14 April 2011 posts

Workout notes Ms. Vickie’s yoga class with Lynn in the early morning. I was able to get into head stand easily but then had some vertigo problems during the “laying down” phase; the other stuff was ok.

Then over lunch, I lifted weights (and did rotator cuff PT) and then walked 3 miles easily outside (included some Bradley Park hills; the day was too pretty to stay inside)
Weights:
squats (free, no Smith Machine): 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 155, 4 x 175 (not great depth), 10 x 135
curls (dumbbell): 3 sets of 10 x 20 lb.
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120
incline presses: 10 x 115, 8 x 130 8 x 125
rows: 2 sets of 10 with 220 (close grip), 1 set of 10 with 180 (wide grip) (Hammer Machine)
sit ups: 4 sets of 25 with various inclines.

Shoulder notes: somewhat sore on one of the rotator cuff exercises (where the elbow is tucked and the arm moves from the chest and is rotated outward. This is day three of NSAIDS.

News of the weird
Well, I now know not to bring in strippers to give me a lap dance in class.

A La Salle University professor, Jack Rappaport, has been suspended for allegedly hiring strippers to give lap dances at an extra-credit seminar on business ethics.
Rappaport was in the front of the classroom and three bikini-clad and miniskirted women were on top of him giving him a lap dance, according to Brad Bernardino, a sophomore at La Salle who attended the March 21 session. At various other times, Bernardino added, the strippers gave willing students lap dances, and a PowerPoint presentation related to business ethics ran in the background.

Oh well…

Can meditation help with pain? Well, there was a study that compared people with no meditation at all, people with fake meditation training (who thought that they were getting the real training) and those who got the real training. It turns out that the “real meditation training” group dealt with pain better; and this was verified by a brain scan! But there are some serious caveats to this study:

Now for the caveats. Every subject had some pain relief by meditating, but there was wide variability among participants — between 11% and 93%. Further, it’s difficult to draw conclusions from 15 people (18 were recruited, but one was excluded for not being sensitive enough to the heat, one was too sensitive and another fell asleep in meditation).

And the pain the researchers inflicted — a burning sensation for a few minutes — doesn’t compare to what many people, such as cancer patients, must endure.

Overall, such studies add to a growing body of research suggesting that even short meditation sessions can have measurable pain-relieving benefits. That’s important to folks who must struggle with the aches and pains of daily life and who don’t want to pop painkillers for every twinge. And for sure, daily meditation has clear medical benefits.

But meditate, for a few seconds, on the thought of undergoing even a small surgery without painkillers.

Still, this is worth thinking about for dealing with, say, the pain of athletic performance.

Science fun
Even if you aren’t a fan of arachnids, this spider is beautiful:

(click the thumbnail to see the photo at Jerry Coyne’s blog along with the article)

Speaking of Coyne’s blog, surf here to see some serious FAIL on the part of apologists for religion. Among the howlers: atheism is diminished because of the lack of martyrs and, well, religious types lead the way for skepticism (you see, if someone doubted one religion, it HAD to be because another religion was true…)

Security Sometimes a change of policy can make cheating more likely and therefore call for increased security. Here Schneier provides an example:

In the U.S., under the No Child Left Behind Act, students have to pass certain tests; otherwise, schools are penalized. In the District of Columbia, things went further. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the public school system from 2007 to 2010, offered teachers $8,000 bonuses — and threatened them with termination — for improving test scores. Scores did increase significantly during the period, and the schools were held up as examples of how incentives affect teaching behavior.

It turns out that a lot of those score increases were faked. In addition to teaching students, teachers cheated on their students’ tests by changing wrong answers to correct ones. That’s how the cheating was discovered; researchers looked at the actual test papers and found more erasures than usual, and many more erasures from wrong answers to correct ones than could be explained by anything other than deliberate manipulation.

Teachers were always able to manipulate their students’ test answers, but before, there wasn’t much incentive to do so. With Rhee’s changes, there was a much greater incentive to cheat.

The point is that whatever security measures were in place to prevent teacher cheating before the financial incentives and threats of firing wasn’t sufficient to prevent teacher cheating afterwards. Because Rhee significantly decreased the costs of cooperation (by threatening to fire teachers of poorly performing students) and increased the benefits of defection ($8,000), she created a security risk. And she should have increased security measures to restore balance to those incentives.

Politics/Economy
Mr. Paul Ryan gets used as a pinata! Of course, many idiots in the media said “ok, so Ryan’s plan isn’t serious; therefore Obama’s can’t be either.” Uh, no. Example: creationism being false doesn’t mean that evolution is also false.

And no, Mr. Limbaugh, Ryan’s plan isn’t being attacked because we can’t get dates.

By the way, here is the President’s speech on the budget.

Fahreed Zakaria’s response was fair and thoughtful but Robert Reich worries that too much of the plan is dependent on the economy recovering…(while noting that long range forecasts are almost always useless anyway)

Evidently my wife is “unwilling”

then again, I must not be a willing mate since my wife likes President Obama as well:

Rush: Obama’s Base Are “Walking Human Debris” Who Get “Orgasm” From “Savag[ing] Us” Since They “Can’t Find Willing Mates”

I guess that pointing out factual errors and absurd projections (e. g., that the Ryan plan assumes a 3 percent unemployment rate in the future) is not playing fair.

But then again, Mr. Limbaugh is a fair representative of the current Republican party….

Politics: Winning vs. Losing

It appears to me that many of my political friends would rather lose noisily than to win a series of incremental victories quietly.

Perhaps I am wrong?

13 April 2011: topics (no sweat and no spandex….)

I’ll blog a bit about two of my favorite non-sports and non-spandex topics: science and economics.

Science
Here is a post about an evolutionary mechanism called Lateral Gene Transfer; this mechanism involves one species taking genes directly from another. This doesn’t significantly affect the tree of life for eukaryotes (animals whose cells have a nucleus) but it can affect such trees for, say, bacteria.

Astronomy
This is a fun post from Daily Kos about a recently discovered gamma ray source directed at the earth (from a LOOOONG way away)

Politics
Economics
Taxes: Republicans often whine about the “poor not paying taxes”. It is true that some fall under the limit to pay income taxes. But there is social security tax, FICA taxes and sales taxes….and these take quite a bit of a bite out of the budget. Also the wealthy’s tax burden has done down…and while they might pay a disproportionate amount of income tax, this isn’t true of other taxes. See these (and other) facts here. I’ll provide a sample:

2. The wealthiest Americans don’t carry the burden.

This is one of those oft-used canards. Sen. Rand Paul, the tea party favorite from Kentucky, told David Letterman recently that “the wealthy do pay most of the taxes in this country.”

The Internet is awash with statements that the top 1 percent pays, depending on the year, 38 percent or more than 40 percent of taxes.

It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.

Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800.

Paul Krugman, Paul Krugman
Have you guessed that I am a big follower of his?
He has been hard on Paul Ryan for good reason: his plan is a sham:

I’m already hearing some people saying, “Why don’t you subject Obama to the same kind of criticism you leveled at Ryan?’

The answer is, because Obama doesn’t deserve it.

Any budget proposal will have things you don’t find convincing. I’d certainly like to know more about Obama’s proposed elimination of tax loopholes; I’d like to know how we’re going to manage with the low levels of domestic discretionary spending envisioned.

But Obama isn’t proposing to somehow make $3 trillion in tax cuts revenue neutral. He isn’t proposing to shift from Medicare paying 70 percent of bills to vouchers worth only 30 percent. He isn’t claiming that we can shrink government outside the major social insurance programs — but including defense — to Calvin Coolidge levels.

Really, those who defend Ryan’s plans (with his projections of sub 3 percent unemployment) are really similar to creationists!

Krugman also finds it interesting that, according to a recent poll, is the Democrats that are more interested in Medicare cost control than Republicans!

President Obama
Yes, on many places like Daily Kos, President Obama takes a beating from vocal liberals. But this vocal group is a minority and a small minority at that; in the Gallup Presidential Approval tracker the President has 70 percent approval from conservative Democrats, 74 from moderate Democrats and 80 percent from liberal Democrats (and these numbers have remained fairly steady over the past year).

Here is how he compares with President Clinton and President Reagan at a similar time in their administration:

And yes, there are those who understand this.

Of course there are those who think that we are being duped by President Obama; that is, that we let ourselves believe that President Obama really wants to achieve progressive goals but can’t…when in fact he has no desire to achieve them.

Actually, that misreads many of us. I never wanted a noisy “give ‘em hell but end up losing honorably” personality (e. g., Senator Bernie Sanders). I always thought of President Obama as a cold eye pragmatist who wants us to find solutions that work and that can be arrived at in a reasonable amount of time. He has ALWAYS been a compromiser and he campaigned on “bringing us together” and “embracing any idea that might work”. He has never been about selling a liberal vision to America. And darn it, we are getting some good things (e. g. Health Care Reform, so what if it was Bob Dole’s plan?)

I long ago accepted that I am to the left of him.

Ok, what of his big budget speech? You can read the text here. Yes, he calls for more taxes on the rich. Paul Krugman appears to be relieved (or at least not as upset as he feared that he would be)