8 September 2010 rehabilitation

Shoulder: it hurt last night; tough PT session and probably the ketoprofen creme that I used wasn’t strong enough. Today’s PT (on my own) was easier though; I did the band stuff plus the hand bike.

Workout: I got up later than normal so only did the following in the morning:
squats (one leg), 20 x 45, 10 x 95 (Smith)
squats (two leg) 10 x 160 (Smith)
leg press: 15 x 270, 15 x 360, 15 x 360
extensions: 3 sets of 10
curls: 3 sets of 10
toe: 3 sets of 30
sit ups: 4 sets of 25 with no rest between incline settings (high to low)
leg lifts 30
twist crunches: 20, 10
arm bike (6 minutes)

Noon: 45 minutes (3+ miles) of brisk walking on hills (Bradley Park); pretty day.

Knee notes: I can’t quite squat all the way down, but I am so close. But my left knee hurt just a little bit; that quad muscle is very tight. I need to keep stretching it. The piriformis is ok, but I’ve been doing hip hikes and stretches.

I swear; aging is tough. You end up playing “whack-a-mole” with little injuries.

But I have to be patient; fall racing season is just around the corner.

7 September 2010 pm

David Plouffe: on the 2012 midterms. Basically, the Democrats are in a stop-the-bleeding mode.

Andrew Sullivan: “Game On”!

In all this, the president deserves constructive criticism, but also moral and political support in engaging actual problems with actual solutions. Those on the left and in the middle who once saw his potential have no reason to abandon him now. If you were one of them, he needs you and this country needs you now more than ever before.

Right on. I don’t agree with the President on everything, but a lefty who opposes him is crazy. Sure, it is ok to push him and advocate.

Pots-Kettles anyone? Rush Limbaugh calls Barack Obama “angry with a chip on his shoulder”.

Speaking of rabid, this snark is hilarious!

JEFFERSON CITY, MO (The Borowitz Report) – A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate.

The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions.

Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate until he was outed as a dog. [...]

Read the rest…

DK Hirner in the News (brief clip during the Labor Day Parade in Sprinfield)

Video Landing Page – Wandtv.com, NewsCenter17, …, posted with vodpod

7 September 2010 rehabilitation

Workout 6.3 mile course (walk) in 1:26:40. Last 1.04 miles was done in 13 minutes. At first my left knee (non-surgery knee) hurt a bit; I need to stretch my quads more. I was slower for the first half (net downhill: 44:40 and faster for the second net uphill: 42:00)

The day was pretty and cool.

Shoulder: it hurt a bit last night; I didn’t ice RIGHT before bedtime and perhaps overdid the rotator cuff stuff yesterday. Nevertheless it hurts for a set period of time; it is almost as if it wants to extract its pound of flesh before sending the pain away. I was able to get some sleep and even dreamed about frogs.

More PT today, and I bought some stretch bands. I had a good rotator cuff workout there.

7 September 2010 am

Posts for the day:
Here is a review of The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. This is the book that shows that the laws of nature are sufficient to explain why “there is something instead of nothing”; no deities are required.

That is going on my reading list, along with Will Bunch’s book The Backlash .

Education: Science takes a look at study habits. Surprise, surprise: much of the touted stuff that I thought was nonsense, is, well, nonsense:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

On the other hand, stuff I did in my own learning, well, seems to work for most:

None of which is to suggest that these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

These techniques are discussed in greater detail.

Economy
I liked President Obama’s announcement that he wanted to put 50 billion dollars into infrastructure. Ok, that isn’t enough and it might not pass:

Some bleary-eyed thoughts from Japan on the reported administration proposal for $50 billion in new spending:

1. It’s a good idea
2. It’s much too small
3. It won’t pass anyway — which makes you wonder why the administration didn’t propose a bigger plan, so as to at least make the point that the other party is standing in the way of much needed repair to our roads, ports, sewers, and more– not to mention creating jobs. Once again, they’re striking right at the capillaries.

I’m not quite that pessimistic; at least we’ll encounter fewer potholes (if it passes). But then the Republicans might get angry that he hurt the auto repair industry.

Robert Reich on the proposed tax cuts:

President Obama reportedly will propose two big corporate tax cuts this week.

One would expand and make permanent the research and experimentation tax credit, at a cost of about $100 billion over the next ten years. The other would allow companies to write off 100 percent of their new investments in plant and equipment between now and the end of 2011 at a cost next year of substantially more than $100 billion (but a ten-year cost of about $30 billion since those write-offs wouldn’t be taken over the longer-term).

The economy needs two whopping corporate tax cuts right now as much as someone with a serious heart condition needs Botox.

Reich says that Obama is trying to call out the Republicans to show that they simply oppose anything merely because, well, Obama proposed it.
But I am not harsh on the R and D part: after all, R and D rarely pays out short term economic benefit and it is NOT an efficient way to stimulate an economy. But all of society benefits from R and D (eventually). A benefit from a tax cut need not be economic.

Science and Writing
If you aren’t a scientist, don’t try to PWN a scientist. They are smarter than you are:

In his blog On Art in today’s Guardian, Johnathan Jones, whoever he is, makes an invidious and ill-informed comparison between Dawkins and Darwin: “Natural selection: Give me Darwin over Dawkins any day.“

To Jones, Darwin was the moderate Victorian gentleman, presenting evidence without bashing creationism, while Dawkins (of course) is strident and arrogant, putting off his biology audience by touting atheism. This is Mooneyism at its best:

Coyne goes on to quote Jones. Basically, Jones tries to argue: Darwin was nice and polite and Dawkins is mean and strident because, instead of letting the science speak for itself, they attack creationist “thought”.
Coyne goes on to show that Darwin indeed attacked creationist ideas and, yes, there is a ton of science in Dawkin’s latest book The Greatest Show on Earth.

He then concludes:

Jones is clearly out of his element here, which is writing about pictures of dogs playing poker. In his haste to defend faith against the depredations of Dawkins, he makes a complete fool of himself.

Ouch! This smack down kind of reminds me of this about 2:10 into it (after Teddy Atlas yells “quit standing in front of him Mike!”)

Jerry Coyne has a vicious (intellectual) right cross!

6 September 2010 posts.

Posts for day

Football

I missed the game (was at work); it turns out that I am glad that I did. Navy fell 17-14 and evidently blew several chances to win the game.

Economy
Do we have the political will to pull ourselves out of this depression? It was stimulus (due to war spending) that did the trick last time:

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

Then came the war.

I am not optimistic. Though this gives me hope (check out the photos). The President appeared to be back today; at long last he is pushing back against the failed trickle-down economics bullshit. Then again, if the very top prospers, these amoral imbeciles are fine with it.

Speaking of polarizing….yes, this country is polarized. Yes, Obama won Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina. But the states he lost, he really lost. Check out this map to see which states went more Republican.

As Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego, put it: “Americans were polarized from the start in their opinions of Obama and his agenda. The outline of the current configuration of political attitudes was plainly visible during the 2008 campaign.”

Obama won almost 53 percent of the vote, the most by any Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He won red states Democrats had not won in decades. But there was less unifying shape to the results than some broad-brush measures suggested.

George C. Edwards III of Texas A&M University notes that the number of states that deviated significantly from the national vote was more than in any election in 60 years, including 14 that went for John McCain (R). “Never before had many of these states voted so heavily against a victorious Democrat,” Edwards writes, citing the work of others.

Jacobson notes that Obama’s coalition included one of the smallest shares of voters who identified with the opposing party on record. He won because of “unusually high turnout among Democrats” and the fact that the Republican Party had shrunk during President George W. Bush’s second term.

In short, much of the country was never with him to begin with. Frankly, I would have said “ok, fuck you, we won and here is what we are going to do” but he didn’t do that.

Views of Obama as a leftist, as an extremist, as a would-be socialist, as dishonest – all of which became commonplace among some “tea party” activists and other conservative opponents once he was in office – were implanted during the campaign against McCain.

In short, many of the Republicans are ignorant.

But there is more:

But in their paper, the two also highlight how tensions between Obama’s post-partisan instincts clashed with his commitment to “traditional Democratic priorities.” Obama has frustrated liberals in his own party by trying to reach out to Republicans while angering Republicans by pressing an agenda that was anathema to conservatives.

“Consequently, even as the president scored major policy victories, he neither transcended partisanship nor fully satisfied members of his own party,” they write. “More damaging to the president, his attempt to both transcend parties and rally the Democratic base led the public to question his leadership and a steady decline in approval ratings.”

So here they are.

Religion
Christopher Hitchens: he gets the balance right between saying “ok, build that Islamic center” and “Islam is good” as it is right now. He starts by outlining how other religions have had to moderate or conform to US society (e. g., Mormons ending polygamy and allowing blacks to be priests..e. g., full fledged members). Then:

Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world’s only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam’s teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself.

Reactions from even “moderate” Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. “Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.

Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There’s an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it’s very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present.

6 September 2010 rehabilitation

Workout notes 6 minutes of arm bike, rotator cuff, abs.
Also: 1 mile of “running” on the treadmill (9:58), 2 miles of walking outside. My left knee was slightly sore (the non-operated one).

Night: some mild shoulder pain at night; I still slept.

My legs were slightly sore (good soreness) due to yesterday’s workouts (weights, hiking, 8 miles on Saturday).

An unintended post but….:-)

This is Barbara enjoying her new keyboard with her nephew Jacob looking on.

Posts
Mathematics and Statistics

NEVER, I mean NEVER botch the definition of p-value in front of a statistician!
What the p-value means: it is the probability of getting data that extreme (or greater) if the null hypothesis were true.

Politics
Rachel Maddow: reminds us that many of President Reagan’s accomplishments were NOT from policies that would be acceptable by today’s conservatives. She also reminds us of what President Obama has done:

Religion and idiots
A moronic rabbi calls atheists “parasites on moral society”. Parasites, like the 93 percent of the National Academy of Science? Here is an idea: the next time you get sick, don’t avail yourself of modern medicine, as there is an excellent chance that an atheist had a hand in developing it.

And speaking of morality, check this out from the Rabbi’s Holy Book:

All the inhabitants of Ai who had pursued the Israelites into the desert were slain by the sword there in the open, down to the last man. Then all Israel returned and put to the sword those inside the city.
25
There fell that day a total of twelve thousand men and women, the entire population of Ai.
26
Joshua kept the javelin in his hand stretched out until he had fulfilled the doom on all the inhabitants of Ai.
27
However, the Israelites took for themselves as booty the livestock and the spoil of that city, according to the command of the LORD issued to Joshua.
28
Then Joshua destroyed the place by fire, reducing it to an everlasting mound of ruins, as it remains today.
29
He had the king of Ai hanged on a tree until evening; then at sunset Joshua ordered the body removed from the tree and cast at the entrance of the city gate, where a great heap of stones was piled up over it, which remains to the present day.

There is your superior Jewish and Christian morality.
Oh sure, many modern Christians and Jews explain it away (e. g., folklore with no basis in fact, etc.) But that is the only reason that these people are tolerable is that they have found ways to cherry pick the good from their texts and to reject the bad.

More on atheism
Here is a reasonably good video on common misconceptions. This video makes an error when it shows the faces of atheists; Einstein rejected that label (but said the “he could be called agnostic”) and Lincoln had some sort of spirituality (albeit unconventional)

Still, the video is pretty good:

To be honest, when many hear “atheist” they have this in mind:

Posts for pm: 5 September 2010

Education
Here is an article that attacks the usual BS about professors being the cause for higher education costs. Hmm, our salaries rise at roughly inflation and our teaching load (in students) goes up…and we are to blame for faster than inflation rises in costs? Sure. Let’s all run our universities LIKE BUSINESSES because, well, they’ve done so well! Idiots.

PS: yes, the universities do have some dead weight, but our dead weight earns nothing remotely like the CEOs of failed companies earn.

Speaking of recovery: recovery isn’t going too slowly…it isn’t going at all. Sure, some signs have gotten “less bad” but “less bad” is still bad. Note: Krugman uses the concept of “the derivative” from calculus:

Delusion #2 is the belief that the stimulus may yet do the trick, because there are still substantial funds unspent. I tried to deal with this last year. The level of GDP depends not on total funds spent, but on the rate at which funds are being spent, which has already peaked; GDP growth on the rate of change in the rate at which funds are being spent, which peaked last year. It’s all downhill from here.

Education and Religion
Friendly Atheist quotes this from South Carolina:

In 1976, the Code of Laws of South Carolina were written. Among other things, it discusses the University of South Carolina and how it should be run… Section 59-117-100 is particularly interesting:

President shall not be atheist or infidel.

The board of trustees shall take care that the president of the University shall not be an atheist or infidel.

Do you still wonder why I consider the South, on the whole, to be intellectually retarded?

5 September 2010 rehabilitation

Last night: minimal shoulder ache. Ice and ketoprofen creme are doing the trick.

Today: 1 mile AMT, then a weight routine:

Squats: 10 x 95 (single leg), 10 x 95 (single leg), 10 x 155 (both legs) on the Smith Machine
Leg presses: 10 x 180, 15 x 270, 15 x 360
Extensions: 3 sets of 10
Curls: 3 sets of 10
toe: 3 sets of 30
sit ups: 25, 25, 25 25, lowering the incline each set (starting at the highest)

Then to Wild Life Prairie Park; Floodplain trail in 51:20 (30 seconds slower than last week)

This has been my best post surgery week yet.