21 September 2011 PM

Workout notes
Track: 3 mile walk in 35:35 (12:19, 11:57, 11:18) then 2200 yard swim (500 free, 500 kick/free (fins), 1000 alternating 100 pull, 100 free, 200 back/free (fins)). The swim was mediocre; I forgot my usual goggles and ear plugs. I only walked 3 miles because I had to go back to the house because I forgot my lunch.

Posts
Science: the body heals itself but:

Although the body is constantly replacing cells and cell constituents, damage and imperfections accumulate over time. Cleanup efforts are saved for when it really matters. Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, are able to show how the body rids itself of damage when it is time to reproduce and create new life.

‘I have a daughter. She is made of my cells yet has much less cellular damage than my cells. Why didn’t she inherit my cells including the damaged proteins? That’s the process I’m interested in,’ says Malin Hernebring from the Department of Cell- and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg. A few days after conception, the cells in the embryo all look the same – they are unspecified stem cells that can develop into any bodily cell type. As the process of cell specification (differentiation) begins, they go from being able to keep dividing infinitely to being able to do so only a limited number of times. This is when they start cleansing themselves. ‘Quite unexpectedly we found that the level of protein damage was relatively high in the embryo’s unspecified cells, but then it decreased dramatically. A few days after the onset of cell differentiation, the protein damage level had gone down by 80-90 percent. We think this is a result of the damaged material being broken down.’[...]

In the past, researchers have believed that the body keeps cells involved in reproduction isolated and protected from damage. Now it has been shown that these types of cells go through a rejuvenation process that rids them of the inherited damage.

Some types of protein damage in the body increase with age. Although all the necessary information is stored in the DNA, something keeps the body from using it to keep repairing the body.

‘These types of protein damages are what make us appear old, like wrinkles around the eyes. While wrinkles are relatively harmless, serious problems may arise elsewhere in the body. I’m thinking of age-related diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes and cancer.’

(source article)

Social: sometimes well intentioned safety laws have unintended consequences:

Risks of teen driving:

For more than a decade, California and other states have kept their newest teen drivers on a tight leash, restricting the hours when they can get behind the wheel and whom they can bring along as passengers. Public officials were confident that their get-tough policies were saving lives.

Now, though, a nationwide analysis of crash data suggests that the restrictions may have backfired: While the number of fatal crashes among 16- and 17-year-old drivers has fallen, deadly accidents among 18-to-19-year-olds have risen by an almost equal amount. In effect, experts say, the programs that dole out driving privileges in stages, however well-intentioned, have merely shifted the ranks of inexperienced drivers from younger to older teens.

This is called “risk shifting”.

Social
One of the things I like about the United States is that, on the whole, we do a good job protecting freedom of speech:

When Erich Campbell passed two Florida Highway Patrol cruisers parked in the median near Tampa International Airport in December 2009, he flashed his headlights to warn oncoming drivers of the radar patrol.

Then, to his surprise, one of the troopers pulled over his silver Toyota Tundra and ticketed him for improper flashing of high beams.

“Literally within one minute, they had me stopped on the side of the road,” recalled Campbell, 38, a former electrician and full-time student.

In August, the Land O’Lakes, Fla., resident filed a class-action lawsuit in Tallahassee against the highway patrol and other state traffic-enforcement agencies. He seeks an injunction barring law enforcement from issuing headlight-flash tickets, plus refunds and civil damages for previously cited motorists.

Campbell’s lawyer, J. Marc Jones, claims his client’s First Amendment right to free speech was violated. “The flashing of lights to communicate with another driver is clearly speech,” he said.

David Hudson, a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University who has studied the issue, said motorists have previously challenged headlight-flashing tickets in New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee, but those were individual cases, rather than the statewide class-action lawsuit in Florida.

“The First Amendment protects all sorts of non-verbal conduct; it protects more than the spoken or printed word,” Hudson said. “Courts have found that a wide variety of actions — such as honking one’s horn or flashing one’s headlights — are forms of communication under the First Amendment.”

Note: Florida has stopped issuing tickets for this, pending the outcome of this lawsuit.

I also like it that we are free (legally) to criticize religion; that isn’t the case in some European countries.

But still there are too many Americans who want religion to have some privileged status:

A handful of atheists (15 to be exact) did a horrible, horrible thing in Huntington, Beach, California last week. Did they throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls? Did they mutilate the genitals of young women? Did they threaten children who masturbated with the threat of hell? Did they make little girls wear cloth sacks, and not venture out without a male relative?

No, none of that. It was far worse. Their crime? They ripped up pages of the Bible. No, not even pages of the Bible: some photocopies of Bible verses (watch the video here). Actually, one particularly vicious and militant atheist did desecrate a single page of the scriptures.

But that was enough for author and rabbi Brad Hirshfield’s to write an intemperate column at the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post: “When atheism turns ugly.“ He argues that the destruction of texts is the opposite of free thought (note: they did not destroy any texts; they destroyed some photocopies)[...]

Here is the article that Jerry Coyne is talking about:

Fanatical atheism is no worse and no better than fanatical religion, though it may be more bitterly ironic. There is something pretty odd, dare I say hypocritical, about a bunch of people who call themselves “freethinkers” and “humanists” not only verbally abusing people of faith, but actually tearing up verses from the Bible as an act of protest, as they did on a pier in Huntington Beach, California Saturday morning. It doesn’t sound terribly humane to me, and I am quite sure that destroying texts, however much one may object to them, is the opposite of free thought.

Oh boy. Uh…compare that to…uh, perhaps blowing up an abortion clinic, murdering a doctor or having state sanctioned executions for apostasy? PLEASE.

Now to one of the things I really don’t like about the United States: the death penalty. Yes, I am aware of the Troy Davis case; I don’t know the details though I do know that pressure may have lead the Supreme Court of the United States to take a look at the case, thereby providing a temporary delay.

Yes, the vast majority of those who get executed really did what they are being executed for, and many of those who proclaim innocence are simply lying and many of these sucker people into taking them up as a cause. But not everyone who is executed is guilty and that is just plain unacceptable to me.

Note the list of countries that have abolished the death penalty.

I’d much rather be with the countries that abolished it. But let’s face it: Americans are too backwards and too superstitious to do away with it; in this respect we are more similar to the Islamic Republics (though not nearly as bad) than we are to advanced European nations. Note that even the REPUBLIC of Georgia has abolished the death penalty.

No, I can’t blame this one entirely on the Republicans (Gallup):

Yes, the Republicans are MORE LIKELY to be backward, but the percentage of Democrats that support it is still shamefully high.

Politics
Dick Morris: thinks that President Obama might pull out of his reelection bid. Part of his evidence:

Just looking at Michelle Obama’s unsmiling face during her husband’s recent speech to Congress triggered an insight: These folks aren’t having fun anymore.

OKKKAAAAYYY. Note: Intrade has had President Obama at 50 percent plus or minus about .5 percent for the last month or two; yes that was down from earlier.

Economy The Republicans (and to be fair, AP “fact check”) have been saying that President Obama is wrong about his claims about “the wealthy” paying less in tax (as a percentage) than middle class people. Paul Krugman has provided some insights about this (here he discusses who benefited the most from tax cuts and here:

Well, it seems as if a number of people in the media have decided that Obama was fibbing when he said that some millionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries — because, as the usual suspects triumphantly declare, on average millionaires pay higher average taxes than middle-income Americans.

This is, of course, stupid: the operative word is SOME.

And we’re not talking about one or two exceptional guys, either. Look at the IRS data on returns for the 400 highest incomes in America (pdf) — specifically, Table 43. If you look at the numbers since 2004, you’ll see that in a typical year between 30 and 40 percent of those super-high-income players paid an average tax rate of less than 15 percent; most of them paid less than 20 percent. Bear in mind that for the very wealthy the payroll tax — the main burden on working-class Americans — is trivial, because of the cap on Social Security and the fact that it only applies to earned income. And what becomes clear is that the Obama/Buffet claim is absolutely, totally true.

So why the attack? Probably because it’s such an effective line.

In another article, he provides a table. Sure the table takes effort to follow which means that this will be useless for someone looking for a quick soundbite. But I find it interesting. So here it is: (data from the Tax Policy Center)

How to read this: look at, say the 100-200 line (these are household incomes). The percentiles are “percent of households in this income range that pay this percent of taxes”. So the lowest 10′th percentile pays more 10.3 percent in taxes, 25′th percentile pays 15.6 percent, 40′th percentile 18.1, 75′th percentile 22.4 percent and the 90′th percentile pays more than 24.6 percent. Note: this is combined income and payroll tax. Now look at the 1,000,000 income line: that’s right; the lower percentile tax payers pay much less in tax that the upper percentile 40-50K people. So yes, numerically, lots of millionaires pay less tax than lots of middle income people, even though the median millionaire does pay more than the median 40-50K person.

Humor Via the Fail Blog:

see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!

see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!