7 June 2010 (am)

Workout notes: 4 mile walk (6 laps at the West Peoria track; first 5 were 27:22 (about 2.05 miles); then 1 extra. Someone asked me for walking tips. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say “do this”:

Ok, she has a slight “flight phase” that, even if I walked perfectly, wouldn’t have in a Centurion walk. But that is what a good walking stride looks like.

Afterward, I did some ab work, yoga stretches and rotator cuff stuff.
Last night, my shoulder ached and, at times, I heard my shoulder sound like an ice chest with some water in it as I walked.

Science There are some lessons about letting dogma interfere with science here. But even better is this video which Jerry Coyne points us to:

Politics Beware of conventional wisdom; Paul Krugman argues that now is NOT the time to worry about the debt and deficit.

Mano Singham: gives more discussion on the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid flotilla.

Celtics Lead Game 2 Early

It was 29-22 Celtics after one and 36-26 with 9 minutes left in the first half. Ray Allen has 13, Rondo 6, Pierce 4 (on free throws); Gasol was on fire and had 9 first quarter points. But the Celtics are shooting 50 percent from the field and the Lakers only 36 percent; that won’t last.

But Garnett has 3 fouls; Wallace and Davis have played well though.

42-28; Ray Allen is on fire; but the Lakers are leaving him open. He has 19 points with 5 three point shots. The Lakers put Kobe Bryant on him now.

Just under 5 minutes to go in the half; 45-33 Celtics but they have gotten sloppy; Coach Rivers calls time out to settle his team.

52-41; Allen is now 7-7 for 3 pointers. But they are leaving him open and Bryant has 3 fouls.

54-48; the Celtics really got sloppy at the end of the quarter and gave up 5 very quick points in the last few seconds; they did that at the end of quarter 1 in the first game.
Now big MO is on the side of the Lakers.

The main damage was done when Bryant intercepted a pass and knocked down a 3 with about a second left….and stole the ball AGAIN (but missed the shot). When he is on the court, you can’t let up a second.

3′rd quarter; 57-56 Lakers; Celtics with some bonehead ball handling. This one is over.
Garnett can’t hit a thing. Pierce can’t hit anything either. Gasol can’t miss.

61-61; the Lakers bigs are abusing Boston. Rondo hit a 3. Garnett looks wounded.

68-68; Allen has 30 and that is what is keeping Boston in the game.

72-72 at the end of 3.
Factors: Celtics bigs have lots of fouls, Gasol is on fire, Allen has 30, Rondo is running on fumes. Bryant has 4 fouls.
The Lakers have been at the free throw line all night (28-37 versus 12-14 for Boston); Bynum has 17, Bryant 13, Gasol 24.

Man, the Celtics are getting abused in the paint. But Glen Davis is hustling. The Celtic subs are stepping up.

Bryant has 5 fouls, but drives and scores and draws the foul. The Lakers are going to put this away.

Ray Allen misses everything; 4 minutes to go and the Lakers are up 90-89. Artest picks up his 5′th foul. Garnett picked up his 5′th foul; but the Celtics lead 91-90. Finally, the Lakers throw it away. 93-90 Celtics; out of bounds play was close but went to the Celtics.

95-90 Celtics; 1:26; Doc Rivers the running time out!
97-90 Celtics; Perkins kept his cool when he got fouled and made 1 of 2; 98-90.

Bryant takes a long 3; makes it; 98-93. 47.1 seconds left.
But Rondo is shooting 2; he sucks at the free throw line.
33 seconds; Rondo shooting free throws. 100-93; the only thing Rondo does poorly is shoot free throws…shades of Wilt Chamberlain.

The Celtics bench has 24 points; the Lakers 15. But the Lakers are living at the free throw line.

Celtics up 102-93 with 16.6 seconds left. Garnett hit two big free throws. Perkins hits on of 2; Celtics up 103-93 with 10.5 seconds left. Gasol hits one free throw; it finishes 103-94 Celtics.
(photos from yahoo)

Storms and Tornadoes: near miss

Workout notes 13.1 miles on the East Peoria Trail: 3:07 (slow); It took some time for my left butt/piriformis/back to loosen up but I was going well enough at 10 miles (2:23) to do 5K (3.1) more. The splits: 5 mile: 1:11, 1:11, 3.1 43:51.

I admit that I was a bit stiff from yesterday’s weight workout.

Along the way I was serenaded by power saws and lawn mowers; though the trail (paved bike path) was fine, yesterday’s storms and tornadoes probably knocked down some nearby trees.

Highlight: I saw a toad crossing…it was adorable.

Injury: the shoulder was noisy at times though it didn’t hurt.

Frogs:
Here is one of the Smithsonian’s photo contest winners:

More photos here. Hat tip: 3-quarks daily.

Morons: yes, there are those who are denying the oil spill.

Israel: it’s “never again” paranoia isn’t doing it any favors.

Politics Why do we (the public) care so much about the sex lives of the candidates? Kathleen Parker wonders why people don’t keep private affairs, well, private.

Unemployed? There may be a reason you aren’t getting inquiries from your job applications:

Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month? Bad news: Some companies are ignoring all unemployed applicants.

In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a “Quality Engineer.” Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, “Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.”

In a nearly identical job posting for the same position on the Benchmark Electronics website, the red print is missing. But a human resources representative for the company confirmed to HuffPost that the The People Place ad accurately reflects the company’s recruitment policies.

“It’s our preference that they currently be employed,” he said. “We typically go after people that are happy where they are and then tell them about the opportunities here. We do get a lot of applications blindly from people who are currently unemployed — with the economy being what it is, we’ve had a lot of people contact us that don’t have the skill sets we want, so we try to minimize the amount of time we spent on that and try to rifle-shoot the folks we’re interested in.”

There are about 5.5 people looking for work for every job available, according to the latest data from the Labor Department.

Sony Ericsson, a global phone manufacturer that recently announced that it would be bringing 180 new jobs to the Buckhead, Ga. area, also recently posted an ad for a marketing position on The People Place. The add specified: “NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL.” When asked about the ad, a spokeswoman said, “This was a mistake, and once it was noticed it was removed.”

Ads asking the unemployed not to apply are easy to find. A Craigslist ad for assistant restaurant managers in Edgewater, N.J. specifies, “Must be currently employed.” Another job posting for a tax manager at an unnamed “top 25 CPA firm” in New York City contains the same line in all caps.

I Can See The Face of Jesus in the BP Oil Slick

Ok, not really. But what is true is just as absurd:

One third of the 60 million white Christian evangelicals in America believe the world will end in their lifetime , according to a Pew poll. They subscribe to a theology known as “premillennial dispensationalism”. (h/t Gawker)

Now blogs on the Christian fringe are abuzz with possibility that the oil spill is the realization of Revelation 8:8–11. “The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed … A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” According to Revelation, in other words, something terrible happens to the world’s water, a punishment to those of insufficient faith. The foul water, according to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, mirrors one of the plagues God called upon Egypt on behalf of his people Israel.

Then there are the fringies who believe Obama is the anti-Christ, such as the vile Obambi.com blog.

The anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything.

But note: there is an opportunity for a political alliance there, as the Republicans have been more in the pocket of big oil than the Democrats. But frankly, I want nothing to do with those idiots.

Workout notes
Weights in the afternoon:
rotator cuff
pullups (10, 10, regular, 10, 10 chin, 5, 5 wide chin)
rows: 3 sets on the Smith, 10 x 115, 2 x 7 x 135
rows: 2 on the sitting machine
military dumbbell: 10 x 40, 10 x 45 seated, supported, 7 x 50 standing
lat pull downs: 3 x 10 with 145
incline bench: 2 x (10 x 135)
Squats: 10, 15 with 135, with 10 toe raises (Smith machine)
2 circuits of :
10 leg lifts (hanging)
10 leg extensions
10 leg curls
20 toe raises
10 gluteals (150)
20 crunches
10 twists (each side) with 130

Crappy neighbor note well, it has been 72 hours since the moron last cut his grass so he is at it again.

5 June 2010 (noon)

All over the place today

Fluff: online dating sites: yep, many of those who use them are MARRIED (not: got married after using them, but using them to find dates while being married to someone else); now we have

Ashley Madison’s unique selling proposition is pairing married men with married women, counting on mutually assured destruction to do the rest. Skeptics attribute its purported growth to “bot” populations – script-generated profiles that contact and reply to members – or other slight of hand. Noel Biderman, Ashley Madison’s CEO, explains the site’s success as a function of marketing, and this sponsorship goes to further show the service’s vitality. As “…a former sports attorney who was inspired to create the site in 2001 after reading a research report that 30 percent of the people who visit singles dating sites are not single at all,” he seems to have nailed the target audience.

This vaguely reminds me of this:

Of course, this sign is, at best, misleading. Most of us have zero chance at landing someone as physically attractive as those people shown in the sign.

Gaza Flotilla Attack: Mano Singham doesn’t mince words. Yes, I think that Israel has too much influence on our government. We should be allies, but we ought to call them out when they screw up.

Other topics
Friendly atheist teaches math in high school. Here he talks about an incident in which a parent complained about his blog.

Math fail: someone thinks that a penalty of 1/6′th of his wealth is too harsh. A judge agrees, and so makes the penalty 1/5′th. The judge wasn’t being sarcastic.

Science Some day, we might be able to “import” data into the mind. If that seems strange, just think of all of the relative recent events in which a public official
“recalled” stuff that wasn’t true:
Arizona Governor
Republican candidate for Senate
Democratic candidate for Senate
Democratic candidate for President

Republican President

Ronald Reagan was an inveterate teller of anecdotes. He loved to tell people stories both about himself and others. The problem is that so many of these stories weren’t just filled with inconsistencies, many of them were outright lies. As a perfect example, consider the story that was particularly fond of telling in his later years about being part of the film crew present at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Now, this isn’t simply a case of mixing up facts, thinking he was one place when in reality he was at another nearby. Ronald Reagan never left the shores of America during the entirety of World War II!

Yet few people apparently ever had trouble believing his creative memory. It can only be assumed that Ronald Reagan himself must at some subconscious level have believed in the lies; if you believe them, it isn’t lying.

Yes, I’ve misremembered things and so did the late Stephen Jay Gould; in fact one of his stories was about false memories.

Economy Robert Reich predicts a double-dip recession; the middle class just doesn’t have any money to spend.

Yes, the last month’s job numbers were confounded by lots of census jobs, and private sector job growth remains stagnant (plus 40,000). Still, we are better off than we were under President Bush.

Yesterday, we had a quick drop in the stock market. A friend of mine explains why:

When James Angel wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission just over a month ago, he made a prescient point. “With so much activity driven by automated computer systems, there is a risk that something will go extremely wrong at high speed,” the associate professor of finance at Georgetown University warned the US equity market’s main regulator in a letter sent on April 30.

It took only six days for the prediction to come true.

Point counter point: Is it appropriate to build a Muslim center (with a mosque) near ground zero?

Point

Counter point

Ed Brayton:

Here’s conservative hypocrite Andrew McCarthy arguing that the government should not allow an Islamic center (they keep calling it a mosque, but it’s a larger center and a mosque is only one part of it) to be built a couple blocks from the site of the 9/11 attack. He actually justifies it with a ridiculous tu quoque:

There are 2300 mosques at least in the United States, by contrast, in mecca and medina, there are not only no Christian churches, no synagogues, there are no non-Muslims, they’re closed cities. It would be a monument to intolerance on sacred ground.

He then bizarrely claims that allowing the center to be built would be an example of “Islamic supremacism” — while actively arguing that the government should allow religious groups of all kinds to own property and use them for their own purposes except for Muslims.

I have to agree with “counter point” here. Sure, I find Islam to be absurd, but then again, I find all of the major religions to be absurd. These systems only become tolerable when their adherents start using their texts symbolically (as do most educated Christians). If Muslims want to live here and obey our laws and respect freedom of speech, great! Welcome! Those who don’t should be treated the same way that Christians who don’t respect our laws or freedoms are treated (e. g., those who murder doctors).

msnbc.com: Word to your Maddow: Darwin Rap

more about "msnbc.com: Word to your Maddow", posted with vodpod

5 June 2010: West Peoria Race, Boxing and Facebook

Workout notes
Injury: my right shoulder is achy this morning; then again it is raining. But I have lifted, swam nor done rotator cuff exercises; perhaps I should try being diligent about the latter (as in: “every day”).

Walking I walked a 4 mile race this morning; this was the West Peoria Jubilee Race. It was rainy and though I was warmed up and didn’t feel that bad, I felt extremely bound by technique. I did my best to walk taller and then to use feet and, yes, to keep a straight knee. The time showed it: 47:15.: 11:19, 12:15, 11:44, 11:56. This felt like, well, a short marathon paced effort, which was what it was. But I have to be realistic. And yes, the very wet, rainy conditions slowed me a great deal.

I restated walking “from scratch” on April 15 and that was all of one whole mile! And, I’ve only started to care about technique a week or so ago.

The race itself I admit that it has sentimental value for several reasons. One reason is that it covers some of the streets that I routinely practice on; another is that it starts in front of the house of my good friend. She has done the race since it’s inception (1995); she used to run it in 37 minutes or so. Now, it takes her 53 minutes and she walks part of it.

I remember signing up for it and picking up my packet; there was a lady that I knew from the local fitness community there, just hanging around. She was wearing thin white pants…and one of the guys there asked her to demonstrate a bending stretch, which she did (he wanted to see her bend over ). She seemed interested in talking to me for some reason; I didn’t mind.

Also, it was at this race where I cracked 7 minute miles for the first time in ages, and I also ran one of my few sub 26 minute efforts in 1998.

Olivia was all of 3.5 years old and visiting; Barbara decided to take her to do the 2 mile walk together; both wore the black race t-shirt and black tights.

When Barbara said that they would leave 30 minutes prior to race time (.75 miles away from our house), I told her “you don’t know Olivia; you’ll never make it in time”. They didn’t. But they were on the course and I said “hi Olivia” as I passed her near mile 2.

Later, when I got back home, they were on the computer; Olivia was sitting on Barbara’s lap; both in their black race t-shirts and tights, both smacking gum and playing a solitaire game (called “solitary” by Olivia) on the computer.

I just shook my head and left them.

Facebook:

Brotherpeacmaker posted a funny cartoon; it is about a site called “hatebook” where people can be nasty to each other.

In all honesty, I’ve learned from facebook. Here are the things I’ve learned:

1. People that I have something in common with in one area are often very different in other areas. For example, it might be true that a site like Daily Kos is very science and atheist friends. But the vast majority of people who share political points of view with me are very different from that; many hold literal Biblical beliefs (e. g., creationism) and know next to nothing about science. Many are couch potatoes who couldn’t run 4 feet, much less 4 yards.

On the other hand, some endurance athletes are right wing Republicans.

2. People from my past: I fully expected to have grown apart from my high school classmates. That is certainly true; many of the excellent former athletes are, well, those “pregnant males” that you see walking around. Many stopped their personal education a long time ago. But that isn’t always the case; one is a successful ultra runner. Also, one has turned to be a delightful discussion companion.

3. College: yep, my college classmates are indeed mostly right wing Republicans; I expected that. But some really don’t mind. But here is what is hilarious: one of the former cross country runners ran his mile about 1 minute faster than I did when we were at the Naval Academy. He was 4:30-ish, I was 5:30-ish. This year, he trained…and barely broke 6 minutes. Last year, I barely broke 7 minutes. In short, the 1 minute gap between us remains. Aging is a a bitch!

4. People from other walks of life: my facebook friends include lawyers, doctors, truck drivers, small business owners, scientists, mathematicians, radio personalities, economists, academics, religious ministers, military officers, athletes, chronically unemployed and homeless, and yes, a professional boxer. This has really given me an appreciation for what others go through on a day to day basis; though we share basic needs, our day to day lives are often very, very different as are our day to day concerns. This has been good for me.

Boxing I don’t know how I feel about boxing. Yes, I like to watch it and yes, I really admire the skill, dedication, determination and, yes, courage that these guys (and sometime gals) exhibit.

But sometimes I feel guilty about watching them.

True, part of my fascination is that I was so awful at it; I boxed for a couple of short segments in PE class (freshman and sophomore) and I did well enough to earn a 86 out of 100 (the mean really was in the mid 70′s; there wasn’t grade inflation at Annapolis, at least in those days).

We boxed 1 minute rounds, and mostly I used my long arms and jab to keep my opponent away from me; I threw a few combinations. But I got graded well because my punches tended to be straight; I was too slow to throw a looping punch. But I knew that I sucked, and no, you didn’t want to get in the ring with the guys on the boxing team; that would lead to a weekend headache.

So, I appreciate those who are successful. But I feel a bit guilty; am I benefiting from these guys destroying their bodies?

Facebook has helped me appreciate other aspects of professional boxing.
I am facebook friends with Edner Cherry; I’ve enjoyed seeing his bouts on TV in the past. (here and here)

Well, Mr. Cherry was due to fight last night:

But the fight didn’t come off; Mr. Cherry reported on his facebook page that his opponent backed out. I don’t know the details but I do know that means no paycheck (don’t know what advance these guys might get for signing).

This isn’t like basketball: say and injury to a Celtic doesn’t mean that game 2 of the Lakers-Celtics game doesn’t get played. It isn’t even like track and field; if a rival gets injured you can still run the race and get a paycheck.

But in one on one sports: if your opponent backs out (for whatever reason, injury, illness, better offer?) you are screwed.

And speaking of boxing: Mr. Cherry has reached the “title contender” level but hasn’t quite reached “world champion” status as yet. But most boxers don’t make it even near to a championship fight, and most boxers never reach the “contender” stage. Here is an article about what life is like for most of them:

Beethavean Scottland always explained to those who questioned his chosen field: “I’m in a sport where I could get hurt. But I’m in a sport where I could really love my life. That’s boxing.”

The 26-year-old lived in the Baltimore area with his wife and three young children. He was rising in the sport’s rankings.

With a 20-6-2 record, Scottland stepped into a New York ring on June 6, 2001. His opponent, George Khalid Jones, was 15-0. The bout was supposed to be close. Instead, Scottland was beaten unconscious, the brutality broadcast live on ESPN2.

Six days and two brain surgeries later, Scottland died, making a widow of his high-school sweetheart and leaving their children fatherless.

Denise Scottland used donations to bury her husband. Because his death stemmed from fight night — the only night a boxer typically receives paid medical attention — Denise received a check for $20,000 from the promoter’s insurance company. If he had died while training, or while crossing the street, or two weeks after Jones battered his skull, the widow would have received nothing.

“What is she supposed to do with a few thousand dollars?” asked Adrian Davis, Scottland’s trainer and friend. “You telling me she’s going to raise those kids with that?”

Scottland’s story is not new; it’s an all-too-familiar tale in a much-maligned sport. Every participant is willing, chasing a dream, and hoping for the bright lights that will announce him as champion of the world.

[...]

Professional boxing has been a willing participant in its own demise. It’s steeped in tradition and is mired in disorganization as other sports have added labor contracts and tried to keep up with society as a whole. Boxing is still a sport where a handful of individuals direct the flow of millions of dollars.

“There’s a whole realm of people with their heads in the sand, who are happy with things the way they are,” said Dr. Margaret Goodman, Nevada’s chief ringside physician. “I just can’t see these promoters wanting to do anything that would help anyone. I’m sure they love the fighters they have, but financially they have their own burdens.”

There are many layers of traditional management that control a fighter’s life:

The manager and trainer guide the fighter’s career and often his finances. The manager typically takes one-third of the fighter’s purse. In most sports, an agent gets 10 percent. If the athlete is highly compensated, a lower percentage is negotiated.

The promoter is responsible for finding the boxer fights. Most promoters struggle to make money, though, biding their time until they can discover the next heavyweight champion.

A sanctioning body, of which there are many, offers championship belts. A group such as the International Boxing Federation, World Boxing Association or World Boxing Council charges the promoter a fee to put on the title fight and the boxer to wear its belt. The charges vary widely.

And television executives control time slots that lead to more-lucrative purses.

The boxer is the one cog that you have to have to allow everyone else to move. Typically, from a $10,000 payday, a boxer will take home less than half, after paying out managers, cornermen and taxes. [...]

Unlike other sports, professional boxing employs a stringent two-tier class system: the extremely rich and the extremely poor. While headlines will scream of a $20 million prizefight, most of the fighters earn very little, often just $100 a round. For every marquee fight, there are a half-dozen less-lucrative fights that fill out the show.

“The business is not healthy enough to support this many people” depending on the sport for a paycheck, said Aaron Jacobs, a Tampa law student who helps promote about five small boxing shows a year. “It’s a feast-or-famine type of sport, and at this level, it’s famine.”

TAKING CARE OF A BOXER

Boxers are independent contractors, making the promoter-boxer relationship unique in sports. Many promoters say it is not their responsibility to worry about the fighter’s personal interests.

“Are we going to declare fighters unfit and appoint legal guardians for them?” asked Leon Margules, who runs Team Freedom, a Florida-based promoter. “They’re grown men, and they need to care for themselves. Why is that my responsibility?”

Margules says that because many boxers are from lower economic backgrounds, they don’t typically think about things such as life insurance. Fighters embrace their invincibility with inflated confidence.

Bob Arum, head of the Las Vegas-based Top Rank Inc., said he has paid for coffins and for funeral services. Death and injuries are a part of doing business.

“As long as prizefighting exists, there will be the possibility of that kind of tragedy,” he said.

Evander Holyfield, a four-time world heavyweight champion and a professional fighter for 19 years, says he knows who should be responsible.

“We need to take all the people who are making money off the fighter and make them responsible,” Holyfield, 40, said. “The fighter is the one who takes the damage. But you have all these other people who want to be a part of the game, who want to get paid… . They’re making money off fighters — they should be chipping in.”

What about those who do make it? Well…it doesn’t always end well:

DORADO, Puerto Rico — Seated in the same chair he always sits in, Wilfred Benitez is lost.

“Where are we right now?” He peers out a window and sees the greenery outside.

“We’re in Puerto Rico,” I tell him.

He stares ahead and appears to be swallowed in thought. “Oh, Puerto Rico.” Then he mumbles something else.

“He thinks we’re in upstate New York,” his mother interprets. “He doesn’t understand that things are different. He doesn’t know that everything has changed.”

In front of Marvin Montanez-Pagan are rows of small plastic cups, each filled with different colored pills. Marvin is a nurse at Valle Dorado, a private special-needs facility, located about 20 miles outside of San Juan.

Marvin puts a tan pill on the desk with his left hand, tapping excess Marlboro ash into a trash can with his right.

“This looks like an M&M,” he says, “but this little sucker would knock you or me out for three days.”

One row of cups is labeled campeon — champion — and each of these cups contains Wilfred’s twice-daily allotment of capsulized sedatives.

In a past life, the three-time world boxing champion was a millionaire — some say he was the island’s first athlete to earn that much. And he was a celebrity, Puerto Rico’s Ali. Today, at 44 years old, his only real friend is Marvin, who has cared for him for six years.

There are nine patients here, each suffering from mental disabilities in varying degrees. While the others were born with their afflictions, Wilfred earned his.

His condition is so much worse than the others. Wilfred has trouble with conversations, often falls and needs someone to help with life’s basic chores, including visiting the restroom. He can’t remember more than about two minutes’ worth of information.

Some boxers have tried to help; former heavyweight contender Gerry Cooney has started a group that helped out former boxers. I don’t know if the group has been reactivated.

4 June 2010

Workout notes 3 mile “easy” walk focusing on posture. Tomorrow I’ll walk in a local 4 mile race; attempting the 12 or 24 hour race in Minnesota would be idiotic. For tomorrow: I’ll focus on proper posture (or an approximation to it) and on using my feet; I won’t worry about legal knees.

Then I cut the grass, removed the tree/ivy that I tore off; it was quite a chore. I always fuss just a bit to guard against “oh honey, could you do this and that too?” I detest yard work!

I don’t like neighborhoods in which people do it constantly either:

The 4 miler tomorrow: I did this race several times; as a runner I ran 27:54 in 1997, ran 25:59 in 1998, and 26:58 in 1999 and 30:55 in 2005. I’ve also helped out a couple of times.

Posts
Science and Religion: Professor Moran wonders why those who have strong opinions in favor of religion are welcome to express their opinions, but those who have strong feelings against are not.

For more on the Templeton Foundation, read this Nation article.

Science writing
Jerry Coyne laments the tendency for journalists, in the name of “being fair”, quote “both sides” even in situations in which there is only one side. Yes, this happens in mathematics as well (e. g., when a local crank announces a bogus result).

ReligionAyaan Hirsi Ali is an atheist who left Islam and has been the object of death threats. Her book was reviewed by Nicholas Kristof who seemed to be more concerned about her opinions on Islam than by the fact that some Muslims were trying to kill her for exercising free speech rights. Kristof gets blasted here.

BP Spill The Conservation Report points us toward many images of oil covered wildlife. Yes, these images are depressing.

No, environmentalist activists are NOT the culprits behind this spill, even if Sarah Palin thinks so:

Human disasters
Cenk Uygur wonders if the US has a double standard for Israel versus the Arab countries: after all, a US citizen was killed in the Israeli taking over the Gaza relief flotilla.

Social: on the surface, this sounds ridiculous:

In what has to be one of the biggest violations of common sense and burden of proof in motoring news this year, the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that officers can “visually estimate” how fast a person is driving… and give them a ticket for it.

Thanks Ohio Supreme Court for giving cops the green light to make up speeding tickets.

Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor said “Rational triers of fact could find a police officer’s testimony regarding his unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed, when supported by evidence that the officer is trained, certified by (the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy) or a similar organization, and experienced in making such estimations, sufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant’s speed. Independent verification of the vehicle’s speed is not necessary to support a conviction for speeding.” [...]

But here is the rest of the story:

In a 5-1 decision yesterday, Ohio’s Supreme Court upheld a speeding ticket based solely on how fast a driver appeared to be moving. The court considered the case of motorist Mark Jenney who drove through a State Route 21 radar speed trap operated by Copley police officer Christopher R Santimarino on July 3, 2008. Santimarino guessed based on the appearance of Jenney’s black SUV that it was traveling at 79 MPH in a 60 zone.

Santimarino claimed that his thirteen years as a traffic cop and his certification in speed estimation by the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy qualified him to make expert visual determinations of how fast vehicles are moving within 4 MPH. In court, Santimarino testified that his radar showed Jenney was traveling at 82 MPH on direct examination and 83 MPH on cross-examination.

Based on this, a district court convicted Jenney. On appeal, Jenney succeeded in having the radar evidence thrown out because the officer failed to produce the required certification documents at trial. The appeals court then ruled that the visual guess as to Jenney’s speed was sufficient evidence for a conviction. Jenney appealed to the supreme court, which agreed with the lower court rulings that an officer’s educated guess is sufficient to overcome that state’s burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
[...]

Sports: the University of Texas might be joining the Pac-10; they might be able to join the SEC too but:

There is also reason to believe Oklahoma could be enamored with joining the SEC. But that does not appear to be an option Texas officials would be willing to consider. There is a sense among UT officials the academics in the SEC are not on par with Texas.

Ok, so lets look at those graduation rates for football: in 2006, Texas was one of the 12 schools that had sub 50 percent graduation rates in football and men’s basketball.

So, let’s fix that!

Lakers Dominating at the Half 50-41

It was 37-35 Lakers with 5:3x left in the half but the Lakers went on a 13-6 run to lead 50-41.

The Celtics are 10 out of 15 from the line (Lakers are 9 out of 12) and getting outrebounded 23-15. The Lakers are outshooting the Celtics 52-42 percent and are dominating, especially inside.

Bryant has 12, Gasol 11 whereas Rondo has 10, Pierce has 9.

This is sure looking like a Laker rout.

Second half: 9 minutes to go in the third; 57-47; Ray Allen has 4 fouls.

Rondo: good player, but a poor free throw shooter.

65-52 with 6:10 to go in the third…the rout is on.

75-62 with 2:10; Celtics can’t get closer.
84-64….this is how the third ends. 34-23 Lakers in the third.
Total domination.

93-78 with 5:3x left; Garntett missed a put back and then missed it again; his legs are shot.
The Celtics had pulled to within 11.
(photos from yahoo)

NBA Finals Tonight…

I talk my trash here. Of course, that is easy for me to do, given that I don’t have to be on the court against Bryant and Gasol….