21 August 2010 rehabilitation

Shoulder I killed me last night; it woke me up at 1:30. By the time I went to bed, it settled down a bit; yes I used ice prior to sleeping. It didn’t hurt during the day though and didn’t bother me during my walk.

Knee: slight lateral pain last night; I forgot to ice prior to sleeping. Ice took it away nicely.

Piriformis: not a factor today but I had better stretch it out anyway.

Workout: 5.4 mile walk in 1:23:45 (15:31 mpm); I didn’t walk that hard but rather took it easy on a muggy, overcast but not-too-hot morning. The cemetery was nice:

I was going to do the lunchtime 5 miler but was blocked by the motorcycle parade. But this improvised route gave me a nice hill in the cemetery.

Pain: I thought about those with chronic pain. Personally, I’ve been dealing with night pains of various kinds since last October (knee, now shoulder). Ironically, I am NOT in pain during the day. And, I have confidence that the shoulder pain will eventually be resolved by therapy or medicine (shots or surgery, if necessary). But what do people do when their pain has no solution and it is constant? It must really suck.

I also thought about racing. Yeah, I miss it some, but I’ve replace the challenge of times/races with therapy goals. I thought that I might just give up racing all together; we’ll see. I sure as heck don’t want to give up working out though; I enjoy my workouts too much to do that.

This Homemade Ad is too Strident for me.

Bonus question: where did the music in this ad come from? (Song and artist)

21 August 2010 (am)

(and yes, I got calls from the DNC, DCCC, and two different campaigns. )

Science (public understanding) From Why Evolution is True: this talks about the surveys that ask “do you believe evolution”. The gist is that those who say that they believe in an evolutionary process that was guided by a deity really don’t understand the randomness” that goes into scientific evolution; the mutations that occur do so randomly; those that get passed along get passed because they either enhance or do not reduce the reproductive fitness of the recipient of the mutated gene.

Science (video)
I can’t get this to embed, but this is a spectacular video of time elapsed photos of a meteor shower from Joshua Tree National Park.

Science: piranhas Flesh eating piranhas and bikini clad women make for a blockbuster movie, but in reality, piranhas really aren’t a threat to humans (e. g., they don’t eat humans). Really. Watch a human get into a tank of piranhas.

Science/mathematics education Larry Moran talks about this: how many different professors does it take to give a good science education in a particular discipline? Here is a dirty secret: undergraduate math education (for the vast majority of mathematics undergraduates) consists of learning late 19′th century mathematics. Hence, in theory, ONE mathematics professor can give an undergraduate student an adequate mathematics education, though I don’t recommend this.

Seriously: most Ph. D. programs in mathematics require students to pass preliminary exams in algebra, analysis and topology, all well above the level that one can teach most mathematics undergraduates, and one needs at least a bit of knowledge in all these areas to do modern mathematical research.

Educational Issues: a school district in Florida told its teachers to unfriend their students. I can understand why.

Politics Paul Krugman talks about the lies and distortions that he commonly hears when he talks about the economy:

When you consistently irritate the hard right in the United States as I do, you quickly get used to the steady stream of accusations that you’re lying, simply because you didn’t present the facts in a way that suits the commenter. If I write, “The economy added 236,000 jobs a month under Bill Clinton,” the responses from conservatives will range from “That’s a lie! Krugman doesn’t mention the dot-com bubble!” to “That’s cherry-picking! What about Jimmy Carter?” [...]

Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader from Kentucky, said in late July in an interview with CNN that during “the last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.”

So where’s the deception? First, the Republicans are hoping that most people won’t know that standard budget data is presented in fiscal years, which start on October 1 of the previous calendar year. So what they’re talking about isn’t actually the “last year of the Bush administration” — they’ve conveniently lopped off everything that happened after the Lehman Brothers collapse —Troubled Asset Relief Program and all.

Krugman goes on to display a “quarter by quarter” graph of the data.

Evidently I am not alone

Yeah, I was a bit irritated when I wrote my previous post. Evidently the feeling is spreading among the blogs I regularly read:

Why Evolution is True:

Flash: many Americans are morons

. . . at least 18%, according to a Pew Research Center poll. [...]

The Legal Satyricon:

And in related news, it is time for forced sterilization of a lot of people in this retard laden country

One in five Americans think that Obama is a Muslim. (source)

Before you bring out the surgery tools, this seems to be a Fox News focus group. So, really the headline should be “one in five abject fucking retards who get their ‘news’ from Fox think that Obama is a muslim.”

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

Hallowed ground: Why other nations think we’re nuts

Scott Hanley at Angular Unconformities used Google Earth to see how other nations deal with the placement of potentially-offensive installations near the sites of their great national calamaties.

But Robert Reich knows why the rubes (the targets of our derision) are acting up: fear:

Americans who feel economically insecure may even become paranoid, believing, say, that the President of the United States is secretly one of “them.”

Economic fear is the handmaiden of intolerance. It’s used by demagogues who redirect the fear and anger toward people and groups who aren’t really to blame but are easy scapegoats.

It has happened before.

Economic crises animated the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements, the Chinese exclusion acts, the Ku Klux Klan in the economically-ravaged South, and the anti-immigrant movements of the early decades of the 20th century.

In different places around the world, mass economic stress has had far worse results. At its most extreme it has spawned genocide.

We are far from that. But it’s important to understand the roots of America’s growing intolerance. And to fight the hate-mongers and cynical opportunists who are using the fears unleashed by this awful economy to advance their own sordid agendas.

Does that sentiment ring a bell?

I guess that the President was right all along? That is the charitable way to look at it. My view of “them” is far less charitable.

Why I have so little respect for many Republicans

I’ll be clear: I have no problem with policy disagreement. I happen to think that we need to withdraw from Afghanistan and that we need more stimulus spending and to increase taxes on the wealthy. Others disagree; I am happy to have that debate and I admit that I might be wrong about some or all of those positions (in terms of what will yield the best results).

I admit that my positions aren’t always the best and that I don’t know it all.

So where is my beef? It is simple: it lies in the growing “culture wars” between those who just “know” what it means to be an American and who think that others who aren’t like them are really not American.

Politico has a nice article on this:

Much of the right — including the noisy and influential tea party movement — sees greater and more immediate danger from this administration and Congress on issues related to the role of government and the very meaning of America than from the old “social issues.” For while Obama has avoided single-issue fights on issues such as gays in the military and federal funding of abortions — angering parts of his base, in the process — he has, in the minds of conservatives, pushed a comprehensive agenda, and that is far more threatening.

“His worldview is dramatically different than any president, Republican or Democrat, we’ve had,” said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, who attributes conservative fear not just to Obama’s effort to expand the federal government but to the president’s overall governing philosophy.

“He grew up more as a globalist than an American,” Huckabee said. “To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation.”

See: Gov. Huckabee has the hubris to claim that HE decides on what is an American and what isn’t. HE describes what the proper American attitude is.

To Gov. Huckabee and all who think this way: Fuck You.

It is a large world out there. Yes, the United States of America has a place and we do lots of things well. We also have weak areas.
And we are not all alike. Yes, the “rural uneducated but thinks that they are smarter than everyone else” hick in rural Arkansas is an American.

But so is a Nobel Laureate who writes on economic issues for the New York Times.

Like it or not, though not all of us agree with him on all issues at all times, Barack Obama does represent many of us and he won the last Presidential election fair and square. He is black, intellectual and worldly and does not subscribe to some comic book caliber fundamentalist religion. He is one of America’s faces, like it or not.

Attack his policy decisions and priorities all you want. Attack mine too. Americans can disagree on policy. But spare me this “this is “real America” and this isn’t” bullshit. The scientist who came up with a vaccine or a medical cure that saved your life might well be an atheist. Millions of us who produce wealth live in big cities. Many of us have traveled around the word, thereby gaining an understanding that the United States, while currently the dominant country, is just one of many countries. And those of us who know history understand that our place on the perch is, in the great scheme of things, temporary.

Many Americans WANT us to get along with other nations and to not bully them.
Many have no desire to live in a small town nor to attend some brain-dead fundamentalist Christian church.
Many Americans like their Birkenstocks and granola.
Many Americans can spot the joke in this photo (but perhaps not that many in Huckabee’s America? )

20 August 2010 PM

Science: why second hand smoke (even a little) is bad:

Scientists led by Dr. Ronald Crystal at Weill Cornell Medical College documented changes in genetic activity among nonsmokers triggered by exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke. Public-health bans on smoking have been fueled by strong population-based data that links exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke and a higher incidence of lung diseases such as emphysema and even lung cancer, but do not establish a biological cause for the correlation. Now, for the first time, researchers can point to one possible cause: the passive recipient’s genes are actually being affected. (See a new recipe for longevity that says no to smoking.)

Crystal’s team devised a study in which 121 volunteers – some of whom smoked and some of whom had never smoked – agreed to have samples of their airway cells studied for genetic activity. The subjects also provided urine so the researchers could measure the amount of nicotine and its metabolites, like cotinine, for an objective record of their exposure to cigarette smoke.

Airway cells that line the bronchus, from the trachea all the way to the tiny alveoli deep in the lungs, are the first cells that confront cigarette smoke, whether it is inhaled directly from a cigarette or secondhand from the environment. Crystal’s group hypothesized that any deterioration in lung function associated with cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, including emphysema and bronchitis, in which the lungs lose their ability to take in air, would begin with these cells. (See TIME’s guide for good health at every age.)

And indeed, that’s what he and his team found. The researchers removed airway cells from the volunteers using a bronchoscope and tested all 25,000 identified human genes in them to determine which ones were active – either turned on or off – in response to cigarettes. They narrowed the search to 372 genes that were active among the smokers but not in the cells of the nonsmokers. Based on the level of nicotine in the urine, the scientists also divided the volunteers into three groups: smokers, who showed the highest level of the tobacco metabolites; nonsmokers, who showed none of these compounds and a low-exposure group who fell in between. Comparing the 372 genes among these three groups, they found that the low-exposure group shared 34% of the same active genes with nonsmokers and 11% of the same gene activity with smokers. The low-exposure group included both nonsmokers who have never lit up as well as those who admitted to smoking only occasionally. [...]

Food: “locally grown” does NOT mean “smaller carbon footprint”, though there might be other reasons to buy locally grown stuff (e. g., taste, support your neighbor, etc.):

[...]One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy. If it goes by truck, it’s about 300 calories, still a negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the calculations at home, these are “large calories,” or kilocalories, the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far. [...]

New York Mosque, again: Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub has an interesting post pointing out that Hiroshima does have several American things near ground zero and that Pearl Harbor has a Japanese cultural center. Surf there to see the satellite photo and to read the title of his post.

In fact, other nations are lampooning us (e. g., “outrage over plans to build a library next to Sarah Palin“).