4 March 2011 (am)

Workout notes slowish (ok, downright slow) 4.2 mile walk in 1:01:41. I couldn’t get going at all. Then again, I really didn’t want to; it was a pretty morning and I love Bradley park even with the hills (3 uphills in all) . I encountered ONE car the whole time. There are times when I walk or run outside and I forget that I am supposed to be working out. That isn’t a problem with the treadmill.

Yoga: my entry into headstand is a bit better but I’ve got a ways to go before I can do it with straight knees again.

Social
In general, men are idiots:

raditional therapy is apparently too limiting.

Naked therapy, on the other hand, allows for people to open up, or at least that’s what Sarah White, New York’s naked therapist feels.

“The goal is to show patients I have nothing to hide, and to encourage them to be more honest,” White told The Daily. “For men in particular, seeing a naked woman can really help them focus, look deeply into themselves and speak their minds openly.”

During her sessions, the 24-year-old therapist slowly peels away layers of clothing in her New York office, according to the Mail Online. This innovative approach to therapy has attracted a lot of interest, though most of her clients are men.

However, she doesn’t just cut right to the stripping. Each initial session costs $150 and starts as a one-way video and text chat, reports the Mail. From there clients move to a two-way video chat, and in some cases live consultations, which dramatically increase in price.

Economics
The new jobs report recently came out. Yes, we are still adding jobs.

But
1. Growth is too slow to really attack unemployment; after all there are new job seekers all of the time.

2. Many of these jobs don’t pay all that well; this means there won’t be a lot of new money going into the economy.

So, we don’t have a Republican caliber disaster but we are still not healthy enough.

Science You’ve probably heard about how some cukoos lay their eggs in the nest of other birds and their chicks destroy the other eggs. Yes, that is an evolutionary adaptation. Here is a post on this that gives more details.

So, if there is an intelligent designer, it is a rather cruel and ruthless bastard, no?

Zeus vs. Thor…

Yes, I am an outspoken atheist. Yes, I think that religious beliefs (e. g., that gods, deities, etc. exist and interfere with the events of the universe) are nothing more than superstitions.

But what we are seeing here is ridiculous:

3 March 2011

Workout notes
AM: yoga; it is getting easier; headstand is more relaxed though I can’t get into it via straight legs…yet. In plow, I can’t touch my feet to the ground. Wheel (ok, baby wheel; I can’t touch my feet) is less than impressive but I do leave the ground.
Hero and child: forget it.

PM: weights:
Squats (Smith): 10 x 45, 10 x 135
Free squats: 10 x 135, 10 x 155
Curls: (18 pound curl bar): 15 x 48 pounds, 10 x 58 pounds, 10 x 58 pounds (10-5, then 10-10, 10-10 at each end)
with the pedestal
Curls: 15 x 20 lbs. dumbbell
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 200 (hard)
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120 (shoulder friendly grip)
incline press: 10 x 115, 4 x 135, 4 x 135, 10 x 115
sit ups: 4 x 25
ball: hamstring exercises
rotator cuff (all of motions)
Over all, I felt ok.

Humor/Politics
Here Rep. Weiner tells Fox News why he thinks that Justice Thomas should recuse himself from upcoming HCR challenges. But the humor occurs right at the start of this clip (a few seconds into it). Can you find the obvious error?

My guess: if you can spot the error, you aren’t a regular Fox News watcher.

Science This fungus affects an ant’s brain and causes it to commit suicide. There is an evolutionary pay-off though:

The world just got a little weirder: Scientists have identified four new species of brain-controlling fungi that turn ants into zombies that do the parasite’s bidding before it kills them.

Identified from samples collected at two sites in Brazil’s tropical rain forest, each of the four species specializes in controlling a different species of carpenter ant.

The original zombie-ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, was first identified in 1865, and it seems to exist around the world.

“So we knew, right off the bat, there was a range of other species within that,” said study researcher David Hughes, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. “I think it will turn out to be in the hundreds.”

Once it infects an ant, the fungus uses as-yet-unidentified chemicals to control the ant’s behavior, Hughes told LiveScience. It directs the ant to leave its colony (a very un-ant-like thing to do) and bite down on the underside of a leaf — the ant’s soon-to-be resting place. Once it is killed by the fungus, the ant remains anchored in place, thanks to its death grip on the leaf.

Ultimately, the fungus produces a long stalk that protrudes from the ant’s head, shooting spores out in the hopes of infecting other ants. Two of the four newly discovered species also sprouted smaller stalks elsewhere, including from the victim’s feet and lower leg joints – the equivalent of knees.

Remember: evolution cares about reproductive success. Hence it doesn’t provide protection against things that mostly kill after the reproductive years.

Awesome science photos (and science)
This article is interesting reading in and of itself. But the photos are spectacular:

These pictures of bioluminescence in the Gippsland Lakes in my gallery have proven quite popular, so it seems time to provide a story to accompany them. But this is not a short story, rather a convoluted one of fires and floods, of microscopic algae and the inspiring, remarkable and surprising beauty of nature. [...]

Here are some thumbnails to wet your appetite:

Clicking on the photo sends you to the blog post. Do it.
(hat tip: Sandwalk)

Price of free speech
When one hears about the unpleasant aspects of free speech, one often thinks of things such as the recent Supreme Court case which, by an 8-1 margin, decided that Westboro Baptist Church could protest at military funerals (claiming that their deity was punishing our country for accepting homosexuality). My “peanut gallery” opinion is that this was a correct decision. For an expert’s opinion, go here.

But find that free speech extracts a heavier price than this.
I’ll explain by showing a contrast. Canada won’t be permitting Fox News to set up in Canada due to a law that forbids lying on news broadcasts. We have no such law here.

So what is the result? I think that one result is that our public, on the whole, has widespread belief in false things. For example, consider how few Americans accept the theory of evolution:

People in the United States are much less likely to accept Darwin’s idea that humans and apes share a common ancestor than adults in other Western nations, a number of surveys show.

A new study of those surveys suggests that the main reason for this lies in a unique confluence of religion, politics, and the public understanding of biological science in the United States.

Researchers compared the results of past surveys of attitudes toward evolution taken in the U.S. since 1985 and similar surveys in Japan and 32 European countries.

In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.

In European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, and France, more than 80 percent of adults surveyed said they accepted the concept of evolution.

The proportion of western European adults who believed the theory “absolutely false” ranged from 7 percent in Great Britain to 15 percent in the Netherlands.

The only country included in the study where adults were more likely than Americans to reject evolution was Turkey.

News organizations can lie their asses off; they can claim that “controversy exists in the scientific community” when in fact, it doesn’t. And of course, the yokels fall for it.

But…let’s remember that things become very dangerous when the government decides what can be aired and what is “a lie”.
Example: does social security currently contribute to our national debt? Well, it depends on whether or not you think that the “social security trust fund” is a real thing or an accounting fiction (currently, social security is paying out more than it takes in, but that only recently became the case; previously it was running a surplus. But that surplus was used as regular tax money and is no longer there, though the IOU’s are. )

So the American “free speech backer” in me wins out.

Right wingers
I think that many in the right wing have a massive “victim” complex. When they were told by Attorney General Holder that any “voter intimidation” by Black Panther groups, while wrong, didn’t even compare to what was done to African American voters in the Deep South during the bad old days, they went ballistic.

Religion Mano Singham continues with his excellent series on “why atheism is winning”. A snippet:

But it is not simply the popularity of atheist books that makes me think that atheism is winning. Another sign is that the more sophisticated believers (theologians and lay) no longer even try to convince us that we are wrong. They do not try to persuade us that god exists apart from half-hearted appeals to the need for faith and the wonder and seeming inexplicability of nature. This is because atheists know these arguments as well as those of Aquinas and Augustine and why they fail. Believers realize that their idea of god in unsupported by science and history. So instead they plead with us to not be too direct and straightforward about why we don’t believe, which is what all this deploring of our ‘bad tone’ is all about.

For example, Ricky Gervais recently wrote a holiday message in the Wall Street Journal. Gervais is, of course, an outspoken atheist and his essay does not hide the fact. He makes the case succinctly saying “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe.” You can’t get more blunt and direct than that.

His essay raised a lot of questions that resulted in him being invited to a follow-up Q&A with readers which was quite hilarious. In it Gervais provides the perfect response to the criticism of where he thinks he gets off, a mere comedian, making pronouncements about god. This response can be used by anyone who is snootily told that they have no right to opine about such a weighty subject as the existence of god until they have studied the works of the major theologians, something that I hear a lot. Gervais says, “Since there is nothing to know about god, a comedian knows as much about god as any one else. An atheist however is alone in knowing that there is nothing to know so probably has the edge.”

In response to the common assertion that atheism is as much a belief system as religion, Gervais responds: “Atheism isn’t a belief system. I have a belief system but it’s not “based on” atheism, it’s just not based on the existence of a god. I make none of my moral, social, or artistic decisions based on any god or superstitions. Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. I’ve never been skiing. It’s my biggest hobby. I literally do it all the time. But to answer your question I am constantly faced with theories of God, and angels, and hell. It’s everywhere. But unless there is an ounce of credibility to it, I reject.” (My italics)

2 March 2011 PM

Workout notes
Before work, I ran my 5.28-5.31 mile (?) course in 53:36; the run started out terrible (I wanted to quit during the first mile), improved to “bad” by mile 2, and then the last 3 miles were ok; I felt progressively better. Then it was time to quit.

But I remember when a 10 minute pace was “easy and slow, slow, slow”. Gheeze.
Note: my shoulder sometimes aches during runs; I have to learn to relax my shoulders.

Posts
Humor
The following will be INTENTIONAL humor

Jerry Coyne starts it off with his post about, well…Frog gods?

Such is the slow erosion of faith in enlightened countries. But here’s the funniest part. The faithful, of course, are up in arms, defending the rights of parents to warp their children’s minds however they wish. And one of them said this:

Speaking personally, Canon Dr Chris Sugden, the executive secretary of Anglican Mainstream, said the judges were wrong to say religion was a matter of private individuals’ beliefs.

“They are treating religion like Richard Dawkins does, as if Christian faith was on a parallel with Melanesian frog worship,” he said.

If the shoe fits . . . .

(click on the thumbnail to see a full sized photo at Coyne’s blog)

In the discussion, someone posted this video…it is just so wrong….so wrong…:)

Scientists: hounded by …..paparazzi?

Paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould spoke out against the increasingly aggressive tactics of the paparazzi Tuesday, railing against “the reckless throngs of photographers that relentlessly hound America’s top scientists.”

(first hat tip to Dr. Andy for this one…)

Vehicle sticker fail….make sure that you don’t make multiple spelling errors if you are calling someone else dumb…

see more funny videos

Science
Again from Dr. Andy: here is an interesting article about whales: given that they have so much more mass than we do and that they have so many more opportunities for cancer mutations, why don’t more get cancer? Of course, there seems to be some law that says that an animal’s size does not correlate to their cancer rate. Is it all slower metabolism, or is something else going on?

Fox News Lying Again
Evidently Fox News lies too much to qualify as news in Canada. Ok, sometimes they “lie while remaining factual”. Here is a classic case: Bill O’Reilly ran a story about Wisconsin and showed footage of violence at a union protest..in California..and the footage was labeled “union protest” so by the letter of the law, there was no lie.

This is the weasel explanation. Yes, I saw the whole clip…they showed “union protests from around the country” at first but then brought in the footage toward the end. That sure looked as if it were by design, regardless of what it says at this article.

GOP 2012: Mike Huckabee channels “teh stupid”.
First, Mr. Huckabee confuses Kenya with Indonesia. He then says “hey, it was just a slip of the tongue”…but

Huckabee’s Explanation Is Implausible

Huckabee Said Obama Grew Up “In Kenya” Twice During A Discussion About The “Mau Mau Revolution In Kenya.” Huckabee also referenced Obama growing up “with a Kenyan father and grandfather.” From the February 28 edition of WOR’s The Steve Malzberg Show:

MALZBERG: Don’t you think it’s fair also to ask him, I know your stance on this. How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth cer – why Mr. Obama did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate. It’s one thing to say, I’ve — you’ve seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don’t you think we deserve to know more about this man?

HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits -

MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.

HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather. [WOR's The Steve Malzberg Show, 2/28/11]

Mr. Huckabee can spin this any way he wants. But a “slip of the tongue” means saying what you don’t believe; here Mr. Huckabee actually runs with a consequence of believing that Mr. Obama was living in Kenya. Yes, Mr. Obama did write about “the white man’s conceit” in his book Dreams from my Father but that was during his trip to Kenya as an adult.

And Mr. Huckabee continues:

Fischer: Well Governor, what got lost in all the shuffle was the legitimate point that you were making which is that we may have a president who has some fundamentally anti-American ideas that may be rooted in a childhood where he had a father who was virulently anti-colonial, hated the British – might have something to do with the President returning the bust of Winston Churchill back to England. You know, I was struck by the fact that when he made his tour to Indonesia, he made a point of going to an Indonesian memorial that celebrated the victory of Indonesians over British troops – again, part of that anti-colonial thing. And so I’d like you to comment on that; you seem to think that there is some validity to the fact that there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president.

Huckabee: Well, that’s exactly the point that I make in the book and I don’t know why these reporters – maybe they can’t read, I guess that’s part of it because it’s clearly spelled out and I’m quoting a British newspaper who really were expressing the outrage of the Brits over that bust being returned and the point was that they felt like that due to Obama’s father and grandfather it could be that his version and view of the Mau Mau Revolution was very different than most of the people who perhaps would grow up in the United States. And I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.

Oh, there were KKK groups too, some of whose membership had some overlap with Rotary Clubs. But you see where he is going, right? Mr. Huckabee is claiming that HIS local society is “real America”; this is something that Republicans do all of the time.

Well guess what: I don’t want people like that leading our country. The United States, as a whole, is NOT a country that consists of the backwards, ignorant people that dominate Mr. Huckabee’s local world. That is a good thing too, otherwise I wouldn’t have this computer that I am typing on, we wouldn’t have modern medicines, etc.

Brilliant Stephen Colbert satire on class warfare

Brilliant Stephen Colbert satire on class warfare, posted with vodpod

Welcome to March, 2011

Workout notes yoga, then 5.4 miles of walking. Actually, 3.9 were done with Lynn on the Rivertrail; we got into a heated discussion (she went Republican on me when I suggested raising the social security payroll tax cap). But because of that, we walked our fastest “together” pace ever. Sure, it was only just over 16 minute miles, but for us, that is faster than normal.
Then I did 11:50 miles on my own to add a bit of mileage.

Moral: we get better exercise when I get Lynn riled up.

Hmmm, if I call her “Sarah Palin” perhaps we’ll walk 12 minute miles?

Yoga notes: my stiffness from sitting appears to be going down. Things are getting better….slowly.

Work the approximating polynomials are interesting, but some of the computations are mind-numbingly boring.

Posts
Science There is a carnival of evolution going on here. I’ll have to read some of these.

Politics Nate Silver talks about demographics…and how a given demographic means only so much. After all, all of us fit into different demographic categories. Of course, in my case: I am male (mostly anti-Obama), midwestern (split), advanced degree (pro-Obama) and Hispanic (pro-Obama) and liberal (strongly pro-Obama). You could probably accurately predict how I’d vote with a computer.

David Brooks: makes the case for cutting things for policy reasons:

The first one, as I tried to argue last week, is: Make Everybody Hurt. The sacrifice should be spread widely and fairly. A second austerity principle is this: Trim from the old to invest in the young. We should adjust pension promises and reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life so we can preserve programs for those who are growing and learning the most.

So far, this principle is being trampled. Seniors vote. Taxpayers revolt. Public employees occupy capitol buildings to protect their bargaining power for future benefits negotiations. As a result, seniors are being protected while children are getting pummeled. If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced — often in the most thoughtless and destructive ways. The future has no union.

One note: many pensions are “deferred wages”. Back to the article:

It seems simple, but that is not what is happening. Instead, legislators and administrators are simply cutting on the basis of what’s politically easy and what vaguely seems expendable. In education, many administrators are quick to cut athletics, band, cheerleading, art and music because they have the vague impression that those are luxuries. In fact, they are exactly the programs that keep kids in school and build character.

I have a lot of problems with President Obama’s tepid budget. But it does an excellent job of linking funds to outcomes, especially in education.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave a superb speech in November called the New Normal. He observed that this era of austerity should be an occasion to increase productivity and cut the things that are ineffective. Duncan is a fountain of ideas to make more with less.

For example, he says, if we have to increase class sizes, we should put more kids in with the best teachers and then we should pay those teachers more to compensate for the extra load. Most of us parents would rather see our kids in a class of 30 with a great teacher than a class of 25 with an average one.

The president’s budget increases spending on things like early education, and it is also stuffed with mechanisms to make programs perform better. When I spoke with the mavens that put the budget together, I found that they had a clear and skeptical view of whether many of these programs work. They perfectly described the studies measuring the strengths and weaknesses of each program.

Coming from Mr. Brooks, this is high praise.

Yes, he is more conservative than I am. But at least he reasons rather than rants.

Economics: Robert Reich keeps hitting on point: the current problem is caused mostly by grossly unequal wealth distribution:

The bottom 90 percent of Americans now earn, on average, only about $280 more per year than they did thirty years ago. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.

But wait. The American economy is more than twice as large now as it was thirty years ago. So where did the money go? To the top. The richest 1 percent’s share of national has doubled – from around 9 percent in 1977 to over 20 percent now. The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. The 150,000 households that comprise the top one-tenth of one percent now earn as much as the bottom 120 million put together.

Given this explosion of income at the top you might think our tax system would demand a larger share from them. But you’d be wrong. You’re not taking account of the power of the super rich. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. As a result, their taxes have plummeted.

From the 1940s until 1980, the tax rate on the highest earners in America was 70 percent or higher. In the 1950s, it was 91 percent. Even if you include deductions and credits, the rich were paying a far higher share of their income than at any time since.

Under Ronald Reagan the top rate dropped to 28 percent. Under Bill Clinton it rose to 39 percent and then under George W. Bush dropped to 36 percent. As you recall, Republicans have managed to keep it there. Their avowed aim is to keep it there permanently.

[...]

All of which is precisely where Republicans want the nation to be. It sets them up perfectly to blame government, blame public employees, blame unionized workers. It lets them pit workers against one another, divide the Democratic base, and promote the false idea that we’re in a giant zero-sum game and the nation can’t afford to do more.

It diverts attention from what’s happened at the top – so no one sees how well CEOs and Wall Street bankers are doing again, no one pays attention to the paybacks and tax giveaways engineered by their Republican patrons, and no one focuses on the tide of money flowing from the likes of Charles and David Koch into Republican coffers.

Where are the Democrats? Shuffling their feet, looking at the floor. “Please oh please give us four weeks before you shut us down,” they ask. “No,” say the Republicans, “you’ll get only two.” “Well, alright then,” say the Democrats.

Here’s what Democrats should be saying:

Hike taxes on the super-rich. Reform the tax code to create more brackets at the top with higher rates for millionaires and billionaires. Absurdly, the top bracket is now set at $375,000 with a tax rate of 35 percent; the second-highest bracket, at 33 percent, starts at $172,000 for individuals. But the big money is way higher.

The source of income shouldn’t matter – salary, wages, capital gains, other unearned income – all should be treated the same. There’s no reason to reward speculators. (Don’t penalize true entrepreneurs, though. If they’re owners who have held their assets for at least twenty years, keep their capital gains low.)

And while you’re at it, raise the ceiling on income subject to Social Security taxes. And bring back the estate tax.

Oh by the way, this isn’t “communism”. It is just good sense. “Communism” means arresting the rich. I just want to tax them.

28 February 2011: Relationship edition…

Social/human relationships
So women are more equal to men than ever before…in the classroom, in the board room….but not in dating? Yes, this can cause resentment:

A bit of all of the above, probably. But there’s another reason for these rants, one that is far less understood. Let’s call it gender bait and switch. Never before in history have men been matched up with women who are so much their equal—socially, professionally, and sexually. By the time they reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors—in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. They very reasonably assume that the women they are meeting at a bar or café or gym are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.

That’s the bait; here comes the switch. Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure. The might hook up as freely as a Duke athlete. Or, they might want men to play Greatest Generation gentleman. Yes, they want men to pay for dinner, call for dates—a writer at the popular dating website The Frisky titled a recent piece “Call me and ask me out for a damn date!”—and open doors for them. A lot of men wonder: “WTF??!” Why should they do the asking? Why should they pay for dinner? After all, they are equals and in any case, the woman a guy is asking out probably has more cash in her pocket than he does; recent female graduates are making more than males in most large cities. [...]

Men are really, really angry. Consider: “We’re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren’t any desirable American women. They’ve been bred to abuse men.” This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: “Sorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you.”

Now, of course, I am older than these guys. And yes, I married someone who makes more money than I do, and she has always been generous, though I’ve never asked her to be. In fact, you might call my wife an “anti-gold-digger”.

But I’ll be brutally honest: were I to be single again, I would not seek a long term relationship; in fact I’d avoid one. On some level, I like women (I have several women friends that I do things with). But on another level: I wouldn’t want a romantic relationship with them. They are almost all vain megalomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Yes, they’ve all had failed relationships and every one of them was the fault…of the man (of course). They are never at fault; if they treat you poorly they’ll say “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” and if you are in a bad mood you had better NOT “take it out on them.”. So fine….they can find others or perhaps enjoy their houseful of cats.

Fortunately, my wife sometimes DOES admit fault; it is really one of her more charming traits. But I will speak of something though, and I’ll do it by a photo:

(click on the thumbnail to see the photo at the appropriate photo stream)

The individual who made this picture in this position did so…at my request…and said “I hope that you like it”. Yes, the person who did this is a male cross-dresser with an androgynous body. But the larger point is that when I got the e-mail message that the photo was up….my thought was “dang, I’ve NEVER been treated this well by any female…ever!”

It turns out that after more thought: that really wasn’t true; there was time when, at least in private, my wife would sometimes wear something that I said was “sexy” (even if it was something as simple as spandex shorts). She hasn’t done that in a while; she ended up explaining to me that she felt better about her body years ago.

Newsflash: yes, I know that she is older, saggier and overweight. But you know what? I don’t look like Michael Johnson either! My skin sags more in places, I have stretch marks from my obese period, scars and sometimes I limp (when I have been sitting for a long time). We BOTH are older. It really is ok…..I’d really like for that to happen from time to time. And yes, I said something.

28 February 2011

Workout notes

AM: I was somewhat sore and stiff when I woke up. But I decided to try an easy 3 mile run on the treadmill; it ended up being 4 in 41:40. No, not fast, and yes, in 1998, I ran a couple of 10K races in that range. But I was ok with this given that I was only at 1.8 miles 20 minutes into this run. I varied the incline. Then I did rotator cuff stuff with the stretch bands.

PM: over lunch: weights and sit ups:
Squats: 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 5 x 185 Smith
10 x 155 free.
Curls: 3 sets of 15 x 20 pounds.
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120
rows: 10 x 180, 12 x 180, 10 x 200
Incline bench: 10 x 115, 10 x 125, 4 x 135
sit ups: 25, 25, 25, 25 (1, 2, 3, 4 incline)

Science
Cell phones: true, the old story about the cell phones causing brain cancer are false. But they do affect the brain:

Cell phones affect the brain

A word of warning to those creepy, mobile phone-wielding babies in the TV ads for an online investment service: Radiation from cell phones really can affect your brain, though whether or not it causes brain damage remains to be seen. According to a study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, brain regions near a phone’s antenna use 7 percent more energy than normal, likely a result of the ultra-high-frequency radio waves necessary to send and receive signals. “We have no idea what this means yet or how it works,” neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institutes of Health told Wired. “But this is the first reliable study showing the brain is activated by exposure to cellphone radio frequencies.”

Of course, no one as yet knows if this is damaging.

Animals and nature
Jerry Coyne talks about species and why we (as humans) should work to conserve them. There are also a couple of photos of animal mimicry including katydids that evolve to mimic leaves (complete with “bad spots” and spiders that mimic army ants.

(click on the photos to see the regular sized photos at Coyne’s blog; you can also see a large version there)

More evolution yes, a fish has evolved a marking near its anal fin to…..aid it in getting oral sex (sort of….the pay-off is that its sperm has a greater chance of fertilizing more eggs this way. Surf to PZ Myer’s blog to see a photo of such a “lucky fish”.

Monkey love A certain type of monkey actually slaps on a type of cologne: his own urine!

Male capuchin monkeys have been observed to urinate on their hands and then rub the urine vigorously into their fur, and now a new study by scientists in Texas suggests the behavior signals their availability to females, and the females find the smell of the urine-soaked fur attractive.

The new research, by Dr Kimberley Phillips and colleagues of the Department of Psychology at Trinity University in San Antonio, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to study the brains of four adult female tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) while they were smelling the urine of juvenile males and of sexually mature adults.

The results showed the monkeys’ brain scans were different when they were exposed to the urine of juveniles and adults, becoming much more active when the urine was from adult males. Several regions of the brain were activated when the females were sniffing the adult male urine, especially those regions associated with olfactory processing.

Dr Phillips and her team suggest the increased activity shows the urine is being used as a means of communicating the male’s sexual availability and social status. The females’ ability to discriminate between the urine of young monkeys and sexually mature adults also suggests the females are able to detect the higher levels of testosterone in the adult males’ urine. Higher testosterone levels are linked with sexual maturity and also higher social status in capuchin monkeys. [...]

How about that! I suggest that you do not try this at home.

Religion
From Friendly Atheist: I love this bumper sticker on so many levels:

Note: “fiction” does not mean “valueless”; sometimes religious fiction can be meaningful. It can be meaningful and good (e. g., The Good Samaritan) or meaningful and evil (Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac); much of it generates good discussion.

Politics
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that the richest 400 taxpayers paid lower rates than some relatively poor people. His claim was rated “mostly true”.

President Obama: evidently he knows that Mitt Romney is his chief rival for the 2012 Presidential race. So he lands a body blow on Mr. Romney…by PRAISING him:

President Obama on Monday once again brought up Mitt Romney’s role in expanding health care in Massachusetts, in what has become a recurring political nightmare for the former governor who is seen as a likely Republican candidate for president.

Speaking to governors of both parties, Obama said Romney actually had a decent idea about addressing the country’s health care system. “I know that many of you have asked for flexibility for your states under this law,” Obama said at the White House. “In fact, I agree with Mitt Romney, who recently said he’s proud of what he accomplished on health care in Massachusetts and supports giving states the power to determine their own health care solutions.”

I can bet that Mr. Romeny ground his teeth a bit, and people such as Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Pawlenty and Ms. Palin licked their chops just a bit.