19 May 2011 (noon)

Workout notes I didn’t feel good in the morning.
I had to force myself to walk to the pool; I swam 1100 yards and did PT/Stretching/sit ups afterward:
4 x (25 front, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free)
5 x 100 free on the 2: 1:49, 1:50, 1:49, 1:48, 1:48

It didn’t feel that bad. I need to work on getting my elbows higher though; that is probably why my times were so glacially slow.

Politics
This is Dick Morris on Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, beating Obama in a debate? Yeah right. Both Mr. Morris and I would love to see Mr. “please don’t quote me” Gingrich win the Republican nomination!

Science/Mathematics
Jerry Coyne’s post is rather funny:

But when you go to the paper, you’ll see that its abstract is so opaque to a non-mathematician that it might as well be written in Martian:

We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney move in dimension 4 by constructing higher-order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on immersed disks in the 4-ball, we identify some of these new invariants with previously known link invariants such as Milnor, Sato-Levine, and Arf invariants. We also define higher-order Sato-Levine and Arf invariants and show that these invariants detect the obstructions to framing a twisted Whitney tower. Together with Milnor invariants, these higher-order invariants are shown to classify the existence of (twisted) Whitney towers of increasing order in the 4-ball. A conjecture regarding the nontriviality of the higher-order Arf invariants is formulated, and related implications for filtrations of string links and 3-dimensional homology cylinders are described.

(Presumably “Arf invariants” don’t refer to the unchanging vocalizations of a dog. )

This shows how far removed mathematics is from even other scientists. Or are our own biology abstracts just as opaque to mathematicians?

Answer to his question: yes, at least to me.

Note: the paper is about 4 dimensional topology; few non-specialists would understand this abstract either, though the Arf invariant (named after a Turkish mathematician) is really a quadratic form over the field of order 2. It has applications in knot theory and in graph theory.