# blueollie

## Up Early…

Strangely enough, I usually wake up very early the day after a long running or walking event. I sleep soundly, but for a shorter period of time.
Today I was wide awake at 3:30 AM.

I am sorer than expected. Not bad, and not as sore as after a good marathon; that is probably because what I did was really a glorified “hike” with a bit of jogging.

I’ll do an easy, slow paced weight session this morning.

Posts
This New York Times article is about a 16 year old runner who puts in 100-110 miles per week. She ran a 2:58 (good for 6′th among the women) at the Cleveland Marathon.

On one hand, I wonder if she is missing her teenage years; on the other hand: is it really that different from my putting in so much extra time in an effort (a failed effort) to become a football player?

Mathematics and Academia
Yitang Zhang was a bit of an unknown mathematician who managed to solve a very well known problem. It doesn’t happen often, but if you do good work, it will be acknowledged.

This article is a nice synopsis of what happened. Basically: he showed that there are an infinite collections of pairs of primes that are less than 70,000,000 units apart. Of course, the goal is “2″, but, until this, we didn’t have a proof that there was any finite number that worked. Now we have one.

On the other hand, cranky stuff doesn’t get acknowledged, nor should it.

An amusing cartoon:

Note: I very much care about providing a professional level effort in the classroom and in my own research.

Politics
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub provides some old photos of presidents and umbrellas. I wonder if the right wing has finally jumped the shark…ok it has done so a long time ago but I wonder if they are finally getting called out on their ridiculous BS.

May 20, 2013

## That’s Right: Creationists Really Believe this!

From The Nation (about a year ago) (by Katha Pollitt)

Why does it matter that almost half the country rejects the overwhelming evidence of evolution, with or without the hand of God? After all, Americans are famously ignorant of many things—like where Iran is or when World War II took place—and we are still here. One reason is that rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it. A flute discovered in southern Germany is 43,000 years old? Not bloody likely. It’s probably some old bone left over from an ancient barbecue. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, has installed a holographic exhibit of Lucy, the famous proto-human fossil, showing how she was really just a few-thousand-year-old ape after all.

and in an internet “broadside”:

May 18, 2013

## Fake Scandals, Parasites, Fracking and Calculus

Mathematics This is an interesting (and lengthy) post about Gottfried Leibniz: he was one of the cofounders of calculus and one who was credited with inventing the $\frac{df}{dx}$ notation, as well as the “product rule” in calculus.

IQ and race Mano Singham has a gift for writing about tough subjects; his ideas about “race and IQ” are worth reading. We pretty much agree.

Education
Should we use blood types, as a class project, to demonstrate genetics? That SOUNDS nice, but there are some pitfalls (hints: possibly adopted and unaware…or….the offspring of an extra marital affair?)

Academic Freedom: are there limits to this, especially when teaching at a public university in the United States? I say: “yes, there are limits”; we cannot use our students as a captive audience to promote religious beliefs. Note: I am NOT talking about “best teaching practices” but rather “what is legal.” Teaching incompetently is legal but ill advised.

The Obama Scandals: Paul Krugman says it well:

I picked a good week to be away — and I am still away, mostly, although playing a bit of hooky on the notebook right now. For it has been the week of OBAMA SCANDALS, nonstop.

Except it seems that there weren’t actually any scandals, just the usual confusion and low-level mistakes that happen all the time, in any administration.

Fracking I know that many who vote the same way that I do are anti-fracking. It is my opinion that fracking CAN be done competently. But when it isn’t, the consequences are disastrous. So when one considers a practice, one has to also consider safeguards and the likelihood that it will be “done right.”

Evolution, medicine, Malaria and Mosquitos
This is fascination. We’ve known for some time that a parasite can influence the behavior of its host. Now, there is solid evidence that the malaria parasite can make a mosquito more likely to “bite” a human, thereby helping the parasite spread. Read about the experiment at Jerry Coyne’s website.

May 17, 2013

## Two Social Comments….

Teen retailer Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t stock XL or XXL sizes in women’s clothing because they don’t want overweight women wearing their brand.
They want the “cool kids,” and they don’t consider plus-sized women as being a part of that group.

[...]

It’s not surprising that Abercrombie excludes plus-sized women considering the attitude of CEO Mike Jeffries, said Robin Lewis, co-author of The New Rules of Retail and CEO of newsletter The Robin Report.
“He doesn’t want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people,” Lewis told Business Insider. “He doesn’t want his core customers to see people who aren’t as hot as them wearing his clothing. People who wear his clothing should feel like they’re one of the ‘cool kids.’”
The only reason Abercrombie offers XL and XXL men’s sizes is probably to appeal to beefy football players and wrestlers, Lewis said.
We asked the company why it doesn’t offer larger sizes for women. A spokeswoman told us that Abercrombie wasn’t available to provide a comment.
In a 2006 interview with Salon, Jeffries himself said that his business was built around sex appeal.
“It’s almost everything. That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries also told Salon that he wasn’t bothered by excluding some customers.
“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

My response to this: So What? It is a business; no one has a “right” to buy their clothing (or whatever they make).
Of course, if some customers don’t like their attitude, they have the right to NOT buy their clothing.

Ok, I lied just a bit: I am interested to know if their model will work.
I had a friend who was in mail order. He would put an ad for something, say a pen that had a digital watch in the body. He’d pay, perhaps a dollar a piece for them wholesale and then sell them, for say, 100 dollars…..while being perfectly honest about what it was (accurate photo and description). He told me that he sold more by charging MORE for the same item; so evidently there is something to “snob appeal”.

Many recognize that, including Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga:

Bikram’s business goals also became more ambitious. Rather than simply own studios and train teachers, he now aims to turn his disciples into franchisees and give hot-yoga enthusiasts nationwide the exact same experience, from the poses down to the instructor’s monologue. As with Starbucks, he figures, familiarity will prove attractive to Americans—and lucrative, too, with potential for licensing deals galore. “Bikram yoga is so big—this is a bathroom slipper you buy [for] $2 in Kmart,” he says, waving a plastic flip-flop in my face. “But you put ‘Bikram’ on it, it’ll sell for$35 in a second.”

Hey, if you can persuade customers…:-)

However, at this time, Mr. Choudhury might have different issues on his mind.

Issue Two: Biochemist Larry Moran seems befuddled that those who lack scientific credentials (and expertise) seem comfortable telling experts that the experts have it wrong.

This is all very frustrating. Why do IDiots who have no serious training in biochemistry and molecular biology think they know more than the experts?

And why do they refuse to learn when we attempt to educate them?

Professor Moran: this is the American way! Advocates, be they advocates for creationism, “alternative medicine”, or knee-jerk anti-GMO advocates don’t get advice from “experts”; they give it to them! The only time they listen to experts (or someone with a “doctorate” of some sort) is when they confirm what they already (think that they) know.

What they do is come up with a heuristic that makes sense to them; then they “know” it. That their heuristic flies in the face of established physical laws is of no consequence to them; that it coincides with their intuition is all that matters. And they are smart; just ask them if you don’t believe me.

If you try to point out that their ideas are completely at odds with long established science or knowledge, you’ll be accused of: “close minded”, “being an agent of Satan, a tool of “Big Pharma” or “Monsanto”, a racist, sexist or otherwise evil person, etc. That they have no discoveries or intellectual accomplishments won’t matter at all. “Common Sense” is on their side!

It is the Dunning-Kruger effect run wild.

May 10, 2013

## Creationism in some class rooms: how much does it really matter?

workout notes
Weights only in the morning; some miles (2-4? walking) in the afternoon with the group (not done yet).

Weights: (almost empty gym; it is final exam week)
supplementary: rotator cuff, Achilles, Hip Hikes, Side Plank, some yoga
Main: pull ups: 5 sets of 10
bench: 10 x 135, 4 x 185, 7 x 170 (ran out of motivation)
incline: 10 x 140, 6 x 150
abs: 3 sets of 10 each; crunch, twists, sit back, v. crunch (curling the torso makes a huge difference!)
dumbbell bench: 2 sets of 10 x 65 dumbbells
dumbbell military: 3 sets of 12 x 50
dumbbell row: 3 sets of 10 x 65 (I always sweat heavily during this one)
Hammer row: 2 sets of 10 x 210
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 160
curls: 3 sets of 10 x 65 (EZ curl bar; 2 10 pound plates on each side)
Oh yes, I’ve started doing light squats:
5 x 45, 5 x 65, 5 x 75 (no, I am not joking; those are my actual weights, but I am training myself to go deep).

Reason: I want to start squats this summer; my legs are too weak for me to run faster.

Posts
How much harm does creationism cause? Sure, it is bogus but it appears to me that those who don’t believe creationism believe all sorts of other woo-woo; I am beginning to think that most people just aren’t going to understand science anyway.

I read something to that effect in Kenneth Miller’s book Only a Theory. Another research professor said that it might not be worth it to expend too much energy in fighting creationism in the deep south as that is not where we get most of our scientists.

What started me thinking about this: one was this post by Jerry Coyne; he had given some lectures in North Carolina and some had reacted negatively. (Yes, there is a strong research triangle there; I definitely would defend science teaching in that area.)

Then there is this video from a Dayton, Tennessee biology class room: (yes, THAT Dayton, Tennessee; the place of the Scope “Monkey” Trial):

Sure I wouldn’t want MY kid in that classroom with that “biology teacher” (who in the heck graduated him? Bryan College? Liberty? Bob Jones?) but these aren’t my kids.

Seeing stuff like this makes me think that we really made a mistake fighting the Civil War; had we just let the Southern States go we would be a much stronger country, and they’d be happier. We could have our liberal democracy and they could have their theocracy that they crave.

NOTE: yes, I know that there are two big issues. There is the legal issue: the “no establishment” clause forbids the government promoting religion in the class room; this is why creationism is illegal.

The other issue is the issue of “good science teaching”: creationism/intelligent design is regarded as a long-ago-debunked crackpot idea, on a par with homeopathy and astrology. If you don’t believe me, surf to the websites of the best science museums in the nation, or to any biology department in any non-sectarian university. Start with the big research universities in your state; see for yourself what is being researched and taught.

May 8, 2013

## In Ames, Iowa and…

Well, the drive wasn’t that bad, though I got a bit sleepy during the first disk of The Greatest Show on Earth (by Richard Dawkins). It is a good book; I’ve read it and listened to it once before. But every time I go through it, I learn something different.

I was listening to the introduction and Dawkins discussed the role “essentialism” plays in inhibiting people’s acceptance of evolution. In particular people want to see a particular species as a fixed “kind”; they realize that there is variation within the said “kind” but people want species to be discrete, as in nodes on a graph.

In fact, it might be better to view a species as a type of “cluster” of genes whose boundaries are more fuzzy than sharp; in fact it might look a bit like the map of background radiation (left over from the big bang) except with darker clusters with fuzzy “boundaries” and sort of fuzzy lines between clusters…if one wants to put a time axis, one can make it a dendron type graph.

NOTE I can recommend TGSOE to all who are interested in evolution including religious people. Dawkins throws an olive branch to the religious right from the start.

Posts
I don’t believe it: I agree with Senator Tom Coburn on something: he wants to remove tax exemption stats from the NFL.

Science New experiments which subject iron to the pressures that it is at in the earth’s core suggest that our iron core is roughly the same temperature as the sun’s surface.

Politics
Peggy Noonan tries to compare President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama; tries to say that he was “more humble.” She gets the criticism that she deserves.

Two interesting things:

1. President Obama rose under his own steam whereas President Bush was born into privilege and had the skids greased for him. Yet conservatives whine about President Obama being the elitist?

2. Conservatives can dish it out…but whine and howl when it is given back. I find it odd that they are such cry-babies.

April 27, 2013

## Woos, Violence, Science, Chained CPI and other topics…

Workout notes
Weights only: rotator cuff/ hip hikes, Achilles/
pull ups: 5 sets of 10
abs: 3 sets of: sit backs, twists, crunches, vertical crunches
incline bench: 10 x 135, 5 x 155, 6 x 150, 8 x 145
dumbbell military: 3 sets of 12 x 50 (seated; 50 each arm)
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 160
curls: 3 sets of 10 x 57.5 (pulley)
dumbbell bench: 3 sets of 10 x 65
dumbbell row: 3 sets of 10 x 65 each arm.
back PT, side plank, etc.

Note: I always do these with very little rest between sets; I might do curls, incline, dumbbell military, and repeat.

Politics
Robert Reich explains the “chained CPI” concept with respect to social security:

The Obama administration counter to this is that increasing health care costs will be mitigated by some Obamacare provisions.

Science
This is an hour long video via the BBC. But it discusses Richard Dawkins and his ideas; I found it to be informative and entertaining.

Social Science
On the surface, this Psychology Today article by Goal Auzeen Saedi appears to be another “conservative suck” nonsense article. But it makes some interesting non-partisan points:

Further, studies have indicated an automatic association between aggression, America, and the news. A study conducted by researchers at Cornell and The Hebrew University (Ferguson & Hassin, 2007) indicated, “American news watchers who were subtly or nonconsciously primed with American cues exhibited greater accessibility of aggression and war constructs in memory, judged an ambiguously aggressive person in a more aggressive and negative manner, and acted in a relatively more aggressive manner toward an experimenter following a mild provocation, compared with news watchers who were not primed” (p. 1642). American “cues” refers to factors such as images of the American flag or words such as “patriot.” Interestingly, this study showed this effect to be independent of political affiliation, but suggested a disturbing notion that America is implicitly associated with aggression for news watchers.
Taken together, what do these studies suggest? Excessive exposure to news coverage could be toxic as is avoidance of open-minded attitudes and ideals. Perhaps turn off the television and pick up a book? Ideally one that exposes you to differing worldviews.

In my opinion, liberals and Democrats are just as prone to be set off by a simplistic, shallow news presentation as are conservatives and Republicans. The take away here: read something more in depth so you have some context to what is going on.

Social
I found this amusing:

This also touched some emotions.

Commentary and navel staring I am 53 years old. I don’t like it that my body’s physical abilities have degraded; e. g. 5K has gone from 19 to 25 minutes; bench press went from 5 x 225 to 5 x 185. But I really don’t miss the old “dating game” and all of the lying that one had to do. Were I single now and I had the above discussion, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that astrology was nonsense, no matter how “hot” the female was. Sure, such an attitude will alienate you; after all, everyone thinks of themselves as being “smart” and “informed”; I can’t count how many times I’ve read social media comments in which people (especially women) referred to themselves as being “smart” even though many of these people have had very little in the way of difficult intellectual accomplishment.

Well, at my age, I no longer care about alienating people socially.

Speaking of social alienation, a fat woman decided to do a sort-of social experiment:

I was traveling with students in Barcelona in the summer of 2011, walking through La Rambla, when I noticed two guys making fun of me. I could see them in the reflection of a mirrored building, making gestures with their hands to suggest how much bigger I was than the thin girl standing next to me, her small waist accentuated by her crop top and cut-off shorts. They painted her figure in the air like an hourglass. Then they painted my shape like the convex curves of a ball. The guys were saying something, too, but there was only one word I could make out: Gorda. Fat woman.

I’ve been hearing comments like this for much all my life. Maybe someone else would have yelled at them, or shrunk inside. But I don’t get upset when this happens.

I pulled out my camera, and set up a shoot.

For about a year, I’d been taking pictures of strangers’ reactions to me in public for a series I called “Wait Watchers.” I was interested in capturing something I already knew firsthand: If the large women in historical art pieces were walking around today, they would be scorned and ridiculed.

So I found a crowded crosswalk farther down La Rambla, used my rangefinder camera to set the exposure and focus of where I would stand, and handed the camera to my assistant. I bought a cup of gelato and began eating it. I’ve learned I get more successful reactions if I am “doing” something.

In my peripheral vision, I saw a teen girl waiting for the signal to cross the street. As I stood there, eating my ice cream, I heard a repetitive “SLAP, SLAP, SLAP” of a hand on skin. I signaled to my assistant to shoot. It was only when I returned home to Memphis and got the film developed that I realized the sound was the girl hitting her belly as she watched me eat. She did this over and over. I have five frames of her with various facial expressions. I called the resulting image “Gelato.”

I’ll let you surf to the article to see the photos. In one photo, the police are clearly making fun of her. But in other cases, it really wasn’t that clear to me. If you take 100′s of photos, you’ll see many different facial expressions, some which may well be unrelated.

As far as the woman herself: yeah, she is reasonably fat and grossly out of shape. But if she lived here in Peoria, she would NOT stand out at all; she’d mostly blend right in, especially at a Golden Corral or a Chinese Buffet. In fact, some of the slower pace groups in our “beginning runners/walkers” programs are populated by people who look like her; hey you have to start somewhere!

So, I am a bit puzzled about her getting much ridicule; after all, I did get some but at my fattest, I was way fatter than she is now.

Social: our reaction to the Boston Bombing:
Yes, I know it is an Alternet article (linking to Salon and Alternet! wow…my standards have really dropped! )

But this author raises the question:

he Boston Marathon bombing and shootouts with the suspects frightened millions of Americans and turned into one of the biggest media events of the 21st century. But beyond lingering questions of whether the government went too far by shutting down an entire city and whether that might encourage future terrorism, a deeper and darker question remains: why is America’s obsession with evil so selective?

There are all kinds of violent events in America that go unheeded. The British-based Guardian newspaper reported that on the same day as the bombing, 11 people were killed by guns across the U.S. That sad list included a pregnant woman in Dallas allegedly shot by her boyfriend; a 13-year-old who took his own life after being bullied at school; and an off-duty New York City policewoman who killed her husband, her year-old baby, and then committed suicide with her police-issued handgun.

The lists of most violent American trends reveal the mundane shades of evil. There are the most violent cities. There are the murder capitals. There’s domestic violence primarily against women. There are the most dangerous jobs, where injury is common and death far more widespread than from bomb-wielding terrorists—such as at the Texas fertilizer plant that blew up last week and killed at least 14 people and where 270 tons of ammonium nitrate was illegally stored in violation of state and federal law.[...]

I see a few things at work here. First of all, humans tend to overreact to the high profile events and ignore the more mundane; e. g. you are far more likely to be hurt or killed in a car accident than you are by a terrorist bomb.

Secondly: society tends to see underserved sectors (ghettos, isolated rural areas) as places isolated from us. Much of the violence there are people who live in such areas doing some self-enforcing of local codes (reference: Steve Pinker’s book Better Angels). So if poor blacks and poor rural whites shoot each other…well…that isn’t our world so just keep it there, ok? On the other hand: the Boston Marathon is something the media consuming public can relate to; we all know a runner and have watched parades or sporting events. Killing and maiming is out of place here; we rely on police and law enforcement to keep order…and not vigilantism. This is OUR world and such acts are out of place here since we aren’t at war.

Note: This is NOT voicing approval of such attitudes but an attempt to “call it as I see it”.

April 24, 2013

## I’ve Changed My Mind about some stuff, etc.

Creationism and how I’ve changed my mind
In general, I think that science a religion (religion that makes specific claims of miracles) are incompatible. But sometimes accommodationists write good stuff, and here is an excellent post by Karl Giberson on why creationism is so difficult to root out:

The great power of the anti-evolutionary message embraced by so many Americans comes from the following, all of which are on display in the conversation:
1. Appealing to America’s democratic impulse: At a time when we constantly hear that lawmakers should heed the voice of the “90 percent of Americans who want more gun control,” on what basis do lawmakers ignore the “vast majority of Americans who reject evolution?” Does this constituency have no right to be heard? Must their children be forced to learn ideas in the public schools at odds with their family’s values and rejected by most of the voters?

2. Demanding fairness and tolerance: Isn’t America all about being fair? And what could be fairer than giving voice to other viewpoints with widespread support? At a time when most Americans are demanding gay marriage in the name of fairness, why are we being so unfair to the creationists, excluding their ideas about origins?

3.Promoting freedom for our students: Must education be coercive on the topic of origins? Why can’t teachers present “both sides” and let our “bright high school students” make up their own minds? Will this not encourage critical thinking in our science classes? What is this need to restrict science teaching to just one viewpoint when there are others in play?

4. Appealing to authority: A popular anti-evolutionary website contains the signatures of hundreds of credentialed academics who “Dissent from Darwin.” This is a lot of intellectual firepower. Surely such a large crowd of anti-evolutionary scholars can’t all be wrong.

5. Deflecting criticism: Much has been made of the failure of the creationists to publish in scientific journals. But their ideas are blocked from those journals by editorial and peer referees whose allegiance is to the scientific status quo. New paradigms, like Intelligent Design, are rejected out of hand.

6.Currying sympathy: Anti-evolutionists in secular universities or other scientific institutions are forced to hide their views from their colleagues. I was once in a gathering that including several such individuals and they insisted that nobody take any pictures, lest they be identified. If they “come out” they run the risk of losing their jobs, run off by intolerant peers who object to their ideas without considering them. Ben Stein exposed this abuse of Intelligent Design scholars in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

This rhetorical strategy contains great synergistic power; polls show that Americans are not coming around to accept evolution, even as its scientific credibility has grown to point of certainty. The conservative Christians in the video above have heard and embraced all of these arguments. In their view, they have a strong case and every right to press it.

I know, I know: part of the problem might lie with the accommodationists themselves: after all, if you believe that science can accomodate one miracle, why not others? Via Natalie Angier:

Scientists think this is terrible—the public’s bizarre underappreciation of one of science’s great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they’re right. Yet I can’t help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America’s religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

Hey, if you make accommodation for one miracle, why not others? In my opinion, religious liberals are part of the problem.

But here is where I changed my mind
Yes, creationism and intelligent design are dumb ideas that belong on the scrap heap. But so are many other ideas: homeopathy, anti-gmo hysteria, anti-vaccinnation hysteria, birtherism, 9-11 “trutherism”, “the moon landings were faked”, “ghosts haunt places”, “the rest of the country likes idea X if only the public were “educated”", not knowing the difference between a science Nobel Prize and a Nobel Peace Prize, etc.

The longer I live the more I have the opinion that MOST (possibly all) of us have wacky ideas of some sort, myself included. The internet gives us more connectivity for people to express such ideas. Hence, person X who has started a successful business (hard to do) might well believe that the President of the United States isn’t a US citizen and everyone else is lying. Person Y who has done fine charity work might seriously believe that the universe really is 6000 years old. Person Z who also has had some success in life might get vapors if they find that their crops have been genetically modified.

So while I believe that some people really are smarter than others, I also believe that, statistically speaking, the set of people who hold wacko belief X might not be dumber than the population as a whole. They might get some things right that others get wrong.

Personally, I don’t know what my wacky ideas are, and I hope that I someday identify them and lose them.
Yes, I am aware that I have a mild fetish for a certain part of a female’s anatomy but that isn’t a belief; that is just how I am “wired”; I can understand that I am a bit abnormal in that regard. Other hetero males either don’t have it, or have the good sense to keep their mouth shut.

Irrelevant point one:
I noticed that my blog had its hit counts go up from the summer to the late fall of 2008, and again in 2012. Why? Two big events: the Olympics and the Presidential elections. I also had a smaller bump in the fall of 2010 (midterm election time). This makes sense because I often blog about these topics.

Irrelevant point two Often math problems are “easy” until you look at them closely. Seriously. I had smugly thought that during the second half of my sabbatical project I’d look at extending the more modern polynomials to lines embedded in real 3 space. That is harder than I thought; my first obstacle is rather embarrassing: after getting my Ph.D. in topology in 1991, I STILL don’t understand the topology of multiple lines in 3 space…or even multiple lines in the plane…or even in an 2 dimensional band of finite width that extends from minus infinity to positive infinity. Dang.

One issue: given two parallel lines in the plane, is it more appropriate to consider them as disjoint objects, or should I see them having a point at infinity in common; sort of an analogue to:

The above would represent FIVE parallel lines; one for each circle.

I’d have to account for this with a new calculus of some sort. Oh well…if it were easy, someone else would have done it by now.

And…well, IF I can make this work, I’ll have something worthwhile.

Science and Physics
Does this multi-verse talk confuse you? Well, it might be because “many universes” can mean “many things”. Here are three of the most common uses of “multi-verse”: separate universes altogether (bubbles), different dimensions of the same high dimensional space (think parallel planes in 3-space): this is a proposed mathematical model, and a different model to explain quantum mechanics (one universe where this particle decays at time t and another in which it doesn’t.

Watch the video: it is informative and fun:

April 11, 2013

## science topics: jet stream and weather, support for gay marriage, ID, isolation, evolution oddities, etc.

Workout notes
Weights only:
rotator cuff
pull ups (5 sets of 10); hip hikes and Achilles exercises
incline press: 10 x 140, 4 x 155, 6 x 150, 7 x 145
abs: 3 sets each of crunch (10), twist (10), sit backs (10), vertical crunch (20)
dumbbell military: 3 sets of 12 x 50
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 65 (each arm)
dumbbell bench: 2 sets of 10 x 65
curls: 2 sets of 10 x 57.5 pulley, 1 set of 10 x 30 dumbbell
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 160
I’ll run 4 times a week until I can get over this foot soreness.

Posts
For those interested in physics, physicist Mano Singham has a multi-part series on the Higgs Boson; he is giving you some background for it:

Part: I, II, III, IV, V

Social
There is evidence that being socially isolated harms longevity, even in the absence of feelings of loneliness.

Opinions on same sex marriage: favorability IS going up across the board; no doubt about that. But for a detailed analysis: read Nate Silver’s post:

It is also possible to project how the results in each state might change over time. I assume that support for same-sex marriage will continue to increase by one and a half percentage points nationally per year, which reflects the recent historical trend from both polling and ballot-initiative data. (The way that the model is designed, support might be projected to increase slightly faster or slower than that in individual states based on the number of swing voters.) Thus, we can extrapolate the results forward from 2008 to 2012, and to future years like 2016 and 2020.

Roughly speaking, by 2020, only a few states in the deep south will have less than a majority favoring same sex marriage. The median state support (median of all states) will be about 60 percent. Time is marching on and I hope that Illinois stays ahead of the curve.

Climate
What is driving our crazy weather? Conjecture: we have a steep increase in sea ice, which leads to the water having more heat, which leads to a change in the path of the jet stream, which allows that cold arctic air mass to dip down lower than before (in sort of a sine wave type path).

Biology
How about a fish with a transparent head?
Read more at the link; note those green things are…they eyes! The eyes are INSIDE the head!

Read more at Jerry Coyne’s website.

Evolution deniers
If you are going to try to deny established science, it helps to know what you are talking about. ID types, in general, don’t. No, information theory does NOT disprove evolution. And no, Larry Moran is NOT a creationist, though he ascribes a bigger role to genetic drift and a lesser role to natural selection than, say, Jerry Coyne does. But that is a scientific dispute on mechanisms of evolution, NOT a questioning of whether evolution took place or not. This is (sort of) analogous to the various interpretations of quantum mechanics:

But none of these deny quantum mechanics.

March 27, 2013

## Ok, the Creationists have checkmated me

To get the joke, you have to know about the Creation Museum.

Yes, they have one of these as a display:

(image from here)

March 19, 2013