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).

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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.

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