10 April 2011 Zzzzzzz…..

Ultramarathon Results: I worked the McNaughton Potowatomi Trail runs this weekend; this is a race I’ve done several times. But I wasn’t even remotely ready this time.

I showed up at 5 pm and staffed the start-finish line (where the runners check in and out after each 10 mile loop) and finished at 6 am. i was too sleepy to do a loop myself so I went home. Then I went back out and got there 2 hours prior to the course closing and did a very slow 10 mile loop in which I stopped to take down the trail markers (tape) and pick up trash; that slowed me down quite a bit. But I saw what the runners faced; though the trail was no longer muddy it was very warm (88 F). The loop took 4:15 to do which is about 45 minutes slower than my usual “leisurely stroll” pace. But it was still faster than some of my “end of 100 mile” loops! Then again it was a good approximation to my “end of the race zombie” walking as it was start, stop, start, stop…except this time I was stopping to clean up rather than stopping for nausea, fatigue, etc.

The runners did well.

But that was most of my weekend; I hope to get back on schedule tomorrow. But I am finally feeling good enough to start training again; I am thinking about running 8-10 miles on Saturdays when I am not racing and walking 3:30 or so at a training pace on Sundays. I am planning a few races: April 23 (trail 5K), April 30 (road 5K) and perhaps 12K on May 6. We’ll see. On race weekends (except for the 12K race) I’ll walk some later in the morning and do a 8 mile training run the next day. That’s the plan anyway. But endurance athletes know that life can often get in the way of plans.

I hope that I can work out something with my hiking buddy as I enjoy the socializing.

Science
Here is a fun post about a trinary star system; what is interesting is that the large red star in the system is unusually quiet.

Politics
I have to agree with Millard Fillmore here.

Now about that budget deal: yes, I think that it is a big victory for the Republicans. I am not alone in thinking that way.

But Nate Silver says “not so fast“. Mr. Silver’s analysis is based on roughly this: the Republicans have a huge majority in the House, and they are very conservative. On the other hand, the Democrats are generally moderate and not liberal. Hence it was unrealistic to expect anything like a good deal for the Democrats; that is, we lost but covered the point spread.

But the larger loss is that the Republican vision of what the problems really are was the framework instead of a better, more accurate vision (e. g., we have a demand problem, not a “taxes are too high problem”).

Republicans…..

Some time ago, I watched the following video (of the Peoria, IL “Tea-party” “rally’:

And I made a one sentence comment:
“I hope that someone had a defibrillator.”

11 months later, the owner of the video “demolished” me:

@ultraollie At least they all probably have long form birth certificates and their college, medical & legislative records are not sealed. It kills you to think that plenty of young people are disgusted with Communist totalitarianism in US government. How old is your buddy Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, George Soros? LOL

Hmm, I didn’t know that most people’s college and medical records were public access. As far as legislative records…hmmm, those are open public access, no? Of course, what is the birth certificate nonsense anyway? In what passes for a mind, this person must think that the State of Hawaii and all of the local newspapers were involved in some conspiracy to cover up a non-existent birth….almost 50 years ago?

Then we get to the phrase “communist totalitarianism”. Hmm, if the current administration was really that, would this video be allowed to stay up? Didn’t the communist totalitarians throw dissenters in jail and sometimes execute them?

Now as to my friends: “Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank”: if memory serves me, they were all reelected in 2010 and Sen. Reid’s election was an upset win over a….oh yes….TEA PARTY candidate! George Soros? Well, he is still a multimillionaire so I suppose that he is doing well…

Anyway, as far as the tea-party types: yes, I know that they are more educated than average (most people don’t have college degrees…so even a C+ business student with a 22 on their ACT would technically be “above average” when compared with the general public.

But take a good look at this crowd. How would THEY feel if the Ryan “medicare plan” was imposed on them? Really, why shouldn’t it be? If the plan is so great, impose it now.

Of course the Republicans don’t have the guts to do that; they were elected in large part due to the “government hands off of my Medicare” crowd.

But if you think that I am hard on Republicans, check out this Rolling Stone article. The article itself doesn’t say anything I haven’t said over the past couple of days; the Ryan plan is to give even more tax cuts for the rich and to destroy all of the more socialist governmental programs. But just read what Matt Taibbi has to say:

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.

Every few years or so, the Republicans trot out one of these little whippersnappers, who offer proposals to hack away at the federal budget. Each successive whippersnapper inevitably tries, rhetorically, to out-mean the previous one, and their proposals are inevitably couched as the boldest and most ambitious deficit-reduction plans ever seen. Each time, we are told that these plans mark the end of the budgetary reign of terror long ago imposed by the entitlement system begun by FDR and furthered by LBJ.

Never mind that each time the Republicans actually come into power, federal deficit spending explodes and these whippersnappers somehow never get around to touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The key is that for the many years before that moment of truth, before these buffoons actually get a chance to put their money where their lipless little mouths are, they will stomp their feet and scream about how entitlements are bringing us to the edge of apocalypse.

The reason for this is always the same: the Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The author goes on to point out is that the real cost driver are things like Medicare in which we spend hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to keep some old fart alive for a couple of weeks in an intensive care ward of a hospital.

Mr. Taibbi isn’t through with the Republicans though:

Here is how old friend David Brooks, taking a break from his authorship of breathless master-race treatises, put it in a recent column called “Moment of Truth”:

[...]
Brooks then goes on to slobber over all of Ryan’s ostensibly daring proposals, from the Medicare block grants to the more obnoxious Medicare voucher program (replacing Medicare benefits with vouchers to buy overpriced private insurance, which Brooks calls the government “giving you a sum of money” to choose from “a regulated menu of insurance options”).

What he doesn’t mention is that Ryan’s proposal also includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years.

Since Brooks himself is talking about Ryan’s plan cutting $4 trillion over the next ten years (some say that number is higher), what we’re really talking about here is an ambitious program to cut taxes for people like… well, people like me and David Brooks, and paying for it by “consolidating job-training programs” and forcing old people to accept reduced Medicare benefits. [...]

But the icing on the cake comes when a guy like David Brooks – like me a coddled, overcompensated media yuppie whose idea of sacrifice is raking one’s own leaves – comes out and calls Paul Ryan courageous for having the guts to ask seniors to cut back on their health care in order to pay for our tax breaks.

I have to admit that I laughed long and hard over that one.

And to the tea party owner of the Peoria Tax Day video: THAT is how you insult someone. Take notes.

9 April 2011 (post run)

I got in my run; I leave for McNaughton in about 4 hours. I’ll bring my fanny pack and my boots; it should be muddy but I can fit in a slow post-duty loop.

Run: East Peoria Bike Path

Ok, my time wasn’t good at all: 1:22:02; 42:27 out (360 foot climb against the wind) and 39:35 back; in May 2009 (almost 2 years ago!) my times were 1:18:44 and 1:19:23 with similar effort. Still, today didn’t feel too bad. There were a few small clumps of runners and some Cub/Boy scouts trying to hike (and not that successfully ….but one has to start somewhere).

Upside: my shoulder felt ok (and yes, I PT’ed the rotator cuff afterward) and I had slight twinges in both knees (at different times).

What I have to remember is that I stopped running (due to my knee) in October 2009 BEFORE my July 2010 surgery) and only restarted in December of 2010. I have to build up not only from the post surgery lay-off but the pre-surgery lay off as well.

9 April 2011 National Economic Matters, Mud, and Math (ematical Biology)

Mud: I’ll be at McNaughton Park later today to help out with the 5 pm to 6 am shift. I’ll be helping the slower 50 mile finishers and the 100 mile runners.
As far as my own workout: I’ll attempt to run 8 miles after this. I’ll get wet as it is raining off and on. I might drive to East Peoria so as to avoid traffic by using the paved bike path (and get some good hill work going up) or I might do a multiple hill loop at home; we shall see.

Ok, no government shutdown. But what about the larger Paul Ryan plan?

Yes, this plan sets the debate: do we want lower taxes with a government that does far less (e. g., no more medicare?):

The best thing about the long-term budget proposal from Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is that it forces Americans to confront the implications of their choices. If voters want taxes that amount to roughly 18 percent of G.D.P., then they are going to have to accept a government that looks roughly like what Ryan is describing.

The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.

I don’t think that this is a “courageous” plan (even if Fahreed Zakaria thinks that it is) as the Ryan plan taxes the wealthy at very low rates and it doesn’t end medicare RIGHT NOW; it does so for those who haven’t reached 55 years of age yet. His plan does nothing to anger his own base; angering YOUR OWN BASE takes courage.

It isn’t really that “serious” of a plan either, if by “serious” you mean “uses realistic assumptions” and “has numbers that actually add up“:

So, we have a plan that proposes to cut spending to Calving Coolidge levels, without explaining how it will do that; that includes $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but asserts that it will make that up by broadening the base — yet says literally nothing about what that means; and has as its centerpiece a Medicare plan that will collapse as soon as seniors start getting their grossly inadequate vouchers.

Oh, and it directs us to a totally ludicrous Heritage Foundation analysis for support.

There’s nothing serious about this plan. And the way our pundit class swooned over this fantasy document suggests that all those people lecturing the American people about our unwillingness to face up to reality and make hard choices should spend some time looking in the mirror.

My guess: the bar has been lowered so far for the Republicans that any plan that verbiage too complicated for Sarah Palin to speak about is considered serious even if it is Sokal caliber bunk. Remember that when it comes to anything related to intellectual standards, Republicans are graded on a massive curve.

Science: Mathematical models and evolution

The following New York Times article is interesting:

“SuperCooperators” (written with Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist magazine) is an absorbing, accessible book about the power of mathematics. Unlike Darwin with his brine bottles and pigeon coops, Nowak aims to tackle the mysteries of nature with paper, pencil and computer. By looking at phenomena as diverse as H.I.V. infection and English irregular verbs, he has formally defined five distinct mechanisms that have helped give rise to cooperative behavior, from the first molecules that joined to self-replicate, to the first cells that formed multicellular organisms, all the way to human societies, which exhibit a degree of cooperation unmatched in all creation. In Nowak’s view, figuring out how cooperation comes about and breaks down, as well as actively pursuing the “snuggle for existence,” is the key to our survival as a species.

At the heart of Nowak’s ideas is the haunting game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game involves two accomplices who are caught for a crime, interrogated separately and offered a deal. If one player incriminates the other, or “defects,” while the second remains silent, or “cooperates,” he will be given a sentence of one year, while the other player gets four. If both remain silent, they will be sentenced to only two years, but if both defect, they will receive three years. The rational choice for either prisoner is to defect, getting three years — though had both cooperated, they’d have been out in two. In the absence of trust, reason can be self-destructive.

In the 1990s, Nowak and Karl Sigmund, building on work by Robert Axelrod, showed that the Prisoner’s Dilemma, played over and over, could describe cycles of behavior in which strategies of selfishness (“Always Defect”) are beaten out by cooperation (“Tit for Tat”), then overtaken by even more cooperative behavior (“Generous Tit for Tat,” summarized as “Never forget a good turn, but occasionally forgive a bad one”), only to be invaded once more by egoists until the cycle begins anew. These “evolutionary dynamic” models, made more realistic by introducing an element of randomness, demonstrate that under the right conditions, competition can lead to teamwork. They also show how fragile that balance can be.

In “SuperCooperators,” Nowak argues that two of his mechanisms, indirect reciprocity and group selection, played an important role in human evolution. Think of a proto-simian trying to figure out whether to trust another in an exchange: Should I provide sex now for food and protection later? The proto-simian may have observed the behavior of its prospective partner, or it may not have; chances are good that others have, though. Reputation becomes important. The proto-­simian evolves into a hominid, with a bigger brain allowing for more precise communication about reputation. Moral instincts evolve to produce shame, guilt, trust, empathy; social intelligence and conscience are born. Before you know it, Yogi Berra is summing it all up: “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.” Language, cognition and morality, Nowak argues, are evolutionary spinoffs of the fundamental need of social creatures to cooperate.

Of course the debate here is: “ok, maybe the mathematics is correct. But does the model really work, or does it violate long established laws of biology?”

Nowak has also ignited controversy with a paper in the journal Nature, written with E. O. Wilson and Corina Tarnita, arguing that “inclusive fitness” — the idea that organisms cooperate with relatives because it helps pass on shared genes — is not necessary to explain the birth of complex societies like bees and ants, or altruism towards kin in humans. Nature recently published five critical letters, including one with 137 signatories, one of whom denounced the paper’s mathematics as not worth “wasting time” over.

Nowak gives little hint of these fierce debates in this cheerful book, instead offering this striking claim: “The way that we human beings collaborate is as clearly described by mathematics as the descent of the apple that once fell in Newton’s garden.” It seems significant to Nowak that, according to his models, the interest of groups can override the interests of individuals if “the ratio of the benefits to cost is greater than one plus the ratio of group size to number of groups,” and that cooperation can prevail if altruists cluster together in particular topographies. If only we could take such facts into account, as special cancer-preventing “crypt” formations in our colons have unthinkingly done, perhaps we might work together to combat global warming.

Now this book is not about the paper which attacks the established doctrine of “kin selection”; to read about that go here.

8 April 2011 pm

Who is this fat old man?????

Science I love the title of this piece: “Science is Hard”. The article itself basically asks the following question: does this data present strong evidence that a new subatomic particle has been discovered?

The 3-sigma bump reported by Fermilab on Wednesday has garnered a lot of attention. Understandable, since it might be a precious sign of particle physics beyond the Standard Model — but it’s also just a 3-sigma bump, and usually those go away.

For the uninitiated: “3 sigma” means that there is a 1 percent chance (or less) that this bump occurred due to random background. But think of it this way: if you have 100 such time periods, there is a good chance that you’ll see at least one of these “bumps” in the data due to random chance.

Still, read the article. This shows how scientists use data and reveals the kinds of debates that take place.

Politics and Economics
Ryan’s plan includes…yes, more tax breaks for the rich. And no, they haven’t worked before and they won’t work now…unless by working you mean:

(a) the Ryan plan would actually increase the deficit and (b) the whole goal is not to reduce the deficit, but to transfer income upward. In fact, it so happens that the estimated cost of those tax cuts is almost exactly equal to the proposed cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs helping lower-income Americans.

And as for those who consider Mr. Ryan a serious economic player, please read this awesome smackdown of a Ryan backer. You see, any plan with footnotes must be serious. Or so say Republican pundits.

8 April 2011 (am)

Workout notes
Simple today: Just three miles of running on the treadmill in just under 30 minutes (I used my home sport-tech, which is manual and only works at a rather steep incline, so my run times are ALWAYS slower on this than on the road). I got to 5K in 30:50 and called it a day.

Weekend plans: longer run tomorrow morning; work the 5 pm to 6 am shift at McNaughton (50 and 100 mile runs) and perhaps get a 10 mile loop on that course.

Health: I added a “pulling” rotator cuff exercise to my routine; it appears to be helping. Why? Some of my rotator cuff irritation is caused by my arm motion when I run or walk fast. This is helping.
Vertigo: much, much reduced, but still there when I get out of bed too quickly, or when I change from supine (even on the incline bench press) to upright and visa-versa. But I can do yoga head-stand again.
Anemia: my blood hemoglobin is back to the mid 14′s; the blood chemistry looks good again.
Weight: in the 192-194 range. That is too heavy for ultras, but I’ve been lifting so…

Note: I’ve been doing squats; and no, I don’t look anything like this:

Forget how heavy the weight is; I don’t look this good with an unloaded bar!
And it was only recently that I could even squat to this depth at all; the knee flexibility is returning but oh-so-slowly.

Humor
Does Bible study promote peace?

see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!

Computers and security: It is possible to deduce your location from your IP…to within an astonishing degree of accuracy. This is both impressive….and…pause for thought.

Economy and Politics

Where are the Republican priorities?

The Ryan plan calls for cutting the top marginal rate to 25 percent — lower than it has been at any time in the past 80 years. That in itself should tell you that this is a deeply unserious proposal: anyone who tells you that we have to face hard truths, that everyone must sacrifice, and by the way, rich people will pay lower taxes than they have at any time since the 1930s, is just engaged in a power grab.

Beyond that, has anybody besides Bruce Bartlett noticed that Ryan still hasn’t gotten an independent estimate of the revenue losses from his tax plan? Last summer I pointed out that he was getting a free pass on tax cuts that appeared likely to lose a lot of revenue; his defenders came up with all sorts of excuses about how he couldn’t get anyone to do a proper estimate.

You got it. And no, we will never get out of this mountain of debt without taxing the rich.

My Two Cents on the Government Shutdown
I don’t know if the shutdown will be averted or not. But I am hearing a ton of negativity toward Congress about this (here and here)

But, to be brutally honest, I really don’t blame Congress. Basically the Representatives are doing what they were elected to do, and we have two very different visions for our country. One vision is that the government has a role to play in our collective welfare (well articulated here) and those who want to see the New Deal programs and dismantled and governmental regulations all but eliminated. Now in the 1950′s and the 1960′s, this divide wasn’t so great; Republicans saw a need for such things. Remember it was President Nixon who started the EPA and who fought for affirmative action! How times have changed…

So the squabble really isn’t about money. The Republicans want to dismantle much of our government and the Democrats want to keep it.

Anyway we have these two visions (I can recommend Paul Krugman’s book The Conscience of a Liberal; this is well explained there).

It would be simplistic to say: “ok, let’s split into two countries” because, at its core, it is not really a dispute between the North and South. It is more about “city” vs. “rural”. Just check out these election maps: Illinois is regarded as a “blue” state and Texas a “red state”:

This is Texas from the 2008 election; note that Obama carried Dallas, Houston, Austin, El Paso and San Antonio (but lost Ft. Worth). Obama got obliterated in the countryside; there were some counties where he didn’t even get 10 percent!

This is Illinois from the 2010 governor’s election:

The margin came from Chicago.

The bottom line: we have two very different groups of people electing very different representatives and any “compromise” will be seen as capitulation. And frankly, I don’t see any possible compromise. We are at a point in our history where we are headed toward a new Gilded Age with out economy barely out of the 1929 levels.

I don’t blame Congress. I blame the American people; collectively we deserve bad government.

Update Dr. Andy directed me toward what I consider a reasonable Republican response. And yes, if my taxes go up, so be it. Of course, Mr. Brooks does talk about Medicare costs and there should be cost control measures but:

Jonathan Chait gets angry at the way Republicans, who claim to care about the deficit, propose saving money by cutting back on expenditures that are needed to control health costs. Indeed. But there’s a larger dynamic at work here than mere stupidity.

Let’s focus, in particular, on the ridicule some of the quoted Republicans heap on “comparative effectiveness research.”

Ask yourself, what do we have to do to control Medicare costs? We can save some money, maybe a lot, by reforming payment systems so that providers are paid for overall treatment rather than on a fee-for-service basis. But over the long term, the fundamental issue is going to be to decide what Medicare will and won’t pay for. We need, as Henry Aaron has often said, to learn how to say no. [...]

So how are you going to make decisions about what not to do? Um, you need good information about which medical interventions work, and how well they work: comparative effectiveness research. And no, that information isn’t already out there: doctors know surprisingly little about how effective procedures are relative to one another.

Why, then, are Republicans opposed to this kind of research? Some of it is sheer stupidity and/or anti-intellectualism — hey, those researchers are probably atheistic Democrats, you know.

But you should always remember that the GOP comes to bury Medicare, not to save it. The favored “solution” on the right is to replace Medicare with vouchers whose value will systematically lag behind medical costs; so it will be up to insurance companies and patients to say no. There is absolutely no reason to believe that such a system would work; in practice, it would mean denying adequate coverage to all but the affluent. But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

UPDATE II
This is from Fareed Zakaria:

The President has talked passionately and consistently about the need to tackle the country’s problems, act like grownups, do the hard things and win the future. But he has also skipped every opportunity to say how he’d tackle the gigantic problem of entitlements. Ryan’s plan is deeply flawed, but it is courageous. It should prompt the President to say, in effect, “You’re right about the problem. You’re wrong about the solution. And here’s how I would accomplish the same goal by more humane and responsible means.” That would be the beginning of a great national conversation.

[...]

Over the past two years, Ryan has used the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of Obama’s health care plan to criticize it relentlessly. Now the CBO has scored Ryancare, and it is a devastating critique. The main mechanism by which Ryan would cut costs on health care is to limit payments for Medicare and Medicaid. This would save money for the federal government, but it’s not clear at all that it would lower health care prices for seniors or the poor. In fact, last year the CBO studied Ryan’s voucher plan and concluded that it would raise costs because “future beneficiaries would probably face higher premiums in the private market for a package of benefits similar to that currently provided by Medicare.” In other words, Medicare — the Walmart of American health care — can bargain for lower prices than an individual can.

The theory behind Ryan’s health plan is that if individuals have to pay for their health care, they will shop carefully and drive down costs. But health is an unusual economic good and is unlikely to follow the usual market pattern.

So why do I applaud the Ryan plan? Because it is a serious effort to tackle entitlement programs, even though any discussion of cuts in these programs — which are inevitable and unavoidable — could be political suicide. If Democrats don’t like his budget ideas, they should propose their own — presumably without tax cuts and with stronger protections for Medicare and Medicaid and deeper reductions in defense spending. But they, too, must face up to the fiscal reality. The Government Accountability Office concludes that America faces a “fiscal gap” of $99.4 trillion over the next 75 years, which would mean we would have to increase taxes by 50% or reduce spending by 35% simply to stop accumulating more debt. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will together make up 50% of the federal budget by 2021.

(emphasis mine)

I disagree with the Ryan plan being courageous; raising taxes on the rich OR subjecting CURRENT senior citizens to this Medicare plan would be courageous. But yes, something is going to have to give. Yes, this means RATIONING; note that the sickest 25 percent of the Medicare crowd runs up 85 percent of the cost, and we should see if we are getting the best “bang for the buck” there. For example: is it worth 100,000 dollars of tax payer money to give an 80 year old an extra month in the hospital?

But, as Zakaria says, an honest discussion of these issues by a politician will probably lead to that politician not getting reelected. And THAT is the fault of the American people.

7 April 2011

Workout notes
Morning: yoga with Lynn at Ms. Vickie’s class. I like Ms. Vickie, but sometimes I think that her classes reflect her ADD; we rarely stay in a pose long enough to “feel” it; at least during the “flows”. The good news: I can almost squat all the way down; I am oh-so-close. I’ve made major progress, but it has taken EIGHT MONTHS of work.

Now I need to work on getting my leg all the way straight (if possible).

PM Weights plus a 4+ mile walk (outer lane of the Bradley track)
Rotator cuff (added a “pull/row” motion) routine
Rows: 10 x 210, 10 x 210, 8 x 210 (changed the grip)
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 120 (shoulder friendly grip)
curls: 2 sets of 15 x 20 pound dumbbells
curls: 2 sets of 10 with the EZ curl bar (preacher); first with 10′s, next with 15 on each side
incline bench press: 10 x 115, 7 x 130, 7 x 125 (tired by now)
squats (smith): 10 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 155, 1 x 185, 10 x 135 (good depth except on the 185)
sit ups (100)
I tried to run on the track but it didn’t feel good. So I resent and did 32 laps of lane 3 (just over 4 miles)
49:32; the first 3 were almost right at 12:30 each; last was 12:07.

The walk felt fine, though I know that my knees were soft.

Mathematics Education

This post at Schneier’s security blog is very interesting. The gist of the post is this: do you remember the simple logical rule: “P implies Q” is equivalent to “not Q implies not P”. Example: if you have the statement “green apples are sour” means that if you bite an apple and it isn’t sour, then it can’t be green. In my opinion, there is nothing hard about this. But I am in the minority in thinking this way. Consider this experiment:

Consider the Wason selection task. Subjects are presented with four cards next to each other on a table. Each card represents a person, with each side listing some statement about that person. The subject is then given a general rule and asked which cards he would have to turn over to ensure that the four people satisfied that rule. For example, the general rule might be, “If a person travels to Boston, then he or she takes a plane.” The four cards might correspond to travelers and have a destination on one side and a mode of transport on the other. On the side facing the subject, they read: “went to Boston,” “went to New York,” “took a plane,” and “took a car.”

So, which card needs to be turned over? Of course, the card has to be “went to Boston” because there is nothing in the rule about going to New York, there is nothing that says that Boston is the only place you can fly to, and turning over the “car card” might reveal “New York” as a destination. Evidently, this problem is hard for most people.
But here is where this gets interesting: if the exact same logical problem is phrased as a “fairness rule”; say “for you to play in a game, you must attend practice” then the problem because very easy for people to solve! Schneier concludes:

Our brains are specially designed to deal with cheating in social exchanges. The evolutionary psychology explanation is that we evolved brain heuristics for the social problems that our prehistoric ancestors had to deal with. Once humans became good at cheating, they then had to become good at detecting cheating — otherwise, the social group would fall apart.

So, maybe I can use this fact to introduce these sorts of rules?

Science
Scientists found some fossil lice. Why this is important: lice evolve to benefit from their hosts. The latest findings is added evidence to the question: when did birds and mammals diverge? Did this happen when dinosaurs still ruled?

Biologists have found a new way to peer back 130 million years in time, illuminating the catastrophic period in which the dinosaurs perished and birds and mammals arose.

The new approach rests on reconstructing the family tree of lice. Vincent S. Smith, a louse taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, has found that the tree stretches so far back in time that the host of the first louse would have been a dinosaur, probably one of the theropod dinosaurs that were the ancestors of birds.

Dr. Smith and his colleagues reconstructed the louse family tree by analyzing DNA from present-day louse species that parasitize birds and mammals. Most lice are specialists, feeding on a single species to whose fur or feathers their claws are adapted. The adaptation is so precise that when a louse’s host species evolves into a new one, the louse will diversify into different species, too. [...]

In the same way, species of lice on living animals and birds reflect the splits in animal and bird ancestry back to the time that lice first arose. Family trees based on DNA can be given precise dates at all their branch points if a few datable fossils of the right age are available. But this is difficult to do with lice, for which almost no fossils are known. Dr. Smith was fortunate that two fossil lice discovered in the last few years — one of them 44 million and the other 100 million years old — provided the necessary anchors for his tree.

The assembled family tree shows that lice started to radiate into new species well before the end of the Cretaceous period, Dr. Smith and his colleagues report in the current issue of Biology Letters. The finding implies that their hosts, both mammals and birds, had also begun to flourish and speciate before the reign of the dinosaurs was over.

The new tree bears on a longstanding dispute about the rise of birds and mammals. One school holds that both groups proliferated early in the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago, and that many lineages survived the cataclysm that brought the Cretaceous and the dinosaurs to a sudden end: the strike of a large asteroid 65 million years ago. The opposing view is that mammals and birds did not become successful and radiate into many different species until after the demise of the dinosaurs. [....]

Politics
Same old, same old: Republicans want to cut the budget, but only at the expense of others:

As a candidate, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler denounced stimulus spending and, once elected, voted for a Republican budget bill that would make $61 billion in cuts to a vast array of programs this year.

Government overspending is out of control, she said recently in the weekly Republican address, and must be stopped. But perhaps not in her home state, Washington.

There, the Port of Vancouver had been waiting for a $10 million grant, one modeled on a popular program in the stimulus bill. But the money was rescinded in the Republican spending bill, known as H.R. 1, that passed the House in February but was later defeated in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Port officials appealed to Ms. Herrera Beutler, one of 87 freshman Republicans in the House. She agreed to work on the port’s behalf to make sure it got its money before any cuts to the grant program went into effect. The outcome remains unknown.

Southern Republicans
It is no secret that the old Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party became modern day Republicans. To that I say: “good riddance”. I certainly don’t want them with us. Here are but two reasons why:
Social views
Check this out:

PPP polled Republicans in Mississippi and found that Haley Barbour remains a favorite, followed by Huckabee, Gingrich, Palin, Romney, Bachman, Pawlenty and Paul. They also found this:

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal. For the most part there aren’t any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions.

The exceptions are Palin, who is particularly popular with the racists and Romney, who is not.

Now what bothers me isn’t so much the racism. Sure, racism is bad, but I’d venture that every human being has their prejudices of one form or another. Hopefully we work to rid ourselves of as much as we can, and we keep the rest of it to ourselves. Perhaps we might admit these feelings in private or in an anonymous poll. But what bothers me is that these morons think something should be illegal on the basis that they don’t like it! Hey, if you are white and you don’t like blacks or Mexicans, don’t marry one. No problems there. But why should it be illegal for someone else to do so? Idiots.

Then again, my feeling is that these people just aren’t very bright. In Tennessee, they are pushing for a creationism friendly bill:

Tennessee’s House Bill 368 passed the House of Representatives on a 70-23 vote on April 7, 2011. “The debate ranged over the scientific method, ‘intellectual bullies,’ hair spray and ‘Inherit the Wind,’” reported the Chattanooga Times Free Press (April 7, 2011).

The bill, if enacted, would require state and local educational authorities to “assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies” and permit teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.” The only examples provided of “controversial” theories are “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” The sponsor of HB 368, Bill Dunn (R-District 16), claimed that the teaching of “intelligent design” would not be protected by the bill. Its chief lobbyist, David Fowler of the Family Action Council of Tennessee, claimed otherwise in the Chattanoogan (February 21, 2011).

Again, a whole branch of established science is suspect because they don’t like it.
Now, before you say “wait, don’t many democrats believe superstitious bunk?” Well, I know of no movement that tries to get homeopathy, healing crystals or astrology taught in public school science classes. And if there was one, I’d be right there to oppose it.

Ironically, it might well be legal to teach, say, homeopathic “theory” in science class because that wouldn’t be establishing religion whereas the creationists want a particular religious viewpoint giving credibility. It is legal to teach bogus science (though it is a bad idea) but it is illegal to advocate for one religion or another in the public schools.

6 April 2011: Potpourri

Workout notes I slept in a bit later than normal and ran over lunch time.
The good: pretty day, but windy (of course; this is Illinois in spring)
The bad: my body just plain rebelled; it just didn’t want to do it.

Nevertheless, I decided to run from the gym to the start of my 4.2 mile “cornstalk” course, do the course, then run enough to give me 5+ miles (actually 5.2 in total).
One highlight: about 3.8 miles into it my department chair joined me; he slowed down to run with me a bit. That sped me up and actually got me feeling better; my gait changes for the better when I run with someone; not sure as to why.

Anyway, the first .2 miles was a struggle and then the first 1.04 came in 9:38; but this pace was just plain work. I couldn’t seem to get it together and even with Mat pushing me a bit (until I got onto Cooper), I could manage no better than 9:08 for the final 1.04 to finish the 4.2 segment (hilly) in 40:05. Then I did another .8 very slowly to get 5.2 in 50:57 (I did walk a few steps).

What is going on: my gait is different; I can’t straighten my right knee and I have trouble bending it easily. It is just going to take some work; lots of shorter runs, squats, etc.

Posts
Economics

Bondad blog makes an interesting point about the currently unemployed: in many cases, it was the JOB itself that was eliminated; that is, that job won’t be coming back even if the economy recovers.

The Republican budget and Ryan’s medicare plan: Paul Krugman points out that these plans are mostly based on bogus numbers and projections. But it gets better:

Wow. Yesterday afternoon I downloaded the tables from that Heritage report that’s the basis for the Ryan plan. The first page looked like this: [...]

You can see the unemployment forecast, with the amazing 2.8 percent prediction, in the fourth set of figures.

But go to the same place right now, and you get this:[...]

Yep — they took the offending number out.

I mean, really, guys — this is all over the blogosphere; did you really think you could get away with pretending it was never there?

Remember: these are Republicans. This is what they do.

Mr. Ryan got his numbers from Heritage; here is how they generated these numbers (via Bondad blog)

What Krugman notes is the Heritage Foundation is projecting an unemployment rate of of 2.8% in 2021 (they are also arguing for an unemployment rate of, 6.4% next year, which is also highly doubtful, as I will argue later today). This is, well, laughable. But more to the point is how their analysis gets there. Their analysis assumes the following order of events: tax cuts lead to more investment, which expands the need to labor which increases hiring. Because workers face lower taxes, they have higher incomes, which increase spending (see page 3 in the report linked above). For those of you who are unfamiliar with this chain of thought, it’s based on and around Say’s Law. Say was a French economist who basically argued that supply creates its own demand. When business in operating, it has to pay labor (wages), lenders (interest) and producers of raw materials (which are converted into other products). All of this money going out from producers creates the income to purchase goods. However, notice one thing missing? Demand is never discussed.

The theory assumes that business is simply stimulated to produce a good out of thin air. While it is important to talk about supply and the factors the effect supply, demand is just as important; if there is no demand for a good, there is no reason to produce it. By focusing their analysis on one side of the demand/side equation, the Heritage Foundation completely misses the economic boat.

Remember that Republicans think in terms of adhering faithfully to a set of unimpeachable principles rather than conforming to, well, facts. This policy might work in certain settings (say, football teams, the boardroom of a business, or say the high command of a military) where the goals are short terms and it is important to “buy into the program” and one has the power to get rid of those who don’t. But it is no way to run a large country.

Speaking of the Republicans, if you haven’t used your New York Times allotment yet, check out this spread on the possible GOP candidates. The argument here isn’t “Sarah Palin” but rather that the GOP will nominate some uninspiring policy wonk (or “wonk wannabe”) who just doesn’t have the stage presence to win on a national stage (think: Bob Dole in 1996). Of course, among this group, Gov. Christie says that he isn’t running. The others: Gov. Daniels (Indiana), Gov. Barbour (Mississippi; the double-chinned “segregation wasn’t that bad” guy) and Gov. Jeb Bush (yep, another Bush!).

Good luck with that, Republicans. I still say it will be either Mr. Pawlenty or Mr. Romney. Then again, I once thought that Mr. Thompson was a viable candidate.
Then again, given Mrs. Thompson….I can see why he wasn’t interested in spending time on the campaign trail.

(click for a larger image)

What I dislike about many Republicans
Ok, I get it. I know that most Republicans will never like me because of what I am. I get that; I have no problem with that. Frankly, I am not interested in socializing with a Fox News watcher either. I am happy to live with this kind of division.

But there is something that bothers me.
I might not agree with Republicans and I might not even like them. But they don’t get to define who is a “real American” (or a real citizen of State X) and who isn’t.
Republicans do this all of the time; here is yet another example (at the state level)

Gov. Scott Walker said this afternoon that the spring election results show there are “two very different worlds in this state.”

“You’ve got a world driven by Madison, and a world driven by everybody else out across the majority of the rest of the state of Wisconsin,” Walker said at a press conference in the Capitol.

… snip …

“For those who believe it’s a referendum, while it might have a statewide impact that we may lean one way or the other, it’s largely driven by Madison, and to a lesser extent Milwaukee,

Residents of urban Wisconsin: you are not Real Badgers. Real Badgers live in small towns and vote for Prosser, by God and Cheese.

Of course, there was the remarks by Mr. Huckabee about President Obama growing up around madrasahs:

Mike Huckabee insists on digging himself deeper and deeper into the rhetorical mess he created when he claimed President Obama grew up in Kenya this week. Trying to shrug it off to Bill O’Reilly yesterday, Huckabee continued to insist that the President was out of touch because he didn’t “join the Boy Scouts,” among other things.

In the eyes of many Republicans, THEY are the “real Americans”. Jon Stewart nailed it when he was pointing out that Michelle Obama had to come across as “loving America enough”:

“She’s got to [prove her patriotism]! She’s a Democrat. She must prove she loves America, as opposed to Republicans who everyone knooows love America. They just hate half the people living in it.”

5 April 2011 pm

Economics
How bad is Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan? Well, look at the assumptions behind it:

OK, let’s leave the badness of the Medicare plan aside for now, and look at the economic projection the plan is based on. Here’s part of what the people at Heritage are claiming the plan will accomplish:

Note the “unemployment with the House budget” numbers: they start at 6.4 percent and drop to 2.8 percent! Talk about wishful thinking…..Paul Krugman continues:

Except briefly during the Korean War, the United States has never achieved unemployment as low as Ryan and co. are claiming. The Fed believes that the lowest unemployment rate compatible with price stability is between 5 and 6 percent — that is, twice what Ryan is claiming he will achieve.

President Obama Here is a list of liberal grievances with him. While I think that these are fair issues, I don’t see these as “YOU PROMISED” but rather unmet goals; some couldn’t be met because the Congress didn’t want it (public option for health care) and some proved to be too tough to achieve. And yes, ironically, one of these “promises” wasn’t really a promise but rather a hope and expectation.

But this is only part of it. Yes, I wish that he was stronger on civil liberties. But on the whole, I think that he is still doing a good job.

Science and technology I often disagree with people “on my side” when it comes to technological issues. One big one: nuclear power. Yes, there are obvious problems. But unfortunately, many anti-nuclear activists simply don’t know what they are talking about. Here is but one example:

For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed by Chernobyl, and that it will continue to slaughter people for generations to come. These claims are false.

The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) is the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like the IPCC, it calls on the world’s leading scientists to assess thousands of papers and produce an overview. Here is what it says about the impacts of Chernobyl.

Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.

In the rest of the population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children – arising “almost entirely” from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure”. People living in the countries affected today “need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident”.

Of course when you present them with evidence, they say that the studies are “cover ups”, etc. Really, these are the equivalent of the right-wing climate change denialists and creationists. The “know” what they “know” and that is that.

Civil Liberties
The sheriff in this video is an idiot.

If exposed underwear was a crime, then many yoga ladies and college women and night-club-going-women would be busted…not to mention plumbers.

Fun stuff
A judge rules that thong underwear isn’t a business expense for a newscaster.

Spandex butts
Someone has a collection of photos; many are from Latin America.
This is a sample of what you’ll see there:

(click to see the larger photo at the photostream)

Of course, GIYP has a similar photo:

(click on the image to see the larger image at GIYP)

White pants makes me think of spring.

5 April 2011 (AM)

Workout notes
Yoga. Later: 4.2 mile hilly walk in 55:07 It was sunny, windy and chilly (high 30′s; maybe 1-2 C).
Yoga: I admit that I have not been giving much of an effort; the good news is that the vertigo has diminished enough for me to get into headstand. It is still there though.

I had to cut this short due to blood work at the doctor’s office, which didn’t amount to much.

Posts
Here is my biggest criticism of President Obama: he seems too keen to compromise for the sake of compromise with the Republicans. I sure hope that he stands up to people like Paul Ryan who are offering a plan to ruin Medicare:

Matt Yglesias has a very good point: the supposed transition strategy under the Ryan plan, in which everyone currently under (sic; he means “over”) 55 gets Medicare as we know it, while everyone younger than that gets vouchers that won’t be enough to buy adequate insurance, sets up an unstable political dynamic. In fact, we can be sure that whatever happens, it won’t be what the plan says will happen.

If the Medicare Advantage precedent holds, what will happen in 2022 or a bit later is that Congress will react to the fury of younger seniors — who see that those born just a few years earlier have vastly better benefits than they do — by increasing the vouchers. And the end result, in that case, would be that the Ryan plan substantially increases Medicare costs; remember that the payment increases that were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, introduced to rescue failing Medicare Advantage programs, have resulted in large overpayments, adding hundreds of billions to the program’s costs.

On the other hand, if the vouchers aren’t increased, a furious group of new seniors will demand that the current Medicare get cut.
Either way, Medicare is trashed…which is the point. Remember that the Republican goal is to dismantle government safety nets.