johnsjar

My running has improved a whole lot but I am currently “hamstrung” by an unknown knee problem. I have an appointment to have it checked out Nov. 10th. This is to rule out anything serious and maybe to get a physio referral. I am quite sure that it is an IT band problem. I think it is causing my knee to not track properly which leads to popping and swelling after the first few kilometers.

I have not been paying attention to proper stretching in that area. The stretches I do in karate don’t touch this area enough to make a difference. Also possibly contributing to the problem is the road surface. I have been running on one side of the canted road, which puts stress on that side of my body. I have to start running in the center to avoid the slope. Trail running, although also often canted, is randomly uneven enough to cancel out any trend toward running imbalances. It’s just when you run again and again for months and years on one side of a crowned road surface that problems happen. Your pelvis is tilted in one direction because one leg, the same leg, is always lower than the other.

Physio will hopefully pinpoint any muscle imbalances contributing to the problem. That is really all the bad news I have about my running.

The good news is that I have been able to run a lot faster. My training pace has gone from 7:30 to just under 7 minutes per km for runs under 21 km. For marathons, I don’t know yet. My last marathon training pace was 8 minutes per km but I ran it in about 8:25 per km if I remember right. I tried training for it at 7:30, but I just couldn’t keep up the pace over marathon training distances over 23 or so km.

I am “this” close to breaking a less than one hour 10 km if I try and run faster than my training pace. Of course, I would have to run a 6 minute pace but I should be able to do that and faster. Over short distances like 5 km and 10 km it is not impossible. I have been able to maintain almost a 6 minute pace for a 5 km and recently I have run a 10 km with a 6:21 pace. Due to the current IT Band problem I have to wait for that goal. Hopefully, I should be able to do it before the end of this year. Either that or the doctor will say “never run again.” Ha ha ha! They’d have to amputate both legs before I would even begin to consider that.

My weight is steadily declining because I abandoned (with great difficulty) the notion that I could exercise my way out of over-eating. For three or more years I failed to get down below 185 pounds averaged over a week. I was 210 pounds in the beginning. Of my training for life that is, not my beginning beginning. Then, I think I was only like 8 pounds two ounces or something. Ha ha ha. Now my average is 178 pounds. My goal weight is 165 pounds. I am not starving by any means. I am still eating between 2000 and 2500 calories per day, sometimes less. I can’t begin to tell you how hard it is to take control of my food intake, but I have to very closely monitor exactly how much I am taking in otherwise the inevitable just one bite evolves back into a 4,000 calorie day. You might think that’s a lot of calories and how the hell can anyone eat that much. Until you look at the calorie content of pine nuts and pistachios and margarine-suffocated toast. Check out cashews! Toxic! A serving is like, three cashews before overdosing on calories! According to my daily needs, I need somewhere around 2400 calories to maintain my current weight, without the extra exercise I do, which amounts to about 800 calories extra burn 5 times a week.

I have this friend who is convinced that he has to take high blood pressure medication for the rest of his life because he can’t control it otherwise. He also believes that he must drink sugared pop because the aspartame in pop causes high blood pressure. I don’t know if he is still deluding himself this way or not. I think so; I think he is still in denial and in a “can’t help myself because I am too far gone attitude”.

My problem is not so serious yet that it will affect my karate and I should still be able to compete in the tournament November 8th, and grade this December. I can still run but I have to slow down until I see what’s happening with my knee. My right big toe is still far from normal, but at least the pain is under control and does not cause me too much grief. I am really glad I did not elect to have surgery on it a couple of years back. Stretching really takes a lot of the stress off of my cartilage-less toe joint.

Mentally, I am chomping at the bit raring to tie one on intellectually. Now that my work is tapering off a bit I am heavily back into catching up and reviewing my science skills in Geology, Physics, and Math. I’ve just become a member of the Geological Society of America and can access the online Geology Journal AND I get sent the year’s copies of Geology, and the Bulletin on CD or DVD. Unfortunately that’s all I can afford. I need access to Georef as well, but I may have to go the the U of A library for that. Some day I’d like to go back and maybe go for my Masters, then a Doctorate, but that’s just a pipe dream for now. I know I have to specialize, but there are so many fields I absolutely love such as paleontology, volcanology, igneous petrology, geochemistry, etc. etc. I think I might like volcanology the best. Maybe remote sensing and planetary geology. It definitely will never be petroleum geology, nor environmental, mining, or engineering geology either, that’s for sure. Those are way too economically goal-oriented corporate pressure tanks. I prefer figuring out how the Earth and other planets work on a pure scientific basis. I’ll let others find practical applications for the knowledge. Or maybe I’m just not that good at finishing what I start.

Don’t get me wrong, I am far, far away from even a Master’s Degree level, and in spite of my now 17 year old undergraduate degree in geology I still feel I have just a high school education. In other news on the “don’t stop thinking and learning or you’ll rot” front, I am learning Spanish, and plan on some Japanese in the near future. I am already pretty fluent in French. As for Spanish, I’ve been trying to learn it now for several years, and hopefully if I work really really hard this winter, I might be able to follow a debate with a two year old. And I know one or two words of Japanese, which shows you how long it takes me to do anything. I am just too busy having fun to live!

So, all in all, I just this happy happy guy, you know? Isn’t life great? So much to look forward to, so much to anticipate! No, I’m not manic. Really.

…but apparently I am according to this web site. The main web site is www.drdino.com/ but the topic I want to talk about here is that scientists are morons, more or less. I’d like to examine this web site by looking at some of the articles posted on it by people who obviously must be geniuses and certainly not morons like me.

One article I’d like to comment on can be found here: www.drdino.com/articles.php?spec=95. It is written by John Hinton who must be a very intelligent and perceptive person to have so thoroughly destroyed in only 6 short paragraphs, the geological observations of thousands of scientists over the last 200 years.

John Hinton begins his article with this statement:

Standing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and concluding that the multiple bands that line the canyon walls are products of millions of years of sedimentation is just plain stupid.

He then clearly demonstrates his training and careful thought processes with the following statements:

I spent a couple of weeks wandering through the Grand Canyon when I was in my early twenties.

And:

The idea that nearly perfect stripes would have formed through years of decay, being of distinct and differing colors, and without erosion lines, was just plain dumb.

And (I have left the spelling or grammar mistake uncorrected):

I was puzzled at the time as to why they so many scientists were so gullible, but I just figured that they were morons and left it at that.

Years later, after coming to Christ and asking the Holy Spirit to guide me in all that I do, I understood why they insisted on following such a nonsensical theory. I then understood that they were not just morons, but they were morons with an agenda that guided all of their science falsely so called.

Having established John Hinton’s impeccable credentials, I would like to ask him why he stopped thinking as soon as he encountered an intellectual difficulty choosing rather to label anyone else who had a different opinion “morons.”

According to John Hinton:

The line that “it had been carved out by a river” made absolutely no sense to me, but what puzzled me more were the evenly colored stripes of even heights that were uniformly found throughout the entire canyon. Not being a Christian at that time, I was not troubled by the idea of the earth being millions or billions of years old, but I was not able to understand how each of these individual layers, or stripes, got to be of one unified color.

Did they expect us to believe that millions of years of light pink debris were followed by millions of years of gray debris, followed by millions of years of dark pink debris, and so forth? What possible factors could have explained this uniformity of color, not to mention the uniformity of the lines dividing the layers? They are relatively smooth, even lines that stretch for great distances without any signs of erosion between them. It actually looked like the product of different types and weights of silt settling after a flood, although at the time, I erroneously considered the possibility of more than one flood having been involved.

Without commenting on the specific formations containing the beds and layers of which John Hinton speaks, he has apparently never heard of unconformities and diagenetic alteration of sediments leading to the so-called uniformity of colors to which he refers. He attributes it all to a single flood deposit without even knowing what the rock types are nor of the mineral composition, grain size, texture, and fabric. If he does know, he must feel that such characteristics are too unimportant to mention. I am not an expert in the stratigraphy of the Grand Canyon, but I am very sure that there are layers of coarse-grained sediments both above and below additional layers of fine silt and clay sediments. And that would be over-simplifying to an absurd degree on my part. In other words, the lithologies are interbedded and highly variable through time, reflecting the different depositional environments that created them. If these sediments were deposited in a single event, why aren’t all the coarse grained rocks at the bottom, grading into fine clay at the top?

I guess I’m just too stupid to live, by gum! John, can you enlighten me as to your higher thought processes so I can make sense of them?

While you’re at it can you please answer the following:

1. Why does it make no sense to you that the Grand Canyon was eroded, or carved out by the Colorado river and its tributaries?
2. How do you know that the beds are not separated by erosion lines? Describe for me what an erosion line means. In fact, while you’re at it describe to me your understanding of unconformities, disconformities, paraconformities, angular unconformities, and nonconformaties.
3. How long did it take you to determine that the beds of which you speak “…were uniformly found throughout the entire canyon…”?
4. Why do you make a point that you once were not a Christian as if that mattered one iota when it comes to the facts unless you are trying to use a manipulative tactic? As if you were somehow once a moron too, but were persuaded by the superior reasoning power of the Young Earth Creationist Elite.
5. I’m sorry for sinking to your level, but you deserve it. Moron.

Let’s at least try to have some respect for each other. I don’t really believe you are a moron, nor do I believe that other people of faith are anything but compassionate human beings just trying to find the truth. Scientists sometimes pride themselves on reversing their cherished theories in favor of better ones but they can’t do that unless they are willing to at least admit the possibility that they might be in error. They must be willing to look at the evidence, not ignore it.

OK I have a major problem with my knee. I started out fine, at well under a 7 minute pace until km 7 where the old knee popping/swelling thing reared it’s ugly head. The knee popping is especially bad going uphill, and the swelling really takes off on the downhill. So I had to walk a lot on the way back home and my total time was 1:27. I’ve been puzzling over this knee problem for quite a while, at least since the spring as far as I can recollect. I think I finally have a probable cause.

I considered muscle imbalances causing my knee to not track properly, but now I think it is my IT band. Possibly both are contributing to the problem.

I am going to get some professional help to resolve this. And I am going to focus a lot more on stretching my IT bands.

Just when one has an epiphany, or is on the verge of a huge breakthrough, serious setbacks almost always happen. At least to me they do. The only thing holding me back from a sub-hour 10 km right now is my knee problem.

So, as angry as I feel about the delay, I am going to get this fixed as soon as physically possible then continue on towards that sub-hour 10 km goal.

This problem has not affected my karate training at all.

…because I can treat it as the start of my training week, which makes it easier psychologically somehow. I missed karate this morning mostly because I felt too lazy to go. I don’t often miss classes so I don’t feel too guilty. I still have to alter my Gi a bit by shortening my sleeves and legs but I decided that it is beyond my skill level because the darned things are tapered. It is not beyond the skill of Marilyn, however she is still down with a nasty bug and so I have to wait until she is feeling better.

I still have a lot of yard work to do before the snow flies and that includes filling in some gopher holes in my driveway. Just about a half dozen at most should do it. I have to because the badgers have widened the holes big enough to cripple an elephant.

Then I have to winterize my equipment which means a brush cutter, lawn mower, and lawn tractor.

I did go into Devon today to change out my mom’s water. She doesn’t like to drink the warm tap water in Devon, so she uses bottled water.

I wrote to a creationist web site that supports a young earth theory for permission to copy some of their articles so I could comment on them. The contact page required a phone number and it prompted me to “please enter a phone number”. Since I don’t want to give out my phone number to people I don’t trust, I just copied their own phone number and put it into the form. After all they did not ask for *my* phone number. I did give them my genuine email address though. If they do not reply I will take it as implicit that they are giving me permission. It is a public document anyway and it is legal to quote from public documents. I like this web site because it calls scientists and geologists “morons”. I did not know I was a moron before! Cool!

It’s a fun hobby, what can I say?

He said I should take my friends and family and everyone where I live and move into Calmar, which is a community across the river from where I live.

God told me that if I obeyed him and you obeyed me as a representative of God Almighty himself, that peace, harmony, joy, riches, a good life, and eternal salvation will be yours.

We must move to Calmar. Unfortunately, Calmar is infested with Calmarians and they must be destroyed because they are evil anyway. God has commanded that we do not negotiate, nor have mercy on, nor spare any Calmarians. We must go there and kill all of them including the women and children. Especially the women and children. We must kill them all, then burn everything to ashes, saving nothing, not even are we allowed to take their animals, they also must be destroyed.

Do not fret because these Calmarians are evil people, the spawn of Satan and therefore sub-human. If you do not obey it will go very badly for you from the hand and word of the Almighty God whom I serve faithfully, and who speaks to me daily.

Will you follow me into battle and murder the town of Calmar and all it’s inhabitants, sparing none?

Of course you wouldn’t. That would be totally insane. How about then, if I suggested to you that Hitler, in his campaign to commit genocide against the Jewish people, and mass murder against anyone else who disagreed with him, was totally justified? What about Pol Pot in Cambodia? What about manifest destiny and the murder of the aboriginal peoples all over the world? What about the Spanish inquisition? What about the massacre and genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, Armenia, and in countless other times and places?

What if because one of my employees stole an insignificant amount of office supplies that I retaliated by executing thousands of my own employees by poisoning their coffee with some horrible disease organism just to teach you and future employees a lesson? Do you think that would be a reasonable course of action on my part? (This is actually from the Bible but paraphrased heavily to lend a modern turn to the story).

Why then, would you attribute these same actions to God? Why would you put God in the same psychopathic genocidal maniac mold that you put others in? Why do you think it is OK for God to commit merciless genocide for no sane rational reason just because he is God? Don’t you think it is strange to say that God is love and mercy and forgiveness then blink and smile when he commits atrocities and genocide? Today we would call such a character a dangerous schizophrenic psychopath and lock him up forever.

This is one of the major reasons why I don’t think the Bible reflects God’s character in this matter. It is very obviously a total forgery written by people very much like Hitler and Pol Pot who want to maintain power and control at any price. And if they find willing sheep for them to do their bidding, why not?

I am telling you here and now that God did not command people to be so immoral. He did not order the destruction of entire races. He did not suggest to Abraham that he murder his only son. If you believe that, then you are wrong about the character of God.

I believe that the immoral leaders first selected other peoples and tribes outside their own, then de-humanized them so that it would be OK to kill them because they are just demons in disguise anyway. It is the so-called leopard theory in politics where you set up an outside threat to make your own people forget your faults and focus their attention on an outside (but imaginary) threat while you consolidate your own power at home.

Why do you persist in thinking that God would command such atrocities, yet claim he is all-good, and merciful? This is completely contradictory to his good character. If you or I acted that way, how would you feel about our character and trustworthiness?

This is why I think that the Bible, although perhaps revealing the real God to some unknown extent, is full of lies and slander against God. My intent is to show that the Bible is not the perfect work of God, but has been heavily edited, altered, and changed, and finally stapled together by the growing political power of the first millennium and called “The Bible”. I am NOT saying that the entire Bible is hogwash. I don’t know for sure. I AM saying that many claims in it are not true, especially the science which will be my main focus in future posts.

By the way, just for the record, God did NOT, nor has he EVER spoken to me. And I love the people of Calmar.

…from a virtual friend I “met” through a running blog. In the interests of her privacy I won’t name her but she has been reading my blog and she wrote me to tell me that I inspired her to take up karate and she had her first class recently.

I initially started this blog for two reasons. The first reason was that as part of my business in computer repair I needed to keep up with technology so I had to learn what blogging was all about the hard way so I could help others. The second reason came after when I wondered what the heck I would write about. I decided to write about my journey from middle age death to a new level of fitness and lifestyle through running. Much later I took up karate.

I thought who the hell cares? But then I wondered if there was some small chance that I could somehow help other people by showing them that it was possible to improve their lifestyle and fitness. Would my story inspire others to improve their lives in some way? I never knew, nor had I any expectation that I would ever know.

Until I got this email. Let me tell you that email is my greatest trophy ever! Far better and more meaningful to me than any of the other shiny medals I got running.

Thanks for writing to me to let me know that I haven’t been wasting my breath. You know who you are.

There is a huge controversy today about whether the world was created by God, or by strictly natural processes. There are many other beliefs and opinions, but here I want to talk about two opposing beliefs in an unavoidably stereotypical way. On one side we have the creationists and intelligent design advocates, who believe there is a God who has created the universe. On the other side we have the scientists and atheists who feel they do not have to resort to supernatural forces to explain the creation of, and the evolution of the universe. Obviously, there are many gradations of belief between these two extremes. But how do we decide who is right? How can we make intelligent judgments in the face of some possibly unanswerable questions? In other words, how can we employ the best possible critical thinking skills when we try to make sense of the world? How do we get information? How is that information processed and interpreted? These questions will be explored and some possible answers suggested in future articles. In this article, I will try to set some sort of baseline by which we can understand how we obtain, perceive, and interpret data in the first place.

Three factors can be imagined that heavily influence our critical thinking skills when we try to sense or perceive the world around us. These are the thing sensed, the senses, and the mind. The first of these factors, the thing sensed, is often a physical object we can see, but it can also be a sound or a sensation derived from the presence or absence of acoustic or electromagnetic radiation such as thunder, heat, or cold. These events are beyond our influence in the sense that they have a reality outside of our own existence. For example, we may be deaf and unable to hear distant thunder, but that does not mean the thunder is not real.

The second factor is the senses. How they perceive input depends heavily not only on what is perceived, but also on the mechanisms of the sensing organs and the mind which interprets the inputs. To perceive these external events, we rely on our 5 senses which we use to touch, taste, hear, smell, and see. Unlike the external stimuli which are real and beyond our remote influence, we can manipulate our senses either consciously and voluntarily, or unconsciously and involuntarily. We may be color blind, or we may have unusually acute hearing, or we may have other enhanced or defective senses relative to other people. We may hear a noise and think it is thunder, but it may very well be something else. The mind is the last factor which has the difficult task of integrating and interpreting the world around us.

The mind must process many things all at once. The mind must take into account not only current sensory inputs, but also past sensory inputs which may be of use in interpreting the current situation. Our senses are very good and can’t be faulted because barring defects, they merely report to our mind the fact that some photons have impinged on our retinas, or our skin is getting uncomfortably hot from leaning on a lit stove. The mind, however, sometimes comes to the wrong conclusion for various reasons. Perhaps the object sensed is too far away for a positive identification, or it is too dark, or we have a cold and can’t smell very well, in which case we might say that the mind has insufficient data. Often, however, the mind is overwhelmed with too much data. In this case the mind has a defense mechanism which is comparable to a firewall.

Our minds very frequently use a firewall through which data is sifted and either allowed in or blocked, that is, kept out. For example, we normally filter out what we are not focused on. Either we filter out background noises while on the phone, or we ignore our peripheral vision while avoiding a pothole in the road. This would be an example of how we use our built-in firewall to filter data. Another example might be that people under a lot of stress sometimes cannot handle too much sensory input and so again, this time unconsciously perhaps, information is blocked out. Most of us do this when we feel “burnt out”. This natural firewall, whether it operates subconsciously or deliberately in a conscious manner, is one of perhaps two factors which can lead to errors in thinking, or errors in processing information.

The second factor almost always operates actively and in a conscious and deliberate way. This mechanism has to do with the quality of the information we choose to accept, whether we come by this information directly or indirectly. One example of indirect inaccuracy is if we allow hearsay, gossip, or rumors to influence our perceptions and conclusions. Another example is in accepting uncritically statements made by an authority, whether that authority is a medical dictionary, a history book, or a religious or scientific authority. This is indirect because you are getting the information second hand. Direct inaccuracy is more difficult to recognize and handle. It is a very serious problem with deep social roots and causes and I will be writing about this in future articles.

An example of direct inaccuracy is when it is getting dark outside and we cannot see things such as color accurately. I can say the sky is blue, and you can say it is red and we can both be right, but the objective truth is that the sky scatters light of wavelength x and the perceived color is independent of that fact. In this sense we cannot create our own truth as claimed by the many spiritual philosophies that seem to be popular today.

Another example deals with optical illusions such as mirages. Almost everyone who has been in a vehicle driving down the highway on a hot day has seen water covering the highway that disappears as you approach. This is real in that your eyes perceive a reflection from the road which looks like water. An example of a mental processing error is the perception that the harvest moon on the horizon is very much larger than when it is high in the sky. It seems almost impossible to believe that it is exactly the same size as when it is high in the sky. Yet we know the full moon large on the horizon is an illusion. You can probably find illusions for all your senses. For example, if you hold one hand in hot water and another in cold water at the same time, then place both hands in lukewarm water, one hand will feel the water as cold, another as hot. Yet the water is neither, it is lukewarm. The water temperature is independent of what you think it is.

The ability to use our minds and think clearly is therefore dependent on at least three important variables, the accuracy of our senses (which are affected by environmental conditions), our firewall (which limits our multitasking and focus), and how we process the information in our minds (incorrectly concluding the physical properties of objects or of misinterpreting events). The common saying that “seeing is believing” might be true some of the time, but certainly not as often as we might think. To illustrate how we can easily be fooled simply find a book on optical or sensory illusions, or do a search on the Internet for this topic. So how does all this help us to achieve critical thinking skills in our search for the truth?

It helps us by showing us how easily we can be fooled. Once we realize how we perceive the world, we can then monitor and manage as best we can how we interpret it. It also helps us to realize that there is no other known way to perceive the world other than by our physical senses. There is no such thing as extra-sensory perception (ESP) or supernatural senses.

Note that although I find it highly unlikely that there is a God, I do not say that there is not a God in the Judaic, Christian, or Islamic sense. I am saying that if there was, God would communicate with us via the 5 senses he gave us and not in some mysterious, 6th sense sort of way. In other words, investigating and searching for God with only the 5 senses he created in us should be sufficient to find and communicate with him and would be consistent with his creation. Nothing else should be required. Occam’s razor.