14 May 2011 posts

Workout notes I did these in the afternoon due to graduation.
Swimming: 10 x (25 side, 25 side, 25 free); couldn’t quite do these on the 2:15; this set took about 22:30 to do. Then I did 5 x 50 free on the 1: 54-55 mostly. Goodness, I am SLOW. But that is what one expects coming back from being off for so long. And no, I don’t anticipate getting faster anytime soon.

Weights After swimming. I didn’t superset much but rather did rotator cuff between sets…and did the exercises for BOTH shoulders.
Incline bench press: 10 x 115, 7 x 135, 6 x 135, 5 x 135
dumbbell curls: 4 sets of 10 x 25 lb.
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 140 (shoulder friendly grip)
rows (Hammer machine): medium grip: 10 x 200, 10 x 200. Narrow: 7 x 230, 7 x 230.
Sit ups: 4 x 25 (varied incline)
hip hikes, back stuff, etc.

Assorted things
Graduation: lasted 3 hours, 10 minutes. The student name readings lasted about 2 of those; that is 1 hour of preliminary yick-yack.
Ray LaHood (Secretary of Transportation and former Representative of IL-18) was the featured speaker.
He reminded us that politics in the United States has always been divisive (and featured actual fist fights at times). But he said that he is serving in President Obama’s administration because he wants to do good for America and that this is a calling that goes beyond Republican or Democrat (that got applause).
Ok…that is fairly standard “let’s all get along” boilerplate.

He mentioned that the internet atmosphere sometimes allows for less civility, though the internet is also helpful at times (e. g., in spreading some of the pro-democracy movements in the world).

He then talked about the generation of undergraduates. He mentioned that the New York Times had “almost a whole issue” devoted to “when will this generation finally grow up”…he then said “many people agree with that….but NOT ME.” I had to laugh…that is the old “hey, others say you are a scumbag but I don’t think that you are” sort of trick. Such “complements” rarely make the recipient feel good.

We also had the usual case of an administrator talking about the changes that he/she instituted; he/she wondered what the undergraduate experience would have been like without those changes……..then later, after the name reading and diploma receiving, we had someone come up and get their commission via R. O. T. C…..to the reserves…and got a standing ovation. My wife told me that she got tears watching this on the live stream; I got….well it meant that the exercises were over so I was happy.

Politics
Here is the President on energy policy and oil.

I don’t like all of this “new drilling” stuff as I don’t think it is a long term answer. Note: before anyone accuses me of being a hypocrite, be advised that I walk to work every day. So I do my part in conservation.

Back to the President’s program: He talks about the removal of the tax breaks, but in a letter sent by his campaign to supporters, he warns us that this tax subsidy removal will not happen with the current composition of Congress, so don’t expect it:

The CEOs from the five major oil companies — which together booked $36 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2011 alone — went to the Senate yesterday to try to justify the $4 billion in tax giveaways they’re receiving this year.

It’s a head-smackingly obvious example of how broken Washington is that there’s even a question about this. These companies don’t need and don’t deserve taxpayer money — especially with a budget deficit to close and gas prices at or near record highs.

Even worse is the fact that when the Senate tries to strip these oil company giveaways, it’s likely that a minority of senators will block a vote from happening. And even if the Senate manages to pass a bill eliminating the giveaways, there’s little chance it will be brought up for a vote in the House.

Here’s why: These five companies are expert manipulators of the money-for-influence game in Washington that the President is working to change. It’s simple math — they spent more than $145 million last year on nearly 800 lobbyists whose job is to defeat bills like this one. The $4 billion they’ll likely get to keep as a result represents a 2,700% return on their investment.

I’d like to be able to say with certainty that you can do something to help pass this bill, but the fact is that at this stage we may not be able to affect the outcome of next week’s vote.

What we can do is build a campaign that will keep a spotlight on issues like this and the fundamental reasons why Washington doesn’t work.

Science
I enjoy the blog Conservation Report. Here is a video that a recent post linked to:

This is about how a colorblind fish (cuttlefish) manages to camouflage itself. Note that we see an experiment in which the cuttlefish is placed against a background that does NOT occur in nature.

Human evolution
New evidence has come in: it appears that Neanderthals actually lived as recently as 33,000 years ago; this is based on a tool find in the Ural mountains:

A Neanderthal-style toolkit found in the frigid far north of Russia’s Ural Mountains dates to 33,000 years ago and may mark the last refuge of Neanderthals before they went extinct, according to a new Science study.

Another possibility is that anatomically modern humans crafted the hefty tools using what’s known as Mousterian technology associated with Neanderthals, but anthropologists believe that’s unlikely.

“We consider it overwhelmingly probable that the Mousterian technology we describe was performed by Neanderthals, and thus that they indeed survived longer, that is until 33,000 years ago, than most other scientists believe,” co-author Jan Mangerud, a professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bergen and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, told Discovery News.

Most anthropologists believe modern humans began to replace Neanderthals starting around 75,000 to 50,000 years ago. Project leader Ludovic Slimak said the study suggests “that Neanderthals did not disappear due to climate shifts or cultural inferiority. It is clear that, showing such adaptability, the Mousterian cultures can no longer be considered as archaic.” [...]

Note: some of us actually have some Neanderthal DNA; evidently some mated with us in our distant past.

Religion/Atheism
I wasn’t going to talk about this topic, but some philosopher posted the following comment on their Facebook wall:

Question of the Day: Why are most (not all) atheists so terrified to admit that their theological beliefs involve an element of faith?

Of course the hypothesis of the question is completely wrong:
1. atheists, in general aren’t “terrified” and
2. not believing in some supernatural entity is hardly “faith”

What many will never understand is that atheism is really about “belief” and an atheist doesn’t believe in gods, deities, spirits or whatever. That requires no “faith”.
Not it is true that one might deem the atheist position to be “more likely” based on the fact that one uses evidence (e. g. lack of design in nature) to make one’s conclusion, and when one does that, one assumes that the laws of science operate consistently. That assumption might be false so accepting the laws of science might be considered some sort of faith by some. I don’t see it that way; I accept the laws of science because they have consistently worked…and I am happy to revise them when new evidence comes in. Science can be falsified….”faith” can’t.

True, one might see this process of revising the laws based on evidence to be based on a sort of “faith”, but I have little patience with this sort of word-salad play. I am not interested in it.

The other thing about atheism that many don’t get: when I say that I am an atheist I am NOT saying that I can prove that no god exists: that is impossible! I am saying “I don’t believe it”. But few atheists say that they know “for certain” that there is nothing beyond the ability of our senses to detect, or that there is something that we haven’t detected yet….not even Richard Dawkins! Here is an excerpt from a discussion between him and Francis Collins from Time Magazine (and I respect both of these men):

“DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That’s God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small–at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.”

In short, if there is some “spirit of the universe”, it might have NOTHING to do with any deity that any human has worshiped.

It would be foolish for me to claim that I KNOW that no such entity exists, but I am comfortable in rejecting any of the gods that I’ve heard about.

The other topic of discussion was how pervasive religion is among humans. The claim was that “if so many believe this, then this belief cannot possibly be delusional”. It just so happens that Jerry Coyne talked about a similar topic (not as a part of our thread). He was talking about an Oxford University study about how pervasive religious belief is. Coyne critiques one of the conclusions:

“If you’ve got something so deep-rooted in human nature, thwarting it is in some sense not enabling humans to fulfill their basic interests,” Trigg said.

“There is quite a drive to think that religion is private,” he said, arguing that such a belief is wrong. “It isn’t just a quirky interest of a few, it’s basic human nature.”

“This shows that it’s much more universal, prevalent, and deep-rooted. It’s got to be reckoned with. You can’t just pretend it isn’t there,” he said.

And the Oxford study, known as the Cognition, Religion and Theology Project, strongly implies that religion will not wither away, he said.

“The secularization thesis of the 1960s – I think that was hopeless,” Trigg concluded.

That’s hogwash. As we can see from the tremendous secularization of the world over the past few centuries, especially in Europe, it is not impossible for religion to wither. The pervasiveness of a belief gives no warrant that that belief will be with us forever. Look how pervasive, only a century ago, was the idea that women were second-class citizens. This was true in nearly every society. Ditto for gays and ethnic minorities. And look how attitudes have changed! Granted, women, for instance, still get the short end of the stick, but in many parts of the world they’re much better off. Most of us now realize that people should be treated as equals, regardless of gender, color, and sexual orientation. That would have been inconceivable a few hundred years ago.

He is right of course; in fact some of the data about how secular much of Europe has become can be found here. Mano Singham points out that this change (from mostly religious to secular) has occurred in about one generation.

So we’ll see how long it lasts….I certainly won’t live to see religion’s extinction but perhaps when I am in my final days, maybe the United States will be like Europe is now.

New Peoria Half Marathon?

Just a couple of days ago, I came across this.

I’ve heard that they are shooting for 1500 runners and have a 4 hour time limit.
This is the course: basically is starts downtown and goes across the Bob Michael bridge (so far, so good). But then it hooks to the East Peoria Rivertrail and does an out and back on that.

My guess: there will be some issues here:

Note how narrow this bridge is. It is close enough to the start where I wouldn’t anticipate too much 2 way traffic but still….here is another bridge:

And check out this photo from a 4 mile race (same course): this was at mile 3.75 and the race had only 450 runners:

What is it going to be like at the turn around (on the River Trail) with a field of 1500?

I sure hope that the race has picked an experienced race director who knows the course well; my guess is that there are some work-arounds and some tweaks as the path is paralleled by some low traffic roads that could have, say, half-lane coned off.

Graduation Day is here (2011)

This is what it is going to be like, sans the television screen.

Oh well; every job has its downsides.

The Things Mike Huckabee Approves of….

I am on Mike Huckabee’s mailing list. He too whined about the President’s mocking of the radical right wing. But what I found interesting was this:

The Supreme Court ruled that burning an American flag was protected free speech…but they never said people who did it were immune to other people’s free speech. A student at LSU got permission from the school to burn a flag in support of another student who took an American flag off the LSU War Memorial and burned it in protest of Osama bin Laden’s killing. But the second student couldn’t get a local burn permit, so he just began reading a statement. He discovered, though, that the other students also had free speech rights. They drowned him out by chanting, “USA, USA” and “Go to hell, hippie.” Then they also followed the Court’s lead by interpreting actions as speech, and began throwing trash and water balloons at him. I assume the water balloons were just in case he HAD gotten the flag lit. Police had to intervene and escort him to a safe location.

It’s definitely not the ’60s anymore: the student government president gave an impassioned defense – of the crowd with the water balloons. He said, “It’s time that my generation stand up for what they believe in and exercise their freedom of speech and let people know that we are not OK with this.” My gosh—this ol’ Razorback has to tip my hat to the LSU Tigers on this one.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

Yes, one has the right to say “I don’t like it when you do that”; that too is free speech. But shouting someone down is more or less akin to just making noise to mask a message. What would Mr. Huckabee say we showed up at his rallies and wouldn’t let him speak?

But worse, look at what Mr. Huckabee chose to emphasize: “Go to hell, hippie”.
He approves of this?

PS: I approved of the Bin Laden operation and killing.

The Al Gore problem

Mention Al Gore around any group of polyester clad middle aged mediocrities and you’ll hear chortles about “how he says that he invented the internet”. Of course he never claimed that (he said that when in Congress, he took the initiative to push for the internet to be put in the public sphere). He might have been guilty of exaggerating his importance in pushing for it, but that is about it.

But Al Gore really got slammed in the media; he developed a reputation as a “nerd” who told whoppers” and was never able to shake it. There are those who claim that the same is happening to Mitt Romney (example: they pick on him for not wearing a tie,
Paul Krugman has some things to say about that:

Indeed: the treatment of Gore in the 2000 race should be taught as a lesson in journalistic malpractice; what the Milbank piece shows is that, on the contrary, it’s still considered somehow justified.

What Chait doesn’t quite say, however, is that there are also reverse Al Gore problems, in which the press corps in effect decides that someone is a genuine, honest, good fellow, and ignores all evidence to the contrary. George W. Bush is the most obvious example; anyone remember Chris Matthews saying — in 2005, no less — that the man who misled us into war and made dishonesty about policy standard operating procedure — “glimmers” with “sunny nobility“? Oh, and this was after Katrina.

And as for McCain — not only weren’t his mannerisms taken as evidence of character flaws, he retained his label as a straight-talking maverick long after he had established through his actions that he was anything but. Actually, the McCain enabling continues to this day: he’s a perennial Sunday talk guest, even though he has no significant political power and has been wrong about everything for years.

Now, I don’t feel sorry for Romney; he’s a smart guy who chose to sell his soul, and is now paying the price. But it’s very bad to see that Heathers political reporting is still the norm.

The part about Mr. McCain made me howl with laughter (emphasis mine).

13 May 2011 afternoon

Personal: grades are turned in and the only thing that remains between me and a few months worth of freedom is 3 hours of listening to windbags (aka: “graduation exercises”)

Workout notes Over lunch;
Swim: 1000 yards: 5 x (25 side, 25 side, 25 sfs, 25 free) on the 3
Then 6 x (25 3g, 25 free)
Then 200 in 3:40; chased Mike (my ex department chair; he is a few years older than I, but he is also 6 foot 6 inches tall)
That 200 was astonishingly slow, but I admit that I was checking in with my shoulders; I don’t want to relapse.

3g drill: take 3 strokes then glide on the side, take 3 more strokes and glide, repeat.

Run: 2 miles on the treadmill (19:55; 10:20/9:35)
Walk: 2 miles on the indoor track (23:57; 12:25/11:32)
rotator cuff, piriformis stretches, hip hikes, etc.

Weights: I did the glute/abductors/adductors series (two sets of 10 for each exercise)

Posts
Republicans
That mean old President Obama hurt Mr. Krauthammer’s feelings.

I’ll tell you what Mr. Krauthammer reminds me of: he reminds me of a creationist who gets showed away from a biology meeting. If the Republicans want to get taken seriously, they can produce serious proposals backed by serious data and not crap like this.

The Republicans should quit lying!!! Here is an egregious example from our own Representative, Mr. Aaron Schock (taken from the “Schock Report”):

Out of control spending has plagued this nation under both parties, but the scale of President Obama’s overspending is astronomically higher than President Bush’s. The average annual deficits in the Bush years were $250 billion overspent per year. The highest annual Bush deficit was $458 billion. Contrast that with $1.4 trillion overspent per year under President Obama with trillion dollar annual deficits projected for years to come.

Uh, where exactly did that overspending come from?

In a spirited and unscripted debate with the House GOP, President Barack Obama said Republicans were wrong to portray him as running up large deficits.

Speaking at a retreat for House Republicans in Baltimore on Jan. 29, 2010, Obama was particularly critical of a question from Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. Hensarling asked Obama, “You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy?”

“The fact of the matter is,” Obama replied, “is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion — $1.3 trillion. So when you say that suddenly I’ve got a monthly deficit that’s higher than the annual deficit left by Republicans, that’s factually just not true, and you know it’s not true. And what is true is that we came in already with a $1.3 trillion deficit before I had passed any law. What is true is, we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.”

We checked Hensarling’s claim in a separate item. Here, we’ll look at Obama’s claim that he came into office with a $1.3 trillion deficit and $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.

On Jan. 7, 2009, two weeks before Obama took office, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the deficit for fiscal year 2009 was projected to be $1.2 trillion. The 10-year projection was estimated to be about $3.1 trillion. So Obama’s number was very close on the 2009 deficit — he said $1.3 trillion — but substantially different from the 10-year projection — he said $8 trillion.

There are two reasons why he differs from the CBO. On the difference between the $1.2 trillion and the $1.3 trillion, the Obama administration credited a small portion of spending on its watch to policies of the previous administration. The reason for this is that the federal government runs on a fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, so Bush and Obama technically split responsibility for 2009 spending.

The large difference on the 10-year projection has to do with Bush administration tax cuts. The CBO creates its estimates based on current law, which means the CBO assumes that the Bush tax cuts will end in 2010 and everyone will start paying higher taxes in 2011 and going forward. The Obama administration, on the other hand, assumed in its baseline that those tax cuts would be renewed. [...]

Obama’s numbers are fairly solid, so we rate his statement Mostly True.

World Events

I mostly agree with this. I like Michael Moore, but he is wrong about this.

Common Controversy Pushes Jon Stewart Close to the Edge – The Atlantic Wire

How do you respond to Fox News when it’s a “caricature of [their] own cartoon”?

Common Controversy Pushes Jon Stewart Close to …, posted with vodpod

On Getting Older…

Seeing this photo makes me a bit nostalgic. I grew up on air force bases and as a little boy, I loved books about military aircraft. I thought that this was the coolest photo: I loved the glass nose, the gun turrets and just the whole plane in general. I also found war movies to be exciting.

Now when I see this, I think of the horror: I think of the statistics: a B-17 tour was between 25 to 35 missions (depending on when the tour was). Loss rates were between 2 and 5 percent. Even at 3 percent: the probability of finishing 25 missions was 46.7 percent and the probability of finishing 25 missions was 34 percent. But it is worse than that: sometimes a plane would return with wounded or dead crew members: a German fighter might not shoot down the plane but still kill some of the crew.

I think of crew members burning to death as the plane caught fire or being ripped to pieces by machine guns or 20 mm cannon shells.

Of course, there is the horror of those who are under the bombs and the fighter pilots who had to fly into massed gunfire. But being that my dad served 23 years in the Air Force and that I served in the Navy, my thoughts immediately turn to the bomber crews.

Ironically, I spent several years in Japan (and was born there!); as a young teenager I lived in Tachikawa Air Force base, which was a Japanese fighter base in World War II (to protect Tokyo); I also lived in Green Park, which was made from the old Musashino aircraft engine factory:

Here is the view from the B-29s which bombed the factory in World War II

At the top of the photo is the entrance to the plant…which was turned into this housing area:

Note: the building was very heavily constructed, though the B-29′s did manage to blow off one wing. The rest were more or less intact.

And yes, I thought that the B-29 was cool too. I even built a model of one:

.

In fact, the B-50 (a heavily upgraded B-29) was still in service when I was in early grade school.

Nevertheless, as an older person, I tend to associate the B-29 with the horrors they caused on the ground:

You are seeing about 1.8 square miles being burned; about 2100 people died in that attack. The Tokyo raid (the March 9 raid) was much worse; 15.8 square miles were burned and about 80,000 people died.

So when I see the cool looking bombers, I cannot divorce my thoughts from the horror in the planes and the horrors going on beneath the planes.

Note: this is NOT a “Japan was a victim” type of post. Not in the least.

It is just that when I was young, I could see the “cool machinery” of war and not automatically think about what the machinery was used for.
And yes, I still have a soft spot for the large military planes; for example I enjoyed this video of the Russian “Bear” Bomber:

(I’ll bet that those fuel efficient turboprops don’t look so silly these-a-days)

And don’t forget the B-52 (I once lived on Ellsworth Air Force Base, which housed SAC B-52′s)

As awesome as these aircraft are, they are still…..well…killing machines.

12 May 2011 short and sweet

Workout notes
I overslept yoga class. So over lunch I walked 3.5 miles (2.1 miles around the W. Peoria track in 27:45) and then swam 1000 yards:

4 x (25 front, 25 sfs, 25 side, 25 free) on the 3
25 front, 25 side, 25 side, 25 free
6 x (25 drill, 25 free)
4 x (25 3g, 25 free)
Then rotator cuff stuff and strict sit ups (4 x 25)

Injury: piriformis is still a small problem, but I got the feeling that it is starting to break up again.

Mostly I graded all day.
Boooooring.

So, I’ll post what I probably missed in yoga class:

11 May 2011 posts….later in the day

This will be all over the place
Politics House Republicans are asking President Obama to ask the Democrats to NOT attack them on their vote on their budget!

Hard to believe:

Nearly a dozen House Republican freshmen held a press conference outside the Capitol Tuesday morning to “wipe the slate clean,” and “hit the reset button.”

“Yeah, I mean there’s been — again, this is a both-sides issue,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) when asked if GOP candidates and the NRCC had engaged in ‘MediScare’ tactics last year. “To say that one side is blameless in trying to use issues to win votes is just dishonest.”

On Tuesday, Kinzinger and 41 of his colleagues sent a letter to President Obama, asking him to rein in Democratic attacks on GOP members who voted for the House budget, which includes a plan to privatize Medicare and cap spending on the program.

[...]

Aside from the chutzpah of winning an election by scaring seniors about Medicare, then demanding an end to scare tactics, isn’t this just pathetic? Pleading with Democrats not to engage in politics?

That reminds me of the old joke: “hey Republicans, if you quit lying about us, we’ll quit telling the truth about you.”. This is amazing, but in character for this amoral group.

Dick Morris: manages to lie while remaining factual
Yes, Medicare is the big long term debt driver. But what does Dick Morris say?

Medicare has only gone up by 16 percent since Obama took office. Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation, Section 8 housing, AFDC and other welfare entitlements have risen by 54 percent. And regular discretionary domestic spending has risen by 41 percent. By directing the nation’s attention to Medicare — as opposed to these other programs — the House Republicans have totally played into Obama’s hands.

Did you catch these things? Those other “welfare” entitlements have gone up mostly as a result of the horrible economy that President Bush left us. But here is the biggest fallacy: yes spending on those other programs have gone up by a bigger percentage. But what was the biggest program to begin with?

Think of it this way: consider your household budget. Suppose your drink 30 dollars of soda a month. Now suppose you drink 60 dollars of soda the next month. Now suppose your 1000 dollar a month mortgage went up to 1200.
So you see, your mortgage expense “only” went up 20 percent whereas your soda budget went up 100 percent. So your soda budget is a bigger driver of your financial strain? Hardly.

But this is the line of reasoning that Mr. Morris is presenting. It probably will be enough to fool Newsmax readers.

More politics
I saw this on my facebook wall. Really.

A little bit of light science
Check out this optical illusion. Basically you have a wheel of colored dots. The dots change color in a set pattern. This is easy to see. Then the wheel turns and it appears that the color changes stop..but they really don’t.

Social science
I really have little patience with articles such as this one:

Back in April, my Salon column pointed out that though women are far less likely to be overweight than men, they comprise 90 percent of customers in the commercial weight-loss industry.

So women being less obese than men is bad? (Note: in the United States; the 2009 obesity rates are 69.3 percent for men, 52.7 percent for women.

The survey mentioned in this Salon article is:

[Women] were asked to choose whether they would rather be obese or have one of 12 socially stigmatized conditions, such as alcoholism or herpes. In many cases, the women would rather have more of the other conditions, with 25.4 percent preferring severe depression and 14.5 percent preferring total blindness over obesity.

You read that right — one in four women would prefer to be severely depressed rather than overweight, and nearly one in six would prefer to lose their sight rather than face the same fate. These are truly stunning numbers — but, then, they come as responses to hypotheticals. So the key question this study raises is: Do the results mean anything in real-world practice?

In a word, yes.

So how does the author back up his “yes” answer? No, he doesn’t provide health data; he points out that models are thin, often unrealistically so.
And the MEASURED harmful effect is…..uh, remember that 52.7 percent of women are obese.
Yes, the author does point out that obesity is a problem and there is nothing wrong with attacking obesity as a health issue. But attacking it as a beauty issue is bad, bad bad. But the evidence is…well…a 52.7 percent obesity rate?

Sorry, but I remain unconvinced. Losing weight because you want to look good is fine.
Sure, I know that there are anorexics but they are rare exception.

Fun
Here are some hilarious facebook snarks over misspellings. I’ll post a couple of these: