How can you answer this but by ridicule?

Re: overturning the vote of millions: That is what a Constitutional Democracy is about! Some rights are not subject to the whims of the majority.

Example: if we had “atheist utopia”; say a town of 10,000 in which 9,500 were atheists, it would still be illegal to ban religion in that town, even if 9500 voted to do so.

This is something similar.

Well, at least our Republican fundamentalist morons haven’t lead us to this or this, but give them time.

25 August 2010 (pm)

Training: here is why exercise can take away your hunger (though swimming often makes me MORE hungry…eventually):

Researchers behind the new work found that “physical activity reorganizes the set point of nutritional balance through anti-inflammatory signaling,” they reported in their paper, which published online August 24 in PLoS Biology.

The key to the signaling seemed to be interleukin-6 (IL-6) and IL-10, which are proteins secreted by immune cells. The compound IL-6 gets released from muscles when they contract and has been found to “play a central role in the regulation of appetite, energy expenditure and body composition,” the researchers noted. But just how these compounds might be acting on the nervous system’s components, such as the hypothalamus, remained murky.

To further explore this association, the Brazil-based research team examined energy use in both lean and obese rats that swam or ran on a treadmill. After the exercise, both the lean and the obese rats had lower insulin levels, but the rats that had been fed to become obese went back to eating more like their lean peers. By sampling the biological profiles of some of these animals, the scientists found that the exercise had changed the obese rats’ hypothalamic chemistry, which included boosting IL-6. Rats that were given an antibody to inhibit IL-6 before exercise did not show the same biochemical or feeding patterns afterward.

“These molecules were crucial for increasing the sensitivity of the most important hormones, insulin and leptin, which control appetite,” José Carvalheira, of the Department of Internal Medicine at the State University of Campinas in São Paulo and coauthor of the new study, said in a prepared statement.

Although the intense bursts of exercise seemed to spur these noticeable shifts in chemical profiles, in this study the activity only reduced the food intake in rats that were already obese, and the activity did not seem to directly relate to immediately apparent weight loss. But this chemical change alone suggests that physical activity “could help to reorganize the set point of nutritional balance and, therefore, aid in counteracting the energy imbalance induced by overnutrition-related obesity,” Carvalheira and his colleagues noted in the study.

Oil eating microbes they are stepping it up in the gulf!

Petroleum-eating bacteria – which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor – proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing that reduced the amount of oil amounts in the undersea “plume” by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science. [...]

The findings point to a different conclusion from that drawn by readers of a study published last week, also in the journal Science. That research by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found no reduction in the oxygen content of the gigantic oil plume, suggesting that microbes were consuming the oil very slowly.

The Berkeley team study published Tuesday also indicates indirectly that dispersants used to break the wellhead stream of oil into a mass of submicroscopic particles might have speeded the cleanup. By increasing the surface area between oil and water, the dispersants seem to have provided the deep-sea microbes greater access to this unusual food source. [...]

Inside the plume, researchers found about twice as many bacterial cells per milliliter of water as outside it. There was also twice as much “phospholipid,” a type of compound in cell membranes. Both findings pointed to an oil plume teeming with life. In fact, the researchers detected 951 subfamilies of bacteria containing more than 10,000 distinct species. Curiously, 16 of those 951 subfamilies were especially abundant in the plume samples compared with specimens outside the plume.

They were of a type called gamma-Proteobacteria (and dominated by the order of bacteria called Oceanospirillales) known to be able to degrade oil-like substances in cold water.

The scientists then looked at the roughly 5,000 genes active in the bacteria. They found that the 1,600 genes involved in “hydrocarbon degradation” were cranked up to much higher concentrations in the plume bacteria than in the bacteria outside it.

From a purely Darwinian point of view, this was no surprise. About 500,000 barrels of oil get into into the gulf’s water each years through seafloor seeps. (In comparison, the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska was 260,000 barrels.) Natural selection has favored microbial species able to quickly use oil as a nutrient when it is around. It’s particularly favored ones that can use it in very cold, bottom waters – conditions generally not conducive to rapid bacterial growth. Many of the species flourishing in the samples taken by the Berkeley group actually consume oil better at 40 degrees Fahrenheit than at 70 degrees.

Natural selection in action! Of course, the woos and religious nut-jobs will probably say that they prayed to Jesus for this to happen.

Frogs: new micro frogs are discovered; they are tiny but adorable!

Economy
Paul Krugman: he remembers what they predicted. He lets us know that he remembers.

Sorry, can’t resist. That was the title of this Business Week article a few months ago. The tone made it pretty clear that if you had any sense, you’d ignore the bearded academic and go with the market wizard:

If [Krugman] makes you want to head for the hills with your shotgun and turnip seeds, consider another view, expressed the week prior at the London School of Economics. The speaker was not a decorated academic with visions of 1873, he was a profit seeker, pure and simple: John Paulson, the hedge-fund manager on whose behalf Goldman Sachs (GS) cooked up those killer collateralized debt obligations designed to pay off handsomely in the event of a housing crash. He was right about that one, you’ll recall.

“We’re in the middle of a sustained recovery in the U.S.,” Paulson declared in London. “The risk of a double dip is less than 10 percent.”

[...]

So, how’s it going? I’m sure that if Paulson had proved right, there would be a followup article mocking yours truly. Wanna bet that there won’t be a piece saying that maybe professors know something that traders don’t?

Tee hee. Well sort of; I really wish that Dr. Krugman had been wrong.

Racism and right wingers
Leonard Pitts: won’t let them get away with claiming MLK’s legacy. Read the whole thing; here is a snippet:

`This is a moment,” said Glenn Beck three months ago on his radio program, “…that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement. It has been so distorted and so turned upside down. . . . We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place!”

Beck was promoting his Restoring Honor rally, to be held Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King famously spoke there. You’ll notice he didn’t define the “we” he had in mind, but it seems reasonable to suppose Beck was speaking of people like himself: affluent middle-aged conservatives possessed of the ability to see socialism and communism in places where it somehow escapes the notice of others.

If you agree that assumption is reasonable, then you must also agree Beck’s contention that his “we” were the architects of the civil rights movement is worse than nonsensical, worse than mendacious, worse than shameless. It is obscene. It is theft of legacy. It is robbery of martyr’s graves.

We’re in an odd moment. Having opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century, some social conservatives seek, now that that movement stands vindicated and venerated, to arrogate unto themselves its language and heroes, to remake it in their image.
[...]
The fatuous and dishonorable attempt to posit conservatives as the prime engine of civil rights depends for success on the ignorance of the American people. Sadly, as anyone who has ever watched a Jay Walking segment on The Tonight Show can attest, the American people have ignorance in plenitude.

This, then, is to serve notice as Beck and his tea party faithful gather in Lincoln’s shadow to claim the mantle of King: Some of us are not ignorant. Some of us remember. Some of us know very well who “we” is.

And, who “we” is not.

No one gets spared here…

Yeah, I know, the D’s were trying to be political. But President Obama stood up for some politically risky things as a candidate (e. g. opposing that “gas tax holiday” that McCain and Clinton favored) and I hope he does something similar now.

25 August 2010 Rehabilitation

Workout: 2 mile walk, abs and legs, stretching, 1 mile “fun” walk on the treadmill where I raised the speed from 14:50 to 12:45 and raised the incline from 0 to 5.

Legs: 1 legged squats, (2 sets of 10 with 75, 1 set of 20 stand alone weightless), squats (15 x 135) all on the Smith Machine, 3 sets of press, extensions, curls, 1 set of 5 heavy leg extensions, abs included 30 yoga leg lifts, 30 twist crunches, 3 sets of 20 sit ups (highest, second highest, third highest), crunches. Stretches and some hip hikes too finished it.

Shoulder: didn’t hurt last night; this was the first pain free night in a long time.
Piriformis: some on the RIGHT side (not the trouble side) during one legged squats. That is why I did the hip hikes.

Shoulder: after teaching: twinges, some momentary weakness (loss of power). Not super painful; the pain is a mild twinge/power loss.
Later: it is twitching all over the place with lots of “power loss” during the twitches.

25 August 2010

Classes start today. Back at it; I’ll be busy with a rewrite and classes, and rehabbing my knee/shoulder.

Politics Senator Jim Inhofe calls Senator John McCain a “closet liberal”. I say: Senator Inhofe is an out of the closet loon (creationist, climate change denier, etc.)

But Senator McCain did win his reelection primary (57-32 at of last night) and will probably win reelection.

Science
Mice can be trained to sniff out disease:

Scientists have trained mice to recognize the whiff of bird flu in duck poop, and they think they can train dogs to do the same thing. If so, flu-sniffing dogs — or chemical sensors built to duplicate this not-so-stupid pet trick — could become a new line of defense in the fight against epidemics.

The latest findings focus on the detection of avian influenza, a.k.a. bird flu. But Bruce Kimball, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher who presented the study today in Boston at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, suggested that the trick could be used to sniff out other diseases as well. “To be honest with you, I think we could demonstrate this type of effect in a lot of areas,” he told me.

Human evolution Here is an interview with a scientist who thinks that tools really forced human evolution; that is, it wasn’t mostly natural selection after a certain point:

You begin your book The Artificial Ape by claiming that Darwin was wrong. In what way?

Darwin is one of my heroes, but I believe he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world – especially when it comes to the size of our cranium.

Darwin had to put large cranial size down to sexual selection, arguing that women found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That’s because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies’ head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.

So you are saying that technology came before humans?

The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 2.5 million years ago. That’s the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That’s a gap of more than 300,000 years – more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools.

Is it possible that we just don’t have a genus Homo fossil, but they really were around?

Some researchers are holding out for an earlier specimen of genus Homo. I’m trying to free us to think that we had stone tools first and that those tools created a significant part of our intelligence. The tools caused the genus Homo to emerge.

I don’t know how this conjecture will play out.

Social From NPR: young people are struggling to find athletes to use as a hero or role model.

My take: so what? Being a good athlete means that you are good at sports. That is fine; I enjoy boxing,NBA, NFL and track action. But being a good athlete hardly means being a hero. Scandals? Meh. Sure, I don’t like cheating. But this off the field/court/out of the ring stuff means little; these peoples are really a type of entertainer and not much else. Scandals involving our elected leaders or, say, scientists who falsify research bother me much more.

Teabaggers: UNTIE! YOU’RE TIME HAS COME!

Note: at least one sign has two misspellings. Which is it?

24 August 2010 (pm)

Humor This headline in and of itself is hilarious! (note: this is from The Onion)

Study: Children Exposed To Pornography May Expect Sex To Be Enjoyable

Really not funny but Things that 20 percent (or more) Americans believe (beyond “Obama is a Muslim”). One of them I knew about already (that 1 in 5 Americans believe that the Sun goes around the Earth). More shocking: 24 percent didn’t know that we gained our independence from Great Britain (UK and England were also considered correct answers).

Note: in this list of incredible things was included that “George Bush was a great President”. While I certainly don’t agree with that, this is a matter of opinion and therefore not in the same category as the two things that I mentioned, believing in witches (NOT the Wicca type but rather ones that can cast spells).

Science Astronomy: the most planet dense “exo-solar system” was recently discovered, which includes a planet not much larger than the earth. This exo-planet is very close to its star; this system also has no Jupiter caliber gas planets.

Human biology: This article isn’t so much about the biology, but is interesting nevertheless: there are a few women who are born with no internal female organs. This is one such case. A friend explained it to me this way:

Lauri Dömötör Berger I learned about this in my genetics class just last semester. Basically, at the extreme earliest of stages (like within the first few days after conception), those male genes must be “turned on” by what’s called “housekeeping genes” or Hox genes. For whatever reason, these Hox genes fail to do so. Since you can live with one X chromosome (all females have one inactive X chromosome), but you cannot live without an X chromosome, or just a Y chromosome, you get female physiology, at least from the outside.

24 August 2010 (AM)

The semester starts tomorrow; I have lesson plans, quizzes, and my lunch stuff all ready to go. Oh yes, I need some pain killers at work.

I also got my hair cut in West Peoria; from my short time in there, people show up to chat, bag, and talk about local politics. Still, I can recommend that barber shop (right across the street from Haddad’s West Peoria Market, where I get my groceries. So I am beardless.

Links:
Now we can use “bone printing” to scan for terrorists: that’s right; enter a stadium and get your bones scanned that way if a terrorist tries to enter…oh wait…

Because every country has a database of terrorist skeletons just waiting to be used.

Ok, not all new ideas are good for what they were intended to be used for.

Economics:
People are taking issue with what Paul Krugman said. He doesn’t care:

The Tax Policy Center estimates (pdf) say that the budget cost of making all the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to only the middle class cuts, is $680 billion over the next decade. It also says that 55 percent of the benefit flows to 120,000 taxpayers. That’s $374 billion divided by 120,000; TPC expresses it as a per year gain of $310,000, but it is more than $3 million per member of the top .1% over the course of the decade.

So if you are reading some source claiming that I got it all wrong, you have just learned something about that source’s credibility.

I’ll put it more bluntly: many (not all) of his critics are idiots who routinely get their “information” from liars.
Was that too strident?

Oh wait, there’s more. Eugene Robinson says that they are wimps too: (ok, I switched from “critics of Krguman” to rabid right wingers…but the first is a subset of the second…)

The thing is, though, that the manufactured brouhaha over the Park51 project is part of a larger pattern in which the far right embraces victimhood and stokes fear. The faction that likes to portray itself as a bunch of John Waynes and “mama grizzlies,” it turns out, spends an awful lot of time cowering in the corner and complaining about how beastly everyone else is being.

Witness the frequent eruptions over instances of reverse racism — real or imagined. The Shirley Sherrod affair was the most recent example of how eagerly the far right wants to sell the false narrative that African Americans, once they achieve positions of authority, will use their newly acquired power to punish whites for historical discrimination. The facts of the Sherrod case, as they finally emerged, argue persuasively against this fictional tale of longed-for revenge. But it will be back.

And look at the hysteria over illegal immigration. Facts don’t matter — for example, that the flow of undocumented migrants has decreased, or that border enforcement under President Obama is much tougher than under George W. Bush, or that illegal immigrants are not responsible for any kind of crime wave. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), has gone so far as to sound the alarm about alleged “terror babies.” The idea is that undocumented pregnant women would cross the border so that their children could have U.S. citizenship, then take the babies away to be raised as terrorists — who would be able to come back in 20 years or so, with legitimate U.S. passports, and presumably wreak untold havoc. No, I did not make that up.

Is the far right really afraid of its own shadow? Do these people really have so little faith in our nation’s strength, resilience and values? I hope this is all just cynical political calculation, because there are genuine threats and challenges out there. We’ll be better off meeting them with a spine, not a whine.

Emphasis mine. All of those “tough” right wingers are really little cowering sissies.

Psst: David Brooks/Kathleen Parker type Republicans; those on the left side of this political cartoon: I am NOT talking about you!

24 Aug 2010 Rehabilitation

1:11:13 (walk; cool conditions, felt fine)

Last night: pain in my shoulder 4 hours into sleeping then none. Some slight lateral pain in the knee (surface, shallow, not in the joint, not behind).

PT: therapist is out sick. But that is just as well since I’ve had no improvement.

Daily Kos: Awesome Jon Stewart debate: Is Fox News evil or stupid? (+ Colbert on anti-Muslim protesters)

Daily Kos: Awesome Jon Stewart debate: Is Fox N…, posted with vodpod