Morton Pumpkin Fest 10K 2011

Today I ran the Morton Pumpkin Fest 10K; I’ve done it previously in 1997 and 1999 (42:xx), 2000 (44:xx), 2001 (52:xx, social run) 2002 (57:xx as a walker, bent knees), 2005 (49:xx as a runner), 2008 (57:xx as a runner).

There was the very real danger that I might set a personal worst today, though my training is starting to pick up a bit.

The weather was cool (50′s) with a breeze; the upshot is that I finished in 56:22 (my watch). The downside: I started too quickly (for me in my current conditioning): 8:40 mpm. It felt slow at first but after 2 miles, I could feel it draining me. so I made myself walk for a minute to recover and so I could run with a slower pack; the faster pack was sucking me along.

That went fine…until I got to mile 4 (35:30; 18:07 for the 2 mile stretch). That was starting to drain on me again. So I took one more 1 minute break and still reached mile 5 in 44:58. Then I should have gone into a “just finish” with dignity mode; instead I tried to pick it up. That lasted about 2:30 or so. Then I HAD to walk; I was wheezing like a steam engine. And yes, that MILF with short hair and shiny blue spandex shorts got away.

That last mile is always deceptive; you see the small Ferris wheel and the line for the pancakes and think that you are closer to the finish than you really are; you have to discipline yourself to push to the traffic lights in the distance (which are about 20-30 yards behind the true finish line). I hit mile 6 in 54:34 (9:36 with my unplanned walk) and managed to hold off one younger woman right at the line. Hey, it is still a race, isn’t it?

I walked back to get Tracy who was doing her “not quite running, not quite walking” and she finished just over 1:22. I met her at about 5.5 miles and yelled out “get going Lard Butt!” (Tracy is skinny). The policeman working traffic control laughed and asked “are you going to let him talk to you like that!” We finished together. In past years, she had run 1:06 (2005) and 1:03 (2002). We are all slowing down.

Still, even with the uneven pacing at the start and my foolish attempt to kick, this was my best running race of 2011..then again the bar is mighty low.

The good news: when I ran in the 42′s, only skinny women were ahead of me. Now, the women with bigger asses are ahead of me (not intentional on my part ) and almost all of them were in lycra! Now if only I were fast enough to stay in sight of them longer…that’s incentive to train, right?

The President Makes the Case For His Jobs Bill

16 September 2011 PM

Workout notes No swim; no lifeguard.
But I did lift: lunges and rotator cuff
100 sit ups (4 sets of 25 with two sets together)
adduction: 3 sets with 180
abduction: 3 sets with 180
dumbbell military: seated: two sets of 15 x 40 lb., standing: one set of 10
incline bench: 10 x 120, 8 x 120
bench press: 135 x 10, 155 x 7, 155 x 6
curls (dumbbell) 3 sets of 12 x 25 lb.
pull down: 3 sets of 10 x 145
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 200

Posts
Wisdom of the crowd? It depends: yes, there is wisdom in following the smartest and most capable, and there is wisdom in averaging responses. But on consulting with the average? Not so much.

The experiment was carried out at The Royal Veterinary College’s annual Open Day in May this year when RVC researchers asked prospective students and their families to guess the number of sweets in a jar. The average guesses of 82 people who guessed in isolation came within just one sweet of the true quantity.

However, in the real-world people have access to public information, so the researchers re-ran the experiment but told people what others had guessed. Whether the researchers provided the last person’s guess, the mean guess, or a random guess, collective wisdom plummeted.

In fact, individuals with access to public information over-estimated the number of sweets in the jar, resembling information cascades that result in economic bubbles where people drive prices of items (e.g. stocks) above their value.
Use of public information did prove to be beneficial however, when individuals were given access to the current best guess. This reduced the likelihood of extreme predictions, and individuals in this test both performed better individually and collectively at smaller group sizes than the other conditions studied. [...]

What our work demonstrates is that for accurate collective decisions, you either aggregate completely independent opinions, or copy successful individuals; anything in-between seems doomed to failure.”

Media
Yes, the media is pretty stupid….instead of reporting facts it tries to give “both sides” even when there is only one:

There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.” No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.

I have in mind two examples, both involving, as it happens, David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. Neither one is exactly new, but I picked them because not only is Gregory host of television’s highest-rated Sunday morning news show, by far, but his program is also considered to be the most influential and important of all TV news programs. As the alleged gold standard of television interviewing and discussion, it sets the tone for much of the rest of the week’s reporting. Also, I just can’t get these two examples out of my head, they are so damn stupid. See if you agree.

I. On August 13, discussing the Ames, Iowa, straw poll, Gregory made this observation on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown: “You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that’s extreme. Well, people on the other side think introducing healthcare reform for the whole country is akin to European socialism.” To be honest, in the space allotted to me I’m not sure I can do justice to the multiple forms of stupidity this comment manages to combine. But let me try. To begin with, we have the stupidity of lavishing so much attention on the wholly meaningless Ames straw poll in the first place. Leave that aside. Gregory was trying to create a sense of moral and intellectual equivalence between Rick Perry’s 2009 suggestion that Texas might secede from the United States—an action that set off the Civil War when South Carolina did it in 1860—and Obama’s proposal and Congress’s passage of a healthcare reform bill modeled on the one put in place by Mitt Romney when he was the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Given that Obama dropped the bill’s public option, the legislation relies entirely on private healthcare providers and does not create any significant new government bureaucracies to help implement it. When all is said and done, the program is a modest—and in many ways disappointing—version of a vision that has been part of American debate since Teddy Roosevelt proposed it in 1912 and Harry Truman made it a central part of the Democratic Party platform since 1948.

Moreover, Gregory applies the word “socialism” not only to the legislation but also to contemporary European economies. Here one is forced to inquire, “Which ones?” France, Germany, Britain, Italy, etc., are all capitalist economies led by conservative governments. True, Republican idiots like Newt Gingrich—Gregory’s most frequent guest in 2009—use the word “socialist” to mean “enjoys a higher tax rate on wealthy people than Republican funders would prefer,” but why must Gregory misuse it in the service of the same cause?

The answer is, of course, to prevent angering the stupid Republican viewers.
Lest you think that this is aimed only at Republicans, I have to admit (very reluctantly) that the stupidity comes when we talk about woo that is in fashion with liberals (e. g., “alternative” medicine, new age nonsense and the like). Also note that Michelle Bachmann’s concern about mental retardation and vaccines is shared by many on the left. Yes, The Nation (the article that called out the stupidity of the “socialist” claim) ran “climate change denialist” stuff too.

Republicans and safety nets
Paul Krugman weighs in on what some of the tea party behavior at some of the recent debates says:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.

Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.

The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.

So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!”

Think, in particular, of the children.

The day after the debate, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates on income, poverty and health insurance. The overall picture was terrible: the weak economy continues to wreak havoc on American lives. One relatively bright spot, however, was health care for children: the percentage of children without health coverage was lower in 2010 than before the recession, largely thanks to the 2009 expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.

And the reason S-chip was expanded in 2009 but not earlier was, of course, that former President George W. Bush blocked earlier attempts to cover more children — to the cheers of many on the right. Did I mention that one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation?

So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics. [...]

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

There was a time when I had conservative friends; our discussions were about HOW to have a more just, more compassionate society and not on whether to have one at all. We had rough agreement of where we wanted to go but disagreed on how to get there.

Politics
Of course the Presidents approval ratings have taken a hit with everyone but blacks and liberal Democrats.

But Congress is rated even lower; well at least people rate OTHER PEOPLE’s Representatives and Senators pretty darned low:

Congress faces historically low approval ratings as it wades into the debate over the $447 billion jobs package proposed by President Obama, with just 12 percent of Americans now approving of the way Congress is handling its job, matching its all-time low, recorded in October 2008 at the height of the economic crisis, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Voters are slightly more disapproving of the Republicans in Congress than they are of the Democrats, with just 19 percent approving of Republicans, compared with 28 percent that approve of Democrats.

Republican voters are more dissatisfied with their party’s representatives than are Democrats. Half of Republican voters say they disapprove of Republicans in Congress, while 43 percent of Democratic voters say they disapprove of Democrats in Congress. Independents are slightly less approving of Congressional Republicans than Congressional Democrats.

But as far as their own…well, that is low too but, of course, not as low:

When pollsters asked about voters’ own representatives in Congress, they expressed generally more positive or supportive views. But public opinion has changed, with many now saying it’s time for someone else to have a chance. Just 33 percent of voters say their own representative in Congress deserves to be re-elected, and 57 percent say it’s time to elect someone else — another record level of dissatisfaction.

Democratic and independent voters are slightly more frustrated with their own representatives, with about 6 in 10 of each saying it’s time for a new person. This isn’t entirely surprising, with Republicans currently in control of the House. But nearly half of Republican voters also say their representative does not deserve re-election.

I suppose that isn’t a surprise: conservatives are disgusted at the socialist liberals who won’t go along and liberals don’t like conservative obstructionism either (one person’s obstructionism is another person’s “willingness to fight for principle”).