11 June 2011 early am

Workout notes

1.5 mile warm up, 3 mile run (30:36), 1 mile cool down (walking). I did the “Pair up for Health” 3 miler (4.8 km); this included trails, obstacles (crawls, walls, hay jumps, football type rope drills, running along railroad tracks and yes, a slide). Talk about being mediocre: out of 127 runners, I was the MEDIAN runner (64′th place). But only one person who was 50+ beat me (and only a couple 40+ people) though first in my age group was very impressive (20:15). The overall winner was 17:15, though his lifetime 10K pr is well under 31 minutes.

The day was cool and I enjoyed myself, even if it was humbling.

Posts

But I hope that the President can lead us to tackling the demand problem. Business have cash; the problem is that they don’t have US customers and they won’t hire unless they have a reason to do so.

The President shouldn’t expect assistance from the Republicans. Their candidates live in never-never land.
Tim Pawlenty issued a ridiculous op-ed (which I talked about earlier) and is now incensed that people are calling out his garbage for what it is:

Tim Pawlenty — who has turned out to be a much bigger fool than I or, I think, anyone imagined — replies to criticism of his claim that he can get 10 years of GDP growth at 5 percent:

Obama’s economic team doesn’t have a plan, so their spokespeople attack ours. The idea that they don’t believe in the American people enough to say that we can grow the economy at 5% GDP really says everything. You have to wonder if in fact Obama’s grand plan is that we don’t grow at all — and if so — he and the central planners are doing a great job of that.

Well, here are 10-year growth rates starting with 1929-39:

Yes, hey, I can issue a plan that calls for 10 percent growth! Mr. Pawlenty is not serious.
Neither is Mr. Herman Cain who issued a ridiculous pledge to not sign a bill that was longer than three pages long. Well, now he says that the pledge was merely an “exaggeration”:

In an interview with Hotsheet Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain retreated from his claim that he would only sign bills that are three pages or less.

After it was pointed out to him that defense appropriations bills, the Civil Rights Act, the Patriot Act and the Fair Tax proposal at the center of his economic policy all exceed three pages, Cain told CBSNews.com Senior Political Reporter Brian Montopoli, “Brian, that was an exaggeration.”

“It was an exaggeration to drive home a point: I want short bills,” he said. “…When they write a bill, I want them to address the particular topic that it is supposed to address. Because as you know, they have this habit in Washington DC of throwing everything including the kitchen sink in there in order to try to get it passed along with something that the other side might want.”

Cain vowed to veto bills that included earmarks and said he would demand “clean bills.”

“Yes they are going to be longer than three pages,” he said. “But they are not going to be 2,700 pages that nobody read.”

Yep, “that-there COMMON SENSE” in action (eyeroll).

Bottom line: yes, I think that the economic recovery is too slow and that the President is trying this failed “supply side stuff” instead of “demand side”. But it was the Republicans that got us into this mess to begin with.

It is a bit like this: the Republicans made the patient sick by giving him arsenic. Obama comes along and keeps the patient alive, but doesn’t make him robust….he does get him out of the ICU though. Now the Republicans want another chance….to give the patient EVEN MORE arsenic!

Science/Mathematics
This is a nice 15 minute talk on computing…note that we STILL don’t know the fastest way to multiply two arbitrary n by n matrices together!

Also, you see an explanation of the “p versus np” problem.

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