WSJ Catchup October 11, 2009

The Democrats' New Bob Casey Problem
Will ObamaCare fund abortions?



The War on Specialists
ObamaCare punishes cardiology and oncology to finance GPs.



Max's Mad Mandate
The Baucus health bill will break 50 state budgets via Medicaid.



Google and the Problem With 'Net Neutrality'
Broadband has been a rare bright spot in the economy. Why discourage new investment?



Hollywood Justice
The rush to support Roman Polanski shows how isolated the entertainment industry is from the rest of the world.


Revelation Revised
"A scholar traces the changes made to the Book of Mormon."

The Fleeting Benefits of Marathons
Many Newcomers Race, but Few Follow Through With Lifelong Exercise

Inner Beauty: A Healthy Colon

September 27, 2009 WSJ Catchup

New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies
Researchers Stumble Upon Alternative Explanation for the Lifelong Challenges Faced by Children Born in Colder Months

Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles
Tariffs, rising state and federal taxes, and currency devaluation ruined the 1930s, and they could do the same today.

Getting Well: It's About Time

Google's Phone Service Likely to Draw Scrutiny
System for Managing Calls and Messages Gains Attention as FCC Reconciles New Technology With Old Rules

September 20, 2009 WSJ Catchup

Obama Is Pushing Israel Toward War
President Obama can't outsource matters of war and peace to another state.

Health-Care Reform and the Constitution
Why hasn't the Commerce Clause been read to allow interstate insurance sales?

Government Medicine vs. the Elderly
In Britain in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths came after 'terminal sedation.'

Swine Flu Contagious for About a Week

A Pitcher's New Core Routine: A Videogame and a 'Hula Hoop'

Mandated Health Insurance Squeezes Those in the Middle

New Online Music Service Drums Up Listeners but Not Many Want to Pay

Nest-Egg Maneuvers
Answers to readers' questions about new rules, starting Jan. 1, involving Roth savings plans

Long Marches, In Brief
The 'short history' approach to military conflict

U.S. as Traffic Cop in Web Fight
FCC Proposal on Bandwidth a Boon for Consumers and Silicon Valley, Blow to Telecoms

Duggar Economics: The Costs of 19 Kids

Health-Care Reform and the President's Faithful Helpers

The Stimulus Didn't Work
The data show government transfers and rebates have not increased consumption at all.

The Ins and Outs of Hiring an Independent Contractor

Pretty Good Performance for a Dolt

Obama's Missile Offense
It's better these days to be a U.S. adversary than its friend.

September 13, 2009 WSJ Catchup

ObamaCare's Crippling Deficits
The higher taxes, debt payments and interest rates needed to pay for health reform mean lower living standards.

Windmills Are Killing Our Birds
One standard for oil companies, another for green energy sources.

Credit Scores: What You Need to Know Now
Tighter Lending Makes Cracking the System Vital; Benefits of Paying on Time

The Year of Investing Cautiously

Income Gap Shrinks in Slump at the Expense of the Wealthy

Should a Shrinking Dollar Worry You?

Higher Taxes Are Coming. Are You Prepared?

Read the Union Health-Care Label
Get ready for Detroit-style labor relations in our hospitals.
"ObamaCare is a Trojan Horse for more forced unionization."

Retail Health Clinics Move to Treat Complex Illnesses, Rankling Doctors

The President's Tort Two-Step
Special-interests and the health-care status quo.

The Keynesians Were Wrong Again
We won't see a return to growth without incentives for job-creating investment.

Medicare Is No Model for Health Reform
Many doctors refuse Medicare patients because payments are so low.

Motorola Bets on Google-Powered Phones
Struggling Cellphone Maker Counting on New Devices to Revive Flagging Handset Business

The Battle Over Bionic Vocals
Should people sing like Transformers? An iPhone app and Jay-Z fire up a debate

A Coach's Faith
Why Tony Dungy helped Michael Vick return to pro football.

September 7, 2009 WSJ Catchup

Below are some of the articles in the Wall Street Journal from the past week that I thought were informative. If a link fails to show the entire article use Google to search for it and it will take you to the full article.



How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade



A Doctor's Plan for Legal Industry Reform
My modest proposal to rearrange how lawyers do business.



Stop Me Before I Spend
How to make sure you save more—by putting savings on autopilot



Why Your Coach Votes Republican
In Politics, Football's Bosses Usually Run Right; Mr. Friedgen Picks on 'Socialists'
If you can read, read this article.



Do as I Say And as I Do
Why Ray Kroc scraped up gum at a Chicago-area McDonald's.



Older, Wiser, Slower
After 50, Avid Athletes Find That to Stay Healthy, They Must Let Go of the Need to Win
"Evidence shows that feeling worse during exercise translates to doing less exercise in the future," Whatever, I guess I just liked the pictures of Mark "The Grip" Allen in action.



Finding Smells That Repel
Mosquitoes



Why Investors Need to See the Light and Slow Down



Warning: The Deficits Are Coming!
The former head of the Government Accountability Office is on a crusade to alert taxpayers to their true obligations.



How to Insure Every American
We don't need radical change. Subsidies and high risk pools can get the job done.

August 29, 2009 WSJ Catchup

Here are the WSJ articles from this week that I felt worthy of passing along:

Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing!
'Extreme' Pogoers Do Backflips, Hop Minivans; In This Sport, Bounces Per Second Matter

The Absent-Minded Chairman
Charlie Rangel wins the personal lottery.

Microsoft Cuts Price of Xbox 360

Mound City on the Mississippi

BOOK EXCERPT: 'Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi'

Bridging the Gay-Evangelical Divide
Extreme opinions move toward the middle.

Makers of Military Drones Take Off

Ghostly Companions
Survivors of extreme situations—on Everest and elsewhere—credit the help of a 'third man' who is not there.

Study Guide
How to save money on the first year of college

The Mistakes We Make—and Why We Make Them
How investors think often gets in the way of their results. Meir Statman looks into our heads and tells us what we're doing wrong.

Obama's Health Rationer-in-Chief
White House health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the 'overuse' of medical care.

August 23, 2009 WSJ Catchup

I love the Wall Street Journal. It always contains the latest breaking news and is often the source of most of the news that makes the national news cycle. A subscription is required to view it online, but specific articles can be Googled and viewed without a restriction. I'll try to list some that caught my attention this past week.

ObamaCare Is All About Rationing

Why AT&T Killed Google Voice

The Africans Are Hearing Footsteps

American Sprinters Hit A Headwind

The Death Book For Veterans

Tax Withholding Is Bad for Democracy "The top 1% of American households pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95% combined... This deforms the behavior of everyone—the voters who think they aren't paying for Congress's latest bright idea, the politicians who know that promising new programs will always be a winning political strategy with the majority of taxpayers who don't think they have to pay for them, and the wealthy who know that the only way to get politicians to refrain from that strategy is to buy them off."

Illinois Marathon Race Report

April 11, 2009 Champaign-Urbana, IL

The Inaugural Illinois Marathon Race Report

Goals: Better my PR set in my only other open marathon (3:22). Exceed my projected time based on my fitness prior to training in December (3:12). Finish as close to my best case scenario as possible (2:58).

Training: I completed Brad Hudson's Advanced Marathon Plan. I averaged just under 70 miles a week from January to race day. I did no swimming. Minimal lifting. I cycled several days a week. I covered a lot of miles on weekends with my wife and daughters.

Challenges: Aside from the winter weather, job and family challenges, I had a few aches and pains. This resulted from running two weekend long runs. I encouraged my wife Lori to run the St. Louis Marathon and promised to help her through the process. I also accompanied my daughter on her weekend long run in preparation for track. Otherwise my training went really well.

Sponsored by: I have run in Asics for the last several years. I prefer the Nimbus for long runs. I got a pair of Nike Pegasus for recovery runs and easy runs, they are fine. For faster paced runs I grew to like the Nike Lunar Trainer and I raced in Nike LunaRacer. I use Hammer Perpetuem and supplement it with glutamine for recovery. I have added Recoverite. I worked on my arm swing with e3 handgrips I read about in Run For Life. Under Armor Cold Gear, Sugoi and Asics Thermopolis kept me warm. I listen to my Creative Muvo frequently and listen to podcasts from IMTalk.me and CompetitorRadio.com. I raced in RaceReady LD Easy shorts, so I could carry a few spare gels.

Race Details: I won't go into this much, because this race was very well administrated and executed. Others will critique it more thouroughly and you can read their views. I will say that I like the 1/2 zip technical top and finisher medal. I got a 50 cent stocking cap, long black nylon dress socks for arm warmers and 89 cent jersey gloves, courtesy of Wal-Mart. I discarded these over the opening miles. Ask me where we stayed if you like offline.

Play By Play: This being my second marathon I was relieved to find that when the gun went off (rather the starter said "go") I had to slow down, relax and fall into an easy pace. This carried through the first 2 miles at 7:10 pace. I fell into a nice rhythm and just ran along. Here are my splits:

1. 7:11 (slowest split)


2. 7:09


3. 7:02


4. 6:58


5. 6:53


6. 7:07


7. 6:59


8. 6:58
   
9. 6:47


10. 6:57


11. 6:49


12. 6:55


13. 6:35 Half Marathon passed in 1:31:36 My biggest fear was to just not have it when the gun went off. When you run a lot every day there is a lot of accumulated fatigue. I just don't run fast every day. So it is hard to know how you are doingin training. Every now and then you get a glimpse, but then it is gone. So after the start I looked at my Garmin and saw I was running 6:40 pace effortlessly, I knew it was looking like a good day. At 2 mile a friend BJ Vineyard passed me and I just let him go, I remember about 3 young fast guys passed me. I just tried to be patient. My PR for the one half marathon I have run was 1:31 and a second or 2, so I was OK with that. I felt like I was just cruising. I didn't wear a heart rate strap. I wish I had. I would have like to know how hard I was working.


14. 6:27 (fastest split)


15. 6:31


16. 6:31


17. 6:45


18. 6:51


19. 6:55


20. 6:58


21. 6:50


22. 6:58


23. 6:38


24. 7:02


25. 7:10


26. 7:00
    

Finish time 3:01:47. Garmin says 26.44 miles. I tried to run the tangents aggressively. I got up on curbs to cut corners and ran the shortest route possible. That's how it's measured. These courses are always 26.4 miles or more. As the race progressed I knew I had to hustle and try to run 6:40's to have a chance at 3:00. I caught BJ and ran with him for about a mile and a half, but he was cramping and I was feeling absolutely nothing. When I felt the first fatigue of the day it worried me for a second until I realized I was running slightly uphill. By around mile 19 I knew I was going to finish strong. But my pace fell off a bit. 3:00 slipped away. Running down Green St. for the third time, I remembered all the hard work I had done on there when I was a student. That was nostalgic. When I turned back to the stadium I realized why I had slowed down. The wind had been picking up and now it was pushing me. I had been catching people all day. That had just about stopped. There were no pretenders. I think I passed all of the strong runners that had passed me earlier. I felt sorry for the third female finisher. I had caught her in mile 21 and she passed me back right before mile 26. Most really good females are pace queens. They run really smartly paced races, but the guys just outkick them. I felt sorry for what I was going to do when I entered Memorial Stadium. I knew I was only going to be in the spotlight for a few seconds but I had rehearsed for the last 5 months. Maybe longer? I mean what kid hasn't listened to a ballgame on a sunny afternoon and thought of what it would be like to run onto the field with the stands chearing? Anybody who drives by the stadium can see the south end zone from the street. We made a right off the street and went down through a wagon gate and onto the field. When I came up the hill unto the field I was sprinting with my right fist held high to about the 30 yard line. We ran around the east sideline and around the goalpost to finish at the 50 in the center of the field. I was still kicking, passing a dozen half marathon stragglers in the stadium. I ran the last 30 yards with both arms in the air, watching myself on the Jumbotron. Man, it was great. Incredible. I hope I don't sound too self-congratulatory, I know it is, but I just went ahead and told you exactly what I was thinking. I have a sub 3:00 in my sights now. BQ

2009 Illinois Marathon

Running is supposed to be fun and I have to say that nothing compares to a marathon.

Sodium Bicarbonate as an Ergogenic Aid

Ingestion of 0.3 grams/Kg of sodium bicarbonate 1 to 2 hours prior to a high-intensity exertion of less than 30 minutes duration produces a measurable performance improvement in 54% of completed studies.

Blood pH is elevated for about 3 hours after ingestion. About 50% of subjects experience significant diarrhea within about 1 hour of ingestion.

Sodium bicarbonate is common baking soda. 1 teaspoon of baking soda is 5 grams of sodium bicarbonate. The typical dose for a typical 70 Kg athlete is 4 teaspoons.