Petite Girl Lifts Twice Her Weight

She lifts 220 pounds. DotaPro’s dream girl?

Petite Girl Lifts Twice Her Weight, posted with vodpod

24 August 2010 early am

A President can only do so much; here is an example:

US government funding for research using embryonic stem cells has been thrown into disarray after a judge ruled that it violates laws prohibiting the destruction of human embryos.

The effect of the temporary injunction, by district court judge Royce Lamberth, bars federal funding for studies on stem cells derived from human embryos that are later discarded, which had been allowed by President Obama’s executive order last year.

The judge ruled that the research violated the Dickey-Wicker amendment first passed by Congress in 1995, which outlawed the use of taxpayer funds to carry out any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed”.

The New York Times reported that the ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at medical research universities across the US: “Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling’s immediate impact on their work.”

The injunction appears to set the scientific clock back to President Bush’s executive order restricting federally-funded research to stem cells already in existence by August 2001. But some scientists fear that the scope of the latest ruling may even prohibit research on that basis, since the limited lines of stem cells allowed under the Bush regulations were also derived from human embryos.[...]

The judge’s decision is almost certain to be appealed by the administration but it does confirm fears at the time of President Obama’s order that an executive ruling would provide weaker protection for funding than legislation passed by Congress.

Well, time for Congress to get cracking.

Three Links…

Bush Tax cuts vs. Obama’s plan, in pictures.

Christopher Hitchens on the “ground zero” mosque; he gets it. I don’t like Islam but the opposition to this mosque is nothing more than an attempt to score cheap political points at the expense of an unpopular group of people.

If you follow PZ Myers: he is having some serious heart trouble. But do not pray for him.

23 August 2010

Science/Technology
Believe it or not, a computer virus has actually caused a plane crash.

Astronomy: an amateur has caught a meteor strike on Jupiter:

Exercise Science Yes, there is such thing as muscle memory; here is a bit about its mechanism. Upshot: it is easier to “get strong again” than it is to get strong the first time. Yes, that includes the case where someone took steroids the first time.

Particle Physics/Mathematics This blurb shows the role that Lie groups play in particle physics. There are some who think that the monster Lie group is making a comeback; others say that the implications of such a role have been ruled out by experiment. I don’t have the standing to give an informed opinion, but my guess is that there might be some cool mathematical spin-off research.

Science Smackdown: Lawrence M. Krauss smacks down the woos who misuse quantum mechanics (e. g., to postulate divine intervention, make points about meditation, etc.). A sample:

No area of physics stimulates more nonsense in the public arena than quantum mechanics—and with good reason. No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because all of our experience involves a world of classical phenomena where, for example, a baseball thrown from pitcher to catcher seems to take just one path, the one described by Newton’s laws of motion. Yet at a microscopic level, the universe behaves quite differently. Electrons traveling from one place to another do not take any single path but instead, as Feynman first demonstrated, take every possible path at the same time.

Moreover, although the underlying laws of quantum mechanics are completely deterministic—I need to repeat this, they are completely deterministic—the results of measurements can only be described probabilistically. This inherent uncertainty, enshrined most in the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, implies that various combinations of physical quantities can never be measured with absolute accuracy at the same time. Associated with that fact, but in no way equivalent to it, is the dilemma that when we measure a quantum system, we often change it in the process, so that the observer may not always be separated from that which is observed.

When science becomes this strange, it inevitably generates possibilities for confusion, and with confusion comes the opportunity for profit. I hereby wish to bestow my Worst Abusers of Quantum Mechanics for Fun and Profit (but Mostly Profit) award on the following:

Deepak Chopra: I have read numerous pieces by him on why quantum mechanics provides rationales for everything from the existence of God to the possibility of changing the past. Nothing I have ever read, however, suggests he has enough understanding of quantum mechanics to pass an undergraduate course I might teach on the subject.

I love it when a smart person tells off people who pretend to know more than they actually do!

Politics-Economics No, there isn’t enough money for teachers but there is enough to extend the Bush tax-cuts to the wealthiest among us; or at least so say the Republicans and blue-dog Democrats.

More smackdown: Here is a list of overrated people. Guess who makes the list? Hint: who does EVERY “serious” current Republican politician compare themselves to? Which former president performed heroic deeds in his imagination?

And speaking of current Republican politicians who worship St. Raygun, how was she created anyway? One conjecture: she was the result of a bad miscalculation by the McCain campaign: they really believed there were armies of disaffected Hillary Clinton voters ready to vote for the Republicans, if only they had a reason. (PUMAs)

23 August 2010: Rehabilitation

Shoulder: some ache last night, some ache during the day. It really isn’t getting better. I broke down and ordered some ketoprofen creme.

Knee: pretty good; straightening it out all the way is still a bit of a struggle. But it is getting stronger:
2 mile walk, leg routine (extensions, presses, curls, calf then abs), then 3 sets of one legged squats on the Smith Machine: 10 x 65, 10 x 65, 10 x 95. Then:1 mile walk home, stretching, ice.

Piriformis: unnoticeable

Snark Fail

I have no problem with calling red America “dumfuckistan”. But there is a major problem with this picture, and I am not talking about Nebraska’s 1 congressional district vote that went to Barack Obama. And the EV total is right…what is wrong?

Moral: don’t make a basic mistake if you are going to call someone else “stupid”.

Thought for the Day

Matters Religious

I’ve read a few of Bishop Spong’s books. He has some interesting things to say (e. g., the world view of those who wrote the books of the Bible).

Yes, the Nazis in Germany enjoyed plenty of Christian support:

Yes, Falwell was full of crap:

(I concede that the worlds came from the Adams administration (Treaty of Tripoli) but it was approved by the Senate at the time. )

In America today (more or less)

What happened: a guy walks through and the riff-raff that composed this mob “thought” he was a Muslim (not that any of these nominal members of homo sapiens were capable of “thought”). More here.

On the other hand: this is just plain sad. What is the right thing to do here?

Of course, this is the interesting paradox of poor people being fat. How is this possible?

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A review

The short: I enjoyed the book and found it hard to put down. It challenged some of my thinking and changed the way that I look at things.

What I didn’t like: the book was very inefficient; he could have conveyed the same message in about 1/3 of the pages.
But: the fluff/padding was still interesting; the author has a sense of humor and writes in an entertaining style.

What is the gist of the book? Well, the lessons are basically these:

1. Some processes lend themselves to being mathematically modeled, others don’t. Unfortunately, some people use mathematical models in situations where it is inappropriate to do so (e. g., making long term forecasts about the economy). People who rely too much on mathematical modeling are caught unprepared (or just plain surprised) when some situation arises that wasn’t considered possible in the mathematical model (e. g., think of a boxer getting in a fight with someone who grabs, kicks and bites).

2. Some processes can be effectively modeled by the normal distribution, others can’t. Example: suppose you are machining bolts and are concerned about quality, as, say, measured by the width of the bolt. That sort of process lends itself to a normal distribution; after all, if the specification is, say, 1 cm, there is no way that an errant bolt will be, say, 10 cm wide. On the other hand, if you are talking about stock markets, it is possible that some catastrophic event (called a “black swan”) can occur that causes the market to, say, lose half or even 2/3′rd of its value. If one tried to model recent market price changes by some sort of normal-like distribution, such a large variation would be deemed as being all but impossible.

3. Sometimes these extremely rare events have catastrophic outcomes. But these events are often impossible to predict beforehand, even if people do “after the fact studies” that say “see, you should have predicted this.”

4. The future catastrophic event is, more often than not, one that hasn’t happened before. The ones that happened in the past, in many cases, won’t happen again (e. g., terrorists successfully coordinating at attack that slams airplanes into buildings). But the past catastrophic events are the ones that people prepare for! Bottom line: sometimes, preparing to react better is possible where being proactive is, in fact, counter productive.

5. Sometimes humans look for and find patterns that are really just coincidence, and then use faulty logic to make an inference. Example: suppose you interview 100 successful CEO’s and find that all of them pray to Jesus each day. So, obviously, praying to Jesus is a factor in becoming a CEO, right? Well, you need to look at everyone in business who prayed to Jesus and see how many of them became CEOs; often that part of the study is not done. Very rarely do we examine what the failures did.

I admit that I had to laugh at his repeated slamming of academics (I am an academic). In one place, he imagines a meeting between someone named “Fat Tony” and an academic. Taleb poses the problem: “suppose you are told that a coin is fair. Now you flip it 99 times and it comes up heads. On the 100′th flip, what the odds of another head?” Fat Tony says something like “about 99 percent” where the academic says “50 percent”.

Frankly, that hypothetical story is pure nonsense. In this case, the academic is really saying “if I am 100 percent sure that the coin is fair, there is a Black Swan even that has 100 heads in a row” though, in reality, the academic would reject the null hypothesis that the coin is fair as the probability of a fair coin coming up heads 99 times in a row is which is way in the rejection region of a statistical test.

Taleb also discusses an interesting aspect of human nature that I didn’t believe at first..until I tried it out with friends. This is a demonstration: ask your friend “which is more likely:
1. A random person drives drunk and gets into an auto accident or
2. A random person gets into an auto accident.

Or you could ask: “which is more likely: a random person:
1. Is a smoker and gets lung cancer or
2. Gets lung cancer.

Of course, the correct answer in each case is “2″: the set of all auto accidents caused by drunk driving is a subset of all auto accidents and the set of all lung cancer cases due to smoking is a subset of all lung cancer cases.

But when I did this, my friend chose “1″!!!!!!

I had to shake my head, but that is a human tendency.

One other oddity of the book toward the end, Taleb discusses fitness. He mentions that he hit on the perfect fitness program by asking himself: “what did early humans do? Ans.: walk long distances to hunt, and engage in short burst of high intensity activity”. He then decided to walk long, slow distances and do sprints every so often.

Well, nature also had humans die early of various diseases; any vaccine or cure works against “mother nature”. So I hardly view nature as always being optimal. But I did note with amusement that Taleb walks 10-15 hours a week, which translates to 30-45 miles per week! (20 minutes per mile pace).

I’d say THAT is why he is fit.