Shut your loser mouth, Dale Chung. "He's a great X's and O's coach," Chung said. "Ethically? Not so much. He knows what he did was wrong."

Here's the story.

A Southern California high school basketball coach has been suspended and faces accusations of mercilessly running up the score after his team won a game 161-2, one of the most lopsided scores in state history.

The winning coach must be a real monster.

Anderson said that he wasn't trying to run up the score or embarrass the opposition. His team had won four previous games by at least 70 points, and Bloomington had already lost a game by 91.

"The game just got away from me," Anderson told the San Bernardino Sun on Friday. "I didn't play any starters in the second half. I didn't expect them to be that bad. I'm not trying to embarrass anybody."

He says if he had it to do again, he'd have played only reserves after the first quarter, or, "I wouldn't play the game at all."

But what does Dale Chung's loser mouth think?

"People shouldn't feel sorry for my team," Chung said. "They should feel sorry for his team, which isn't learning the game the right way."

I'm sure it's fine to feel sorry for your team, coached, such as it is, by a self-righteous ass.

Also, what a bullshit suspension. Is it everything that's wrong with America? No, but it's a solid 32% of it.

I hate pumping at work so much. It's the worst. It takes 30 minutes, twice a day, and the timing is inflexible, or else I might accidentally leak through my shirt.

I'm just having a super hard time with scheduling meetings - with students, committees, whatever - and it doesn't really make sense that these two pumpings would have such an impact but it does.

I'm too much of a prude to talk about it, except when absolutely necessary. So it's occupying a huge part of my mental attention, but I'm constantly self-monitoring and not saying anything when it would otherwise be reasonable to mention the extra commitment that's dragging you down.

And then it's uncomfortable and unpleasant and no fun. And extra details to remember: take this home at the end of the day, don't forget to rinse this or stick that in the freezer, don't leave home without the equipment and cooler, and on and on. It's the worst.

At Book Club last night, there was a long discussion of hot yoga, and how much everyone loves it. I was the only one who hadn't tried it. I can't imagine many people here haven't at least heard of it, but the basics:

A hot yoga, or Bikram yoga, session moves through 26 poses in a room heated to near 105 degrees F, with a humidity level of around 40 percent. The practice, named after creator Yogiraj Bikram Choudhury, can help improve strength, flexibility and balance, while helping decrease your risk of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease.

What I'm curious about is their assertion that they get a strong cardio workout during a 90 minute session. They uniformly asserted that your heart is pounding, and at the end you're completely wiped out, like after exercising intensely.

If you google "does hot yoga count as cardio" you get things like:

Hot yoga, along with power yoga, moves quickly from one pose to the next, giving you a more rigorous workout than traditional Hatha yoga. According to the American Council on Exercise, such intense forms of yoga only provide a mild aerobic benefit. The best way to gauge whether your yoga session is giving you an aerobic workout is to take your heart rate.

or

[Y]ou certainly experience more fatigue, a higher heart rate, greater amount of perspiration, and a significantly higher degree of perceived exertion by the end of the class. But this seeming difficulty is not really due to the fact that you are burning more calories. As a matter of fact, you could simply walk into a hot room and stand there for 45 minutes, and your heart rate will significantly increase. That is because your body's primary mode of cooling is to sweat and to shunt blood to your extremities. As you sweat, you lose blood volume, and as you shunt blood, your heart has to work harder to deliver that blood. So your heart rate goes up, but the increased heart rate is simply your body's environmental, temperature-regulating response to hot conditions, and not because you're moving more muscles or burning more calories -- and the only significant weight you're going to lose in a hot yoga class is water weight.

The latter article is completely muddled - it claims to be addressing whether or not hot yoga counts as cardio, but then says "No, because it doesn't burn enough calories, even though it gets your heart rate up, so it won't help you lose weight" even though elsewhere what it says is "getting your heart rate up is what counts".

So my question in: Is getting your heart rate up sufficient to get the health benefits of a cardio workout? Or does it have to be driven by certain run/jump/etc motions to count?

My dad's biggest fear - kidding on the square - is that they will produce a pill that mimics exercise, and everyone will catch up with his virtuous drive to exercise without actually putting in the time and effort that he has. I'm not there, but this hot yoga triggers the faintest echo of that fear, in me.

It's time for legislators to step up. Either it's ok for kids to walk to the fucking park in the middle of the fucking day in fucking Silver Springs, or it's not. No parent should have to wonder, and it can't be left up to the discretion of individual neighbors, police officers, or bureaucrats. The story, obviously, is tailor-made for outrage.

But if got me wondering about something else, and a quick google didn't turn up anything helpful. We know that crime has been falling for decades, and we know that most people don't believe that, although their beliefs don't seem entirely unpegged from the crime rate. So how low would crime have to be for people to start believing that it's not a major concern? Part of me is pretty sure that although I'm asking for a number, the answer is a color.

Ayn Rand was a bit of a sourpuss.

Via Benquo, elsewhere

This is gosh-darned amazing.

They are the first to free climb every inch of the 3,000-foot Dawn Wall in a single expedition, long considered impossible, using only their hands and feet to pull themselves up. Ropes were merely safety devices to break the occasional fall. By virtue of its scale and difficulty, the climb was considered by some to be the most difficult ever accomplished.

19 days of this.

I hope there's a documentary soon.

Nascar driver Kurt Busch testifies that his ex-girlfriend is an assassin.

Busch offered up specific examples of her returning from missions, sometimes with bruises.

Once, he said, they were in El Paso, Texas, where Driscoll had left that night in camouflage and boots. She returned later to the hotel at which he was staying wearing a trench coat. Under it she was wearing an evening gown splattered with blood and other matter, Busch testified.

Neither Driscoll nor her attorney refuted the claims during the hearing.

NPR's take.

Via Jammies

Witt sends in links!

1. Lots and lots of cinematically beautiful pictures here. The captions make you realize how careful even the White House photographer has to be about every word he says.

2.What stalled the gender revolution? Childcare that costs more than college.

3. Science fiction and the post-Ferguson world.

Except for a week over the holidays, I've been more-or-less eliminating carbs and sugar since the end of November. Mostly because I like experimenting on myself, I think.

1. Experience: Here is the biggest noticeable result: my sense of taste. Back in 2005-2006, I went one full year without desserts, and it did nothing for my sweet tooth. Within thirty seconds, I went back to the exact same desire and capacity for sweets that I'd had a year ago.

What's changed now is my perception of the intensity of sweets. Fruit (which I've cut back on) tastes much sweeter. Chocolate and desserts (which I still crave) taste incredibly sweet, to the point where it seems a little too much. That's the main result, and it's striking.

2. Maintenance: I find it very easy to stick to and the food is appealing. Occasionally I cheat with some chocolate, and I don't see any reason that would ever change. Meal planning is a bit more of a pain, but not insurmountable, but we'll see how it goes once I'm swamped at work as well. The expense is noticeable. Especially nuts and things to snack on from the bulk food aisle - super pricey.

3. Vanity: Nothing is worth drawing any conclusions about here, because of being two months post-partum. I'm much more muscular, but exactly the same weight, as the other times I've been two months post-partum. So I do feel better about myself! But it's more attributable to the changes in my exercise habits than changes in my diet.

4. Science: I really wish I knew better how to make sense of the science. I'm wading through Good Calories, Bad Calories, and it's completely convincing, and then I read this takedown, and it's also completely convincing. I don't have the chops to read science very critically, and I can't evaluate who is a trusty authority and who is cherry-picking studies to substantiate their claims. I wish I knew who to trust.

Why did the media world ignore the Boko Haram massacre, especially compared to the Hebdo killings?

On the one hand, this is such a tired old question, because the reason is obvious and trivial - the Hebdo murders were much more unexpected, it occurred in a location and context where people had a much greater expectation of safety, and we place great value on freedom of speech. Plus some racism, or at least designations of victims as "like us" or "unlike us".

On the other hand, it is nevertheless profoundly sad that the slaughter of two thousand people doesn't trigger much shock in us. It also seems, to me anyway, like a far more intractable problem than extremist violence in Paris, and people tend to discuss things when there's something to grab onto and discuss, instead of just a clearly awful insolvable problem.

Looks like some hacking going on. Whether they just got to the Twitter account, or have actually accessed military plans, I don't know.

And: It's already been taken down. The few "China Scenario" "Korea Scenario" slides that were up didn't look like anything that would be super-secret, but I figure we'll be hearing more about this soon.

To quote elsewhere, "Sort of a breathtaking assertion of white privilege".

A wacky former MIT professor took cinema verite to a whole new level by robbing a Manhattan bank and recording the heist, authorities said. Joseph Gibbons, 61, a filmmaker and "visual artist'' who taught for a decade at one of the world's most prestigious universities, has gone rogue, robbing banks as part of his latest "art'' project.

The article is funny, but it's hard to tell if the professor is a pompous ass or actually coming apart at the seams. He was indeed arrested.

#Seahawks fan jersey headgear combo game too strong #CARvsSEA pic.twitter.com/09Vd8CLRll

— History Of Sports (@BeforeFamePics) January 11, 2015

Witt writes: Apparently our friend really is working under an uncommonly progressive police chief.

A UCLA professor is creating the first national database to document incidents of racial profiling in an effort to decrease racial discrimination in law enforcement.
Psychology Professor Phillip Goff, co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity [CPE], is currently spearheading the new project that will provide police with a way to record racial profiling incidents under a standardized national system.

Goff and three other professors from across the country were awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation... The database will collect information on pedestrian and vehicle stops and the use of force by police....

"Right now people believe there is a problem with racial profiling (by) law enforcement in the United States ... but we don't even have a measure for it yet," Goff said. "If you can't measure a problem, how can you possibly manage it?"

[...]

Chris Burbank, chief of police in Salt Lake City, originally thought of the idea for the database. Burbank reached out to Goff with the idea at the CPE's 2012 summer conference.

Burbank said that he wants to work toward reducing racial bias in policing, and that he believes his department's involvement in the database project can help achieve racial equality in law enforcement.

The project depends on the voluntary participation of police departments. More than 30 police departments already agreed to contribute data to the database.