Come together? Not in this lifetime...

Workout notes Since I won’t be running on Saturday, I figured out that I needed a medium/long run today and one on Sunday (weights and medium walking tomorrow).

So I went to the university gym (local roads still have icy patches) and decided to run somewhere between 8 and 10 miles, split between our “8 laps to the mile” indoor track and the treadmill.

What happened: 10K (50 laps) on the track in 1:01, 5K (3.11 miles) on the treadmill in 29:04. The track: 19:55 (2 miles), 9:49, 9:35, 9:40, 9:37 (58:38) then the treadmill went 9:50, 19:05, 28:12, 29:04 (slight variation of the incline). That is 1:30:04 or 9:40 mpm for 15K. That is far from stellar but better than my usual post-blood donation week workouts.

Note: I decided to leave the track as it is a “some rubber on concrete” type of operation; it is probably just a tiny bit softer than pavement but I could feel the pounding a bit. The whole time: first 58 minutes: one walker (a guy); last two minutes: two guys got on. It was very, very empty.

Posts
I like the Field Museum in Chicago, but there is trouble afoot. Evidently, there is some movement to cut back on the science research being sponsored/performed there. As Jerry Coyne points out: that is really the heart of a top caliber museum, even if the cutting edge research is hidden from view. Yeah, I’ve noticed the “dumbing down” of the displays, but the reality appears to be this: (opinion only)
the more expensive a museum is, the more patrons it needs. The more patrons it draws, the more “regression to the mean” effects occur which leads to the museum playing lighter demands on the visitors.

I still remember my trip to the Los Alamos science museum. It was small, and I spent 4 hours there! But you should have seen many of the other visitors; it was a “come in…give a blank glance and leave” all within 15-20 minutes time.

This was one of the exhibits: they explained why the Tokomak had to be in the shape of a torus: the only two smooth surfaces that have nowhere vanishing vector fields are the torus and the klein bottle, and only the former embeds in 3-space (this is a consequence of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem).

They gave a display of the “hairy ball” theorem, etc. The museum worked for me, but I wonder how popular it was with the public in general.

Speaking of education Randazza’s blog takes another swing at campus speech codes. The argument here appears to be: if you don’t let students discuss emotionally charged topics, then the dialogue becomes sterile and students with differing views might tend to withdraw into like minded groups.

I don’t know; one thing is that student with student speech is different from faculty to student speech. Here is why: when I am in the front of the class room, my job is to teach mathematics and NOT to have a captive audience for my social opinons. And were I to say something like: “well, Mexicans are too stupid to ever learn math”, I would probably damage my credibility to teach mathematics to this student population, thereby harming my ability to do my job.

On the other hand, being too PC might also harm our ability to educate. Example: yes, the earth is about 4 billion years old, modern animals did evolve by a process that shows ZERO signs of being designed and the current animal kingdom shares common ancestry. Those are FACTS.

Other facts: certain racial groups in the United States commit certain crimes at a higher rate than other groups (African Americans are more likely to commit homicide (and be victims too, especially males), white people are more likely to drive while intoxicated, etc.) Statistically speaking, women are not as physically strong as men (though a female Olympic weight lifter is stronger than all but a tiny percentage of males). Certain groups score higher on IQ tests than other groups. Countries with higher religiosity commit homicide at higher rates than countries with lower religiosity, and the same applies to states in the United States.

These are all facts and all of these make one group or another uncomfortable. But part of education is learning to confront uncomfortable reality and make sense of it.

So, I understand the need to, say, keep a skinhead group from burning crosses on the quad lawn. But controversial topics SHOULD be discussed on a college campus!

Politics
This is tough to remember: politically speaking, one person’s obstructionism is someone else’s “stand up and fight for us”. Our House of Representatives consists of people from wildly differing districts and while Congress has a low approval rating on the whole, people, in general, disapprove of OTHERS in Congress and not their own Representative. Example: my friends (and I!) might think that John Shimkus is a delusional idiot but he is reasonably popular in his district.

I admit that I live in a place that made things worse. For the longest time I was in a Republican US House District (IL-18) but, thanks to redistricting, put into a Democratic leaning one (IL-17). So for the first time since 1990 (when I lived in Austin, Texas), I voted for the winner in a contested US House race. I did vote for Ray LaHood a couple of times, but that is when he had zero or crackpot opposition.

As far as Republicans go, read this “mainstream” article from Town Hall:

As a candidate for president of the United States, it is incumbent on me to make a statement regarding the Sandy Hook massacre and to explain how my policies would help prevent other such massacres should I become president. As I discuss this sensitive topic, it is also incumbent on me to sound more rational and articulate than the incumbent. That will not be difficult.

[...]

First and foremost, concealed weapons permits decrease violence. The rationale is simple if we consider that crime only happens when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target in the absence of a capable guardian. Everyone knows that the gunless are suitable targets for violent crime. This is particularly the case when there is no one around to guard them.

So my plan will turn these teachers into capable guardians. I really think everyone will benefit when teachers stop taking “social justice in the classroom” and other silly education classes in order to be certified to teach our kids. Simply put, there can be no social justice when children are being slaughtered in the schoolhouse.

2. More male teachers (and fewer metrosexual students). Some have suggested that most female teachers would not feel comfortable around guns. So they might be deterred from teaching if they have to go through weapons certification, which requires firing a weapon. This is not a problem as far as I am concerned.

For far too long, men have been grossly underrepresented in the teaching profession. This has had a profound impact on young men. From kindergarten to high school graduation, they are too often in the position of trying to please a female authority figure. This lack of balance affects their relationships with both women and men. A constant concern with pleasing women eventually turns a man into a woman. That is why we have so many young adult metrosexual males talking about their feelings.

Simply put, having gun toting male role models in the classroom will be good. Having your student taught by Ted Nugent just might keep him from becoming Ted Baxter.

3. Fewer liberals in the teaching profession. For years, conservatives have been looking for a cure to the problem of liberal indoctrination in our schools. [...]

Ok, on the flip side of this: what would I find appealing? This Slate article is about how a candidate can appeal to the “no specified religion” voter (different from an atheist voter; the atheist voter would be a proper subset of this block).

I’ll highlight a couple of points:

2. Even if you’re religious, don’t gratuitously bash or exclude those who aren’t. For the most part, the nonreligious are politically realistic. We know that in a society as religious as the United States, some amount of pandering is an electoral necessity. But just because you speak to churches doesn’t mean you can’t also speak to the unchurched. In March 2012, for example, the Reason Rally brought together tens of thousands of American nonbelievers on the National Mall in Washington, DC. One of the speakers at that event was Iowa senator Tom Harkin, and despite some grumbling over his support of non-evidence-based medicine, we recognized that it took political courage for him to address us. The next time he’s in a tight race, it’s very possible that a few Iowa nonbelievers will remember that, and will be willing to do just a little bit more to support him.

[...]

6. Stand up for science. The nonreligious have no use for religious dogmas being passed off as science. We want candidates who take a firm line against creationism or abstinence-only sex ed, who affirm that these are religious ideas that can be taught at home or in church, but which have no place in our secular public schools. But it doesn’t end with opposing religiously motivated pseudoscience: we also want to see good science promoted and supported. We want candidates who’ll support generous funding for fundamental scientific research, and not just those branches of science that have military applications. We want to see candidates who accept, and are willing to act on, the overwhelming scientific consensus about the reality of human-caused climate change (as compared to the conservatives who deny it for explicitly religious reasons). We want investment in alternative energy, in next-generation infrastructure and mass transit, and in making higher education as widely available and affordable as possible. Since it’s a well-known fact that greater education correlates with less religious extremism, this is not only good policy, it’s good politics, and it benefits both progressive Americans and America as a whole.

Yes, Sen. Harkin’s support for quack/woo “medicine” irritated me too. But no one is perfect.

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