23 June 2011 Evening

Topics
Humor This is supposed to discourage religious door to door proselytizing. I’m afraid that it would just encourage me:

Social
I am tempted to say that this represents my worst stereotype about Republicans. But, it was a Republican that alerted me to this (albeit one with a military background):

An Evans neighborhood association has blocked a group that was prepared to build a home free of charge for a local veteran who was injured in Afghanistan.

The homebuilding group, Homes for Our Troops, says Knob Hill Property Owners Association approved the home’s design June 2 but reversed its decision in a later meeting.

A member of the association, however, says the group got only a conditional approval, pending a review of its design; the neighborhood is carefully protected by building covenants, and the final design did not fit.[...]

But owners association member Tom Rogers said Homes for Our Troops did not do everything asked of it. The group did not have written approval from the association’s architectural review board, but negotiated through e-mail only.

“What’s important to understand is the family already lives here. They’re a great family. We have no qualms with them,” Rogers said. “The problem is, that street down there has 5,000-square-foot homes all the way up and down the street there. … It just doesn’t fit. That’s the whole issue.”

Gonsalves said his team checked association documents, which do recommend that at least 2,700-square-foot houses be built, but Rogers said homeowners in that section built much larger homes.[...]

Entitlement; house size, “fitting in”. Pity there is no such thing as “karma” as I wouldn’t mind it if a tornado just happened to slam into that neighborhood (but just destroy the houses and not injure anyone).

Politics
No Drama Obama: remember how Israel’s prime minister just told off President Obama? Well guess what:

Today, news has broken that – SURPRISE – Netanyahu “agreed to peace talks based on 1967 borders on the condition that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state and solve the Palestinian refugee issue outside of Israel’s borders” in talks with presidential advisor Dennis Ross and acting Middle East enjoy David Hale.

In other words, Netanyahu today, it is reported, has agreed, more or less, to Obama’s terms – those same terms he spent many a glorious hour defaming and ridiculing while being hosted by our President in Washington, while here as our guest.

Now, Netanyahu, if reports coming out of Israel are accurate, is eating those words. And who do you think is the one making him chew?

Yes. Obama don’t take no mess.

Author’s Note: Two things. First, Netanyahu’s communications office “denied” that today’s reports are true that the Prime Minister accepted 1967 as future borders. However, this denial, it seems, is purely cosmetic, for the denial itself doesn’t actually address what Netanyahu is reported to have agreed on, which is “peace talks based on 1967 borders.” Second, the significance of Netanyahu’s bending to Obama’s will, if true, is, in and of itself, a game-changer in the Middle East with reference to a possible negotiated settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. However, that analysis will have to wait for another diary (or for your comments below).

Of course, someone else called this some time ago (e. g., said that Israel’s PM would have to make a show of being offended…that was all part of it)

The Last Word

Obama and Israel, posted with vodpod

2012 Race
Nate Silver handicaps the Republican field; he has Romney at 40 percent, Pawlenty at 18 percent (too high), Perry at 12.5 percent and Bachmann at 12 percent. He’ll handicap the lower tier candidates in a subsequent post.

Yoga classes: take the kids?

This post makes for interesting reading. I admit that I like it. Add to that people who bring their cell phones to class and don’t turn them off….and even answer them!!!

Yes, I’ve seen it happen.

23 June 2011 midday

Workout notes 2200 yds; the shoulder got a bit fatigued (not painful):
10 x (25 kick (side, front, side), 25 swim) 13:30
5 x (25 free, 25 back, 25 breast, 25 free) on the 2:20
1000 alternating 100 free, 100 pull (pushed by a math colleague who is 6 foot, 6 inches tall (1.98 meters)
18:53 total
4 x 50 butterfly kick with fins (kick only!)

Note: I had some butt/piriformis pain “just walking around slowly” but only a few tingles while swimming. This morning I didn’t have it but I had some back stiffness. It is healing but is right now in its “take its pound of flesh out of you” phase.

Posts
Humor

Education

(click for larger)

World Events
Many of my friends (myself included) thought that the time-table for withdrawal was too slow. But evidently it is fast enough to pose some risk:

he U.S. military’s top officer told Congress on Thursday that President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw up to 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by next summer is riskier than he originally was prepared to endorse.

Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a House hearing that he supports the president’s plans. But Mullen said they are “more aggressive and incur more risk” than he had considered prudent.

“More force for more time is, without doubt, the safer course,” Mullen said. “But that does not necessarily make it the best course. Only the president, in the end, can really determine the acceptable level of risk we must take. I believe he has done so.”

Obama announced Wednesday evening that the U.S. and its allies had achieved enough in Afghanistan to merit a drawdown of forces beginning this summer. Obama said 10,000 troops would come home by the end of this year, to be followed by as many as 23,000 next summer. That will leave about 68,000 U.S. troops there.

Mullen, who is retiring Oct. 1, was blunt in testifying about the risks and potential rewards of Obama’s decision.

“No commander ever wants to sacrifice fighting power in the middle of a war,” Mullen said. “And no decision to demand that sacrifice is ever without risk. This is particularly true in a counterinsurgency, where success is achieved not solely by technological prowess or conventional superiority, but by the wit and the wisdom of our people as they pursue terrorists and engage the local populace on a daily basis. In a counterinsurgency, firepower is manpower.”

On the other hand, Mullen said, taking the safer course would have entailed other kinds of risks, such as increasing the Afghan government’s dependence on the U.S.

These decisions are never easy.

Evolutionary adaptation: women’s beach volleyball and the smell of urine…

Ok; this is a weird title…on purpose.

Workout notes I am planning to swim over lunch. This morning Lynn and I went to yoga with Ms. Nancy; Ms. Nancy is very creative; some of her classes are good but once in a while her creations will flop. Today, she was “on” and I left class feeling relaxed and limber.

Economics and Health Care
True, the Ryan plan sets up health care exchanges as does “Obamacare”. But: the Ryan plan removes current Medicare coverage and replaces it with something that is likely to be inadequate (the Ryan plan has supplements going up by inflation whereas premiums are going up much faster) whereas Obamacare helps people who don’t have insurance now to obtain some. That is, one reduces coverage, the other increases it. Paul Krugman has a humorous way of explaining the fallacy of the comparison:

So the argument that Ryancare is just like Obamacare is like saying that the company janitor, who gets paid $18,000 a year, and a senior vice president who gets paid 20 or 30 times that much both get paid salaries, so hey, they get exactly the same deal!

It’s truly amazing that the Very Serious don’t get this point.

One other thing: it might make sense to put young, healthy people into the insurance pool; after all their risk is lower. But older people are all but certain to be a bad deal; who wants to insure someone who is all but guaranteed to get sick? If anything, it makes sense to put everyone into Medicare (or at least allow people to buy into it); this would add money to the pool by adding lower risk people to the pool.

The title of this blog post
Yes, masturbation probably has an adaptive purpose:

1. Masturbation might remove old, worn-out, broken sperm from the reproductive tract. That would increase the fraction of healthy, speedy sperm, improving a male’s chance of becoming a father. “In humans, masturbation increases sperm quality (by promoting younger sperm) without affecting sperm numbers in the female reproductive tract,” notes biologist Jane Waterman of the University of Central Florida in a new paper in the journal PLoS One. As far back as 1993, biologists had observed that masturbating decreased the number of sperm a man delivered the next time he had sex with his partner, but not the number of sperm the woman retained. They concluded that “masturbation is a male strategy to increase sperm fitness.”

Research presented at a science meeting last year offered support for the fitter-sperm idea. Ejaculating daily for seven days improved sperm quality as measured by the amount of DNA damage: levels of damage averaged 34 percent on a standard measurement index after three days’ abstinence, but after a week of … um, non-abstinence, the level of damage dropped to 26 percent, in the “fair” range for sperm quality. Looking only at men whose sperm damage decreased (in a few, damage got worse for some reason), the average damage level fell to just under 23 percent—putting them in the “good” range. In addition, sperm motility rose significantly. Result: healthier and possibly more babies.

Note: there are three more points that are explained: hygienic, sexual advertising, and “victory lap”, at least among males. Females aren’t covered as there isn’t nearly as much data from nature.

What does this have to do with women’s beach volleyball? Do you really need to ask?

The smell of urine: yes, evolution uses this too!
Consider the following finding:

So the researchers collected urine samples from a range of sources, including zoos in New England and South Dakota. Their collection covered 38 species from predators such as lions, snow leopards and servals to herbivores including cows, giraffes and zebra. They also tested humans, cats and various rodents.[...]

Liberles and his team double-checked the role of 2-phenylethylamine by placing a few drops of it – on its own, or within lion urine – in a cage. They found that mice and rats stayed away from that part of the cage. But when they used an enzyme to remove the chemical from lion urine, the drops no longer caused any reaction.

Note: the mice stayed away from this chemical when it was taken from urine of animals that are not native to its area; that is, meat eating animals tend to have this chemical and the mice and rats have “learned” to avoid animals that smell like that! Surf to the article to read more; there are still some questions which are being researched.

What Happens when you run too many races…

It seems as if I have to do this every year.

22 June 2011 am

Workout notes: weights only today (giving myself a day off from swimming; the shoulder feels great but I want to stay conservative in my come-back)

weights: I did super sets on everything as the gym was all but empty.
Incline presses: 10 x 115, 8 x 135, 6 x 135, 6 x 135
curls (dumbbell) three sets of 10 x 25 lb. I did these seated with back support; the first set was tough.
rows (hammer machine): 10 x 200, 10 x 205, 10 x 205
pull-downs: 3 sets of 10 x 140 (shoulder friendly grip)
military presses (dumbbell): 10 x 30 lb., 10 x 40 lb. (reintroduced these today; shoulder was ok with them)
sit ups: incline 1 (highest): 40, 40, 20, incline 2: 20, incline 3: 20, incline 20.
hip adduction: 3 sets of 10 (170, 190, 190)
hip abduction: 3 sets of 10 (170, 190, 190)
glute push back (Life machine): 3 set of 10 with each leg (110 lbs.)
I also did my hip hikes, stretches, rolling around on the tennis ball, etc.

Note: I use this glute machine:

Wow, this woman has some leg development!

Here is the Hammer Row Machine being used…note I use 210 for both arms at once (105 per arm):

So I am not as quite as strong as this guy.

Science

Jerry Coyne shares his favorite popular books on evolution.

I am not an expert, but my favorites are Why Evolution is True by Coyne, The Greatest Show on Earth by Dawkins, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution by Futuyma (dated, but very good) and perhaps my favorite: Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. How anyone can read this last book and not be convinced of the broad truth of evolution is beyond me.

Fox News False Statements – The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – 06/21/11 – Video Clip | Comedy Central

Fox News becomes the New England Patriots of lying when PolitiFact checks for false statements. Airdate – 06/21/11

Fox News False Statements – The Daily Show with…, posted with vodpod

Note: here is the Politifact fact check of what he said.

Some readers have taken Politifact to task; I think that they were right, though some of the responders also had a point.

Here is what I mean: it might be true that, say, Fox News viewers know the basics (e. g., three branches of Federal Government, who their Representatives and Senators are, etc.) at the same level as others. But the type of things that they believe (that President Obama was born in Kenya, the world was created 6000 years ago, that Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann know history accurately) are completely in crackpot territory.

22 June 2011 am

I haven’t been to the gym yet.

What I’ve been doing: I’ve mostly been working through a book called A Quantum Mechanics Primer by Gillepsie. Sure, it deals with the elementary one-dimensional, non-relativistic stuff. But it provides some interesting applications for basic concepts from calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and basic calculus-based probability and statistics. There is a little bit of partial differential equations too, so far.

But I can see where I can uses some of this for examples in class.

Posts
Politics
The State of South Carolina won’t be funding a presidential primary. The Republican party says that they will have one, but the Republicans will have to cough up quite a bit of money to pull it off. I wonder how this will change the race, if there is indeed a race at that time?

Economy Paul Krugman laments that bad economic ideas (trickle-down, supply side economics) always percolate to the top:

Bill Gross of Pimco calls for more fiscal stimulus and denounces the “anti-Keynesian” consensus. Now he tells us.

But can we note just how bizarre our situation is? Keynesian economics has actually come through the crisis with flying colors. The only knock on it is the “Obama tried stimulus and it failed, neener neener” thing — but those of us who took our Keynesianism seriously warned literally from the beginning that the stimulus was far too small.

And yet in the political domain Keynesianism is seen as discredited, while various forms of crowding out/austerity is expansionary talk, which have in fact totally failed — look at interest rates! — have become orthodoxy.

Charts that make (non-rich Republicans) angry
Mother Jones has some here. Basics: rich have gotten much richer; the rest of us haven’t.

21 June 2011 (pm)

Science and Frogs
When is a species really extinct? This might sound like an easy question (provided we could observe perfectly) but even with perfect observation, the answer isn’t that easy (Mathew Cobb at Jerry Coyne’s blog):

Since I first read about them when I was about 12 years old, I’ve been intrigued by the somewhat mysterious Vegas Valley leopard frogs. Known from a handful of springs, all in what is now more or less metropolitan Las Vegas, they had disappeared before the middle of the 20th century, and had been poorly known before apparently slipping out of existence. But now they’re back– sort of.

Evon Hekkala of Fordham University and her colleagues have a paper in press in Conservation Genetics in which, using DNA extracted from specimens of Vegas Valley frogs in the collection of the California Academy of Sciences, they find that Vegas frogs are closely related to the Chiricahua leopard frog of Arizona and nearby areas. In fact, the Vegas frogs are nested within the many samples of Chiricahua frogs they studied. From this they conclude that the Vegas frog is conspecific with the Chiricahua frog, and thus the Vegas Valley leopard frog is not extinct.

Note: conspecific means “same species” (can interbreed easily, offspring is viable, etc.) Note: the ambiguity is that certain segments of a species can become extinct so perhaps the Chiricahua leopard frog can be thought of as an extinct segment within a species.

Of course, I have no training in biology and welcome correction from those who know more.

Social/internet
The New York Times ran this Brian Stelter article about anonymity and the internet: basically if you do something and someone either posts a photo of you or posts a video of you, people can find out who you are:

Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.

A commuter in the New York area who verbally tangled with a conductor last Tuesday — and defended herself by asking “Do you know what schools I’ve been to and how well-educated I am?” — was publicly identified after a fellow rider posted a cellphone video of the encounter on YouTube. The woman, who had gone to N.Y.U., was ridiculed by a cadre of bloggers, one of whom termed it the latest episode of “Name and Shame on the Web.”

Women who were online pen pals of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person’s online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup defeat last week when they were identified, tagged by acquaintances online. [...]

Politics/Economy
You are hearing a lot of noise from the Republicans about the National Labor Relations Board fighting Boeing from opening a South Carolina factory. This is what you are not hearing:

Fox News has repeatedly suggested that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is engaging in unlawful or “anti-American” activity by filing a complaint against Boeing for deciding to build a new plant in the “right to work” state of South Carolina. But the NLRB complaint alleges that Boeing moved to South Carolina in retaliation for union workers’ decision to strike, and experts say that allegations in the case represent an “absolutely standard violation” of federal labor law.[...]

And Experts Say Allegations In NLRB Complaint Are An “Absolutely Standard Violation” Of Federal Labor Laws

Labor Law Professor Brudney: “Relocating Work Away From A Plant Because Of Too Much Lawful Union Activity Would Be A Classic Violation” Of Federal Labor Laws. In a telephone interview with Media Matters, James J. Brudney, the Newton D. Baker-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, said: “Relocating work away from a plant because of too much lawful union activity would be a classic violation of 8(a)(3)” of the National Labor Relations Act, which makes it illegal for employers “to discriminat[e] in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” [Media Matters, 5/11/11]

Bottom line: the NLRB is following the law. If the Republicans think that this is a bad law, they ought to introduce legislation to remove it.

2012 Race John Huntsman is in. Read if you’d like. I don’t see him as viable in the Republican primary, but who knows? He worked for President Obama and says that he respects him and that both he and the President loves the country; he thinks that he’d make a better President. Now while I disagree with the final statement, this is the type of conduct that I approve of. Whether he gets love in the Republican primary remains to be seen.

Note: Mr. Huntsman was the governor of Utah and was President Obama’s ambassador to China.

Paul Krugman
Investments: they are actually ok, given the state of the economy; there is no “Fear of Obama”:

Investment has been growing quite fast since the economy bottomed out; it’s still low, but that’s what you’d expect given the fact that the economy is still depressed and awash in excess capacity. Brad DeLong has a good chart:

Social
Though life expectancy has gone up (in the United States), they haven’t gone up everywhere:

Compare this to the “voting shift” map (blue means “more Democrat in 2008 than in 2004; read means “more Republican”; many of the blue counties actually went Republican in 2008, but by a lesser margin.

21 June 2011: Happy Summer Solstice! (sports stuff)

Workout notes Yoga in the morning; Vickie did a lot of sun slatues.
Noon: swimming; 5 x (25 3g, 25 swim), 5 x (25 fist, 25 swim), 5 x (25 free, 25 back)
Then 10 x 100 on the 2: 1:44, 1:44, 1:43, 1:42, 1:41, 1:40, 1:41, 1:40, 1:39, 1:39 1:41.3 average.
Then 5 x (25 kick, 25 swim) fins (3 front, 1 each side)

This is progress, 6 days ago it was an average of 1:42.4. Before that it was 1:44.6 on 1 June and 1:49.7 on 29 May. Hmmm, at this rate (roughly 1 second per week) I should be world class within a year!

The good news is that my shoulder isn’t bothering me, but I AM doing my PT faithfully and I am gradually increasing yardage, doing drills, etc.

Butt Injury I stumbled onto this Jen Miller article at the New York Times:

The technical name of the condition I have is gluteus medius tendinosis — an inflammation of the tendons in the gluteus medius, one of three large muscles that make up the butt. It’s a very isolated and painful injury that knocked me out of marathon training in January with stabbing pains in my hip. It’s a symptom related to what running experts hammer at: the need for cross-training and strength training. I was running so much that I told myself I didn’t have time for the exercise machines or weights, so I have no one to blame but myself. [...]

“A new thought in running medicine is that almost all lower extremity injuries, whether they involve your calf, your plantar fascia or your iliotibial band, are linked to the gluteus medius,” said Dr. Darrin Bright, a sports medicine physician with Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and medical director of that city’s marathon. “In the last five to 10 years, we’ve just realized how much of an important role the gluteus medius plays in stabilizing the hips and the pelvis in running.”

If you think of the pelvis as a cup, the muscles that attach to it, including the three gluteal muscles and the lower abdominals, interact in an intricate choreography to keep the cup upright when you run or walk. If these muscles are strong, the cup stays in place with no pain. If one or more of those muscles is weak, the smaller muscles around the hip take on pressure they weren’t designed to bear.

The cup still stays up, but at a price. First come muscle tears and inflammation, followed by scar tissue in the muscle. If left untreated, this process becomes a cycle that keeps feeding into itself.

“For people who have persistent pain, it’s healing gone wrong,” Dr. Bright said. “That gluteus medius isn’t firing the way it’s supposed to. You’re getting an inhibition of the muscle fibers. It’s kind of dead.” [...]

Now, this isn’t a precise diagnosis, but it is enough to lead me to do what I need to do. In my case: I think that poor posture and weak gluteals caused it: mostly my symptoms are a tingling that runs down the side of my leg to my foot (sometimes at night), knots in the left gluteal cheek and gluteal pain when I stand in one place for too long, or when I walk too slow.

I also have a sore spot in the front, sort of where the top of the thigh connects to the torso (where you fold forward when you bend over)

Also swim kicking brings it on.

What relives the pain: standing straighter, tensing the gluteal cheeks, grinding the knots with a tennis ball, stretching (especially forward bends, and raising my leg sideways (think: nut cracker)and then rotating the toe away from the body (looks kind of strange)

The body is complicated.

Walking:

This is at about 3.1 km or so (1.9 miles);here you break for two 4.5 km loops; the 4 mile runners (white numbers) turn and head back; the 15K runners go up the hill. I am in a white cap and turquoise shirt (left of center; sort of background). Note the two ladies in spandex tights in the right foreground. I followed them for a while (remember: I was walking) and they stayed together for 10K or so. The one in the white went on to finish 1:30 ahead of me; the one in the blue finished 4:30 behind me.

This is taken from this set which has some nice shots of the course and of the faster runners too.