never good in English; I couldn’t write a complete sentence to save my life!

You never see a math professor saying “oh, I could never read Shakespeare; I never understood adjectives and nouns”. Yet you see liberal arts types proudly professing ignorance of science and mathematics.

(hat tip: Sandwalk)

Pulling my Hair out…

Darn it…what I am working on should be simple…how hard can a degree 4 polynomial be? But…

So I’ll take a break.

Now, is it possible for a woman to be so attractive that when she dresses in a “sort-of” sexy manner, she distracts the male employees? Yes, there is a lawsuit about this:

Claiming she’s tarnishing the financial industry’s reputation, ex-Citibanker Debrahlee Lorenzana’s current employer, JPMorgan Chase, now threatens to fire her for speaking to the press, the Voice learned today.

Debrahlee Lorenzana is the sexy former Citibanker whose story we broke on the cover of the Voice this week. She claims in a lawsuit that Citibank fired her for distracting men in her office with her naturally good looks. Now, Lorenzana says she’s received orders from her current employer, JPMorgan Chase, to stop speaking to the media about her Citi lawsuit. JPMorgan Chase has threatened to fire her if she continues to speak out.

Until now, Lorenzana had been mum about where she currently works — except to say that she’s employed at another bank — and has not said anything about how her current employer is responding to her going public with her lawsuit against Citi. (The Voice had honored her request not to name her current employer.)

But now, according to Lorenzana and to her lawyer Jack Tuckner, she is on the verge of losing her job at the Chase branch in Brooklyn where she currently works.

Yes, this is her:

But this is, IMHO, the “hottest” “office attire” photo:

(see all 26 photos here)

Ok, she is an attractive woman, but I see nothing wrong with the submitted “office” photos. But here is more from another article:

If you’re ever walking around Manhattan you’ll notice, albeit with less frequency these days, red boxes all around town that contain the Village Voice. The cover art is usually rather striking. Last week, the cover photo was particularly striking, in my opinion, because of the subject of this story:

This is the way Debbie Lorenzana tells it: Her bosses told her they couldn’t concentrate on their work because her appearance was too distracting. They ordered her to stop wearing turtlenecks. She was also forbidden to wear pencil skirts, three-inch heels, or fitted business suits. Lorenzana, a 33-year-old single mom, pointed out female colleagues whose clothing was far more revealing than hers: “They said their body shapes were different from mine, and I drew too much attention,” she says.

The article notes Ms. Lorenzana, 33, filed a lawsuit against Citibank for firing her because of her style of dress. She says managers at her branch repeatedly tried to get her to tone down her “provactive” appearance. Her lawyer says that they simply couldn’t control their libidos. Citibank cited performance issues and vows to defend itself with the usual lawyerly vigor. I’m sure the matter will be settled in the usual lawyerly way. In the meantime, she is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame.

What is interesting is “provocative” appearance in the workplace. Hard thing to pin down for a court of law, mindful of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous quote. But we can say there are some commonly held opinions on the matter and they mostly apply to women.

Emphasis mine. Note that it is subjective. For example, we have an English professor (female) who routinely wears very tight or very brief clothing to class; lately I’ve seen her in very thin, very tight white pants with bikini underpants in full view. BUT she is also approaching 70 years old and frankly, her students laugh at her. So, I doubt that she’d be in the same boat.

Also, my wife has a shape such that if, say, slacks fit her waist properly, they are going to be snug on her butt. So from time to time, she asks me if her attire is office appropriate. But then again, she is in her 60′s; so while she is attractive to me, she isn’t the same boat as Ms. Lorenzana.

By the way, Ms. Lorenzana has run into another problem:

Meanwhile, she’ll keep busy. She only has a Facebook inbox filled with three thousand friend requests to respond to.