You're first!

My wife brought up a good point today: Wouldn't it be awful to be a tattoo artist's first client? Any mistakes are going to be permanent.

I wondered aloud if there are such things as "tattoo colleges" that like barber colleges--you can get a haircut at a big discount, but it might not be perfect.

This brought to mind a larger idea I have been having about physical skill and talent. Take something like surgery or dentistry; these people spend years training for their job and they must have at least a reasonable ability in order to graduate. All of the selective pressures leading up to the point where they actually use their hands are academic, but what really matters in the end is their manual abilities. If they don't have much manual ability, they have so much sunk time and expense that they pretty much have to stick to a profession they aren't much good at.

That's funny but what's the real reason?

"Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able," the 42-year-old actor reveals in Esquire magazine's October issue, on newsstands Sept. 19.

Brad, I believe you, I really do. You have always shown a true commitment to your values, so this is entirely consistent with that. One question though, do you really think Angie will buy your "explanation"?

Here is my theory FWIW, she is a lot smarter than you. She doesn't want to get married either but wants you to think she does.

Yes, this makes sense

I came back from my long run today and felt faint even after drinking around 20 oz of water. I weighed my self and was still around 4 lbs low, so the water I drank had only made a dent. Just for the fun of it I took my blood pressure and it was really low. Something like 109/63 (I can't remember the exact figures). It sort of makes sense in that if you deplete water from the system, the blood will reflect this and be of lower volume--hence the lower pressure.

It also makes sense when you recall that one of the classes of hypertension medicines are diuretics.

I love science in action.

Update: Thu run 4.25 miles in 32:15. I feel much better now.

Update 2: The Bay State Marathon will be having water/gatoraide stations throughout the race so dehydration should not be much of a problem.

Update 3: Friday run 5.5 miles in 42:37

This was better...

My wife had intended to make pasta tonight with Béchamel sauce and Smithfield Ham. As it turned out, time was limited and she needed to go to the middle school open house. So we improvised to save time. Here is the recipe:

Cook 1 lb of linguine according to package directions.

Drain and return to pot, add around 1/2 lb of cubed ham to the pasta and then add the following sauce and mix under moderate heat until it reaches the proper consistency. (So that the noodles are coated with cheese rather than the sauce being a puddle on the bottom of the pan.)

Sauce:

Brown a couple of crushed and chopped cloves of garlic in a teaspoon of olive oil.

Pour in 1 cup of good white wine (Use something you would drink, we used leftover pinot grigio from last night.) As you stir the wine on medium heat, slowly add the grated cheese. We used around 1/3 lb of 4:1 Danish Fontina and Romano.

It was fabulous! and probably had a million calories per bite.

Leisure on Sunday: Tip # 1

Don't fill your truck with building supplies on Saturday if you are in the mood to relax on Sunday.

A day of odds and ends

--We all got up early on this Saturday because we wanted to have breakfast together and the new car was scheduled for FREE! routine service this morning at 8:00AM

--Surenna wanted help with uploading videos to her blog. In the past we would upload to YouTube and then embed from there, but recently Blogger has added a tab for directly embedding. But, Safari doesn't have that tab. So, I installed Firefox on her Mac and as you can see from her blog, if you go there, she has been embedding video non-stop.

--Vaishali had promised Surenna a trip to the mall as a reward for doing Summer academic work, the other two girls wanted to play at grandparent's house and I needed insulation for the attic--I was up there a few weeks back and was appalled at how little insulation there was. So, I figured on taking the truck: Drop the two girls off at grandparent's, drop mom and daughter at mall, pick-up insulation and then retrieve the shoppers and head home. Eh, didn't work out that way.

I was in the Home Depot insulation section and they had rolls of R30 packaged in 6-roll bales. Each roll had a little more than 30 square feet of coverage, so I figured one bale would do around 200 square feet. While I was figuring out how much I needed, I noticed a guy there with his teen-aged son--also looking at attic insulation. He was cutting open bales to get at the individual rolls and asked if I wanted him to cut open some for me. I replied that the bales seemed like a nice neat and compact packaging solution as they were. He seemed incredulous that I would need a whole bale! And started out instructing me on how to measure area--take the length of your attic and multiply by the width...Yes, I know! Each bale of 6 rolls only does 200 square foot, so I will need 4 or 5 bales.

The guy continued cutting open bales and ended up cutting into the roll packaging, leaving greatly expanded bats of fiberglass swelling around the openings. I don't think he ended up buying anything. I stacked 4 bales onto a dolly. Another guy, this one not a clown, helped me lift the 4th one to the top of the stack. These 4 bales filled our Yukon XL! There is about 3 feet behind the 3rd row seat and I had to put down the 3rd row AND 2nd row seats to fit it all in. I couldn't bring the ladies home from the mall unless Surenna sat on her mom's lap. They didn't want to do that and agreed to the great hardship of staying at the mall for an extra hour of shopping while I ran the truck home and came back in another car.

--Once home the girls took the dog for a long walk while I mowed the lawn.

--Grandparents brought home the girls and stayed for dinner along with a relative who comes out from Brookline on weekends sometimes to visit.

--Vaishali made Chicken Tikka Masala, Aloo Ghobi, Tandoori Chicken and a few other things. I played Scrabble with her parents.

--Next, real soon, brownies made by Surenna. Yum!

Style: It sometimes makes total sense

Wednesday Marathon training...

This is a shorter run than the other long ones, but I am much happier with it for a couple of reasons:

1. Even though it has a woodland trail, I was able to pretty accurately map it due to geographic features and that I could identify entrance and exit points.

2. I hammered on he pace. Every time I felt myself slowing, I dug-down and got back up to speed. I hit the 13.1 mile mark right at 1:45--which is right at my marathon goal pace of 8 minutes/mile. I slacked off right after that point in part because I had hoped to take the rail trail back, but there was a cop parked right there so I chickened-out and took the (steeply up-hill) road instead.

Update: Ran 4.25 miles Thursday, fast, but untimed because I forgot to bring my watch to work.

Lets Just Wait 5 Years and See What Happens

Right now we are at the bottom of an 11-year cycle. This means we will be at the bottom of the next cycle in around 11 years. It also means we will know how high the top of the cycle will be in between 5 and 6 years. As we can see from the above graph, there is a pretty strong correlation between sun spots and climate. If we see a peak in around 2013 of 50 or fewer sun spots per month, then we need to prepare for colder weather. It is not clear that high sun spot levels like the 250/month 1950's would send us into the other extreme. It happened in the 1950's and everything was A-Okay Daddy-O.

Update:

WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a media teleconference Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 12:30 p.m. EDT, to discuss data from the joint NASA and European Space Agency Ulysses mission that reveals the sun's solar wind is at a 50-year low. The sun's current state could result in changing conditions in the solar system.

Sunday marathon training run

Run notes:

1. I was feeling tired and slow by mile 3--this was going to be a long day...

2. Canal Street started bad and got worse: There were all kinds of no-trespassing signs, which I ignored since I had no idea how to connect with the rest of the planned run if I skipped this part. The road degenerated into an underwater path--probably due to the hurricane induced torrential rains we had last night.

3. At about mile 6 I saw the most interesting house: It was octagonal, I think. It was close to the corner of Brick Kiln Road and 3A (Boston Road).

4. Toward the end of the run a boxer ran up to me and then followed me for about half a mile. A boxer can be an intimidating dog, but this one was a puppy, although almost full grown. He followed me the way dogs do: He would run 100 feet ahead, investigate a front yard and then dash back to me and run alongside for a bit. A couple of times he even playfully shouldered into my hip.

Update: Monday 4.25 Miles in 32:32

Update2: Tuesday 4.0 miles, run in the AM with the dog. Untimed

Behind the scenes

"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama told host Bill O'Reilly. "It's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

Setting: Oval Office, December 2006:

PotUS Bush: So, General Petraeus do you have a plan for me?

Gen Petraeus: Yes sir! But it won't work. Or more technically, nobody thinks it will work, but it is the only idea we have--you know, besides just abandoning the project.

PotUS Bush: Okay, so the plan won't work. But my understanding here is that it will not work in a less-bad way than any other conceivable plan?

Gen Petraeus: Exactly sir! Some of the optimists claim that this effort will delay the inevitable civil war and that is a kind of success. Doctors (for instance) consider a treatment a success if they extend a patient's life beyond what it would have been without the treatment. In this case however, we have no expectation (nobody does) that this effort will even delay the civil war. Some of our political opponents even claim that our effort will aggravate the situation.

"I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there," the Illinois senator said that night, a month before announcing his presidential bid. "In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

PotUS Bush: So, General; why should I approve your plan?

Gen Petraeus: Mr. President: When we plan this kind of operation we establish scenarios. For example there is a 50:50 chance that the plan will go more or less as we expect, within a range of slightly better or slightly worse. Then there is a 25% chance it will go much better than expected and a 25% chance it will go much worse. If the plan goes much, much, much better than expected; a less than 1% expectation, then it might someday be called a success.

PotUS Bush: So this plan will only be considered a success if it works as well as our wildest dreams?

Gen Petraeus: No Mr. President. It will have to succeed beyond our wildest dreams to ever be considered a success.

PotUS Bush: Senator McCain, can I count on your public endorsement for this plan?

Sen McCain: As you know Mr. President, I am in favor of any costly effort which nobody thinks will work as long as there are no available plans which will work better. As I see it sir, if you are going to loose at something you've got to show that you tried your hardest. Otherwise, people will always say that you could have won, but you just didn't try hard enough.

PotUS Bush: That is a good point Senator. If we pull-out now, we show lack of resolve. If we show utter resolve but still fail, we show a fundamental lack of capability. Which is worse? I say resolve is more important and who knows, maybe our capabilities go beyond what any of us expect!

Why are commenters so bone-headed?

Not mine of course: Hers. Here is an Obama supporter who debunks a lot of the anti Palin nonsense going around. She ends with this, pretty easy to understand comment:

On Sarah Palin as a VP I have no particular opinion, except that she doesn't make me any more interested in voting for John McCain. But the people criticizing her are making me considerably less interested in voting for Obama. If this sort of deranged logic produces unwavering support for Obama, I have to question my own judgement.

It is very simple really. If you are part of a group and you can see that some members of that group are acting in an unhinged manner, it ought to make you wonder if your membership is wise.

I didn't wade through all 278 responses, but I read the first few dozen and the pro-Obama types just don't get it. At all. They point out that this trash isn't coming from the "official" campaign so why should it redound to the chosen one? This misses the point and I thought these guys were from the subtle, nuance-getting party...

The fact that Megan is introspective enough to reconsider her position is pretty good evidence that she is not among those caught-up in the hysteria.

New Marathon training route

It says it is 15.5 miles, but I suspect it is actually further since I had to guess at the route through the woods--you cannot see the path on the map. I know from timing myself that my road pace is around 8 minutes per mile and while I spend more than 12 minutes in the first section of woods, the mapping gives me less than one mile: It is probably more like 1.5 miles. Similar analysis of the second wooded path indicates it is short by 1/4 to 1/3 mile. All these errors taken together probably push today's route to just shy of 17 miles. Maybe next time I will keep it all on the roads to make it easier to measure.

28 year-old training route.

The below route is the one and only long distance training run I did in preparation for the 1980 Seattle Marathon..

I would start from my school (just up the road) once mid-week and then do the route once per weekend starting from home. That makes two of my 6 weekly runs, two more were short slow recovery runs and then two more mid-distance regular pace runs.

Now that I am about to try a marathon again, I need to put in at least one run per week of this kind of distance. Ack! That's a long way!

The Prophet and the Country

I read a lot in different forms, but when reading a book it is usually a novel. I keep a few books of short stories around for when I am all out of novels (that I want to read).

Lately I have been ploughing through Kipling's Debits and Credits. Some of the stories have been entertaining, some incomprehensible but the latest struck a chord with me.

The bulk of the story is an American in the English countryside describing his views on prohibition. In a nutshell, he thinks it will weaken the national character and the nation destroyed--much like the way native Americans were destroyed by European vices (and germs).

I will indulge in only a small bit of literary criticism and then move on to my larger point.

The two men are together for the night because the Englishman's car broke-down due to a faulty magneto, which if memory serves is described as two inches of finest steel. It is described this way at least twice: Once at the time his car breaks down and then again at the end, after listening to the American all night long. I think what Kipling is trying to say is that a big, powerful thing can become totally useless if one very important part goes bad. The part I don't get is whether he is warning America that we risk our country by weakening our moral fiber with nannying laws. Or maybe he is commenting on the American, who due to his wife's death, or possibly his exile from his home,-has some part of himself broken.

What really interested me was that both sides in debates like prohibition have the same goal: They want their nation to be strong. That alcohol causes harm in the form of lives wasted can not be ignored. But do we not weaken all who can learn self-control by taking such decision making out of their hands? This is on top of the utility of preventing the vast majority from a slightly beneficial enjoyment, all to protect a few abusers from themselves.

History repeats itself--Except when it doesn't

Marx is supposed to have said:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

It would be neat to try and force the selection of two women as running-mate for the U.S. Presidency. It just doesn't work though. Each selection made sense at the time, but for different reasons. In the first case, Mondale had no realistic chance of winning against the very popular Reagan--Indeed, the President won every state except Mondale's home state of Minnesota. It made sense to at least make history by his selection of Rep. Ferraro. If there was any "tragedy" it was only in that Rep. Ferraro and Sen. Mondale went back to the relative obscurity from which they came. The present case is similar in that he made a pick which was logical given his situation: He needed someone young and dynamic (a rising star), someone who could shore-up the conservative and evangelical base and it would help if it could be a woman. Gov. Palin fits all of these criteria.

Farce? No. Tragedy? No. Still, history in the making is interesting even if doesn't fit dramatic templates.

Meenah does six.

Now that it is becoming a little cooler and the girl is getting out of her puppyhood, it seems like a good time to see just what she can do. She definitely seemed more tired at the end than normal, but she was in good spirits during the run and would speed up when I did.

Iowahawk strikes gold....again!

The Idiossey The Not-Really-That-Epic Poem of Obamacles (with Apologies to Homer)

Six degrees of separation--Sometimes fewer

There is a big article on the idea here, but I am concerned with the mundane practical applications. The idea is that any two people on the planet can be connected by people they know: For instance, I am one step away from people I know and two steps away from people who are known by people I know. Everyone on the planet is at most 6 steps apart.

There are things about the theory which I am curious about: Do we count as people we know only the ones we are currently in contact with? I must have known on the order of a couple of hundred Marines (on a first-name basis) over the 11 years in that organization, but it has been a long time and currently have only one phone # that I think is valid. Also, when research is done, it must be very difficult for subjects to name every person they know, but even if you could do that you would have to have similar data on each of those people and so on. So what I am getting at is this: If I wanted to say hi to a bushman in the Kalahari, how would I know who to pass the message to first?

This whole line of musing comes from the nomination of Sarah Palin. I looked-up some of her stats when I got the news of her being picked by McCain for VP. She attended the University of Idaho at the same time I was 8 miles away attending Washington State University. At the time, the drinking age was 18 in Idaho and 21 in Washington, so all the college bars were in Moscow and kids from both schools mixed freely.

There is a near-certain connection that I know of. I was pals with a girl who had just graduated from UI when we were working in Sun Valley and she was a Journalism major, just like Sarah Palin! Those two must have met since they had the same major and graduated the same year from the same smallish university. The problem as above with the Marines--I have no idea where she is now. We exchanged the odd letter for a couple of years after we both left Sun Valley and then lost touch.

All Dads Say That...

"Isn't that true"? She said.

"Isn't what true? I didn't really hear what you guys were talking about", I replied.

"My dad here, was just saying that I am the prettiest girl in the world and I was saying that all dads say that about their daughters. Don't you say that about your girls?"

"Oh no, not at all. I tell them that they are not all that pretty, so they better study hard."

It got a good laugh from a very pretty girl, even if it wasn't a totally honest answer.