Dr. Forbush Thinks

Will we go quietly into the deep dark night?

I am asking this question because it seems to me that America is on the verge of falling into the Dark Ages. I am sure that the Romans never felt like their empire would crumble, but it did. It took a while as the thinking and questioning of the Greek intellectuals was replaced by the non-questioning anti-intellectual religious that came to lead the Roman Empire into the Dark Middle Ages.

Yesterday, I was startled by a comment on my recent “Global Warming” post. The commenter, that I regard as quite thoughtful on many subjects, wrote, “it comes as no surprise there would be disagreement on such a politicized issue as global warming.” He went on to suggest that bureaucrats tended to be left leaning Democrats, therefore it would be natural that government scientists would promote the idea of Global Warming.

This sentiment should frighten us all.

First of all we should examine why we have government scientists at all. Is it because each issue needs to create a means to support its pre-determined agenda? If that is the case, then we should not have government scientists at all. Each political party should just pay additional science consultants to create their personal fiction to support their own ideas. Of course this is stupid from the point of view of an American citizen, but not the politician. No, Americans have government scientists for the same reason they have government intelligence agencies and government ambassadors. Government scientists among the many things that they do they look at the science and determine the risks of policy on our country, and based on those risks they offer suggestions for policy proposals and the risks of those policy proposals. If the scientists are influenced by the politics, then their assessment of the risks are as flaw as the CIA’s intelligence on the WMDs in Iraq.

The charter of government is to provide security, and if the risks are not studied in a fair non-political light the policy based on those assessments will certainly be flawed.

So, to think that government scientists are mainly left leaning Democrats flies in the face of the entire point of having government scientists at all.

But, it is easy to see how someone might come to this conclusion in a culture that is moving further away from science. When I was in college during one of those late night philosophical discussions that generally involve a bit of alcohol a friend told me that she had no idea how a TV worked. Well, I knew a bit about how a TV worked and I offered to explain it to her, but she told me that she didn’t care because she was happy to believe that it all worked by magic. And, I realized that I was in the minority and she was in the majority of the American people.

However, if we begin to fall back on the idea that we don’t care how things work and we can imagine them working by some mysterious magic called “science” we are not to far away from the dark ages. Because if we don’t think about how things work, we can easily begin to mix up the ideas of science and the fantasy ideas of magic that are removed by impossibility from the truth. And, if we allow our minds to intermingle these concepts based in reality and these concepts based in fiction our culture will be more susceptible to leaders who justify their actions with fiction and lies.

Perhaps that is the true reason we now find ourselves under the power of this regime, the extreme right wing coalition of neo-cons and fundamentalist Christians. These people have an agenda and they only need to search for the justification. They discredit science as a rule so that they can pick the things that they like, but then they can deny the rest as “only a theory” or “inconclusive.”

Aristotle was the main scientific philosopher of ancient Greece. His work was based on observation of the world around him and reasoning that allowed him to understand that the world was round long before Christopher Columbus. He estimated the circumference of the Earth by measuring the difference in the length of a shadow cast by the sun at noon on uniform sticks placed in two different locations across the Mediterranean Sea from each other. But, the works of Aristotle were lost in the burning of the libraries brought on by the religious leaders. If it weren’t for the Muslim clerics who found value in these writings we may have never heard of Aristotle today.

Similarly, if we lose the culture of scientific inquiry our people will be doomed to memorize texts and believe what they read without questioning. If these religious zealots that continue to plant seeds of doubt in the general public continue to grow in strength everything we know about the world will gradually be lost. If the value of science continues to be reduced our children will be pushed away from pure science.

In fact, I have heard arguments from the right claiming that only science with a known economic benefit should be pursued. But, if you know that it has economic benefit, then it isn’t science anymore, it is called engineering. Engineering uses what science has discovered and applies that to known problems. And, if we push our children away from pure science this “new” knowledge will not exist for the engineers who want to build “new” projects. Engineers will eventually be reduced to repeating old engineering ideas over and over again. Progress will only be made by accident, instead of by applying “new” science. And, slowly we will become a stagnant culture relying on other cultures to provide “new” things for us.

Even the fall into the Dark Ages wasn’t instantaneous. And, I wouldn’t expect America’s fall to be any different. Those scientists that are alive today will continue to use the science that they know and understand. They will continue to publish their work, but fewer young people will read their work. And over time these scientific reports and papers will have less influence on the American culture. Things on the fringe will be the first to be lost, but as time goes on fewer people will be able to understand more common things like Particle Physics, General Relativity, Physical Chemistry and Organic Chemistry. Some ideas about genetics will continue, because with the birth of every baby the parents look for the influence of genetics. But, the idea of evolution will certainly disappear from the main culture. Instead conversations will center on the idea that the different races must have descended from the different sons of Noah, or some other malarkey.

People will be happy to know that the wizards at Apple will continue to recite the incantations to create the same iPod that has existed for a hundred years, but it still plays the same 10,000 songs, because someone lost the recipe for downloading new ones.






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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Politics, Science, Religion, History, Global Warming

After rereading what I wrote yesterday I found myself being disappointed that I never actually described the experience of the race itself. What I wrote about it did not communicate why I liked the trail run. So, I am going to try to write about the run as a description of my personal experience.

I guess that I have to begin with getting up in the morning. Since the race was at 9:00AM and according to MapQuest it was almost two hours away we had to leave at 6:00AM to allow time for registration, changing clothes and finding the place. We got out of the house at 6:20AM and stopped for hot chocolate. But, we were on the road by 6:30AM with only a small room for error.

Fortunately, the times given by MapQuest seem to assume that a little old lady from Pasadena would be driving and we made the trek with plenty of time to spare. We were early and found a place to park that was quite close to the registration area. The surroundings were wonderful. The run was in a park set in the middle of a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The air was cool, but not uncomfortable for running, I would guess that the temperature was in the upper 50s Fahrenheit. We got our numbers, pinned them on and used the clean convenient restrooms.

It was announced that we would wait a few minutes longer than the scheduled race time to allow for stragglers that might have gotten lost. The pause wasn’t a problem as we had the beautiful park everywhere we looked.

My daughter, wife and a friend from the athletic club we train at were with me. But, the rest of the people at the race were quite friendly. The director of the race gave us instructions, like follow the signs pertaining to your distance. Our group had all signed up for the 5.5-mile race. The other races were 10.5 miles and 16 miles which was once around 5.5-mile and 10.5-mile course. He also told us that the trail Marathon had been cancelled this year because it had taken some of the people seven hours to complete.

Then he went down the road a bit with the group that would run the 10.5-mile race. He would start them first, and we would wait 5-minutes for them to get down the path before we would start. As we waited I began to shiver. I just wanted to get started so I could get warm.

Finally the moment happened when the director of the race said, “Go!” But, we only moved slowly through the gate at the beginning of the trail. The trail was only wide enough for two or three people, so squeezing over 100 people through that tiny opening took some time. This was probably the worst part of the race, because our group had been standing at the back of the pack and we had to wait until almost everyone got started before we could actually begin to run. I looked at my watch and I believe that it took nearly 5 minutes before I got up to a jogging pace, only to be stopped at another traffic jam on the path.

After traveling only a short distance of walking and slow jogging we made it to a road crossing where I could pass by a large number of people and begin to pick up my pace. But right across the road was the first hill. It wasn’t very steep, but it did require a bit more energy to accelerate and pass by some of the runners on the path. At this point my wife called out, “See you later,” as I began to pick up speed. My daughter and our friend had been stuck in the crowd and they were already behind us.

It quickly became apparent that running on a trail was different than running on the street. There were sticks, mud and logs lying across the path in places. When you are walking a stick isn’t a big deal, but when you are running and step on a stick your foot will roll and you may lose your balance. This happened to a person directly behind me at the beginning of the race. I heard a thump, and turned to see someone on the ground. I asked if they were OK, and they said yes as they got up and began to run. “I’d better be careful,” I thought to myself.

Over the next mile or so I passed quite a few people, one by one and I finally managed to get to a good pace. I saw the first mile marker on the path and I was certainly in a groove. I heard heavy breathing behind me, and I anticipated that someone was about to pass me so I moved over. But they just stayed behind me for quite some time. I was looking for the mile 2 marker for quite some time, but I never saw it. Based on what I expected my pace to be I had guessed that I had passed it quite some time ago, but the race didn’t seem that clear anymore. In fact the rest of the race is blurred together in my memory.

I do know that the racecourse took us to a waterfall that must have been 30 feet high. The race went down a set of stairs to the observation platform, then turned around and went back up. It was a bit disappointing to see some of the runners going halfway down the stairs, then turning around, but it wasn’t like we were trying to win the gold medal in the Olympics or anything.

Then we made it to “Slippery Rock” the sign proclaimed. This was certainly the steepest part of the race. From the race profile posted on the Internet I learned that this steep climb was about 300 feet up in about two tenths of a mile. Most of the people were walking up the rock, and I was with them. I don’t know how anyone could actually run up this rock. But, I took long strides and I passed by about ten people just on the face of this rock. The three-mile mark was not posted, but it was somewhere on the face of this rock based on the race profile.

My wife had passed me by before we had gotten to the rock, but I thought that I might be able to catch her. But she maintained her speed and I remained behind her as we climbed the rock. At the top of the rock was the mid-course water station. I ignored it as I usually do. I don’t particularly like water sloshing around in my stomach as I am running, so I put off the water until the end of the race.

Then the course took us down the backside of the rock, which was a nice downhill run with only a few obstacles in the way. One interesting obstruction was a tree leaning against a cliff and the path went under it. I certainly had to duck, and I imagined that if I were too tired I might not have been able to find the strength to duck. Then I would have “hit the tree.” I began to think that it was funny to have “hit the tree.” I began to amuse myself by thinking that Marathoners “hit the wall” but trail runners “hit the tree.”

I know, it wasn’t really that funny, but that’s what happens when you exert yourself too these extremes. And, while I was thinking this I saw that I was getting close to my wife. I ran past her and told her to be careful not to “hit the tree.” She didn’t think that it was funny.

Of course the end part of the race is even foggier. I know that my wife passed me again on another uphill stretch. She certainly does quite well on the climbs. But, I didn’t let her get too far ahead of me. And, we passed the 4.5 mile marker very close together. I told her that we had less than a mile to go, and I passed her on an uphill climb for the first time. It wasn’t long after that that I saw the flags and the clock showing that we had reached the end of the trail. I saw that my time was 1:02:20 and I turned around to wait for my wife to finish behind me. When she did I saw that she finished at 1:02:35.

They had snacks and water set up at the finish, but it wasn’t for those of us who had just finished the race. Instead it was for the 16 milers who were just passing through on to the 10.5-mile loop. I wanted to get some water that was located up the hill at the registration table. My wife waited for my daughter and our friend to finish while I went to get some snacks and water. They had fresh fruit, trail mix, water and even candy. I grabbed some stuff and headed back to wait at the finish line. And, my daughter finished the race about ten minutes behind us. We had fun talking about the details of the race and eating snacks.

The amazing thing about this race was that the results were being typed in a laptop computer and printed out periodically. They put the results up at the snack table and we could see where we finished. And, that’s when I found out that I actually finished 9th overall in the race. I was surprised, I had never finished that high in the results before. I also found out that our real time was 57:20 and 57:35, because I had forgotten about the 5-minute delay for the start of our race. My wife finished second among the women in the race and I finished 3rd in my age group.

Well, we stood around talking with the other runners for some time and then we felt rested enough to hike a little ways through the woods. We thought that we might take some time to actually look around and enjoy the redwoods, waterfalls and banana slugs. We walked back to the “slippery rock” and the stairs that took us down to the waterfalls. This time we lingered just looking at the falls and the fish swimming in the creek at the bottom. Then we turned around and climbed the slippery rock one more time as we headed back home again.

I hope y’all like that better than what I wrote yesterday…











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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Trail Running, Trails, Running, Exercise, Jogging

I had such a wonderful experience this weekend that I find the need to write about it. And, you should remember that this is coming from a person who once wrote, “I hate running.”

First, a little back ground for those of you who don’t read every post that I make. I assume that’s most of you. Twenty some years ago I was on a swim team. I was pretty good and I swam for one year on my college swim team. However, because of the time required for swim team I decided that I should put that time toward studies and social activities instead, and my training went from several hours per day to dancing in night clubs over the weekend. When I went to graduate school I did even less dancing and even more studying. Without much more explanation most of you can imagine that I put on some weight and became much less athletic, to put it lightly.

Actually I really like swimming and I should have continued swimming on my own, but even though it was easy to find a pool while I was in school, it was certainly more difficult once I started working in the “real world.” My current employer actually had an option to join a nearby sports club at a discount, but it was difficult to find the time to use the membership. I actually ended up using the membership to play racquetball during lunch with some of the guys from work and injured my elbow in the process. But, over the twenty some years since my swim team days I gained about 50 pounds.

My wife had been trying to encourage me to run with her, but my memory of running always went back to my high school cross-country days. Fall was the off season for swimming, so I ran cross-country to try to stay in shape in the off season, but I always hated running. I hated almost everything about it. I find it boring. I didn’t like the dryness in my mouth. I didn’t like the pushing at the start of the race. I didn’t like the pain of trying to climb the hills. I just didn’t like it, but I hoped that I would be able to maintain my physical fitness during the off season none-the-less.

Back in 2001 when my son had been assigned a school project to write a report on a National Park our family took a trip to Lassen National Park to see the volcanoes. This was the first hiking that I had done in quite a while, and the critical moment of the trip was the family climb of the “cinder cone.” This grueling climb proved that I was truly out of shape, and that needed to be fixed. But like all good intentions that is all that they are until you take action. I started walking a bit more often than I had been, but running was still out of the question. I still had the thought of that pain and discomfort in the back of my mind. I just remembered that I hated running, and even when my wife tried to encourage me to jog a little I scoffed at her and let her run ahead.

But, three years later I was involved in an accident that changed my life. My car was rear-ended and I needed to take the car to the body shop to fix it. And, while I was waiting to drop the car off early one morning I saw an athletic center across the street that had just finished building a pool. The pool wasn’t quite finished, but by the time that they had finished I was a member of the sports club. And, I religiously went to swim laps every morning for at least an hour.

After about a year of doing this I felt much healthier and I had lost about twenty pounds. I wasn’t in a hurry to undo the weight that I had put on over the years, so I wasn’t disappointed with the slow progress. But I did feel that I might be able to run a 5K with my wife and kids one weekend. In fact, my wife actually ran a 10K while I ran/walked the 5K with my kids just to keep them occupied. And, I was so sore the next day, it made me remember why I hated running. However, being the insane person that I am I figured that the 5K was actually good for me, and when my wife entered another 10K I entered the 5K with the kids again. And, once again I was extremely sore for even more than a few days.

I didn’t understand how I could be so sore if I worked out every day, even if it was swimming, and still be so incredibly sore after running a 5K. But that didn’t stop me, because I searched the Internet to find the answer. I came to the conclusion that if I ran at least once a week my running muscles would not become so sore after a race. And, I began to run on the treadmill at the very same club at least once a week. A strange thing happened, I began to like running on the treadmill. I liked running on the treadmill because I could set a pace and push myself just the right amount to get stronger, but not exhaust myself too quickly. I could gradually increase my pace, and best of all I could stop any time that I wanted without having to walk all the way home from some strange place. Of course this worked to keep me from becoming so incredibly sore after running a 5K. Well, I entered a 10-mile race and a 10K in the last few months and I actually enjoyed the runs. I tried to run them as fast as I could. And, over the last couple of months I am still getting better.

This weekend we went to a completely new type of run. It is called a trail run. The idea is to run a race through the hiking trails of a park. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages of this type of run, compared to the typical street run. The disadvantage is that there isn’t much room on a trail for a large number of runners, so this race was limited to only 250 people. Another disadvantage is that there are hills on the hiking trails that are quite steep. This must be one of the factors that help to limit the number of runners on the trail.

However, the advantage of running through the beauty of the park and the added challenge of the course outweigh any of the disadvantages. Just to give an idea of the grueling nature of the race that I ran, it took me 57:20 minutes to run 5.5 miles up and down hills. There was a slow start at the beginning of the race where over 100 people tried to squeeze into a trail that was only wide enough for two or three people. Last month I ran a 10K, which is 6.2 miles in 47:28 minutes. Of course, every race depends on its terrain and conditions. That is what makes the race unique.

So, after my experience of this race I can’t wait to run the next one. I am hooked on trail running. I find myself needing to write the sentence that I never thought that I could write.

I love trail running.




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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Running, Exercise, Health

On the very basic level the Universe is just puckers in space. These puckers are a little more complex than the puckers sewn into material to make than fancy dress oh just so fine. These puckers are waves in the very space-time continuum, as they like to say in science fiction movies. But, these puckers are the basis for everything that we experience and basically our own existence as well.

About 100 years ago quantum mechanics was born with the discovery that sometimes particles behave as waves and sometime waves behave as particles. This observation lead to confusion among scientists at the time, and it remains a puzzle in many ways to this day. This is because at the quantum level statistics becomes the predictor as to where a particle may go, as opposed to knowing where an object will go based on mass, momentum and forces acting on the particle. The confusion between particles and waves also manifests itself in the looking at very low intensity light waves that build up interference patterns one particle at a time suggesting that time is not what our existence suggests that it is.

But, it all comes down to interactions. Wave particles interact with particle waves. Sometimes these waves create attractive forces, and sometimes these waves create repulsive forces. Two particles near each other share waves that causes these particles to remain together. This more complex structure is just a more complex pucker in the space-time continuum. Sometimes when two of these complex puckers travel near each other the puckers rearrange themselves in a more complex way resulting in new wave puckers and new particle puckers to travel off in different directions. After some time a complex pucker may not have enough energy to maintain the complexity of its structure, and it will change its shape and emit a wave or particle pucker.

The amazing thing about this is that these complex puckers in space find ways to organize themselves into more and more complex puckers. But, every rearrangement of a pucker results in energy in the form of other puckers being generated or absorbed to allow this rearrangement to happen. And again the key to all of this is the interactions of the puckers at larger and larger scales.

If you think about this for a moment or two you will soon realize that we are also very complex puckers in the space-time continuum. And, in being puckers in this Universe we are also part of the Universe itself. We feel as if we are different entities existing apart from the Universe, but observation tells us that we are all part of the one entity - The Universe. We are all puckers in the Universe interacting in very complex ways with all the other puckers in the Universe.

This idea isn’t new at all. Many religions have an idea of humanity as being part of something greater than the self. The goal of meditation and yoga is sometimes expressed as becoming “one with the Universe.” This happens when you let go of all those ideas and things that tie you to the self and you become aware that you are a piece of the Universe itself. The idea is freeing, as is the actual experience of feeling it, not just knowing it. Some people have used drugs to experience this same feeling, and they repeat the procedure of partaking in this ritual in order to continue experiencing this feeling.

Imagination, drugs, ritual and meditation have all been used in an effort to bring people to this concept. All of these methods have problems and pitfalls, but once one has success with any method they wish to share the experience. But not all methods work the same for all people. Even the idea that I have expressed above may leave a sour taste in the mouth of many.

When we step back and look at the night sky with its many stars in the night the view is awesome. When we spend a little more time thinking that each one of those stars contains planets and complex structures and we have no idea what diverse conditions exist. The individual stars in the night that we observe are mainly members of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. But, there are thousands of galaxies, each one of which contains a similar number of stars as our own galaxy. The distances to these places are immense and the energy required to send instruments or people exploring to these places is mind boggling. Each person on Earth could own his or her own star and all the planets associated with it with many more left over. The only problem is to get to any of these stars. But, all those stars are also just puckers in the Universe.

Interactions between the puckers in space have been described as being mediated by the forces found in nature. There is gravitation, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and electromagnetic interactions. Great big puckers warp the space time continuum and cause an attraction between the great big puckers. This is kind of like two puckers on a bed sheet have the propensity to want to become one much bigger pucker.

However, if we think about communities of people (or animals) in terms of this same pucker analogy these large puckers also interact with each other in more complex ways. Communication in its many diverse and complicated ways becomes the mechanism for interaction. Communication becomes an action at a distance, persuading people to act on what they hear or see. Organization of groups of people into families, communities, and larger structures can be viewed as another even more complex systems of interactions between certain classes of puckers in the Universe. The problem or course is that these interactions are complex and difficult to understand at any level other than mere statistics.

In fact, it is funny that the simplest interactions in the Universe and the most complex interactions in the Universe can only be described by statistics.










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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit



Science, Philosophy, Complex Interactions

I don’t really like writing about exercise or health, because it is monotonous and boring for the most part. I do write about it from time to time, because it is part of my life. Well, at least it is part of my life recently, like the last two years. Last time I wrote about losing weight was back in September when I crossed the 40-pound mark. At the time I wrote that I didn’t even realize that I was forty pounds over weight, let alone thought that I could loose forty pounds. So, this week when I crossed the fifty-pound mark I was even more amazed if that could be possible. How could I possibly continue to loose weight?

Basically I have lost about one pound per week over the last 10 weeks. That doesn’t seem to be very much weight over that time period, but it is much faster than the average amount of weight that I have lost over the last two years. It took me about 15 months to loose the first forty pounds, as I lost weight slowly and built my endurance.

How did I do it?

I wrote about how I put the weight on over about twenty years. It was gradual and I really didn’t think that I was getting heavy or feeling unhealthy. I didn’t really eat very much, but I didn’t really exercise much either. Exercise had always been part of my life as I was growing up. I swam on the YMCA swim team from the age of 10 to about 18. After high school I joined the College Swim Team, and I played Water Polo as well. However, school began to take more time and swim team was no longer part of my life. When swim team ended so did my exercise routine. But, the weight didn’t really pile on when I quit the team, I just stayed the same. But, when I went to graduate school I spent more time inside and less time outside because I was now in Texas and its hot there. I believe I put on about ten pounds that first year, but that was about it.

A couple of years later I found myself in the Woodlands, Texas and I began to exercise again. I joined the sports center and I road my bike to work. Even with the hot Texas weather I could go to the pool and swim a few laps and cool off. But, it wasn’t swim team and swimming a mile was a long workout at the time. For those who don’t swim 1 mile is 1720 yards, and a length of the pool is 25 yards. So, 1 mile would be 68 4/5 lengths. Since I am the only one counting lengths I usually use 1750 yards = 70 lengths = 1 mile, just to keep track. Swim team workouts are usually much longer than 1 mile. For example, when I was in college a swim team workout was about 5 or 6 thousand yards for a two hour practice when we were working on distance.

When I moved to Germany I lived in Pinneberg which is a small town about ten miles north of Hamburg. I didn’t have a car, so I decided that I would ride my bike to and from work. For the five months that I lived in Pinneberg I got in very good shape and I never weighed myself, so I don’t know if I lost a lot of weight or not. When we moved closer to Hamburg I also rode my bike, but the ride was less than two miles so I hardly broke a sweat. I know that I put on weight at this time, because I was weighed when I finally got my German Driver’s license.

When I moved back to the United States the company that I worked for gave everyone a free club membership at the gym down the street. So, for three years I went to the pool every other day and swam about one mile. Then I started to play racquetball instead, but I was still staying relatively healthy. When our company moved 10 miles to the south it was no longer practical to workout at lunch and I began to put on weight again. When I started to go out to lunch everyday I managed to get my weight up to 198 pounds.

At this point we took a family trip to Lassen National Park to climb a volcano. For me this was a very difficult trip physically. I hadn’t realized that I had been in such bad shape. I was fine just getting around from the car to the house or even walking around the block, but hiking took a bit more effort. After this trip my wife and I decided that we would try to get in better shape. The key word here was “try.” We started out trying to walk up to the middle school in the morning and walk around the track. We thought that maybe we could gradually increase the speed and distance, but I wasn’t running yet. I thought that maybe I could run a lap or two if I kept at it. Of course when it rained or it was cold we found it difficult to get out there, but at least it was some exercise. But, I wasn’t really loosing any weight.
One day in March of 2003 I was hit from behind when I was stopped at a stop sign. The guy jumps out of the car shaking his fist at me shouting, “Why did you stop there?” Fortunately no one was hurt and the car only had minor damage that was easily repaired at a body shop. And, when I took the car to the body shop I discovered a new pool in town. The health club across the street had put in a new pool, but it wasn’t even open yet. I was first in line to sign up for a membership. Well, the pool had troubles and it didn’t actually open until May and when I finally got the details for our “family” membership worked out it was June.

However, once I got the membership I began to use it every weekday and most weekends. I decided that if I woke up at 5:00am I could get to the pool at 5:30am and work out until 6:45am. Then I could sit in the Jacuzzi for ten minutes to loosen my sore muscles and get home by 7:15am. As time went on I worked my way up to swimming about 4000 yards a day. And, I have followed this schedule ever since.

Once I began to get in better shape my wife who loves to run and hates to swim decided to use the treadmill, ski machine and elliptical machine. My wife suggested that we should enter some of the local races just for fun. In fact, my wife and daughter had run a couple of races in San Francisco before I even started swimming. Since I was beginning to feel healthier I thought that I was game for a short 5K. I could run with the kids, while my wife did the serious running. I discovered that even though I was getting in better shape I was still out of shape as far as running goes. I was sore for days after that short 5K run.

As time went on I ran in more 5Ks, at events where my wife ran 10Ks and even a 10 miles race. But, to my surprise I found myself sore after every race. I swam every day, and I was getting in very good shape, but I was sore after every single race. I began to think that I just couldn’t run these races because of the hobbling that I would go through for four days after the race. Then I decided to use the Internet. After doing some research I discovered that my legs were sore because the muscles were being ripped apart and they were sore over those four days as my body repaired the damage. But, the solution was that if I used those muscles at least once a week I wouldn’t damage the muscles and they wouldn’t go through the four day period of repair and pain. So, I added running to my schedule in order to avoid the pain for the once every couple of months when we enter a race as a family. And, guess what, it works. I have begun to run along the beach once a week instead of swimming. And last week I actually ran ten miles without “much” pain the next day.

So, that brings us to today when I have crossed the 50-pounds lost mark. According to various resources on the web I have discovered my idea weight is 153 pounds. There are actually many different standards used to determine what an ideal weight should be. One web page has a number of different standards so they can be compared. The People Choice Ideal Weight is effected by your actual weight, which is confusing. This is the average weight that other people of your Age, Height, Weight and Gender would describe as their ideal weight. So, heavier people predict heavier ideal weights and lighter people predict lighter ideal weights.

But, this doesn’t tell the whole story. It turns out that muscles have weight and fat has weight. If you have more muscle and less fat, but the same weight we should have a way to determine who is healthier. I found another web page that uses the ratio of waist-to-height to determine your percentage of fat. This assumes that if you have a lot of muscle it isn’t all concentrated in your abdominal muscles because you are a nut when comes to sit-ups.

But this is really cool, because if you go to the explanation of Waist-to-Height Ratio you will find the ratio for a Barbie doll, a Ken doll and a college swimmer. I love it, because now that my waist is 29 inches I qualify as a college swimmer, at least as far as my Waist-to-Height Ratio goes. But, the scary part is that my waist needs to be 25 inches to be a Ken doll.












Running, Swimming, Health, Exercise

Since Thanksgiving in the United States is mainly about eating, I thought that I would ponder the eating and report back on it. Eating is done by every living thing on Earth that we know of and most likely every living thing in the Universe. This is because eating in the broadest terms is the means in which energy is acquired by the living organisms. For example, plants eat by converting sunlight into sugar and that sugar is both stored in the plant, and also fed to each cell in its structure. Some animals eat these plants and use the sugar stored in the plant while they convert the sugar to fat and store it for later use. Other animals eat these animals and make use of the fat stored in their bodies.

Humans have taken food to an entirely different level. They have created foods with fats and sugars in them. They have learned how to extract fats and sugars out of many different animals and plants and combine them in new and interesting ways. Humans have learned to use heat to transform these foods into a variety of tastes and smells that make people want to eat even more. It is as if humans are on the never-ending search for the perfect food.

Of course, the idea behind eating isn’t really supposed to be about the eating, but rather it is supposed to be about the nourishment. After all we eat to get our bodies to function, this is the primary reason for eating. But, nature has given our bodies a natural desire to crave food, because without it we would most likely starve to death. Unfortunately the way the drive to eat works is not the best feedback system in the world. A feedback system is an engineering system that monitors a parameter in a process and responds to the value of that parameter. Natures feedback system was along the lines of “get hungry then go catch food.” If you ate too much you would get lazy and decide not to go hunt. If you began to starve you would become more and more motivated to catch something in order to abate the hunger in your stomach.

Now days the feedback system is broken. The threshold for being too lazy to go catch food has been changed to the threshold to walk to the refrigerator and grab a Coke and cold pizza. Or maybe the threshold to drive to the 24-hour grocery store to buy Oreos and Chocolate Milk is a bit to low. Either way, nature’s feedback system is broken and only human intelligence can intervene. Humans can do this in several different ways. They can pray, “Oh God please don’t let me get fat,” as they drive to the 7-11 for a Slurpy and beef jerky. Or, they can decide to fight the urge to eat. But, we also need to remember that catching the food is nature’s way to get man to exercise. So, the third way to fix nature’s feedback system is to do artificial exercise. Instead of going out and hunting food with your bare hands you can run on the treadmill or street. Instead of trekking through the woods picking nuts and berries you can trek through the woods admiring natures wonders. And instead of fishing in a stream you can swim in the pool, like I do.

Getting back to my point about the perfect food. (You thought I forgot, right?) Since I started working out I have noticed that the types of foods that my body craves has changed. For example, every morning I would wake up, get ready for work and make a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast. When we had lunchmeat in the ‘fridge I would put that on the bagel as well. As time went by the thickness of the cream cheese seemed to get thicker and the layer of lunchmeat turned into ham, salami and turkey. After I began working out my taste for food changed little by little. I was only interested in eating what I liked; I wasn’t trying to be a “health nut.” So, I began putting avocado on my bagel. Then I started buying whole wheat and nut bagels. Soon the cream cheese seemed a bit heavy, so I switched to butter. Then I discovered Kashi. I thought that maybe I had a bit of time to eat a bowl of Kashi before driving off. I began reading the paper and eating Kashi and milk. One day while walking down the dairy aisle my wife suggested that we should try yogurt. We have always bought yogurt for a snack, and I had put it into Mussili while we lived in Germany, so I thought that yogurt and Kashi might be a good mix. Soon I was eating Plain yogurt and Kashi for breakfast. It was just the right food to eat after a good morning workout. Or, so I thought until I discovered the perfect food.

On Thanksgiving day we normally cook the traditional meal. We have turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, gravy and CRANBERRY sauce. And this year after Thanksgiving on Friday morning we went out to the club to work out. When we got back I was ready for breakfast. I open the refrigerator door and found my yogurt when I saw the leftover CRANBERRY sauce. What a great idea I had at that moment that it is impossible to describe, but eating the yogurt and cranberry sauce surpassed the actual idea by many orders of magnitude. As I ate the cranberry sauce and yogurt I thought “this must be the perfect food.” With every bite I thought, “surely this is the perfect food.”

Of course, these perfect food things never last very long. If you eat them to often you become weary of them and begin to look for new and better foods. So, it may be wise to not eat this food every day for the rest of your life. But, if you ever get the chance because you have cranberry sauce and yogurt in the refrigerator at the same time after a good workout, then you certainly need to try a bite of the “perfect food.”





health, health food, excercise, workout

Since this is Friday I thought that I would write something a bit different.

I went to the doctor today. I thought that since I was in probably the best health that I’ve been in the last twenty years I should get it on the record. This is sort of the opposite reaction that the out shape guy has when he doesn’t want to go to the doctor, because he knows what the doctor is going to say, and he doesn’t want to hear it. In my case, I lost over forty pounds since the last time I was at the doctor and I feel great.

Of course this doesn’t make any sense at all, but it is human nature.

I already knew that my blood pressure was really good, because I used the machine at the grocery store and I discovered that my blood pressure was good. But, when I was there I discovered something surprising. My pulse was only 48 beats per minute. Of course I had the blood work done, and it verified that my cholesterol, kidneys and liver were all AOK.

When I got to the doctor’s office this morning they do the typical things. First, a nurse takes your vital signs, blood pressure, weight, pulse, EKG etc… Well, since I had seen that my pulse was 48 at the grocery store I became obsessed with taking my pulse. I go through these periods of obsession that’s basically why I am a scientist. I like to take measurements, and I take them often out of curiosity more than anything else does.

Since I work out in the morning I really get my pulse going during my workout. It generally gets as high as 150 beats per minute. After my workout it will settle down gradually over the next hour or so. Typically my pulse in the morning ranges between 54 and 66 beats per minute. This isn’t as low as the 48 beats per minute that the machine at the grocery store measured, but those are typical numbers for a male in fairly good shape. For some reason my pulse tends to be a bit lower in the evening hours, and 48 isn’t unusual in the evening, when I measured my blood pressure in the grocery store.

Well, I worked out this morning before my doctor’s visit. I wondered what my pulse was before I went into the doctor’s office and I measured it to be 66 beats per minute. I did this by counting the number of beats in 30 seconds and multiplied by two. Typically a pulse is measured by counting the number of beats in 10 or 15 seconds and multiplying by 6 or 4. When the nurse measured my pulse she got 84. I have no idea how she got such a high number. She didn’t spend much time taking my pulse. She may have spent 5 or 10 seconds, but certainly not 15 counting the beats. 84 is a number that could be calculated by counting 7 beats in 5 seconds, 14 beats in 10 seconds or 21 beats in 15 seconds.

You can see how the resolution changes depending on how many seconds you spend counting beats. For example, if you spend 5 seconds counting beats you will get 48 if you count 4 beats, 60 if you count 5, 72 if you count 6 and 84 if you count 7. If my pulse was actually 66 then you would have an equal probability of counting either 5 or 6 beats in 5 seconds. There is also a smaller possibility that you could count either 4 or 7 counts in 5 seconds. This means that if a pulse is taken by counting the number of beats in 5 seconds an actual pulse of 66 could be measured to be anywhere between 48 and 84. If we compare this to counting beats over 15 seconds instead we can see that a pulse of 66 would be about 16 or 17 beats. A count of 16 beats would result in a measure of 64 and a count of 17 would result in a measure of 68. A count of 15 would result in a pulse of 60 beats per minute and a count of 18 would result in a pulse of 72 beats per minute. It would be virtually impossible to measure a pulse of 84.

The measurement of my pulse certainly is not critical, and the record of my EKG has a much more detailed measurement of the time between pulses, so this doesn’t really matter much. In fact, I wonder why they even bother taking a pulse at all if they aren’t going to spend the time to do it well. After the nurse finished her measurements I took my pulse again, wondering if somehow my heart began to race for some reason. But, I soon found out that my pulse was 66 just like it had been earlier.

Well, this is just another lesson about being aware of what is going on when you visit the doctor. You need to understand what the doctor is saying, and how he reached his conclusions. You need to ask questions. For example, if he said that he came to some conclusion based on my pulse being 84 I certainly would have said that it was much lower. Since he shook my hand and said don’t come back for another year I didn’t worry about it.






Doctor Visit, Health, Science, Biology

When I was in High School my favorite author was Kurt Vonnegut Jr. At the time I couldn’t really explain why I liked his writing, but he always created interesting plots that were easy to follow and understand. He always added a dab of science, but his science fiction was more about human relations than new technology.

When my High School English teacher saw what I was reading she asked me if she could borrow the book when I was finished. The book was Cat’s Cradle, a story about the development of a new crystalline form of ice. This crystalline form of ice was known as ice-nine and when it was placed in water the water molecules would align themselves with the crystal of ice-nine and the water in this form would be solid at room temperature. The military could use this to turn bogs and swamps into solid ground. And, even all these years later I remember Kurt Vonnegut writing: “…and the Marines go marching on.”

Obviously all of the water in the world in connected in some way, and when the military puts the water into the environment the entire world becomes one large frozen ball of ice-nine. When my teacher returned the book to me she said one thing, “That book was certainly anti-science.” Even when I was in High School I didn’t see the book as being anti-science, but anti-military. Science only said that ice-nine existed. The military decided to use the ice-nine for war and in turn reeked enormous environmental damage. Scientists make the observations and try to understand the world. Ignoring the truth about the world is not an option. However, knowledge can be dangerous when people are determined to use the knowledge for their own gain without regard for the rest of the world.

Today I listened to an old radio program called “Dimension X.” This program and “X minus 1” the result of its evolution made radio plays out of Science fiction stories. The story I listened to today was called “A Report on the Barnhouse Effect” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Once again Kurt Vonnegut uses the same theme. A research scientist discovers a way to effect the world with telekinesis. The story was written in the 1940s, so the vocabulary is a bit different from what we use today, but Kurt Vonnegut had to create vocabulary to describe his ideas.

Professor Barnhouse first learns how to control dice so they will always land the way he wants, and he gradually learns how to do more. His assistant convinces him to divulge this knowledge to the military who quickly sets up a multitude of tests to see what kind of damage he can cause. After the destruction of 20 missiles flying across the ocean Professor Barnhouse runs off after leaving a note. The note says that after becoming the first super weapon with a conscience he has decided to remove himself from the stockpile. Then he proceeds to go out and destroy nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon factories around the world in an effort to create peace.

I thought that this was a wonderful way to illustrate the difference between science and how scientific information can be used. The science part is the discovery of telekinetic power. However, if that were actually true the observation of the existence of the power is the science. Once the existence is known it can be used in many different ways. Professor Barnhouse suggests that he can use the power to dig trenches and bring water to the poor farmers who need irrigation for their crops. In fact, using this telekinetic power could solve many of the world’s problems and its use could promote peace. But, the other side of the coin shows us that there are also those who fear others and would rather use the same power for destruction and war. The science is the same, but those who use the knowledge determine its use.

And, this brings us back to the 100-year-old argument about evolution. Scientists have observed evolution and they know the facts. These are observations of the way the world is. However, some people either deny the truth about what we know about the Universe or they deny that God left clues about the Universe. Science just tells us what has been observed. The knowledge that scientists have observed can be used to make arguments about religion, but since the premise of religion can never be observed the arguments make no sense. So, the most dangerous argument that is made begins by telling us that science tells us that man is the result of evolution. The Bible, however, tells us that man is the result of Gods creation. The Bible is right, therefore science is wrong. Science simply observes the world and collects the information.
The reason this is a dangerous argument is because it tells us that we can not believe anything that we observe. Since we can’t believe what we see, hear, touch then how can we even know that we exist? How can we believe anything about the world we live in? Doubt leads to mental illness and self-destruction. Doubt leaves a vacuum and the Radical Christian Right would have you believe that the only way to fill that vacuum is with the word of God in the Bible. Of course this is the way a cult operates. A cult demands that you deny everything and then you are ready to accept the “new truth.” Therefore, a philosophy based on this kind of assumption results in a culture that denies reality in favor of dogma and science and rational thought become less valued. This destroys the basis of American culture and moves us closer to a religious state.



politics, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Evolution, Science

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