10 June 2011 (later am)

Workout notes Walked to Lynn’s house, did 3 with her, walked back home to give myself about 5. I focused on posture and that sped me up, unintentionally.
Then I lifted:
incline bench: 10 x 115, 9 x 130, 4 x 135, 4 x 135
dumbbell curl: 4 sets of 10 x 25
Hammer machine row: 3 sets of 10 x 200 (medium grip)
pull down: 3 sets of 10 x 140 (2 with shoulder friendly grip, one with regular grip)
sit ups 4 x 25 (various inclines)
rotator cuff, hip hikes, stretching.

Note: I am very tired; I stayed up too late watching the Heat-Mavericks game. What a series! My guess: this one goes 7.

Posts

The crooks are getting more sophisticated:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the four men allegedly participated in a scheme to steal customer information using sophisticated “skimming” technology that secretly recorded account data from bank ATM machines and teller PIN Pads.


Over the course of a year, the skimming gang is believe to have stolen nearly two million dollars from various branches of Citibank and JPMorgan Chase.

“This type of criminal activity unfairly targets individuals and businesses, ultimately resulting in compromised identities, significant economic impact, and the distrust of financial
instruments and institutions,” stated U.S. Secret Service agent Brian G. Parr. 



“The Secret Service maintains strategic partnerships to combat this fraudulent activity and bring these perpetrators to justice.” [...]

One is referred to as the replacement PIN pad method, which involves swapping a teller PIN Pad for an identical device that conceals a skimmer with wireless access capabilities. 


The other method is commonly known as an “overlay,” because criminals place electronic skimming devices over legitimate ATM and bank PIN pads.

Because overlay devices look identical to the pads beneath them, customers are typically unaware of their presence – as they don’t actually interfere with ATM or PIN pad operations.



Surf to the link to see the names of the people charged and a photo of what one of these pads looks like.

How the mind learns
I can recommend this article which gives data that seems to indicate that teaching students how to recognize patterns helps them learn.
I can believe this. Think of it this way: in calculus class, we teach students how to solve closed form integrals with the Fundamental Theorem of (Integral) Calculus: where on the interval of interest (and of course is continuous on . But if that is all you tell them, they will be able to repeat the statement of the theorem but it is highly unlikely that they’ll be able to solve even easy homework problems (a few will be able to, but most won’t). They will need practice; e. g., they need to recognize that and do a few of them. They will have to practice the substitution rule with a few examples before they “get” it, even though the substitution rule is merely the FTC plus the chain rule.

Health care reform Dr. Andy sent me the following article on health care: the article argues that the “free market” can, at times, make health care worse. Why? Say, someone develops a cure for a disease in a laboratory. Well, unless doctors and hospitals are persuaded to use this cure, it won’t sell even if the cure is effective. So the company must spend a ton of money to advertise the product.

And remember that the most functional products aren’t the ones that always win in the “free market”; sometimes it is the ones with the most “flash” (the article uses the example of basketball shoes; styling has a great deal to do with how well the shoes sell).

Science
Science and Religion Mano Singham cleans up some common misconceptions about what “scientific truth” is:

This is similar to the points I made in my series on why atheism is winning.

Over the past five hundred years, the progress of science has worked to strip away God’s roles in the world. He isn’t needed to keep things moving, or to develop the complexity of living creatures, or to account for the existence of the universe. Perhaps the greatest triumph of the scientific revolution has been in the realm of methodology. Control groups, double-blind experiments, an insistence on precise and testable predictions – a suite of techniques constructed to guard against the very human tendency to see things that aren’t there. There is no control group for the universe, but in our attempts to explain it we should aim for a similar level of rigor. If and when cosmologists develop a successful scientific understanding of the origin of the universe, we will be left with a picture in which there is no place for God to act – if he does (e.g., through subtle influences on quantum-mechanical transitions or the progress of evolution), it is only in ways that are unnecessary and imperceptible. We can’t be sure that a fully naturalist understanding of cosmology is forthcoming, but at the same time there is no reason to doubt it. Two thousand years ago, it was perfectly reasonable to invoke God as an explanation for natural phenomena; now, we can do much better.

None of this amounts to a “proof” that God doesn’t exist, of course. Such a proof is not forthcoming; science isn’t in the business of proving things. Rather, science judges the merits of competing models in terms of their simplicity, clarity, comprehensiveness, and fit to the data. Unsuccessful theories are never disproven, as we can always concoct elaborate schemes to save the phenomena; they just fade away as better theories gain acceptance. Attempting to explain the natural world by appealing to God is, by scientific standards, not a very successful theory. The fact that we humans have been able to understand so much about how the natural world works, in our incredibly limited region of space over a remarkably short period of time, is a triumph of the human spirit, one in which we can all be justifiably proud.

Religious believers misuse this fundamental nature of scientific inquiry, that all conclusions are tentative and that what we believe to be true is a collective judgment made by comparing theories and determining which one is best supported by evidence, to make the misleading case that unless we have proved one single theory to be true, other theories (especially the god theory) should merit serious consideration. This is wrong. While we may not be able to prove which theories are right and which are wrong, we do know how to judge which ones are good and which ones are bad.

God is a terrible theory. It fails utterly to deliver the goods, and so should be abandoned like all the other failed theories of the past. In the film Love and Death, Woody Allen’s character says, “If it turns out that there is a god, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.” He is right.

So, this is why I discount the possibility of a deity that intervenes in the events of the universe. There might be some non-intervening one but I am agnostic with respect to that kind of deity.

Evolution: is an observed physical change that is correlated with an observed environmental change necessarily and evolutionary change if the physical change is in an inheritable characteristic?

No. Correlation is not causation, and if there is causation it might not be the result of a genetic process. Anyway, read Jerry Coyne’s post; it is on an article that shows a correlation with the geometry of a bird’s win with the changes in the environment. A cause is suggested…but there is no genetic evidence presented.

Example: height is an inheritable property and Japanese have grown in height since World War II…but this change is not genetic but rather due to diet.

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