12 June 2011 early am

I am ready to go walking (in just a bit; not sure as to how long I’ll last). I’ll focus on technique and keeping good (or at least better) posture.

Governors: Rick Perry wants a day of fasting and prayer. So far, only Gov. Brownback (woo, er, R-Kansas) has agreed, though at least half of the activities might do Gov. Christie some good.

We are so busted

They are onto us!

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.

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.

9 June 2011 late pm

It is halftime of a very close Heat-Mavericks game; it is a good one.

A conservative facebook friend posted this:

YESTERDAY I had plans to write a very convincing blog post on why Tim Pawlenty would win the Republican nomination. [...]

My theory was that a majority of Republican primary voters would decide that Hunt Mitchman was their best chance to beat Barack Obama, and that Tim Pawlenty was the most believably conservative and least threatening of the Hunt Mitchman types, so voters would eventually move into his camp. This is an extension of the placebo argument that I put forward in a previous post.

But perhaps Mr Pawlenty is not convinced of this theory. Perhaps he agrees with Jonathan Bernstein, who yesterday morning—after hearing Rick Santorum argue that Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan didn’t go far enough—proposed that the largely indistinguishable candidates have a serious incentive to differentiate themselves from each other. And, yesterday afternoon, Mr Pawlenty tried to do just that, proposing an economic plan that harkened back to the early 1980s. In return, he received what must have been a pleasing headline from the New York Times.

He also received plenty of ridicule. Mr Pawlenty’s optimistic plan aims for 5% growth over ten years. Why no other candidate has proposed this is beyond me—people like growth, stupid. And “it’s been done before”, he says.

Between 1983 and 1987, the Reagan recovery grew at 4.9 percent annually. Between 1996 and 1999, under President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress, the economy grew at around 4.7 percent annually.

Never mind that neither of those expansions lasted five, let alone ten, years, or amounted to 5% growth. The key is you really have to want 5% growth, [...]

The purpose of Mr Pawlenty’s speech was not to lay out a rational economic policy fit for a president. The purpose was to lay out an irrational economic policy fit for Republican primary voters. And, just as important, to lay down a marker for Mitt Romney, Mr Pawlenty’s main Hunt Mitchman rival and the current frontrunner. By staking out ground so far to the right, he now forces Mr Romney to forge an even zanier economic scheme, lest he be accused of dishonouring the legacy of Reagan (as defined by people far to the right of Reagan). It’s a canny political strategy.

And it’s awful for America. As the candidates try to out-tea-party one another, they push the Overton window of acceptable economic policy to the absurd right. This makes it much more difficult for a reasonable Republican candidate to win office, and for any Republican politician to support reasonable economic policy. And no matter what party you belong to, you should find it troubling that Mr Pawlenty’s ridiculous economic plan could ever be considered acceptable by a large portion of the population.

Wow. As I said, what happened in the 2010 Delaware US Senate race may well happen in the 2012 Presidential race…we shall see.

The Sarah Palin History Network 06/07/11

The Sarah Palin History Network explains the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The Sarah Palin History Network 06/07/11, posted with vodpod

Hat tip: Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

9 June 2011: kind of dead edition

I am feeling tired; my sleep patterns are a bit off.

Workout notes yoga in the morning (as I said before)
Lunch: 3 mile walk in 39:10 (13:55 first mile) on the indoor track; I tried to focus on technique and form.
Swim: 10 x (25 front, 25 swim), 10 x (25 3g, 25 swim), 6 x 50 fist, 4 x (25 front, 25 back)
My piriformis hurt a bit; I need to be regular on my piriformis and back stretches.

My shoulder felt ok.

Ultra notes:
I ran through my calculations again; gives the anticipated 24 hour walk result “y” in terms of weekly training mileage “x” (taken over 12 weeks, with a 2 week taper). and which suggests a strong linear correlation between training mileage and performance; the slope term is significant at the level with 95 percent confidence interval .

Upshot: my upping my weekly training mileage gives me a “one for one” benefit or, put another way, every 7 miles I walk in training means one more mile in a race. My training mileage explains about 61 percent of my performance.

Other topics
Here is what I consider to be valid criticism of President Obama: Robert Reich talks about the President reaching out to Republicans by offering things like a reduction in the employer contribution to the payroll tax and other such “business friendly” things. Reich points out that the real problem is on the “demand side”:

Can we get real for a moment? Businesses don’t need more financial incentives. They’re already sitting on a vast cash horde estimated to be upwards of $1.6 trillion. Besides, large and middle-sized companies are having no difficulty getting loans at bargain-basement rates, courtesy of the Fed.

In consequence, businesses are already spending as much as they can justify economically. Almost two-thirds of the measly growth in the economy so far this year has come from businesses rebuilding their inventories. But without more consumer spending, there’s they won’t spend more. A robust economy can’t be built on inventory replacements.

The problem isn’t on the supply side. It’s on the demand side. Businesses are reluctant to spend more and create more jobs because there aren’t enough consumers out there able and willing to buy what businesses have to sell.

The reason consumers aren’t buying is because consumers’ paychecks are dropping, adjusted for inflation. And job losses are mounting. The 83,000 new private-sector jobs created in May represent a net loss because 125,000 jobs are needed merely to keep up with an expanding labor force. The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits edged higher last week.

9 June 2011 early am

I woke up in time for yoga; I’ll swim and maybe do a short walk over lunch.
Yoga: I went through the motions; tiny class (3 plus the teacher) but Barbara and Theresa are “babes” so it was fun for me.

Now many of the sights in our gym aren’t so pretty:

Julie Larson (the writer of the strip Dinette Set) understands life in small-to-medium sized towns in Illinois.

Posts
Frogs: The Darwin frog is shaped like a bamboo leaf. It also has an interesting characteristic: the tadpoles actually develop in the male’s vocal sack and come out as larger tadpoles.

Here is a longer video (5 and a half minutes) long.

Creationism
Of course Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection was published in the 1860′s, though other types of “evolution” had been proposed before that. Some creationists don’t seem to remember this:

Atheism Here is a discussion on the atheism/agnosticism “debate”. It is an ok read but I admit that I entertain myself in a different way.

So I call myself an “atheist”. Here is what I mean by that:
1. I believe that the standard gods (those worshiped by humans throughout the years) do not exist. It is possible that some of them do, but I see the probability as being so remote as to not be worth thinking about.
2. I do not believe in any deity that interferes in the events of the universe; in particular I believe that humans were the result of a stochastic evolutionary process and not an intentional result of some plan. Again, I might be wrong, but I consider the possibility to be so remote as to not worry about it.
3. There might be some “cosmic spirit/creative force/whatever” that humans don’t know about and haven’t been able to detect so far; in fact it might “exist” (whatever that means) but will remain undetectable by us. I really am agnostic with respect to this type of “whatever”; in fact I agree with Richard Dawkins here:

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.

[...]

If you like this sort of discussion, read the whole thing; this is a discussion between Francis Collins (mapper of the human genome and the head of our NIH) and Richard Dawkins. Now having these two over for dinner would be some type of party!
Obviously, I really like both of these guys.

Some FANS 24 Hour Photos and stuff

Note: many, many more photos here.
My subcollection of these photos (via Betty Greene and Bruce Leisure) can be found here.

Course: One 1.6 mile (2.57 km) out and back followed by 2.4 mile (3.89 km) loops around a Lake, with small out and back segments (220 yards, or 200 meter) in the last hour. It is mostly asphalt; some concrete though one is allowed to run/walk on the grass.

I am relaxed early on. I walked a mile or two with this elderly gentleman.

Ray Sharp went out hard early.

Now you see why Mellody Hughes won “most inspirational walker”; she wore a variety of crazy shorts (here is her “smiley face butt” shorts); she also did 100km plus.

Dan Molnar had a nice steady effort and ended up with 100 km plus also.

The day was to get hot; here Barbara Curnow leads two other generations (daughter and granddaughter) in an attempt to get everyone 50 miles. Barbara and daughter made it!

Late in the race: Maryann’s tights were a big hit. So were her 80 miles.

Marsha White (3′rd with 76 miles) and Maryann together; this was earlier in the race.

about 30 km into the race, I had enough energy left to be able to clown just a bit; that didn’t last. Note the runner who is also joining in.

I am losing energy here as the day heated up.

Keith Hardy enjoying his drink; it was really getting hot (by Midwestern standards) then.

The O’Connors walked the 12 hour together and tied for 1′st with 45 miles.

In the early morning hours. My race: 30.7 miles (almost 50K) in the first 8:40 more or less steady; ok, I did walk a couple of miles with a MILF in yoga pants pushing a stroller; I gawked a bit but we also talked.
Then the next 3:20 saw me getting sick, attempting one 2.4 mile lap and barely finishing it; I then went back to my hotel room to sleep it off. I returned with 5:22 left to go (18:38) and got 21 more miles.

Mellody’s “electrifying butt” shorts…..very “shocking” (lighting pattern…get it? )

Note Keith Hardy’s “reelect me for school board” sign in the background.

I found some inspiration toward the end of the race!

Last 400 meters of the race; giving my all; my form is falling apart.

Finishing that last 200 meters in the last 90 seconds. No form at all. But the guy behind me and I high 5′d each other.

After the race: Ray Sharp (2′nd place): laying down; Maryann Ramirez (winner in loud tights), Keith Hardy (right) and me (yellow gold shirt).

I won! I won! Maryann with her well deserved 1′st place award.

This attack ad won’t work, at least on TV

The “clever” NRSC put out this attack ad:

Of course, if you pay attention to the ad, you’ll see that it is an attack ad.
(point: they use the HCR debacle as an example of how the President didn’t bring the country together; what they don’t say is that this was basically the bill that Bob Dole wrote in the early 1990′s and that Mitt Romney passed in Massachusetts and that the temper tantrum was mostly the result of cynical blind opposition by Republicans who put politics above country…but never mind that…)

But…the images, minus the sound..are mostly positive and on a TV ad, the images matter more than the actual content.

So if this is the best that the Republican attack machine can muster, this might not be such a hard task.

8 June 2011 (pm)

Workout notes
Swim: 4 x (25 front, 25 side, 50 free), 1 x (25 front, 25 sfs, 50 free)
Then 5 x (25 3g, 25 free, 25 fist, 25 free); I was finishing these in 2:03 to 2:05.
Then 5 x 100 on the 2: 1:45, 1:43, 1:43, 1:41, 1:39.
That last one was my first sub 1:40 in a long, long time; hopefully it won’t be the last.

I went outside to walk a bit; I did a hodgepodge of courses as the local outdoor track was being resurfaced. It was about 90 F out and I wanted some heat conditioning; I focused on posture. I can tell it worked as my piriformis didn’t bother me at all, either during or after.

Posts
Yes, Republicans were crowing about a recent poll that showed Mitt Romney in a virtual dead heat with President Obama. But that is just one poll:

Just when conservatives were getting their hopes up because a recent WAPO poll showed Obama statistically tied with Romney, a breaking new poll has slammed that door shut.

What follows are the results from Quinnipiac which are similar to the last 14 polls that shows Obama ahead. In fact, the last poll that I could find other than the WAPO poll was Quinnipiac, November 2010 where they had Obama down to Romney by one point.

I’m also including some sad racial data that shows surprisingly high levels of racial and religious bigotry that is led by republicans. However we dems have work to do as well especially regarding Hispanics.

1. “If the 2012 election for President were being held today, and the candidates were – Barack Obama the Democrat and [blank] the Republican for whom would you vote?”

a. Obama 47% Romney 41%
b. Obama 48% Huntsman 34%
c. Obama 48% Pawlenty 36%
d. Obama 53% Palin 36%

2. Obama vs. Romney by demographics and party affiliation:

a. Independents: Obama 45/38%
b. Men: Obama 43/45%
c. Women: Obama 50/38%
d. Under 34: Obama 52/34%
e. 35-54: Obama 48-40%
f. 55+ Obama 44/46%

And, 17% of conservatives support Obama.

Sure, the economy still sucks and there is a lot of time between now and November 2012.
But again, it was worse when the Republicans held control:

Even worse, the Republicans want to take us back and do the same things that didn’t work before!