27 August 2010 posts (pm)

Humor (and education oriented)

What NOT to do with powerpoint

Note: I don’t use it, but I still found it to be hilarious.

Humor This is one protest that I could get “behind”.

Books: here is Huffington Post’s take on what is being read in public. Personally, I tend to choose books that are easier to read when I am in public spaces (don’t need to concentrate that hard). But I also choose “statement” books that say “I like evolution, atheism, politics, Obama, etc.” so as to strike up a favorable chance conversation.

Politics President Barack Obama is on the wrong side of history here (re: gay marriage). I hope that he changes his mind.

Also, on the economy: Robert Reich talks about how the Democrats ought to sell their plans and why it should be sold in that way:

So instead of playing defense, Democrats should go on the attack.

Accuse Republicans of being shills for the rich.

And don’t stop there. Do tax jujitsu. In addition to ending the Bush tax cut for the rich, put forward another proposal for growing the economy that cuts taxes on lower-income Americans.

Democrats should propose eliminating payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income, and making up the revenue loss by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000.

This would give the economy an immediate boost by adding to the paychecks of just about every working American. 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. And because lower-income people would get most of the benefit, it’s likely to be spent. [...]

Call it the People’s Tax Cut, and let Republicans explain why they’re against it.

Mathematics
Here is an article which describes the use of mathematics in making heart stints.

Science
Planet orbits: in other solar systems, the orbits aren’t always stable.

Cells: liver cells have been created from skin cells by British scientists:

British scientists have grown liver cells out of stem cells from human skin, boosting hopes that healthy cells can be transplanted into organs to repair damage from diseases like cirrhosis and cancer, according to new findings.

Cambridge University researchers took skin biopsies from seven patients suffering from various hereditary liver diseases, and from three healthy patients, “reprogramming” the skin samples into stem cells which can effectively become any tissue in the body.

For the first time, such cells were used to mimic a range of liver diseases, according to the findings published in Wednesday’s Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Growing liver cells in a laboratory is particularly difficult.

By replicating such cells in diseased livers, and replicating the healthy cells from a control group, researchers can not only determine precisely what is happening in the diseased cell, but also test the effectiveness of new therapies to treat diseases.

Principal investigator of the research Ludovic Vallier, of the MRC Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Cambridge, described the work as “an important step towards delivering the clinical promises of stem cells.”

World Events
No one seems to care that much about Pakistan’s trouble. No, this isn’t quite the reason. But here is one conjecture as to why:

Pakistan is a country that no one quite gets completely, but apparently everybody knows enough about to be an expert. If you’re a nuclear proliferation expert, suddenly you’re an expert on Pakistan. If you’re terrorism expert, ditto: expert on Pakistan. India expert? Pakistan, too then. Of South Asian origin of any kind at a think-tank, university, or newspaper? Expert on Pakistan. Angry that your parents sent you to the wrong madrassa when you were young? Expert on Pakistan.

This unique stock of global expertise on Pakistan naturally generates a scary picture. Between our fear of terrorism, nervousness about a Muslim country with a nuclear weapon, and global discomfort with an intelligence service that seems to do whatever it wants (rather than what we want it to do), Pakistan makes the world, and Americans in particular, extremely uncomfortable. In a 2008 Gallup poll of Americans, only Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, North Korea, and Iran were less popular than Pakistan.

The net result of Pakistan’s own sins, and a global media that is gaga over India, is that Pakistan is always the bad guy. You’d be hard pressed to find a news story anywhere that celebrates the country’s incredible scenery, diversity, food, unique brand of Islam, evolving and exciting musical tradition, or even its arresting array of sporting talent, though all those things are present in abundance.

How bad is it? Well, in 2007, when the Pakistani cricket team’s national coach, an Englishman named Bob Woolmer, was found dead in his hotel room, the first instinct of the international press was that a Pakistani team member must have killed him. This is the story of modern day Pakistan.

Contrary to what many Pakistani conspiracy theorists believe, the suspicion and contempt with which the country is seen with is not deliberate or carefully calculated. It’s just how things pan out when you are the perennial bad boy in a neighborhood that everyone wishes could be transformed into Scandinavia — because after 9/11, the world cannot afford a dysfunctional ghetto in South and Central Asia anymore. Or so goes the paternalist doctrine.

It is bad enough that the Pakistani elite don’t seem eager to cooperate with this agenda of transformation; now, nature also seems to be set against it. The floods in Pakistan are the third major humanitarian crisis to afflict the country in recent years. The 2005 earthquake and the massive internal displacement of Pakistanis from Swat and the FATA region in 2009 were well-managed disasters, according to many international aid workers. While international support was valuable in mitigating the effects of those disasters, most experts agree that it was Pakistanis, both in government and civil society, that did the heavy lifting.

27 August 2010 Rehabilitation

Workout notes 2 mile walk, leg routine (squats 10 x 135, 10 x 155, then single legged 10 x 95), leg presses: 20 x 180, 10 x 270 (sliding machine), then extensions, curls, toe raises (3 circuits, 10 reps for extensions, curls, 20-30 for toe raises), abs (150 reps; 40 twist crunches, 30 yoga lifts, 40 regular crunches, 15, 10, 15 sit ups on various inclines. Then 11 minutes (1 mile) on the AMT with a running motion.

On the walk: I chased away a cat that was attacking a wounded bunny.

Pains: the shoulder was so-so last night; not a ton of pain. The tape seemed to help during the day.

2 Girls, 1 Cup….

You may have heard about 2 Girls, 1 Cup (if not, try here)

Here is the Republican version of that.
(ok…Elephant version….)

More Shameless Pro-Obama Fluff

26 August 2010: from science, frogs, politics and the weird

Weird
A guy gets arrested for arguing with his bike!

Here are the top 10 dying cities. I am outraged that Peoria, IL, didn’t make the list.

Politics

The return of the know-nothings:

The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans.

Perfect: we have someone who is good at radio feeding the narrative that the moronic subset of the Republican base wants to hear, and they lack both the willingness and the ability to fact check for themselves.

Here is how the organization is going for them: reasonably well thanks to the astro-turf group Freedomworks. I happened to note this:

Through its political action committee, FreedomWorks plans to spend $10 million on the midterm elections, on campaign paraphernalia — signs for candidates like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida are stacked around the offices here — voter lists, and a phone system that allows volunteers to make calls for candidates around the country from their home computers. With “microfinancing” grants, it will steer money from FreedomWorks donors — the tax code protects their anonymity — to local Tea Parties.

If you read further, this looks remarkably like the organization that the Obama campaign built in 2007-2008. I also note:

That list allowed the group to mobilize volunteers to Massachusetts in January to campaign for Scott P. Brown, who won the United States Senate seat that had been occupied by Edward M. Kennedy for nearly 50 years, and to Utah to elect Mike Lee as the Republican nominee for Senate after Tea Party groups deposed the three-term incumbent Robert F. Bennett. About 180,000 people voted in the primary that Mr. Lee won; FreedomWorks says 30,000 had received a phone call or a visit from its volunteers.

Its candidates are libertarians and economic conservatives, but in the 2010 midterm elections, FreedomWorks is urging Tea Party groups to work for any Republican, on the theory that a compromised Republican is better than Democratic control of Congress.

Now why in the hell can’t liberals do something similar? Really. If you read this article, you’ll see that, at least on economic grounds, Freedomworks is as ideologically pure as any group of liberals; they cling to a loony ultra-libertarian economics policy. But they are willing to support “any Republican” whereas liberals tend to be purity trolls for one issue or another. If a candidate differs from a liberal in that precious 5 percent, the other 95 percent of agreement goes out the window.

More politics: why the Republicans will probably make gains in 2010 (maybe take the House?) and why they will fail once they gain power:

This week Morning Feature reviews our summer reading. Today we look at Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah. Tomorrow we consider Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules through the historical lens of Edward Miller’s War Plan Orange. Saturday we conclude with Mario Livio’s Is God a Mathematician?

Written in the wake of defeats in 2008, Max Blumenthal portrayed the GOP as a party “shattered” by its fealty to religious zealots. Yet polls show them poised to gain seats in the House and Senate in the 2010 midterms. Why the turnaround?

In part it’s statistics: if all other things were equal, with 58% Democratic majorities in both houses, you would expect 58% of incumbent losses to be Democrats and the GOP to gain seats. But all other things are not equal. Voters tend to hold the majority party responsible for current conditions, so a weak economy puts more Democrats at risk. Even with no Democratic missteps, it would be surprising if Tea Party Republicans did not gain seats in 2010.

And there have been Democratic missteps, such as not being prepared for last August’s ragefest over health care or this month’s ragefest over the 51 Park Place Islamic Center. More important, the economic crisis was broader and deeper than initially recognized – not merely a banking liquidity crunch, it was a systemic employment and personal debt crunch – and the response did not match the true magnitude of the problem.

A ‘solution’ in search of a crisis.

A deeper reading of Blumenthal’s well-written book suggests another factor that should have dampened Democrats’ giddy enthusiasm after the 2008 elections: conservative ideology, while manifestly unfit for governance, is an ideal breeding ground for political insurgency.

Blumenthal describes conservative religion as “a culture of personal crisis.” That theology proposes that we turn to religion in times of trouble. Ergo, the deeper the trouble, the more likely that more people will turn to religion. Rather than seeking to solve problems through reason and collective effort, the religious right presents God as the solution the problems. By implication, if our purpose here on earth is to draw nearer to God, we need a steady supply of moral and personal crises … lest we come to believe we can solve problems by human reason and collective effort, without need for divine assistance.

In short: the Republicans are good at throwing tantrums and praying to Jesus and really not much else.

Science
Frogs: to the rescue!

Kissing a frog won’t turn it into a prince — except in fairy tales — but frogs may be hopping toward a real-world transformation into princely allies in humanity’s battle with antibiotic-resistant infections that threaten millions of people worldwide. Scientists today reported that frog skin contains natural substances that could be the basis for a powerful new genre of antibiotics. [...]

Using that amphibious treasure trove, they identified more than 100 antibiotic substances in the skins of different frog species from around the world. One even fights “Iraqibacter,” the bacterium responsible for drug-resistant infections in wounded soldiers returning from Iraq.

Michael Conlon, Ph.D., who reported on the research, noted that the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria, which have the ability to shrug off conventional antibiotics, is a growing problem worldwide. As a result, patients need new types of antibiotics to replace drugs that no longer work.

“Frog skin is an excellent potential source of such antibiotic agents,” said Conlon, a biochemist at the United Arab Emirates University in Al-Ain, Abu Dhabi Emirate. “They’ve been around 300 million years, so they’ve had plenty of time to learn how to defend themselves against disease-causing microbes in the environment. Their own environment includes polluted waterways where strong defenses against pathogens are a must.”

Scientists have known for years that the skin of frogs is a rich source of chemicals capable of killing bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Researchers have attempted to isolate those germ-fighting chemicals and make them suitable for development into new antibiotics. Success, however, has been elusive because froggy antibiotics tend to be toxic to human cells and certain chemicals in the bloodstream easily destroy them.

Conlon and colleagues described an approach to overcome these problems. They discovered a way to tweak the molecular structure of frog skin antibiotic substances, making them less toxic to human cells but more powerful germ killers. Similarly, the scientists also discovered other tweaks that enabled the frog skin secretions to shrug off attack by destructive enzymes in the blood. The result was antibiotics that last longer in the bloodstream and are more likely to be effective as infection fighters, Conlon noted.

Ribbit Ribbit!

Evolution: lots of people like to say “Darwin was wrong”. Except that he wasn’t:

You may have seen a small flurry of reports this week about a science paper showing that “Darwin was wrong.” The paper wasn’t a creationist or ID screed, however—it was a paper in a good science journal (Biology Letters) by a crack team of paleontologists from the UK and Canada (Sarda Sahney, Michael Benton, and Paul Ferry). What did the paper say? Did it really show that Darwin was wrong? I’m here to answer your questions.

What did the paper say? It reported a correlation in the fossil record between the number of tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) existing at different times and the number of ecological ” modes of life” those species adopted, all over the 400-million-year period since vertebrates colonized the land. To be exact, it divided up that time period into 66 sub-periods, and in each sub-period the authors totted up the number of tetrapod families that were represented by fossils and the number of modes of life they adopted. Here’s the time plot showing that, as the families diversified exponentially over this period, so did the number of modes of life adopted, with the changes almost in lockstep [...]

Read the article. The basic idea is that the paper that Jerry Coyne reviews claims that this evolution was driven more by filling an available niche than by competition (e. g. survival of the fittest).

Of course, even if the conjecture turns out to be true, this doesn’t mean that Darwin was wrong; natural selection doesn’t depend ONLY on competition. But a title that mentions Darwin being corrected or overthrown is eye-catching.

John McCain’s Victorious Defeat – The Colbert Report – 8/25/10 – Video Clip | Comedy Central

John McCain’s Victorious Defeat – The Colbert R…, posted with vodpod

Good Peoria Journal Star Editorial

Read it.

Here we thought the birthers – those who don’t believe Obama was born in the United States – had cornered the market on kooky. Now they’re getting a run for their money. No doubt there’s some overlap here.

No one can blame the president’s tolerance for the Muslim community center near Ground Zero in New York for these numbers, as the poll was conducted before that issue grew legs. We suppose some continue to fault him for his name, which he did not give himself. Of course, some wouldn’t be satisfied unless he managed to work Jesus’ name into every other sentence; likely a few in that camp would turn the U.S. into a theocracy, if they could. Extremists come in every stripe. Some of this nonsense is fueled by irresponsible politicians and media figures looking to cash in; they could say the sun sets in the east without getting any challenge from the true believers who tune in to them. Based on his performances of the last couple years, little about Newt Gingrich is good for the country.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the president was Muslim. The proper response to that would be: So what? [...]

No one is obligated to like every occupant of the White House. Certainly there are Americans who object to this one, many even for reasons of policy that are more or less legitimate. This issue – we hesitate to even call it that, so manufactured is it – is not among them. Others so despise this president, whatever their motivation, that they’ll grasp at practically anything to discredit him. They’re actually discrediting themselves, diminishing their own arguments.
[...]

By the way, of the nation’s 44 presidents, about a quarter of them have been Episcopalian, followed by Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists and Unitarians. Though Catholicism is the single largest religious denomination in America, there has been but one Roman Catholic president – John F. Kennedy – and it was a big deal at the time, even in places like Peoria. Kennedy ran against a Quaker in Richard Nixon. (By the way, the Jewish faith is yet to be represented in the Oval Office.) Ultimately this blessedly secular government and nation survived every last one of them.

For what it’s worth, a fair number of presidents had ambiguous religious affiliations. Abraham Lincoln often tops the list of the nation’s greatest leaders and could quote Scripture with the best of them, but his spiritual allegiances, while disputed, were generally described as complicated, skeptical of organized religion, and evolving over time and personal circumstance. In any event, he never joined a church. How’d he get away with that? Feel free to take a crack at that one, conspiracy theorists.

Read the whole thing.

Time’s Stimulus article

Please read the whole thing. But the bottom line is that the stimulus did create jobs, the economy would be worse off without it, and the stimulus did enact some of President Obama’s agenda on education, increase of broad band access, increase of funding for scientific research, and doubling of renewable energy. There as a whole lot there. Here are some snippets:

The stimulus is helping scores of manufacturers of wind turbines and solar products expand as well, but today’s grid can only handle so much wind and solar. A key problem is connecting remote wind farms to population centers, so there are billions of dollars for new transmission lines. Then there is the need to find storage capacity for when it isn’t windy or sunny outside. The current grid is like a phone system without voice mail, a just-in-time network where power is wasted if it doesn’t reach a user the moment it’s generated. That’s why the Recovery Act is funding dozens of smart-grid approaches. For instance, A123 is providing truckloads of batteries for a grid-storage project in California and recycled electric-car batteries for a similar effort in Detroit. “If we can show the utilities this stuff works,” says Riley, “it will take off on its own.”

[...]

ARPA-E is funding the new pioneers — mad scientists and engineers with ideas for wind turbines based on jet engines, bacteria to convert carbon dioxide into gasoline, and tiny molten-metal batteries to provide cheap high-voltage storage. That last idea is the brainchild of MIT’s Donald Sadoway, who already has a prototype fuel cell the size of a shot glass. The stimulus will help him create a kind of reverse aluminum smelter to make prototypes the size of a hockey puck and a pizza box. The ultimate goal is a commercial scale battery the size of a tractor trailer that could power an entire neighborhood. “We need radical breakthroughs, so we need radical experiments,” Sadoway says. “These projects send chills down the spine of the carbon world. If a few of them work, [Venezuela's Hugo] Chávez and [Iran's Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad are out of power.”

Then again, the easiest way to blow up the energy world would be to stop wasting so much. That’s the final link in the chain, a full-throttle push to make energy efficiency a national norm. The Recovery Act is weatherizing 250,000 homes this year. It gave homeowners rebates for energy-efficient appliances, much as the Cash for Clunkers program subsidized fuel-efficient cars. It’s retrofitting juice-sucking server farms, factories and power plants; financing research into superefficient lighting, windows and machinery; and funneling billions into state and local efficiency efforts.

26 August 2010 Rehabilitation

Workout 6.1 mile walk in 1:23:35; I did two Cornstalk loops of Bradley Park and 1 .6 mile “extra”; last leg from the park exit to the house was 13:42.

Then I went to PT; I got a shoulder tape job.

Shoulder: I slept last night. But I had some soreness in the morning; the PT wonders if my humerus is too far forward. We shall see. We tested the neck.

Note: I had a few piriformis tingles; I did the stretches and hip hikes afterward.

26 August 2010 (early am)

Runners, cyclists and walkers: be careful out there; drivers really might not be paying much attention.

This photo: from the fail blog; it is really, well, at times, in fact MOST of the time, so appropriate.

Law: no one could object to a piece that says, in effect, “judges ought to act in a civil, professional manner when on the bench”, right? You’d be wrong. (hat tip: Randazza)

Amphibians/Toads/human evolution

Notice how this tree frog reacts to this finger:

Evidently, chimps understand this reflex too.

Note: Hawaii has no native frogs nor toads; they can’t handle salt water. But some introduced frogs and toads have become pests.

Off for a walk…then PT, then back to classes!