The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

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  • Back on Track

    Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change
    335.4 | -6.2 | -33.0
    Blood Pressure | Systolic | Diastolic
    * | 112 | 80

    This was a better week from the viewpoint of weight loss — nearly three times as better, in fact.  Even better, my blood pressure seems to be improving as well:  This week, the BP was 112 over 80, enough of a drop that my doctor considered taking me off the rampiril.  (He didn’t, though.  The recent fluctuation has been enough to warrant further treatment.)  I can’t complain about 33 pounds over five weeks.  That’s a lot better than I would ever do on my own.

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  • Words Fail Me

    From the “sunset interview” in People (as quoted at Shakesville):

    Which moments from the last eight years do you revisit most often?

    THE PRESIDENT: I definitely think about the families I’ve met of the fallen soldiers—about the compassion, love and determination of the families, to make sure that the Commander-in-Chief hears their stories and knows their pride.

    I think about throwing out that pitch at the World Series on [Oct. 30] 2001. My heart was racing when I got to the mound. Didn’t want to bounce it. Didn’t want to let the fans down. My heart was pumping so hard, I wasn’t sure if I could lift my arm. I never felt that anxious any other time during my presidency, curiously enough.

    I cannot get my head around the self-absorption and (literal!) small-mindedness of this man who would be — who has been and regretabbly still is — President of the United States.  January 20 cannot arrive a nanosecond too soon…

  • Holiday Weight Loss

    Weight this week Change since last week Total change
    341.6 -2.4 -26.8

    After two weeks of holidays, my total weight loss was 4.6 pounds.  While that represents a falling-off of my original rate, such is to be expected.  And at least I can say I lost weight during the holidays, which is something uncommon in America.  I’m hoping that, with school back in session and me more on a regular schedule, I might up that rate a little bit.

    My blood pressure hardly changed at all, which was disappointing after several weeks of strong improvement.  Of course 120/86 is still better than 180/120(!) and even than 120/90, though barely.  My doctor put me back on ramipril last week but it hasn’t seemed to have an effect yet.

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  • My walking routes

    Part of my new regimen is exercising, which for me is going to mostly (entirely?) be walking.  Using a cool google maps feature/app called gmap-pedometer, I’ve computed the walking distance for various routes around my home.  All of these are, for the moment, hypothetical, until it gets warmer out.  And I will add others as they occur to me.

  • How to Save a Life

    Weight this week Change since last week Total change
    344.0 -2.2 -24.4

    Just like JD, I often think of that song… Anyway, if you’ve been reading our story so far, you know that an aching tooth sent me to (of all places) the cardiologist’s office. He mandated a number of lifestyle changes to help me stem off a heart attack. First and foremost would be to lose weight … a lot of weight, in fact, and as fast as possible.

    Without mandating anything, he suggested I see a local weight loss clinic (Princeton Weight Management Center), an office affiliated with Health Management Resources, Inc. (hereafter HMR). HMR has 25 years of experience in doctor-managed weight loss and has a track record of bringing down weight by 100 pounds or more, safely. It’s a bit pricey but it’s a full-service weight management program.
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  • The Toothache That Saved My Life

    In mid-October, I had a toothache. As anyone who knows me is aware, this is far from an unusual occurrence. In fact, ever since grad school, my teeth have been an utter mess and I don’t seem able to get a handle on the situation. So every once in a while I suffer a toothache and have to cope with it, which I usually do by dosing myself with 1000 mg’s of Motrin at regular intervals until I can see my dentist.

    During this particular cycle that turned out to be on 2008 October 24. I visited my usual dentist and laid out my agony. He wasn’t surprised, either, especially since my last x-rays had revealed an old crown that was on the verge of failing. Naturally, we both assumed this had happened and that the old cavity lay exposed to new decay. He tapped around my mouth for a few minutes (and after a lifetime of instructions not to stick sharp metal objects in one’s mouth, a visit to the dentist is guaranteed to be harrowing), and came to the unexpected conclusion that the crown had held. In fact, there was no sign of decay anywhere near the tooth that was hurting.

    Somehow being told that did not cause the pain to go away.

    The dentist probed a little more and discovered significant decay on the wisdom tooth nearby. In a shocking (yet disturbingly common) case of bad wiring, the pain signals from that tooth were being reported to my brain as coming from the healthy tooth. This “misplaced pain” is a known phenomenon in dental medicine. In fact I’d previously suffered a bout of it with a different wisdom tooth, so in retrospect it wasn’t all that shocking. In the earlier case, I’d popped over to the oral surgeon, he pulled the tooth, and I lived happily ever after (at least, until this new problem).

    The receptionist placed a call over to the same oral surgeon and, quite luckily, he had a slot open right then. Even better, he was within literal walking distance from the dentist’s office. So I pulled on my jacket, pulled out the iPod, and hiked over to the surgeon’s, where I was immediately seated and my vitals taken pro forma.

    And that‘s where the story took an unexpected turn…
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  • Dawn Breaks

    A few minutes ago, Fox News — Fox News! — called the Presidential race for Senator Barack Obama. By now most networks have agreed, and apparently Senator John McCain has conceded the race.

    Wow.

    It’s going to take a while to absorb this. Words like “historic occasion” don’t cut it. This was an epochal moment at a critical time, and I am proud and amazed to realize that my nation once again rose to the moment. We put paid to some of the ugliness of our history and we recapture some of the promise of our future. People voted for change, for hope, for tomorrow. Against a rough and oft sleazy campaign, Senator Obama — no, President-elect Obama — ran an honorable campaign that took the high road, kept to issues, avoided the politics of personal destruction, and treated the American citizenry as adults, not animals to be cadged or corralled. Barack Obama staked his career on the premise that in a dark and dangerous time, this nation would listen to our better angels — and quite against expectation, the nation responded.

    The Reagan revolution has run its course. The Nixon Southern Strategy lies bankrupt on the dustbin of history. The wiles and vile counsel of Karl Rove and Lee Attwater has been refuted, rejected, and repudiated — we have decided that we will not be a nation ruled by fear, led by slander, demeaned and diminished by demagogy. We don’t have to agree on everything to agree that we are all Americans, we are all heirs of the great revolution, and we are all in this together.

    This campaign has lasted twenty months. It has aroused passion and resistance, hope and fear. It has elevated what is right about this nation and it has exposed all that remains wrong. It has been draining and it has been exhilarating. It has overlaid a touch of the transcendental into our everyday life. And at long last, it is finally over.

    Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States of America. History has been made. The future has been reclaimed. It is finally over…

    … Now, it’s time to get to work.

  • Why Bother to Vote?

    I wrote this at the request of my friend Maureen Leming, who is also Director of Annual Giving and Communications, and who wanted to send it out to the local media. No one bit, but I like it enough that I want it out there. So, self-publishing to the rescue!

    Why Bother to Vote?

    I teach physics to high school seniors, a large number of whom are eligible to vote. Dishearteningly, many of them have decided that they won’t be exercising their franchise because, as they tell me, “It’s not like my vote counts anyway”. With polls in New Jersey showing Barack Obama with double-digit leads, it seems at first glance that they have a point. But I argue fiercely that, despite that superficial impression, they should in fact get to the polls. My argument boils down to this: Elections aren’t about winning a contest. They’re about governing a nation.

    Let’s assume for the moment that the polls are accurate. Let’s assume further that you’re an Obama supporter. (If you’re supporting McCain, there’s more for you below.) Surely there’s no motivation to get out the polls, right? After all, Senator Obama is going to win those 15 electoral votes either way. If the election were just about winning, then those votes are all that matter. But since it’s also about governing, there are other considerations — one of which, for example, is the popular vote. A president who wins the electoral college but just squeaks by on the popular vote (or loses it) can be crippled right out of the gate. Consider George W. Bush, whose first nine months in office were roundly criticized for drift and inertia.

    On the other hand, if Senator Obama wins the election and wins the popular vote handily, it would give his agenda quite the boost. For example, if he wins by an excess of 20 million votes, it would be a landslide comparable to FDR’s election in 1932. Even a more likely outcome of six or seven million votes strengthens his hands and makes rapid adoption of his program much more likely. The length of the presidential “honeymoon” is strongly influenced by the extent by which the president wins the popular vote. In that race, every vote in New Jersey counts just as much as one cast anywhere else — even if that vote doesn’t affect the electoral total.

    Obviously, if you are a McCain supporter in New Jersey, similar but reverse arguments apply: You would want to reduce the margin of an Obama victory, or (of course) increase the margin of a McCain victory. And even if Obama takes New Jersey, McCain could win the presidency — and in that case, you would want his margin of popular votes to be as large as possible. In essence, if your side wins, you want to maximize its advantage in the popular vote so as to advance the agenda with which you agree. And if your side loses, you certainly want to diminish the margin of victory for the other guys, so as to retard their agenda as much as possible. Both possible scenarios dictate that you get out and vote.

    And of course, there are issues here bigger than simple partisan calculus. Democracy depends on an engaged electorate. There is no excuse for sitting out any election, particularly one so fraught with historic import. When turnout is low, politicians know that the road to victory lies in pandering to small but focused interest groups. The key becomes energizing your voter base and ignoring the rest of the population. But when turnout is high, the game changes. Pandering to everyone is the same as not pandering. Discourse and compromise become more viable, indeed, more necessary. When you can’t tailor your message to a narrow group and still win, you feel the pressure to formulate real solutions that appeal to a wider array of voters. Raise voter turnout and you improve the entire political process.

    Think your vote doesn’t count? Heck, on the contrary — it just might save democracy.

  • About that “overhead projector”

    At the debate tonight, Senator John McCain tried to make hay out of an earmark requested by his opponent, Senator Barrack Obama:

    He voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois

    Kinda makes it sound like Sen. Obama wanted $3 million for one of those things you remember from boring sociology lectures, where the prof dragged slide after acetate slide across the glass of a long-necked, dimly-lit contraption. I mean, isn’t that what an overhead projector is?

    Not so much, at least, not in a planetarium. You see, a planetarium shows images by projecting up on the dome… you know, overhead. If you don’t have a projector, you pretty much don’t have a planetarium. According to Sen. Obama’s office:

    The projection equipment in this theater is 40 years old, and is no longer supported with parts or service by the manufacturer

    (quoted at PolitiFact)

    The projector was for the Adler Planetarium and Space Museum, which like most museums does an awful lot of educational outreach. So the question becomes: Why doesn’t John McCain support science education? Doesn’t he love America’s children? Doesn’t he want them to compete in the 21st century? Or does he dislike Adler Planetarium because they teach the newfangled stuff like heliocentrism?

  • One month to go…

    … until the US Presidential election. Barack Obama seems to have the momentum now, gaining about 1 point in national tracking polls every three days. Nate Silver at 538 has a model predicting that Senator Obama will win about 340 electoral votes — over the required total by 70, a landslide by any measure.

    So here’s my prediction, and I’m sorry if I sound paranoid, but I am increasingly worried: Major terrorist scare in the next three weeks. Depending on how badly McCain has tanked, it might only be a “rattle the voters” attempt to scare them back into the Republican camp — something like capturing a “dirty bomber” in an American city. If there’s absolutely no hope for the erratic maverick, then expect an actual event — most likely abroad, but I’m starting to wonder if even that line will be crossed. Sure, it’s risky. People could find out and then there would be Hell to pay. But if it’s a McCain administration, that’s a lot easier to cover up.

    And there is no way that Dick Cheney spends eight years assembling the most executive power in American history, only to hand it over to an upstart Democratic candidate from Chicago. Not going to happen. Not going to be allowed to happen.

    And I don’t even watch 24…