But here was a funny part:

I had to laugh; right now I am “debating” who would win that ride. Surely Mr. Romney could afford the best bike.
But though I don’t like her politically, Ms. Palin would beat all of them easily and not even break a sweat.

Topics
This is just a FAIL on so many levels:

Mitt Romney’s problem with evangelical Christian voters has been well documented.

But as the Republican presidential nomination fight heats up in Florida, a Mormon rite that leaves many Jews seething could prove awkward for the candidate in a state that’s home to more Jewish people than any other besides New York and California.

The religious rite is proxy baptism for the dead. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church, these posthumous “blessings” are intended to “save” ancestors and others who weren’t baptized in life or were baptized “without proper authority.”

Any Mormon may baptize any person posthumously. [...]

Let’s see: some members of one religion are upset with what some other people are doing in a ritual for “dead people”…in private. Ahem: no one is is really doing anything other than magic and hocus-pocus.

Tell you what: I said a prayer that would automatically baptize you in the name of the Great Frog God if you have read this far.

Politics

Social
This article is a bit interesting; it contrasts the French way of raising a kid with the English/US model:

Every so often a new parenting book triggers the sort of conflicting passions most recently associated with the Arab Spring. Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food, is just such an incendiary work. We mothers are a notoriously touchy lot at the best of times, so when another woman dares to suggest there might be a better way of rearing our offspring than muddling through, bribery, intemperate amounts of wine, empty threats and inconsistency, forgive us for digging in our heels. [...]

“In France, children are presented with a fait accompli and the phrase “C’est moi, qui decide” – I make the decisions – is used a lot,” says Druckerman, who has a daughter aged five and twin boys of three. It’s this discipline that sets us monarchist slackers apart from the rigorous republicans. French parents believe that saying “Non” is a responsibility and “rescues children from the tyranny of their own desires”.

Also, their authority derives from a consensus about how children should be brought up. While we pick and mix our attitudes, in France boundaries are reinforced by society. Couples are in charge, the children are not. C’est tout. It may be old-fashioned, but it appears to work.

“Children are an important part of the family, but family life doesn’t revolve round them,” points out Druckerman. “In America and Britain, there’s a belief that having children must entail self- sacrifice and that we must push them to succeed. The French are more patient and allow their children far more freedom. You never see French mothers hovering anxiously round their children in a park.”

French women don’t dedicate themselves selflessly to motherhood. French fathers aren’t enslaved at weekends, driving children to activities. And babies are seldom breast-fed for long – the emphasis instead being on the mother’s sex life returning to normal as soon as possible.

Of course this article ends with a paragraph about how this mom has…wait for it…wonderful kids (surprised?) and how she likes them just as they are.

Social/Political
Paul Krugman shares a snippet about our current lack of economic class mobility (he is quoting John Quiggin):

For years, opinion leaders have told us that it’s all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

Politicfact
Paul Krugman takes politifact to task for saying “half true” (upgraded to “mostly true”) by politifact and then makes a larger point:

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage. In the case of Obama’s job statement, Politifact first called it only half true, then upgraded that to mostly true, not because Obama said anything factually incorrect, but because Politifact perceived Obama as trying to imply that he was responsible for the gains.

This is deeply wrong on two levels. First, fact-checking should be about checking facts — not about trying to impose some sort of Marquess of Queensbury rules on how you’re allowed to use facts. Aside from undermining the mission, this makes the whole thing subjective — notice that Politifact wasn’t even analyzing what Obama said, they were analyzing their impression about what he might have been trying to imply. Leave that for the talking heads!

Second, in practice this turns into a partisan affair. The simple fact is that in today’s US political scene, Republicans make a lot more factual howlers than Democrats. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Yet Politifact wants to be seen as nonpartisan.

I take a slightly different view; this is how and why:

Ok, here is a dissenting opinion (sort of): yes, a fact checker should check to see if the statement is factual or not, but there is some duty, IMHO, to see if the fact is being used responsibly.

Remember the statements about the “lucky duckies” that pay no federal income taxes, as in “in year 200x, 4x percent of Americans paid no Federal Income taxes.” That statement is literally true. However it is deceptive because it cherry picks both a particular year (atypical) and it leaves off things like payroll tax, local taxes, etc.

Climate change deniers do this all the time; they say things like “hey, the average temperature of the planet went up from year X to year X 1″ which might be literally true…but irrelevant to the actual long term trend, especially if there was some other smaller cycle (El nino, La Nina) involved.

Of course, I agree that Politifact is not doing this responsibly; they sure appear to be bending to conservative pressure to be “balanced” because, well, the conservative are lying so much.

Note: this is from my comment.

Science/Evolution

Genes and evolution (by Jeremy Yoder )

Does evolutionary change happen in big jumps, or a series of small steps? The question may seem a little esoteric to non-scientists—how many mutations can dance on the head of a pin?—but it has direct implications for how we identify the genetic basis of human diseases, or desirable traits in domestic plants and animals.

That’s because the evolutionary path by which a particular phenotype, or visible trait, first evolved in a population is closely related to the genetics that underlie the trait in the present. Phenotypes that arose in a single mutational jump will probably remain connected to one or a few genes with large effects; phenotypes that evolved more gradually do so because they are created by the collective action of many genes. So what kind of evolutionary change is most common will determine which kind of gene-to-phenotype relationships we should expect to find.

In an excellent recent review article for the journal Evolution, Matthew Rockman, a biologist with the Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University, makes the case that the era of genomics has, so far, been much too focused on finding genes of large effect. Fortunately, Rockman also sees the beginnings of a new movement towards acknowledging the importance of small-effect genes—one which may ultimately make genomic association studies more useful.

He goes on to talk about Genewise association study (GWAS). Here is the idea: some evolved traits are Mendelian (a mutation of only a few genes, possibly only one are involved). Some involve the mutation of many genes with all of these genes working together to get the given effect (ability to tolerate heat is one such trait). Since these genes didn’t mutate together, this track is far more difficult to find.

I recommend surfing to the blog and reading the rest.

If you believe that capital gains taxes should be low, make the argument and show your data and give evidence of why it helps the economy. If you want to cry about “double taxation” because of corporate taxes…do you REALLY want to go there? That implies that corporations aren’t “people” but rather exist to make the shareholders rich.

You’ll have to answer questions like this one, and you’ll have to admit that capital gains were not always low.

Note the Republican attempt to refute his argument: it is basically that many people make money off of capital gains.

That doesn’t mean that Krugman is wrong; Krugman points out that the FACT that most of the capital gains go to the very wealthy, not all of it. Note that this “rebuttal” is thin on actual data and it basically unsubstantiated ranting.

Today started with lots of rocks…ok pebbles, ok…grains of sand…in the shoes.
The weight room was crowded by 6:15 am thanks to our ROTC unit (some of them are fit…others….well…). I managed to work it all in anyway: 3 sets of rows, 3 sets of curls, 3 sets of pull downs, full rotator cuff sets, 8 x 20 sit ups, 7, 7, 6, 6 pull ups, 2 sets of incline bench (7 x 135, 5 x 135), regular bench (10 x 135, 3 x 175, 4 x 170), one set of military dumbbell presses.

Then the pool was crowded again; there was one gaggle of guys doing the “do one 25 with your head out of the water every 4-5 minutes or so” and a few women in bikinis doing…not sure what. These types will be gone in 2 weeks or less.

Me: 10 x 100 on the 2:10; did a few on the 2 but couldn’t do many of these. Goal: next week 1300, 1600 the week after that, then 2000 per workout the next week, then back to my usual 2200.

Politics
The President did well last night, at least politically speaking. The R’s are trying to paint him as some kind of American hating socialist, and that speech was about as “All American” as it gets. I have expected him to pull out a hot dog and some apple pie.

Of course, the public remains, for the most part, very uninformed. Someone tried to tell me that “Obama doubled” unemployment.

My response was this:

Unemployment didn’t double under his administration: it was 7.8 when he got sworn in and was at 8.7 when he got his stimulus bill passed. The hard data:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

His response:

Ollie, it was 4.4% in January 2007. Was up to 10% in 2009 and is was at 8.6% two months ago.

Yes….and who was President from 2007 to the start of 2009?
(psst: not Obama).
Now if they want to blame CONGRESS that is another thing (and I’d point out that the conditions for this bubble happened before the D’s took over) but that isn’t what he is saying. He is blaming OBAMA for what happened when BUSH was President.

These people are idiots.

Helicopter Parents
Via NPR

HR specialists say boomer parents are advocating on behalf of young adult children, calling up to negotiate better benefits, protest a poor evaluation, etc. NPR seeks to interview people about this. Employers – have you experienced it? Parents – if you’ve done this, why? 20-something employees — if your parent has done this, did you appreciate it, or resent it?

Yep. Sigh…sign of the times; this is mostly the fault of MY generation. It is pathetic.

Education

It does sort of gall me that so many work so hard to try to get some sort of religion into school. Why? Obviously a kid can read whatever holy book/text they want to on breaks; they can pray or do whatever. Why do so many want the schools to sanction such things in one form or another?

Civil Liberties
I found this ruling to be interesting:

American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.

Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21–or face the consequences including contempt of court.

Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination.

“I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer,” Blackburn wrote in a 10-page opinion today. He said the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to require telephone companies to aid in surveillance, could be invoked in forcing decryption of hard drives as well.

Ramona Fricosu, who is accused of being involved in a mortgage scam, has declined to decrypt a laptop encrypted with Symantec’s PGP Desktop that the FBI found in her bedroom during a raid of a home she shared with her mother and children (and whether she’s even able to do so is not yet clear).

Interesting: encryption can be all but impossible for even a professional to break; this situation is seen as something like requiring someone to open a safe with documents in it.

Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds? Recent economic data have been a bit better, but we’ve already had several false dawns on that front. More important, there’s evidence that the two great problems at the root of our slump — the housing bust and excessive private debt — are finally easing. [...]

But the economy is depressed, in large part, because of the housing bust, which immediately suggests the possibility of a virtuous circle: an improving economy leads to a surge in home purchases, which leads to more construction, which strengthens the economy further, and so on. And if you squint hard at recent data, it looks as if something like that may be starting: home sales are up, unemployment claims are down, and builders’ confidence is rising.

Furthermore, the chances for a virtuous circle have been rising, because we’ve made significant progress on the debt front.

That’s not what you hear in public debate, of course, where all the focus is on rising government debt. But anyone who has looked seriously at how we got into this slump knows that private debt, especially household debt, was the real culprit: it was the explosion of household debt during the Bush years that set the stage for the crisis. And the good news is that this private debt has declined in dollar terms, and declined substantially as a percentage of G.D.P., since the end of 2008.

There are, of course, still big risks — above all, the risk that trouble in Europe could derail our own incipient recovery.

That is a bit of good news; keep in mind that Paul Krugman is no cheerleader.

Business I remember talking to a business professor and saying something about the low wages of overseas workers helps drives manufacturing overseas. I was told that was NOT the case and was a bit surprised.

Well, the New York Times has an interesting article about Apple Computer and how it manufactures its products in China. I was surprised at what I learned, and no, this isn’t some “of course they did that; the workers are mistreated over there” type of article. It takes a while to read, but it talks about some of the complexities involved (e. g. if you want to tweak something in your product, you have to adjust your manufacturing process, and it is MUCH easier to do in China than in the US, and it is easier for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons: the industries that feed into one another (say the one that makes glass for view screens and the one that makes small screws) are close together and have a quick line of communication. I highly recommend reading the article, though it is a long one.

Science and Academia
No dear student: professors do not lie awake thinking of ways to make your life harder. No, I don’t go for all of the “invisible man” talk, but most of the article is pretty good. Yes, this is a short, non-technical article. Here is a snippet:

consider this: the fact that you “don’t understand” why you didn’t earn full points for a particular question might itself help explain why you didn’t earn full points. Don’t take this personally or interpret it as a sneer. See it as a learning opportunity. If you understood the material–and do note that there is a large difference between really understanding the material and being able to reproduce a graph or definition you might remember from class–you would have answered the question flawlessly. I recommend (as I have recommended to many others) that you go back, take another crack at it, and see if you can find where you have gone wrong. Then bring it by my office, and we will talk.

Of course, what the student will do is call his/her parents who will call to school to complain; after all THEIR kid is REAL SMART.

That leads me to one of my wish lists for college teaching. My wish list is:
1. Students would be objectively aware of their abilities and their knowledge of the prerequisite material and
2. Parents would be objectively aware of the intelligence and ability of their offspring.

Of course this isn’t going to happen. From the conversations I’ve had (or overheard in person or read on social media), no kid on the lower half of the IQ curve has a parent. ALL kids are smart (think their parents).

Science
The entire article is NOT available free online, but you can find it in the February 2012 Scientific American. Here is the lead in:

Last fall the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force dropped a bombshell, arguing that healthy men should stop undergoing a routine blood test as a screen for prostate cancer. An analysis of the best available evidence, it argued, had shown little or no long-term benefit from the measure—called the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test—for most men with no symptoms of the disease. Use of the screening was not saving lives. In fact, it was needlessly exposing hundreds of thousands of men who were tested and found to have prostate cancer to such common complications as impotence and urinary incontinence (from surgical removal of the prostate) and rectal bleeding (from radiation treatment). Indeed, the task force estimated that more than one million men have been treated because of PSA testing who otherwise would not have been since 1985. At least 5,000 of them died soon after treatment, and another 300,000 men suffered impotence or incontinence, or both.

The upshot: there are some false positives. BUT the bigger “problem” is that many types of prostate cancer is extremely slow acting and many simply will never cause someone trouble; in fact often the cure causes more problems than the cancer does.

I recommend reading the article.

Human Evolution
This is a very interesting article by Christopher Stringer. Here is what it is about: of course, Homo Sapiens came “out of Africa” and then evolved a bit along the way. But what struck me as extra interesting was the revelation is that Homo Sapiens in fact mixed with other Homos (Neanderthals and another type) since leaving Africa and this mixing left a small but significant signature in our genome; similar things happened in Africa after the “out of Africa” migration. In short: it is more complicated than many of us amateurs realize.

I’ll have to reread this one.

My workout: 5 x 200 on 4:15 (free); just getting reacquainted with the water.

Prior to that I walked 4 miles on the track (49:18); 13:14, 12:45, 12:13, 11:05. It often takes me 2-3 miles to feel warmed up and ready to go. But given that I just got my antibiotics 3 days ago, this was plenty. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks time, this will be a mere warm up.

I’ll have more to talk about; I read two excellent articles yesterday (one is a case study about the business/manufacturing end of Apple Computers) and one is on human evolution. I’ll have to digest them this evening prior to blogging about them.

For those who want to read them:

Apple Computer, jobs and China

Human evolution

Circuit one: rotator cuff (pulley; 4 exercises), Rows (Hammer Machine), curls (pulley), lat pull downs:
the rows: 10 x 180, 8 x 230 8 x 230
curls: 10 x 42, 10 x 47.5, 10 x 47.5
pull downs: 10 x 140, 7 x 160, 7 x 160

Circuit two: dumbbell rotator cuff dumbbell, bench press, sit ups:
Bench: 10 x 135, 4 x 170, 4 x 170 (Olympic bar); these felt easier than normal
sit ups: 20 at the highest incline; made myself touch my head with my hands for the whole movement
this gave me 3 sets of sit ups and three sets of three different rotator cuff exercises.

Circuit three: pull ups, sit ups
pull ups: 7, 7 (knuckles facing me), 6, 6 (shoulder friendly grip; palms of the hands facing each other and the knuckles facing out.
sit ups (4 sets of 20)

Circuit four: incline bench press, sit ups:
Incline bench (Olympic bar) 7 x 135, 7 x 135
sit ups in between; that gave me one more set of sit ups.

Circuit Five: stretches, dumbbell bench press:
2 sets of stretches on the stretching machine (the one you sit on),
2 sets of 15 x 40 lb. dumbbell presses. On each rep I extended fully; I went deep enough for my elbows to be parallel with my shoulders; no deeper. I sat on a bench with a low back support.

I always do my weights in circuits like this though I sometimes mix in lower body exercises instead of so many sets of sit ups.

Running:
Here is where I lost my mind just a bit. I decided to do my run on the university track; it was just me and a few young women (different ones came off and on the track during my work out). One was doing mile repeats (8′ish pace) and one was running at about a 7:30 pace; a few were going much slower than that.

My run:
First .5 miles (800 m) : 5:02; just fine. Felt better. Mile 1: 9:34. Ok…just a light strain. Mile 2: 8:54…breathing harder but…feeling ok…sort of…Mile 3 8:36, 1:02 for the last 200 meters for 28:08 for 5K. The time for my final two miles was 17:32.

When I finished my immediate reaction was “oh *hit…what did I do?” I had a minor headache (sinus area) and was coughing all over the place. I flopped down on the mats for about a minute. Gradually I felt better and the cough went away after about an hour. This was fine for a tempo effort…WHEN I AM HEALTHY but I only got my antibiotics a couple of days ago. I’ve got to keep my ego in check, especially when I am running with younger people.

I feel fine now.

Then, after tending to my wife (who got the same crud I had) I became very virtuous. I ate some oatmeal:

Note: Wilford Brimley was born in 1934 and made this commercial in 1988. This means that he was between 53 and 54 years old when he made this. I am 52. I look like THIS???? (yes, I know; he is far wealthier and more successful in his profession than I am in mine…but do I look like THIS????) No wonder this little 5K just about killed me….

Speaking of “doing the right thing”: Joe Paterno died. So out came “what is his legacy” columns.

Frankly, it was mixed, IMHO.
One one hand, he was a successful coach who coached many undefeated teams, national champions, etc. He also encouraged and made it possible for his players to get their degrees and he commanded the respect of many of his former players. He also gave generously to others and to his school.

On the other hand, when things got tough, he appeared to act in a way that preserved his reputation and legacy instead of doing the right thing for the victims (turning that coach into the police…right away)

That is unforgivable, even with all of the good that he did.