13 January 2011 early pm

Sleep: evidently the light you are in prior to sleeping and while sleeping has an effect:

Melatonin is a hormone produced at night by the pineal gland in the brain. In addition to its role in regulating the sleep-wake cycle, melatonin has been shown to lower blood pressure and body temperature and has also been explored as a treatment option for insomnia, hypertension and cancer. In modern society, people are routinely exposed to electrical lighting during evening hours to partake in work, recreational and social activities. This study sought to understand whether exposure to room light in the late evening may inhibit melatonin production.

“On a daily basis, millions of people choose to keep the lights on prior to bedtime and during the usual hours of sleep,” said Joshua Gooley, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. and lead author of the study. “Our study shows that this exposure to indoor light has a strong suppressive effect on the hormone melatonin. This could, in turn, have effects on sleep quality and the body’s ability to regulate body temperature, blood pressure and glucose levels.”

In this study, researchers evaluated 116 healthy volunteers aged 18-30 years who were exposed to room light or dim light in the eight hours preceding bedtime for five consecutive days. An intravenous catheter was inserted into the forearms of study participants for continuous collection of blood plasma every 30-60 minutes for melatonin measurements. Results showed exposure to room light before bedtime shortened melatonin duration by about 90 minutes when compared to dim light exposure. Furthermore, exposure to room light during the usual hours of sleep suppressed melatonin by greater than 50 percent.

So, here is a rookie question: are they talking about eye exposure or skin exposure?

Mollusks: can develop teeth strong enough to crush rock. How?

Derk Joester of Northwestern University is studying how the chiton makes its teeth. Chitons are mollusks. They’re small, rather flat and oval in shape. The chiton Joester studies is called Chaetopleura apiculata, and it has a rather odd way of getting a meal.

“This particular organism literally chews rock in order to feed,” he says. It grinds down rock to get at algae and other food particles that might be sandwiched in the rock. “And for that, it needs incredibly tough and hard teeth.”

In fact, Joester says chiton teeth are one of the hardest and toughest materials known in nature. “They also have a very particular structure that allows them to self-sharpen to a certain degree. … Imagine a knife that keeps its edge forever.”

And that’s a trick Joester would like to be able to replicate in the lab.

A Closer Look

But before you can contemplate making such a thing in the lab, you need to know how the chiton does it. “For that, we are using one of the most powerful microscopes, the so-called atom probe,” Joester says.

He focuses this microscope on the interface between the soft organic molecules of the chiton’s innards with the rock-hard inorganic minerals of the chiton’s teeth. [...]

When materials scientists try to make things in the lab, they frequently have to resort to high temperatures and extreme pressures to force materials into a useful shape. And yet the chiton is able to make its remarkable teeth in regular old seawater and without special equipment. That’s why it’s worth studying.

“We can start to understand what the important design features are, and then start to develop techniques in the lab that might be able to take some of those features out and replicate them,” Estroff says.

Millions of years of evolution did what we currently cannot do!

Politics Evidently conservatives are fine with their own superstitions, but not the superstitions of others. Some were unhappy with the Native American prayers at the recent Arizona memorial service.

Chivalry must be dead!

Can it be that there isn’t at least one gentleman that wants to help Ms. Kardashian pull up her pants?

Hey, viewing this video was a change of pace from writing this article about a set that has no well defined Lebesgue measure.

This reminds me an exchange that I had with my wife: she bought a new business pantsuit but had underestimated the size. She told me: “honey, these pants are so tight that I am afraid to sit down”. Then she saw my face and it was race to see if she could get out the door before I could find my digital camera.

13 January 2011 Topics

Workout notes About 20 minutes of stretching, warm up, sit ups, and TWO sets of 10 on the Smith machine: 10 x 45, 10 x 135, “perfect form” squats.
Then 12 minutes on the AMT
25 laps of easy running in 30:03 (28:54 for 3 miles; 9:50, 9:40, 9:28)
1 mile cool down walk
hip hikes, stretches, etc.

Everything felt better though I had some piriformis tingles.

From the world of running: poor guy…..he didn’t see the race official trying to correct him; he lead at 25.99 miles into the race only to go off course. This was a “relay marathon”.

Posts
Who says that science nerds don’t have a sense of humor? I love this mug even though I am not a cat fan.

Different sort of humor:

see more funny videos

Yeah, I got a speeding ticket (recently) but didn’t do this. Thank goodness….

Social Why do the wealthy feel as if they aren’t wealthy? One reason: they see who is ahead of them. But I love how Paul Krugman finishes this article:

The net result is a society of winners as whiners, where people who are not only doing fine but doing much better relative to the median than they were a generation ago nonetheless feel left behind.

A personal note: I’ve always found extreme inequality at the top rather relaxing from my own point of view. Robin and I are doing very well, of course, but others are much richer; the fact, however, is that especially in New York you know that no matter how much you make, there are other people making so much that your earnings look trivial. So what’s the point of evaluating yourself that way? Of course, it’s probably a lot easier to feel that way when you’ve gotten plenty of other ego-boosters.

In other words, he isn’t the richest, but he is far smarter and more successful than almost all of his critics.
Of course, not only am I not wealthy, but I also know that I am not on the same intellectual level with, say, professors in the MIT mathematics department or even the University of Illinois math department (by a long shot). But I am far smarter than, say, a Sarah Palin supporter.

President Obama’s Speech Reactions to it were pretty good. The contrast between President Obama and Governor Palin was stark and, to be frank, not at all flattering to Gov. Palin (and even less so to those who approve of her).

And please, don’t even start with “it is on both sides”; sure there have been some Democrats who said objectionable things but…

Now to be fair, one reason that the Republicans use more “hunting and gun” metaphors might be because many come from rural and “hunter friendly” areas where people actually relate to hunting and see it as a good thing; tell a liberal that we are going to “bag” a conservative and the image of taking a conservative out of a bulk bin in a co-op and putting them into a reusable canvas bag comes to mind.

But the fact remains that they use more violent rhetoric.

Treadmill Day….13 January 2011

That is -17 C to some of you. Given the snow covered streets and my newly healing back, I’ll be indoors again.

My Latest Math Post

I wrote a short article which is supposed to provide background and motivation for learning the tools necessary to tackle the Lebesgue integral.
Here it is. Required background: one should remember some calculus basics and the definition of the Riemann integral (upper and lower sums, partitions and all that).

Sarah Palin, Blood Libel, and Pat Buchanan: you can’t make this up.

I watched Sarah Palin’s video about the Arizona shootings:

I winced when I heard “blood libel” (at about the 3:30 mark).

Sure enough, many Jewish groups have criticized the use of that term.
These are bad groups to be on the wrong side of if one wants to have political success in either major party. So I wrote this on facebook:

Well, if she is content to be a marginal “Pat Buchanan” type figure, she doesn’t have to apologize. But if she wants
to make a credible run for the Republican nomination in 2012, she will have to.

Then, just a few minutes later I see this:

Pat Buchanan said Wednesday that Sarah Palin has been a victim of the media in the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), and she was right to use the phrase “blood libel” in defending herself from charges that her language had anything to do with the mass shooting.

“Frankly I thought it was an excellent statement with regard to the phrase ‘blood libel’,” Buchanan said. “That of course refers to the libel that was used in the Middle Ages, charges against Jews that were utterly unsupportable slanders and I think she’s using it in that context.”

Pat Buchanan is a bit like everyone’s bigoted uncle or grandfather who can be counted on to blurt out the most embarrassing stuff at exactly the most inconvenient time. Of course, in some cases, the elderly might have an excuse; in many cases their mental function has deteriorated.

So Palin will have to make a decision: does she want to “remain” politically viable, or does she want to be a fringe figure that is, while unelectable, a (very rich) champion of the undereducated far right wing; a sort of “Pat Buchanan with a nice ass” figure?

If it is the former, she’ll have to retract or apologize. If it is the latter, she doesn’t have to.
.
PS: Palin knew that those “targets” were “bullseyes”:

12 January 2011: post workout

The back is definitely better; today’s workout showed that. The shoulder is healing up too.

Workout notes back stretches, stretch machine, piriformis stretches, rotator cuff stuff., hip hikes.
I also did 10 leg lifts, and 4 sets of 10 sit ups (low incline to highest).
Then: light weights: 3 sets of (15 x 20 lb. dumbbell curls), 3 sets of incline bench presses (10 x 95, 115, 115), 3 sets of 10 of rows (180, 90 per arm).
Stretches
3.1 mile run (9:17, 9:10, 8:51, (27:19 at 3) 28:31 total for 25 laps) on the track, 7 lap cool down walk (4 total)
Arm bike (10 minutes or 3:04 miles)
calf, hip hikes

Note: this took about 1:45 total though it looks as if it shouldn’t have taken that long; I worked steadily. All of my reps were “perfect form”; no jerky movements. There is nothing like the potential to aggravate a sore back to reduce the ego.

Science Yes, this is an article about worm sex. But it makes a conjecture that the “type of sex” actually plays a role in the formation of sperm…that is, sperm from one kind of sex has a different shape that sperm from another kind. The highlights:

perm are the most diverse of animal cells, variously adorned with tails, hairs, hooks, bristles and more. “But we don’t know what any of those doodads do,” says Scott Pitnick, an evolutionary biologist at Syracuse University in New York. Fertilization is not easy to observe, and predictions about the function of sperm design are even harder to test, so it took a group of transparent and rather kinky flatworms to unravel a piece of the puzzle. The creatures are simultaneous hermaphrodites: each has both male and female genitalia. The worms are about the size of a comma, but readily mate under a microscope.

The heterosexual world of animal reproduction is populated primarily by males eager to mate and females more concerned with finding a superior partner, but simultaneous hermaphrodites face antagonistic desires at the same time. Flatworm species in the genus Macrostomum solve the conflict by allowing eager sex to come first, and selectivity to follow.

“In the lab they mate like crazy,” says Schärer. “Once, we saw a pair mate 40 times in an hour.” The flatworms hook up tail-to-tail like two interlocking ‘C’s, with the penis, or stylet, of each penetrating the female hole of the other and ejaculating into the corresponding cavity, the antrum.

Ok, and what happened next?

Once the deed is done, selectivity may come into play. The worm bows down and appears to suck the ejaculate of its antrum (see video)2. “When I saw this for the first time in 2002, I almost fainted,” says Schärer.

But:

He has found that species that mate reciprocally, and then suck at the female genital opening, carry ornate sperm with a pair of long bristles emerging at the mid-point and a tail resembling a paint brush. Vizoso says that some Macrostomum species have extra sperm appendages, including structures that look like dreadlocks. These decorations can become lodged in tissue within the female orifice after copulation, combating the efforts of the receiving worm to remove the sperm (see video).

If hairs and bristles function as mechanisms to avoid sperm being sucked out after sex, the authors hypothesized that flatworms that don’t mate with stylet–antrum penetration and subsequent sucking won’t have extra appendages on their sperm [...]
the team deduced that species that engaged in ‘traumatic’ rather than reciprocal sex have evolved smaller sperm, without hairs or bristles. These species have put an end to mating games: they have stylets shaped more like pirates’ hooks than hoses, which they use to stab other worms anywhere in their bodies, and inject the sperm. Once struck, the recipient worm doesn’t stoop to suck, and the no-frills sperm quickly makes its way to the egg (see video).

It will be interesting to see where this leads.

Politics: Sarah Palin. “Blood libel”? Really? (3:30-3:35 mark)

Believe it or not, I agree with her when it comes to the fact that many want to limit free speech by law and that the cry becomes louder when shootings happen. But the idea that we should ask for our candidates and politicians to not use violent metaphors is not unreasonable; we have the right to ask this and the right to criticize candidates who do such things.

And the idea that things happen in a vacuum is absurd; it has been demonstrated that certain social conditions lead to statistical increases in social pathologies. To deny that is to be delusional.

Kicking myself out of bed…

I’ll get to the gym and do something; the back is feeling much better and the shoulder is improving…again. It seems as if I need the arm bike; it is a delicate balance between not doing enough and doing too much.

Hopefully this will inspire me to get to the gym (this is a video of still shots):

The adjective “stinky” doesn’t come to mind, but I know that these women are sweating. the only thing that I’d add is that I’d add some masters women (40 years old and up) and “Athena” triathletes and runners to the mix; one of the few good things about slowing down with age is that I now end up trailing women with, well, bigger butts. When I could run a 5K at 6:10-6:15 minutes per mile the only ladies I saw ahead of me were very slender if not downright skinny. Now that is in my distant past…

And I admit that I am tired of all the cold and snow and realistically we have about 6 more weeks of this stuff. Evidently I am not the only one:

PEORIA —

Enough already.

That’s Buddy Lerney’s opinion of the snow that’s fallen on central Illinois this winter.

“I don’t think it’s as bad as last year, but I don’t think we had as much before Christmas then,” he said as he shoveled his sister’s driveway in East Peoria, a broken snowblower by his side. “Then this (snowblower) broke, so I’m doing it by hand.”

If it seems like there’s been a lot of snow this year, that’s because there has. December was the third snowiest on record, and the season-to-date totals for this winter already have surpassed last winter’s numbers up to Jan. 11 – and last winter was the second snowiest on record.

“Sometimes we can go from a really snowy early winter to limited snow in later winter,” said Kirk Huettl, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Lincoln, adding that it’s a little premature to forecast whether the heavy snowfall trend will continue this winter.

What is known, however, is that there is supposed to be above-average precipitation levels during the latter part of this season. Huettl said it’s possible that that greater precipitation could come in the form of rain rather than snow.

The latest snowfall started late Monday and continued through much of the day Tuesday. Peoria saw a little more than 5 inches. Three to 5 inches across the area was the norm. [...]

As for the next few days, the chief concern is temperature.

“We’re going to have below-normal temperatures for the next few days,” Huettl said. “But there’s not any significant snow in the forecast.”

My “beef” (for which no one is to “blame”) is that my short cut from my house to my office (which I used to walk for over a decade) was taken away by all of the new construction. Hence my route is slightly longer…but the problem is that it takes me past more automobile traffic and there is no good place to walk. Sure there are sidewalks but they are almost never shoveled (the Bradley sidewalks are, but not the neighborhood ones). I see why: though I keep mine shoveled, frequently the city comes by and plows them under if there are no cars parked by the curb.

The whole city is not pedestrian friendly during the winter.

Six more weeks of this crappy weather…

Equality of Opportunity

Paul Krugman’s post is well worth reading:

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

Such a society doesn’t correspond to any kind of abstract ideal, whether it’s “people should be allowed to keep what they earn” or “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. It’s a very non-Utopian compromise. But it works, and it’s a pretty decent arrangement (more decent in some countries than others.)

That decency is what’s under attack by claims that it’s immoral to deprive society’s winners of any portion of their winnings. It isn’t.

Sore Loser FAIL – Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

epic fail video – Sore Loser FAIL

Sore Loser FAIL – Epic Fail Funny Videos and Fu…, posted with vodpod