All you need to know about the Republian Debate

They basically said THAT plus “Obama sucks”. Remember they were playing to those who can write big campaign checks.

15 June 2011 midday

Workout notes Walking: 4 miles on the Bradley track:
14:19, 12:28, 12:02, 11:53; I focused on posture, then turn over then push-off…repeat. I really have to make myself “walk tall”; I just naturally want to bend forward from the waist.

Rotator cuff, stretches, hip hikes (my butt got a bit achy)

Swimming: 1500 yards. 5 x 100 (25 3g, 25 swim, 25 fist, 25 swim) on the 2:15
Then 10 x 100 on the 2: 1:47, 47, 45, 42, 43, 41, 41, 39, 40, 39 or 1:42.4 average.
Compare that to 1:44.6 on 1 June and 1:49.7 on 29 May. Little by little, I am sucking just a bit less.

Piriformis: it ached afterward. But when I got home, the basement was flooded. I did a sort of awkward stiff legged stoop/bend to get the water from out from under the bench (one leg straight, the other bent) and that position seemed to stretch it and make it feel better! The position was something between these two positions:

Maybe I invented a new stretch.

Elephants in the Room – The Colbert Report – 6/14/11 – Video Clip | Comedy Central

ColbertNation.com video – Michele Bachmann announces her candidacy at the second Republican debate, and Tim Pawlenty runs for Mitt Romney’s vice president.

Elephants in the Room – The Colbert Report – 6/…, posted with vodpod

15 June 2011 early morning

Oh well…I am in the final “proof reading of the papers” stage (not fun) and “learning something new” (fun).
I’ll get to that after my post…though the skies might clear enough to get in a short walk outside. I really don’t like the treadmill.

Posts
Here is one reason I love scientists: Jerry Coyne speaks honestly about the good and bad aspects of Stephen Jay Gould. I admit that I was uncomfortable with aspects of Dr. Gould’s book Mismeasure of Man. While I agreed with Dr. Gould’s point of view, I didn’t get the sense that he was being even handed. I much prefer Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (which I am almost finished with) which, while different in scope (he doesn’t deal with the “race science” arguments that Gould attacked) reaches roughly the same conclusions (that no racial group of humans has been proven to be superior to any other racial group) by being far more careful and attacking the very hypothesis at its root; he shows why saying “gee, you know that the Europeans developed technology much more quickly than the Africans so why shouldn’t we assume that they are smarter” is an unreasonable leap to be begin with.

Parenthetical comment: Diamond argues that many things affect technological development: the wild plants and animals that inhabit the region to begin with, communication routes with other societies, and yes, the very geometry of the region! Large land masses whose axis extend East-West means that more people live on the same latitude, hence agricultural techniques that work in one region might also work in regions a great distance away, hence the agricultural experiment of seeing what works has many more people working on it.

Ok, back to Professor Coyne’s article:

I always thought that among Steve Gould’s “real” (non-essay-collection) books, The Mismeasure of Man was the best. Yes, it was tendentious, written to show that scientists could be as biased and racist as anyone else, but it rang true. And the two-page epilogue, about the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a “feeble-minded” black woman, is one of the most eloquent bits of scientific writing I’ve ever seen.

How sad, then, to find that, in a new paper in PLoS Biology (access free), a group of scholars has reanalyzed a piece of Gould’s own analysis—his attack on Samuel Morton’s 1839 study of skull volumes of ethnic groups—and found Gould’s analysis even more flawed that Morton’s. If you’ve read Gould’s book, you’ll remember that a substantial chunk involved reanalyzing Morton’s study to show that Morton had finagled his data, making Native American skulls smaller than those of Caucasians, all to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the latter. [....]

Gould was a man with an agenda. I knew him slightly: he was on my thesis committee at Harvard, and I crossed swords with him several times in the literature (when I was a graduate student, he once accused me of being a “hidebound gradualist”). I think his theory of punctuated equilibrium was pretty much bunk—except for his emphases on the often-jerky pattern of the fossil record. And I found him an unpleasant and arrogant man, but of course a smart and engaging one, too. He could be quite rude to those he considered his intellectual inferiors, and that was pretty much everyone.

Nevertheless, he made two great contributions to my field. [...]

He and Richard Dawkins are the two great popularizers of biology in our era, and it’s always fun to discuss their relative merits. (They disliked each other intensely, of course.)

Bottom line: people are package deals, even the ones who have achieved elite status in a field (especially? ). They have good traits and bad ones, and sometimes the traits that drives them to greatness can make them unpleasant to be around.

And yes, I admit that I sometimes overvalue strong intellects; I sometimes get like this around the intellectual stars:

I’d be the small yellow dog (Chester).

Intellect and Reason
This New York Times article suggests that, at least at times, reason is used to justify one’s current position rather than to seek the truth.

I know this all too well; one time I spent two years trying to prove something but could never “seal the deal” without additional hypothesis. Then I thought: “maybe I can’t do this because what I am trying to prove is false”. Then I published the counter-example.

Economy
Paul Krugman takes the President to task for selling out to the Republican “austerity” vision. Then Krugman goes after Paul Ryan again:

Rick Perlstein sends me to Sam Husseini asking Paul Ryan why, if he’s so concerned with government spending on health care, he doesn’t support single-payer. Ryan’s response is pure gobbledygook: he never answers the question, cites irrelevant facts (Medicare costs are rising! But what about private insurance, which is rising even faster?), and in general stonewalls and runs out the clock.

This is not a serious person, even if he’s a Serious Person.

Here is what is interesting: I noticed that many “serious” rank-and-file Republicans are like that. It isn’t as if they are stupid people; many have started and successfully ran businesses. That is a hard thing to do! But when you start talking about the economy as a whole, the descend into gibberish:

“I deserve it because I worked hard!” “The free market always works best!” “You just want to take from the hard workers and give it to the lazy” (ant-grasshopper fable…which I happen to like), etc.

It is tough to calm them down and remind them that you don’t want to destroy their businesses but rather ensure that they have customers and that perhaps rebuilding roads, bridges and upgrading education might be a way of doing what we need to do and ensuring that there is an educated middle class that can purchase their goods and services.

It isn’t as if we want to stand on the street corners and pass out hundred dollar bills to winos.
Then again they were just fine with electing a drunkard and coke head (with DUI convictions) as the President of the United States; you see only certain people deserve a second (and third and fourth) chance.

Civil Liberties

Rachel Maddow does a good job of explaining why some (well intentioned?) legislation that seeks to protect people from speech is a very bad idea.

msnbc video: Tennessee big government conservat…, posted with vodpod

Privacy: Those “fill in the bubbles” forms are anonymous, right? Well..no. Yes…people actually use different marks to fill in the bubbles! I wonder if this can be used to detect cheating.