The Painful Truth

"The truth, Steve, is that Knight Rider is a kid's show."

"Can't be! Can't fucking be!"

I thought of that bit of dialogue between Binky and Steve Dallas in Bloom County this morning while I resumed the workouts I have been neglecting for the past four months. I did 40 Hindu squats, 15 yoga push-ups (illustrated here), along with a brace of more traditional exercises, these concentrating on my abs as the others are leg/arm exercises mostly, putting in a full 20-minute workout.

It didn't suck. I managed to get through the whole thing without suffering too much. The new weight set is nice, although I wish I had clips instead of spinners for the weights. Programming the electric radiator to start up a half hour before I awoke and having water already present in the room where I do my routine also helped me get on my way. I would have liked music. Note to self: buy a real jumprope.

I'm learning to do other things, like leaving a couple of delay scripts running the night before to switch my laptop over to "daytime" mode automatically (gathering email, RSS and NBZ feeds, mostly, while shutting down BitTorrent), and setting out my clothes the night before.

But what reminded me most of that quote was the fact that I could still do the "hard" exercises without too much pain. Which meant that I am not out of shape. I've lost a little tone around the middle, but the Truth, Steve, is that it's probably not sessility but consumption that's contributing to the now noticeable spare tire I seem to be developing. It should take me about three weeks to get back up to a full calesthenic circuit, and hopefully I'll be able to maintain it. Adding a little muscle wouldn't hurt.

Stupidity in Nevada

I don't normally think of "masonry contractor" when I want someone to educate me on the finer points of biology, but a masonry contractor from Nevada is so concerned with what he sees as the "problems" with evolutionary theory that he doesn't want them debated: he wants the state constitution amended so that teachers would be required to tell students that "some scientists believe it is mathematically impossible that life could have emerged from naturalistic forces," that "nowhere in the fossil record is there found anything that could be described as a transitional fossil," and that "the origin of sex is so unlikely that biologists do not believe an adequate explanation for it will ever emerge."

All three of these are, basically, wrong. Yes, there are a few people with PhDs in economics, or engineering, or mathematics, who have stated that they don't believe that biological processes can emerge from purely chemical ones: suffice it to say that there's nothing biologists or chemists can point to that would agree with them. It is a failure of the imagination that these men suffer from: it seems so complicated they can't imagine how it happened. Well, biologists can.

There are thousands of transitional fossils. You and I are "transitional forms" between our ancestors and our progeny, and if we go far back enough our ancestors are shaped vastly different from ourselves; likewise, our progeny many generations down the line will be different from our current forms. The term "transitional fossil" is a creationist canard, not a term of biology.

The evolution of sex has long been one of contention, but that doesn't mean that it's so mysterious we can't make progress toward understanding it. A paper that appears in last week's issue of Science shows that in species with both asexual and sexual reproductive strategies, those populations where individuals mostly favored the asexual strategy tended to accumulate deleterious mutations faster than those that had sex. Sex, it turns out, is useful because the mixing and matching of genomes shuffles deleterious genes out of the gene pool faster-- fast enough to make the biochemical investment in sexual reproduction worthwhile to the population as a whole.

But Steve Brown doesn't care, and doesn't want to read "hard" science books. He wants his ignorance enshrined in the state constitution. And he wants Nevada's children to share that ignorance with him.

Writing SF smut means...

Writing SF erotica means you never apologize about lines like this: ( Dirty words follow. )

And yes, this means I succumbed and wrote out Polly & Saul's story. They wouldn't leave me alone. The funny thing is, reading that fragment, it is not obvious what exactly Polly thinks is strange-- which is why I like it so much.

3256 words in the past two days, and that's after throwing away a 400-word fishhead. Obviously, the fire is hot, it is time to strike. I promise to finish Visitors and Fragile. Really.