Stewart Takes Sarah Palin To Task For Playing Victim, Invites Her To ‘The Daily Show’ (VIDEO)

Tuesday night’s “Daily Show” began with Jon Stewart saying he had good news, that the victim of the Arizona shooting we’ve been keeping a close eye on was finally making a recovery. Naturally, he was talking about Sarah Palin.

Stewart Takes Sarah Palin To Task For Playing V…, posted with vodpod

19 January 2011

Workout notes I got to the Riverplex late (5:20 am) but had time for squats (20 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 185, 10 x 135 Smith, 10 x 135 free), sit ups (105; 7 sets of 15 from inclines 9 to 2), back, rotator cuff, hip hikes, then 3.11 miles of running in just under 31 minutes. I used the treadmill XC program (number 3) but had to dial back the last hill interval. Next time, I do all of it.

But I didn’t sleep worth a darn last night; I was just all antsy, surly and upset over…well….over nothing important at all.

Getting in front of a math class made me feel a whole lot better; I feel like myself when I am teaching math or doing math.

Posts
That Wiley Coyote finally gets the roadrunner and…

(hat tip: Mano Singham)

Science: here are the top ten retractions from 2010; note that not one has anything to do with climate science. (hat tip: Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

Economics
Here Paul Krugman shows the results of the stimulus bill being too small; note that the growth rate of the actual GDP roughly matches the growth rate of the potential GDP; we are starting from too low of a point. Hence the DERIVATIVE of the difference is zero whereas it needs to be positive. There is a potential calculus one problem here.

In this post, Krugman takes on the GOP talking points on the economy and notes:

The point is that the real world looks a lot like the one Keynes and Friedman envisioned, in which the demand side drives the business cycle. Why should anyone be determined to throw away 75 years of economic thought, to believe that these appearances are deceiving?

Earlier he says:

But what does the other side believe? Someone, I don’t know who at this point, sent me to this post by Robert Murphy, which is the best exposition I’ve seen yet of the Austrian view that’s sweeping the GOP — and I mean that sincerely, never mind the puerile insults aimed at yours truly. As regular readers know, I’m a stylized-example kind of guy, and Austrians tend to prefer lots of words instead; but in this case Murphy does offer a little story that is, in a way, a counterpart to my story about the baby-sitting coop (although my story was based on an actual real-world example).

So what is the essence of this Austrian story? Basically, it says that what we call an economic boom is actually something like China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which led to a temporary surge in consumption but only at the expense of degradation of the country’s underlying productive capacity. And the unemployment that follows is a result of that degradation: there’s simply nothing useful for the unemployed workers to do.

I like this story, and there are probably other cases besides China 1958-1961 to which it applies. But what reason do we have to think that it has anything to do with the business cycles we actually see in market economies? [...]
Oh, and what evidence is there that the economy’s capacity is damaged during booms? Investment rises, not falls, during booms; yes, I know that Austrians take refuge in cosmic talk about the complexity of production and how measured investment may not show what’s really happening, etc., but where’s the positive evidence of what they’re claiming?

Emphasis mine.

Note that the Republican mind thinks in terms of non-falsifiable slogans; that is why there are relatively few scientists in their ranks. So they don’t NEED positive evidence to back up their theories; if an observable is somewhat consistent with their slogans, it is good enough for them.

Sarah Palin is Owed No Less

My Mood

It has been that type of month.

Crappy Last day…whine, etc.

Ice fog. Bull-sh*t meetings. I found that my 9 am class got moved across campus; the problem is that I have an 8 and a 10…and the morons want me to use technology to teach these classes…different technology for each one. To top it off, we have icy roads and sidewalks due to ice fog.

Oh well…here is my sympathy:

End whining…

Now this poor soul has something to whine about. The man had a court order to stop the demolition and he had a signed note to the contractor saying “don’t do it”. But they did anyway; this sounds like something that would happen where I live.

And, I suppose I could be living in Alabama and have an idiot like this for governor:

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) commemorated the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, telling a gathering of Alabamians that he didn’t see skin color as a divisive factor. When it came to religion, however, the recently-inaugurated governor raised some eyebrows with a comment on his view of non-Christians in his state.

“So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother,” Bentley said in his address, according to The Birmingham News, after telling the congregation that he was “color blind.”

Then again, what does one expect out of a Republican, especially a southern one?

Religion and Science It is said that religious fundamentalism offends reason, atheism offends faith and religious moderates offend both. Here is an excellent example of this:

Collins gives the money quote when the interviewer presses him on how he sees Biblical accounts of creation:

Interviewer: Genesis would lead us to believe that the earth is six thousand years old. And it would lead us to believe that God created two human beings—one out of the rib of the other. It’s pretty explicit stuff.

Collins: We interpret it as explicit these days. It is not a textbook of science! It would not have suited God’s purposes to lecture to his chosen people about radioactive decay, and such things as DNA. What God was trying to teach us through those words is the nature of God and the nature of humans—and that comes through loud and clear.

A bit later, Collins asserts:

. . . once you’ve accepted the idea of a God who is the creator of all the laws of nature, the idea that God might at unique moments of history might decide to invade the natural world, and suspend those laws, doesn’t become, really, a logical problem. And certainly the Resurrection is the most dramatic example of that: where God became man, walked on this earth, was crucified, and then, after death, was resurrected—that, for me, is the cornerstone of my faith. And it doesn’t present a real problem, as a believer, as long as I’ve already acknowledged that God is God.

This is embarrassing stuff, even more so coming from America’s most prominent scientist. Quick thoughts:

* The correct translation of the frequent claim that “The Bible is not a textbook of science” is this: “The Bible is not literally true, except for those places where I say it’s literally true.”
* Why is Collins so sure that he knows what God intended when “writing” the Bible, especially since other Christian sects disagree?
* How does Collins know exactly which parts of the Bible are “not science” (i.e., fiction) and which parts are? If Genesis and Adam and Eve are “not science”, why is the Resurrection “science”? There’s precisely the same amount of empirical evidence—i.e., zero—for each of these stories.

In other words, suspend logic and reason where you think it should be suspended.

18 January 2011 (am; pre semester)

Workout notes No pain killers last night; sleep went ok but I woke up stiffer than normal (back).
Still, I did my back/piriformis routine, rotator cuff, sit ups (8 sets of 10 at various inclines), 4 mile run (9:32, 9:08, 9:08, 8:50 for 36:40), 1 mile walk, weights (3 sets of dumbbell curls, 3 sets of incline presses (115 x 10, 115 x 10, 135 x 5), rows (3 sets of 10 with 180), arm bike (10;15 or 3 miles), hip hikes, etc. Note: for the weights, I “superset” these and go without rest.

This wasn’t my best workout ever but it was better than recent ones.

Posts
This will make Sarah Palin’s backers cheer but it won’t help her on a national stage. I see her as a niche figure: sort of like a more personable Ann Coulter.

Speaking of Sarah Palin: Ed Shultz has a short article that shows the folly of relying on “the number of hits one gets with a google search” to make a point:

Sarah Palin appeared on Hannity’s show last night to defend herself (again) against charges that her gun rhetoric and violence innuendo contributed to the atmosphere which led to the shootings in Tucson which left six dead and Rep. Gabrille Giffords critically wounded.

Early in the interview, Sean Hannity said when he Googled the words ‘Sarah Palin Tucson Shooting,’ he got ten thousand results.

What does that prove? Here are some other Sarah Palin Google results.

Google ‘Sarah Palin Alien Invasion’: 61-thousand results

Google ‘Sarah Palin Bubblegum’: 912-thousand results

Google ‘Sarah Palin Hates Clowns’: 851-thousand results

President Obama
He is following President Reagan’s and Clinton’s trajectories, at least in terms of approval ratings:

Snark and humor

Again, the creator of Frazz seems to have my area down. Right now, it is hazardous to try to walk outside (much less run); lots of slippery slush just about everywhere.

You see this at the Riverplex a whole lot; old fat people come in to sit on a water noodle. Note the bags of food hanging up. There is nothing wrong with relaxation but one shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that they are exercising.

18 January 2011: posting

Things will be light for a while, though I am posting away; it is just that I have focused on mathematics for a while:

Dirac Delta “function” in differential equations

Lebesgue Integration and measure I
Lebesgue Integration and measure 2
Lebesgue Integration and measure 3
Lebesgue Integration and measure 4

I hope to do about a half dozen more such posts. Here is what motivated this: I struggled to learn this stuff because I lacked mathematical context; I could memorize the proofs and “understand” the logical steps; I just didn’t know WHY we were doing this and that hampered things considerably.

What is really going on: in calculus class, one learns about integration and differentiation. But mostly one uses functions that are “smooth”; that is, have derivatives of all orders on an open interval; perhaps one might say a few words about “piecewise smooth” functions (e. g., functions with jump discontinuities). One even learns about series and series of functions (e. g. Taylor series, Fourier series) but one usually learns about these on a superficial level. For example, why is it permissible to differentiate Taylor series term by term, but not Fourier series?

Or, consider this example:

Let and let

Now pointwise where is zero on the rationals and 1 on the irrationals and for all

So as a limit of numbers. But the limit function fails to be Riemann integrable at all. These sort of
examples motivated a different theory of integration. But I did NOT have such examples in my head.

There are other strange things: for example, it is possible to have continuous on , for for all except for in a set of measure zero but for to be INCREASING on ?

For those whose calculus is rusty: a function with zero derivative everywhere on an interval is a constant; one would expect that a derivative would have to be positive if the function was continuous and increasing. As you may have guessed: the difference here is the “everywhere except…” condition.

So, my series of posts are designed to give a big picture overview of this ”strange to many including me” subject.

17 January 2011 pm

From the newspaper today and yesterday
This letter to the editor really lifted my spirits a bit:

Careful readers of the Journal Star editorial page will find E.J. Dionne’s Jan. 7 column a worthy riposte to Jonah Goldberg’s from the previous day. “If you agree with a solution, it doesn’t seem ideological,” Goldberg pontificated, which sounds great, an apparently simple, cut-through-the-B.S. assertion. The only problem is that it’s not simple, it’s merely simplistic.

Ideology is not the practical expression of a more abstract political or social philosophy, as Goldberg suggests, but a substitution of that abstraction for a practical solution. This is the point that Dionne made indirectly in accusing conservatives of adhering to abstraction over actual governance.

What Dionne has captured is a fundamental characteristic of the thinking of many on the right, especially the tea partiers. He mentions “small government” and “free markets” as representative examples of these cherished abstractions. What many conservatives have done is make a fetish of both small government and free markets. Instead of being the means by which social ends can be accomplished, both have become ends in themselves, as if the skies of Americans are bluer and the sun brighter because their federal government is smaller.

This is not a mere disagreement with liberals about how to solve problems. It is instead a refusal to acknowledge that real problems have dimension and complexity that turn aside the blunt application of ideological “solutions” that aren’t solutions at all.

It’s worth noting that frustrated thinkers had to start talking about “reality-based” leadership during the Bush era when factually discredited programs like abstinence-only sex education continued to receive support. That is ideology-based leadership, and it ignores problems.

We can agree to disagree, but let’s first agree that problems need solutions, not ideological abstractions.

Douglas Okey

Too many times, conservatives respond with slogans and abstract principles rather than with data, facts or solutions; they see merit to “believing in” something.

Local
The creator of Frazz doesn’t live in Peoria, IL…but this cartoon sure hits home:

This Get Fuzzy is hilarious; remember that the Bucky character is a Republican and a creationist (or do I repeat myself? )

17 January 2011: There are days like this

Last night, I made a mistake. I told my wife that I’d upload her trip photos to photobucket. The problem: when I did the bulk upload, I didn’t use the automatic downsize feature….there were 1.5 Gigabits worth of material! Needless to say, it took 2.5 hours or so; therefore I didn’t get to sleep until very late.

This morning, I slept until 7 and then took my wife to a medial procedure (upper GI endoscopy). She was loopy but wanted lunch…but then she wanted to go to the emergency room because she had chest pains. Of course it was gas; I should have just taken her home and reminded her that her judgment was impaired. Fortunately the emergency room doctor told her not to worry so we went home.

Then i decided to walk to the gym to get a brief workout but my ID wasn’t in the wallet; it was in the check book because I used it as photo ID this weekend because the courthouse still has my license (speeding ticket almost 2 weeks ago).

And of course, there wasn’t much place to walk as the snow is slippery, many sidewalks are not shoveled and my shortcut has been take away due to ongoing construction.

Bleah. Life would be simpler were I single and lived in a better place.

At least I am ready for the academic year to start (almost).

By the way, since I spent so long uploading the photos: you can find them here. There are 27 pages.

I need something to cheer me up, so I’ll look at Kim Kardashian again:

No, that isn’t from Barbara’s photo set.

16 January 2011 pm

Not much to post about today; mostly I move photos around and broke in my new MacBook Pro laptop.

Workout notes
Lots of stretching, rotator cuff stuff.
Track: 24 laps on the outside lane running (Riverplex track): 31:25 (3.27 miles, 9:36 pace)
24 laps of walking on the inside lane (3.05) 40:30 (13:18 pace, 3.05 miles)
Stretching to cool down; tighter than I thought

Spandex: saw a granny (not a bad shape) with tight yoga pants and girdle lines.

Running is getting easier; shoulder is feeling better at night.