8 February 2011 freezing edition

Workout notes Yoga; it was a very shabby effort on my part. Then Lynn took me home and I went to Bradley to lift:

Squats (Smith machine) 20 x 45, 10 x 135, 6 x 185,
Squats (free) 10 x 135, 10 x 155
Incline press: 10 x 115, 10 x 125, 7 x 135
curls: 15 x ? (barbell), 15 x 20, 15 x 20 dumbbells
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120
rows: 10 x 190, 10 x 200, 10 x 200
Sit ups: 4 sets of 25 (incline from 1 to 4)
(note: the “high incline sit ups NEVER get easier!)
walk: 4 miles in 50:54 (12:50, 12:42, 12:45, 12:37)
hip hikes, back exercises
Exercise ball hamstring exercises (3 sets of 10)

On a positive note: my back is feeling better and the piriformis issue is clearing up and the shoulder is getting better. I am beginning to think of training again….but right now it is just a thought. Maybe by this summer I’ll actually be able to TRAIN? Maybe?

Posts
Darwin award?

see more funny videos

Mathematics and statistics:
Here is an article about the potential pitfalls of using statistical measures to detect bias. If you have had a stats class, the ideas are easy to summarize: suppose you had two groups of people who take a standardized test; the mean for group A is 980 and the mean for group B is 1000. Also suppose that the standard deviation is 100. Then suppose the cut-off for, say, an “elite score” on the test is 1300. Then out of 10000 people, 13 from group B will meet the standard but only 7 from group A; that is, a 20 point difference in the mean leads to an 85 percent increase in the number of those scoring “elite”.

Ideas true, academics tend to be liberals and scientists dramatically so. But that doesn’t mean that we need an affirmative action program for conservatives. Paul Krugman has some fun with this:

Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices. Military officers are much more conservative than the population at large; so? (And funny how you don’t see opinion pieces screaming “bias” and demanding an effort to redress the imbalance.)

It’s particularly troubling to apply some test of equal representation when you’re looking at academics who do research on the very subjects that define the political divide. Biologists, physicists, and chemists are all predominantly liberal; does this reflect discrimination, or the tendency of people who actually know science to reject a political tendency that denies climate change and is broadly hostile to the theory of evolution?

Now, I don’t mean to say that political bias in the academy is absent, although it’s not consistent: I can well imagine that it’s hard to be a conservative in some social sciences, but in economics, the obvious bias in things like acceptance of papers at major journals is towards, not against, a doctrinaire free-market view. But the point is that doing head counts is a terrible way to assess that bias.

Teaching Of course, I am a strong supporter of President Obama, but I am a bit worried that he is falling for bad idea in terms of education. Sure, I don’t like it that we sometimes have idiots who earn teaching certificates; we certainly do. And yes, in this crappy economy, any job is a good job. But if we continue to make teaching an unattractive job, we won’t attract the best talent. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub can fill you in a bit more; I highly recommend reading his blog post.

Don’t “Wanna” Go Out…..

Another cold front and….

Michele Bachmann’s New Book Cover

Bonus

7 February 2011: pm

Blog It has taken me 1499 days (first post was on 10 December 2006) but now I’ve finally reached half a million hits. Sure, that is perhaps one day for, say, Daily Kos. I started by averaging 20 hits per day or so; right now 500-600 is typical; that is tiny compared to many.

So, if you are reading this, thank you.

Posts
Football: in the NFL, going to the ground in celebration after a touchdown is illegal, unless:

When I wrote about this issue a couple years ago, the National Football League’s Vice President of Officiating, Mike Pereira, had this to say:

The whole issue is, you can’t go to the ground on your knees or with your hand or anything. There’s only one time that you’re going to be allowed to go on your knee after you score like this, and that’s when you want to praise the Lord. If you do that, then I’m going to allow that, because I do not want to be struck by lightning, I promise you that. We will allow that.

The NFL is a private organization, of course. They can issue (or not issue) fines however they would like. But some consistency in the rules would be nice. If they want to allow Christian prayers after a touchdown, why not just come out and say it?

I admit that this is a good business decision; my guess is that many fans are ok with people giving gratitude to their invisible friend.

I found this 3quarks daily post to be interesting:

Our book Reasonable Atheism does not publish until April, yet we have already been charged with
accommodationism, the cardinal sin amongst so-called New Atheists. The charge derives mainly from the subtitle of our book, “a moral case for respectful disbelief.” Our offense consists in embracing idea that atheists owe to religious believers anything like respect. The accusation runs roughly as follows: “Respect” is merely a euphemism for soft-pedaling one’s criticisms of religion; but religion is a force of great evil, and thus must be fought with unmitigated vigor. Atheist calls for respect in dealing with religion simply reflect a failure of nerve, and must be called out. Anything less than an intellectual total war on religion is capitulation to, and thus complicity with, irrationality.

In our case, the charge of accommodationism as a failure of critical nerve is misplaced; anyone who actually reads our book will find that we pull no punches. But we also think that, as it is commonly employed in atheist circles, the idea of accommodationism involves a conflation between two kinds of evaluation which should be kept distinct. Some clarification is in order. [...]

You can read the rest of the post. But, accommodationism is more about making the claim that religion, as understood by most western believers anyway, is compatible with current science. Sorry, but it isn’t; after all current mainstream religious thought has humans being the intentional outcome of a creative process and science has shown that evolution is an undirected process.

Jerry Coyne talks more about this:

There are two points to be made here. First, even the “tolerant” official views of religion can be anti-science. While the Catholic church officially accepts evolution, it accepts theistic evolution, in which God guided the process and casually slipped an immortal soul into the hominin lineage. And theistic evolution, in which God has a role in the process, is not acceptance of evolution as we biologists understand it. So yes, the true biological view of evolution as a materialistic, unguided process is indeed at odds with most religions. Organizations that promote evolution, such as the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), prefer to avoid this critical point: all they care about is that evolution get taught in the schools, not whether believers wind up accepting the concept of evolution as it’s understood by scientists. (If all they want is evolution to be taught, that, I suppose is fine. But it’s not fine if they want public understanding of evolution.)

Second, if you construe “religion” as “what religious people believe,” then there certainly is opposition to evolution among members of all religions. For example, despite the position of their church, many Catholics adhere to the form of young-earth creationism accepted by 40% of Americans. That 40% does not comprise only Bible-waving fundamentalist Protestants.

When we’re totting up resistance to evolution, then, we have to do more than look at official church positions: we have to see what religious people actually think. And we should stop claiming that theistic evolutionists are fully on the side of science, because they aren’t. They’re on the side of the angels (whose existence, by the way, is accepted by 75% of Americans). These theists see evolution as involving miracles at one point or another.

Only about 20% of Americans agree both that humans evolved and that this process wasn’t guided by God. If you’re a naturalist, those are our real allies. The rest are what Anthony Grayling calls “supernaturalists.”

Of course people should be respected and of course, there are intelligent believers. But accepting that doesn’t make one an accommodationist. Accommodationism is pretending that there is no logical incompatibility between science and mainstream religion.