12 March 2011 post run

I did my 4.2 mile course in 40:21; I was at 9:48 entering into the park and 30:50 leaving it.
The day was dry, cool (40′s) and very windy.

About 2.6 miles into it a smaller, younger woman with black spandex tights and visible panty lines just blew past me (I was startled) and I didn’t even try to keep up. Sad, I know.

But the running is getting easier and when I finished, NOTHING hurt.

This course features 3 climbs totaling 207 feet.

Update: in the afternoon, I went for a 7 mile walk with Lynn (in just over 2 hours; we stopped for lights, to see the sights, etc. She really made fun of me when I had trouble bending over to pick up loose change on the road; I was as stiff as a board.

12 March 2011: Women, Japan, Nuclear Reactors

I am drinking my coffee and will go for a short “before breakfast” run soon. I am a bit stiff from yesterday’s afternoon 8 mile walk.

Japan’s nuclear plant trouble

Here is a relevant article

My take: disclaimer: I haven’t worked with nuclear power plants since 1984 and I worked on a different type of plant. So, I am no expert.
The plant in question is the Fukushima reactor plant; this plant has several “boiling water reactors”. These reactors use water which goes through a reactor and boils; this steam (which is radioactive) turns the blades of a turbine which generates electricity. The steam is then condensed into water and pumped through the core again.

The problem: while the reactor has been shut down (no more fissions) by the control rods, there is a significant amount of heat that comes from the radioactive decay of the so-called “fission products” (the newly formed atoms that are left after the uranium atoms split); depending on reactor design this can amount to well over 10 percent of full power. I don’t know what percent of full power that decay heat makes up in this particular design.

A lack of cooling water could cause the reactor to overheat thereby causing the fuel pellets to melt down, at least partially. Of course there are other issues: steam pressure in the primary circuit (the steam-water circuit that normally runs between the reactor and the turbines), radioactive gasses in the steam that are released, etc.

Of course many things could have caused the explosion that you just saw, and many of the possible causes are not-nuclear related.
So we’ll have to wait and see.

11 March 2011 pm

Workout notes Slept in. then I did 8 miles of walking on the East Peoria Trail: 57:30 out, 54:24 back. Medium effort; nice day, but still slow.

Yes, I did squats yesterday.

The shoulder hurt just a tiny bit.

Humor: no, this isn’t Sarah Palin, but it should be.

see more funny videos, and check out our Foul Bachelor Frog lols!

Japan Earthquake: here is an article on it. The article describes some of the trouble at a nuclear plant. Of course, restoring cooling water to the reactor is crucial; the idea is that even when the reactor is shut down, there is quite of bit of “decay heat” from the radioactive decay of the fission products. So there is no fission to worry about but we do need to transfer the heat out.

A word from the education trenches: back in Texas, the state finances were no where near as good as their governor said that they were. Budget cuts disproportional harm Texas education, which wasn’t doing so great to begin with. Hence, conservatives started to make the “oh, we have all of those idiot minority students” excuse. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub takes that on.

msnbc video: Reich: Walker will pay a huge political price

msnbc video: Reich: Walker will pay a huge poli…, posted with vodpod

That will teach you to vote Republican or not vote at all

Yeah, sitting out the 2010 midterm elections really worked, didn’t it?

Never, ever, vote for a Republican…even one that sounds promising:

Remember that Republicans, at the top, are really about one thing and one thing ONLY: making rich people richer.

You’ve got to be kidding me!

Every so often some peddler of religion gives a “why are atheists so angry” post. Here is yet another. I’ll respond in detail to some of his points:

2. They are convinced that religion is a fairy tale made up of whole cloth that impedes science/progress/rational thought. No avalanche of counterexamples, from noted scientists who are believers to the way in which the scientific method has flourished in the monotheistic west (as opposed to say, the non-monotheistic eastern societies) will serve to dissuade. That which is understood to have happened to Galileo is all, apparently, one needs to know.

True, some good scientists (e. g., Francis Collins) are believers. But the vast majority of elite scientists are not. Cognitive dissonance is real. Note that Isaac Newton practiced alchemy.

Finally, I will go so far as to say that there is sometimes in the atheist a want of wonder.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Scientists are far more full of wonder than the vast majority of believers. The difference is that “goddidit” is not an acceptable answer to us. You should be grateful that it isn’t either; real, unimpeachable progress has never been made by “goddidit”.

Now to a key point:

Here is where I make my bid for more obloquy to be visited on my head. There is an arrogant unwillingness to engage with religion’s serious thinkers.

Well, I happily ignore “serious” astrologers too. Besides, the word salad gods that the “serious” religious thinkers believe in have little in common with the “cure my sick aunt and give me a job” deity that the vast majority of “believes” believe in. How many people would worship some “Holy Rabbit” type of god? If god isn’t going to keep your kid safe or make this person love you, what’s the point?

The bottom line: the “serious religious thinkers” are utterly irrelevant. They make no difference to the ordinary believer and they make no contribution to the knowledge of humanity.

Bluntness doesn’t always mean “truthful” or “accurate”

Gov. Christie of New Jersey is proof of that:

New Jersey’s public-sector unions routinely pressure the State Legislature to give them what they fail to win in contract talks. Most government workers pay nothing for health insurance. Concessions by school employees would have prevented any cuts in school programs last year.

Statements like those are at the core of Gov. Chris Christie’s campaign to cut state spending by getting tougher on unions. They are not, however, accurate.

In fact, on the occasions when the Legislature granted the unions new benefits, it was for pensions, which were not subject to collective bargaining — and it has not happened in eight years. In reality, state employees have paid 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health insurance since 2007, in addition to co-payments and deductibles, and since last spring, many local government workers, including teachers, do as well. The few dozen school districts where employees agreed to concessions last year still saw layoffs and cuts in academic programs.

“Clearly there has been a pattern of the governor playing fast and loose with the details,” said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. “But so far, he’s been adept at getting the public to believe what he says.”

No, he doesn’t always lie, but he doesn’t deserve his “straight talking” reputation.

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.