A word of advice this campaign season. If you believe enough in a candidate to put their bumper sticker on your car, be on your best behavior out there on the highways. You’re now an ambassador!
Whoah … that guy that cut me off, in the Cadillac with the Bush/Cheney bumper sticker … what an asshole!
Just yesterday I was praising Tim Noakes’ The Lore of Running to a friend who recently started training to run his first marathon. Then this morning over breakfast I stumbled across a fascinating article in the March 20 New Scientist (paper only, not the web) about new research Noakes and colleague Alan St. Clair Gibson have been doing on the nature of physical exhaustion in endurance athletes. They think it’s all in our brain, acting as a sort of “central governor” to get our body to slow down well before we actually reach the point of physical exhaustion, essentially leaving us with enough in reserve to flee if there happens to be a lion around the next corner. One can see how that would have been an evolutionary advantage back in the day.
Continue reading ‘Tim Noakes and the Central Governor Theory’ »
From my other blogworld, a lovely image from Mars via Larry Crumpler, with commentary.
Sigh.
The comment spammers are back already. It seems as though I’ll have to try something a little more industrial in strength.
After all the talk about Richard Clarke based largely on the political positioning associated with his arguments, it’s useful to read his underlying argument about the U.S. response to terrorism in his own words.
My story on climate change and national security ran in this morning’s paper. It gave me a chance to take a stab at explaining the idea of “no regrets” policies – climate change responses that are robust to the endless and apparently unsettleable argument in our political arena over the nature and causes of climate change:
One governmental response, favored by many, is to reduce the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But another response, the Sandia group found, could be policies aimed at reducing the vulnerability of societies around the world to climate change.
That could have the advantage of helping regardless of whether the change is natural or human-caused. It could also include policies that would help in the absence of any climate change at all? sometimes called “no regrets” policies.
Helping poor, arid nations ensure adequate water supplies, for example, could help them respond to drought, whether it was natural or a response to greenhouse warming. But it could also help even if there isn’t a drought.
It’s that magic time of year when the garden offers new surprises every day. Today it was one of our tulips, a little gem on the mound in the back yard.
The wisteria is starting to leaf out, and the first iris – a lovely little white thing – is blooming in the front yard.
Lissa got the irrigation system in our back yard running this afternoon, and most of the work is done on the front irrigation. I’ve been pretty diligent about weeding every day during my vacation, so that’s largely under control.
It cooled off nicely as the sun went down, so Lissa and I took a long walk down through the neighborhood to Central, past the high-end folks waiting for a table at Scalo to Flying Star, which is low-rent enough for us without being unapproachably hip. I had shrimp pasta with corn and poblano chiles. L had a patty melt, minus the cheese, which I think is an odd concept (what exactly is left to melt?) but she seemed to thoroughly enjoy.
I feel unbelievably relaxed, like I can really sleep now. And so to bed.
It was one of those annoying little things that I figured out how to do once, but couldn’t remember how when it came up this morning on the libxml mailing list: how to dump a document from its native DocPtr structure into a regular old char buffer.
So when Lucas Brasilino pointed out the answer I jotted down a working example and added it to the libxml2 examples (not there at the moment, should show up when the web site syncs).
See, I’m on vacation.
My friend Dave Thomas and a number of other contributors have set up The Panda’s Thumb, a blog “dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world.”
Check it out.