10 March 2011

Workout notes Yoga in the morning, then weights over lunch:
Squats (free): 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 155, 10 x 155
Curls: 3 sets of 10 with curl bar plus 17.5 on each side for 35 + 18 = 53 pounds (seems about right)
Pull downs: 3 sets of 10 with 120 (shoulder friendly grip)
rows: 10 x 200, 10 x 210, 10 x 210
incline press: 10 x 120, 10 x 125, 4 x 135
rotator cuff stuff
sit ups (100)
exercise ball hamstrings (3 sets of 15)

The knee is slightly achy (weather change?)

Sports: how much is too much?

Recently, researchers in Britain set out to study the heart health of a group of dauntingly fit older athletes. Uninterested in sluggards, the scientists recruited only men who had been part of a British national or Olympic team in distance running or rowing, as well as members of the extremely selective 100 Marathon club, which admits runners who, as you might have guessed, have completed at least a hundred marathons.

All of the men had trained and competed throughout their adult lives and continued to work out strenuously. Twelve were age 50 or older, with the oldest age 67; another 17 were relative striplings, ages 26 to 40. The scientists also gathered a group of 20 healthy men over 50, none of them endurance athletes, for comparison. The different groups underwent a new type of magnetic resonance imaging of their hearts that identifies very early signs of fibrosis, or scarring, within the heart muscle. Fibrosis, if it becomes severe, can lead to stiffening or thickening of portions of the heart, which can contribute to irregular heart function and, eventually, heart failure.

The results, published online a few weeks ago in The Journal of Applied Physiology, were rather disquieting. None of the younger athletes or the older nonathletes had fibrosis in their hearts. But half of the older lifelong athletes showed some heart muscle scarring. The affected men were, in each case, those who’d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage.

Sure the sample is relatively small but:

But another new study, this time in laboratory rats, provides the first solid evidence of a direct link between certain kinds of prolonged exercise and subtle heart damage. For the study, published in the journal Circulation, Canadian and Spanish scientists prodded young, healthy male rats to run at an intense pace, day after day, for three months, which is the equivalent of about 10 years in human terms. The training was deliberately designed to mimic many years of serious marathon training in people, said Dr. Stanley Nattel, a cardiologist who is director of the electrophysiology research program at the Montreal Heart Institute Research Center and a senior author of the study.

The rats had begun their regimens with perfectly normal hearts. At the end of the training period, heart scans showed that most of the rodents had developed diffuse scarring and some structural changes, similar to the changes seen in the human endurance athletes. A control group of unexercised rats had developed no such remodeling of their hearts. The researchers also could manually induce arrhythmias, or disruptions of the heart’s natural electrical rhythm, much more readily in the running rats than in the unexercised animals. Interestingly, when the animals stopped running, their hearts returned to normal within eight weeks. Most of the fibrosis and other apparent damage disappeared.

Now the article goes on to say that this isn’t a huge problem with the general public. Note also that they people were on the extremes; those were not those who strolled marathons but rather those who ran them hard.

My guess is that in my case, when I start to overdo, my joints stop me.
Intensity every day? I’ve never in my life been able to do that….perhaps that is a good thing?
Now-a-days, I get intense 1-2 days a week when I am in training. Lately: never.

Lying: people can lie to themselves very easily, and not know it!

You don’t have to look far for instances of people lying to themselves. Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.

Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies. Their ruse is so potent that they’ll continue to overestimate their abilities in the future, even if they suffer for it. Cheaters continue to prosper in their own heads, even if they fail in reality.

Chance asked 76 students to take a maths test, half of whom could see an answer key at the bottom of their sheets. Afterwards, they had to predict their scores on a second longer test. Even though they knew that they wouldn’t be able to see the answers this time round, they imagined higher scores for themselves (81%) if they had the answers on the first test than if they hadn’t (72%). They might have deliberately cheated, or they might have told themselves that they were only looking to “check” the answers they knew all along. Either way, they had fooled themselves into thinking that their strong performance reflected their own intellect, rather than the presence of the answers.

And they were wrong – when Chance asked her recruits to actually take the hypothetical second test, neither group outperformed the other. Those who had used the answers the first-time round were labouring under an inflated view of their abilities.

Chance also found that the students weren’t aware that they were deceiving themselves. She asked 36 fresh recruits to run through the same hypothetical scenario in their heads. Those who imagined having the answers predicted that they’d get a higher score, but not that they would also expect a better score in the second test. They knew that they would cheat the test, but not that they would cheat themselves.

Some people are more prone to this than others. Before the second test, Chance gave the students a questionnaire designed to measure their capacity for deceiving themselves. The “high self-deceivers” not only predicted that they would get better scores in the second test, but they were especially prone to “taking credit for their answers-aided performance”.

Go on and read the rest; it is interesting. Note: this is why I tell my students to do problems with their notes closed! Also, I have to remember this when I’ve done a lot of treadmill running; it is NOT the same as road running. Same for walking.

More on Wisconsin

Could this fire up the Democratic base in 2012? Nate Silver thinks so.

And…I just can’t resist:

I wonder how many Republicans would even see what is wrong?

A comment about Wisconsin

I remember when the Republicans were screaming bloody murder about the Democrats in Congress passing the health care reform bill (which was based on the compromise that they offered to President Clinton in 1993…but never mind that). I was hearing “jammed through”, “rammed through”, etc.

Now in Wisconsin, the state Republicans separated the anti-right-to-negotiate provision from the budget bill and passed it; they were able to do so by simple majority vote without X number of Senators being present (14 Democrats are in hiding).

Now my liberal friends are saying “rammed through” and “Jammed through”.

Ok, I think that this bill is a horrible idea. No debate there.

But….the people of Wisconsin voted these people in. Period. Elections have consequences. Sometimes I like them and sometimes I don’t.

So, if we don’t want this to happen again, we had better win the next election!
Sure, peaceful protests are fine. Using this as a campaign issue is fine. But the state Republicans followed the rules and voted. Period.

9 March 2011 pm

Workout notes Run over lunch; I decided on the treadmill for the soft surface. 10:55, 21:30, 29:50, then 4 x .25 miles at 8:34 pace with .25 mile walk in between. Yes, these were “slow intervals” but they gave me the feeling of actual running. So now I need to work on squeezing the rest time totally out; next week I walk less but still cover 2 miles. The idea is to do it comfortably and let my muscles adjust.

Then I did some sit-ups (100).

Posts
Humor

see more funny videos, and check out our Insanity Wolf lols!

What is even funnier is that some helicopter parent will probably get offended by this.

Sort of humor
Now that the internet is just about everywhere, so is your past…including stuff that you’d rather forget:

Teacher Quits After Student Uncovers Porn PastTera Myers, a science teacher at Parkway North High School in Missouri, sought administrative leave after one of her students found out she’d been a porn actress some 15 years earlier. Sad! And sadder still that it’s not the first time it’s happened to her:

In 2006, she was suspended from Reidland High School in Paducah, Ky., after a student obtained a copy of an X-rated film she was in and showed it to other students. At the time, Myers went by the name Tericka Dye.

She decided to fight her suspension and reapply for her job. News coverage at the time showed support from teachers and parents, as well an emotional plea from Myers, but her contract was not renewed.

Well, perhaps she go do a “Debbie does science” video aimed at getting undergraduate males to pay attention? Or perhaps she could work as a Fox News anchor? Or, heck, become a Republican candidate for office?

Science

Evolution is breathtakingly interesting. This article is particularly interesting as I just finished reading The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. Of course we share a great deal of our DNA with chimpanzees (90 to 99 percent, depending on the metric used). But that part that we don’t share makes a huge difference. Evidently, there are some new results on this:

When the human genome was first deciphered more than a decade ago, some scientists expected to find extra genes that explained why humans had an intellectual edge over their closest living relatives and other species. But since diverging from chimpanzees around seven million years ago, it turns out that our human ancestors lost several hundred snippets of DNA, which together led to traits that are uniquely human, the researchers claim.

In ditching these chunks of DNA, our ancient ancestors lost facial whiskers and short, tactile spines on their penises. The latter development is thought to have paved the way for more intimate sex and monogamous relationships. The loss of other DNA may have been crucial in allowing humans to grow larger brains.

Intriguingly, hardly any of the lost DNA was from genes, which make the proteins that are the building blocks of life. Instead, the missing DNA came from areas of the genome that regulate where and when certain genes are active.

“Like someone looking for their keys under a lamp post, the genes were the easiest place to look for differences between humans and chimpanzees, and in many respects those have been studied pretty well,” said Philip Reno, a co-author on the study at Penn State University.

“But there is a larger unknown in the form of these other regions of DNA, and in those we are only just beginning to find ways to pull out the differences between humans and chimpanzees.”

In the years since the human genome project was completed it has become clear that humans and chimps share around 96% of their DNA. Of the three billion pairs of “letters” that make up the human genetic code, genes account for less than 2%.

More to come.

What about botany?
Check out this photo:

(clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the blogpost)

So, it is clear why the bee is visiting this flower, right? Well, no….it turns out that:

Photo 1 shows the long, yellow/green bristles on the involucral bracts of Crepis barbigera s.s. and a bee visiting a flower head in full bloom. Of course, the visiting bee is of little concern to the plant given that its seeds are clonal and don’t require fertilization.

(hat tip: Sandwalk)

Cool, huh?

Science and woo: What is going on here?

Is everything information? This seductive idea animates the brand-new book The Information by James Gleick (Pantheon 2011), which I just rave-reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. Gleick’s book is, among other things, an in-depth biography of information theory, which the Bell Labs mathematician Claude Shannon invented in 1948 to provide a framework for improving the efficiency of communications.

A growing number of scientists, Gleick writes, are beginning to wonder whether information “may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.” This notion has inspired other recent books, including Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd (Vintage 2007), Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife (Penguin 2007), Decoding Reality by Vlatko Vedral (Oxford 2010) and Information and the Nature of Reality, a collection of essays edited by Paul Davies (Cambridge 2010). But the everything-is-information meme violates common sense.

I admit that I almost stopped reading the review because of that stupid last sentence. Hey, quantum mechanics violates “common sense”. As one commenter at the original article says, this is not an argument.

The author appears to go on to say that “information” makes sense only in the context of humans and human thought.
I am not convinced. I agree that ultimately information IS physical but that physical things don’t imply information. Still, I wonder why, say, emissions from a rotating neutron star couldn’t be considered “information” in the absence of humans. The authors argument appears to me to be like saying radio transmissions don’t exist if there isn’t a receiver to pick them up.

But I am still fuzzy here and would more than welcome challenge to my thoughts or correction.