Month: October 2006

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Ride Dr. Cheyne’s wild ‘Chamber Horse’! Yeee-hah!

a forerunner of today's home gymHistory is resplendent with artifacts that help us better understand what life was like in bygone days. The object to the left looks like a chair… but it isn’t. It is a ‘chamber horse.’

For those of you who are fans of Jane Austin, you may have run across this line and wondered… ‘what does it mean?’

“…and I have told Mrs Whitby that if anybody enquires for a chamber horse, they may be supplied at a fair rate (poor Mr Hollis’s chamber horse, as good as new); and what can people want more?”

The chamber horse was sort of a forerunner of today’s modern gym…. and critics say that it was used as infrequently then as many home gyms are today. The ‘horse’ was developed by a doctor named George Cheyne in the early 1700’s. The poles are for hanging onto as you bounce on the series of padded springs… yahoo!

A nice article appears on NEW Scientist which I leave for your reading entitled: “Dr. Diet’s recipe for Health.” Dr. Cheyne’s call for chicken and vegetables no hard alcohol except for wine was well ahead of his time. I also checked out the used booksellers to see how Dr. Cheyne’s works were trading… and since I don’t have several thousand dollars to spend…

  Continue reading “Ride Dr. Cheyne’s wild ‘Chamber Horse’! Yeee-hah!”

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Level the Playing field!….. 5th Year of Eligibility is Fair

Here I am as a young track & field athlete.... if you look closely, Laura is in the stands!It does seem like a lifetime ago that I was a scholarship athlete at UCLA… but I do remember coming home, eating my dinner and then falling asleep. Somehow, I still managed to graduate in 4 years.

Since then, times have really changed for both students and student-athletes. Today, graduating in 4 years is a real challenge for many. It could be that economic times are tougher or maybe students are just dragging their collective heals; however, more often than not it is the university itself that slows the graduation rates. Sometimes, just getting 1) the required classes in majors whose unit requirements have inflated over the years and 2) obtaining the prerequisites in a timely manner slows the process to a crawl.

When I was at UCLA, I almost completed a triple major but opted to graduate ‘on-time.’ It is clear that by today’s hurdles and requirements, I would never have been able to be so adventurous and my graduation date would have been stretched out. With students taking longer and longer to complete their degrees often due to no fault of their own … it seems only logical that we reevaluate the support we offer student athletes with a fifth year of eligibility. Here’s a link and a copy of a letter I wrote to the Daily Trojan:

 Unequal standards

A favorite topic – by some – is to pick on athletes who struggle through the academic requirements set by the NCAA (Athlete graduation rate lags, Oct. 6, 2006). I always ask myself, “How many ‘regular’ students make progress to degree completion in the time allotted by the NCAA?” You’d be surprised to know the answer.

In the non-football powerhouse, academic community in which I live (San Luis Obispo), the “average” student graduates in 6.5 years. This is more of a pain to the parents than it is to the university or the NCAA, but it points out the fact that athletes everywhere are held to different and, in my opinion, unfair standards.

The unintended expectation of the NCAA academic progress regulations is that athletes are required to outperform their non-athletic peers, but this is unreasonable given the time, energy and recovery demands of Division I athletics.

Every effort should be made to aid athletes and non-athletes in earning their bachelor’s degrees. A big, positive step for athletes in reaching this goal would be in offering a fifth year of eligibility.

Roger Freberg
San Luis Obispo, Calif.

This is not to criticize the NCAA. The NCAA has made great strides in supporting athletes over the years… in particular , allowing athletes with remaining eligibility to continue through graduate school ( as did my daughter Karen) is a wonderful tweak to the system for the best students in the student-athlete mix. The addition of a fifth year would help everyone else towards earning their bachelor’s degree… which is the point, isn’t it?

As for me, I really did have an unfair advantage… I married my tutor.

Roger Freberg

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In Academia, Dinosaurs still Walk the Earth

it's hard being a dinosaur... science is sooooo scientific.... we need to ignore it and reach out with our feeeeelings!One of the fun things about marrying young is that you tend to share so much more… sometimes it takes the form of your bride slipping an article under your nose in order to see what shade of red you become.

Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Laura tends to ‘bait’ me with juicy stories like the one that appeared in her APS Observer entitled “With the Brain is seeing believing?” , it does stimulate conversation over the breakfast table.

My first reaction was to say,”why doesn’t this woman just stop?” However, she is employing the oldest technique in the book… the ‘distraction.’

So what am I talking about? As I mentioned in a previous blog, many people who have devoted their lives to the notion that everything can be explained by cultural or environmental factors are very uncomfortable with what is being discovered in the area of genetics and brain imaging….. why?  The reason is simple, it shakes their very intellectual foundations…. it’s hard being wrong. It’ll be even harder being thought of as ‘quaint.’

Pictured above, Carol Wade is clearly feeling very uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I have read her work. Carol has coauthored an Introductory Psychology Text , which we own along with others. Her text is resplendant with cultural and environmental examples to demonstrate the power of these factors, she pays lip service to the developments in science, but it is clear to me that she just brushes them aside as less significant…. if not insignificant.

Carol is quick to criticize the study of ‘brain scans’… but it is unclear as to whether or not she has ever studied them herself. Data can be such uncomfortable things when they don’t go the way you expect. In fairness, Carol does show a picture in her text of a ‘brain scan’ and does give some play to the fact that some male and female differences may exist… but this is minor.

Many of us have observed that men and women are different at the very core… and outside of the obvious physical differences … we noticed that there must be something more that explains why men and women think differently, have different abilities and often hold very different perspectives. We hypothesized that we are not taught to be boys and girls, so much, as there must be something ‘inborn’ that influences our behavior and outlook from the very start.

Science is beginning to reveal all of this, and science is confirming what many of us thought to be true all along… however, this is making others (non-science folk) very uncomfortable.   A “Tsunami’ of data bringing greater understanding of how we work is already here, and more is coming…. and folks like Carol who refuse to rethink their fundamental precepts will be a mere quaint footnote in history.

Sites for Science:

Brain scans that spy on the senses

Scanning the brain

Genetic influences:

Environment and genetic influences play different roles
in boys’ and girls’ gender-role behavior

The Nature of Genetic Influences on Behavior:
Lessons From “Simpler” Organisms

On Brain Structure

Roger Freberg

 

 

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What’s with weenie man Ted Turner?

Ted Turner has decided which side he is on in the war on terror?

Ted Turner is a true ‘existentialist’… he does what he wants and he says what he wants…. but it always leaves me shaking my head.

Take a look at his life… he built CNN and made a ton… but then he marries Jane Fonda… which has got to be one of the weirdest things to do… I guess it probably helped that you both saw eye-to-eye politically. Talk about ‘sleeping with the enemy.’

Recently, he has made a few more typically strange statements…

First, he says the ‘media’ has no place in showing an American Flag. AaaAaah, Ted, you bought the United Nations with a billion bucks, so should they be showing your flag? Frankly, the blue beenies have yet to serve and protect anyone, dude.

Your other statement about not having decided what side you are on in the war on terror is just plain wacked. Although I know you own a huge part of the frozen north in Montana or the Dakotas… a place where Osama has little or no interest… you might think about the rest of us. If you haven’t seen Ted’s interview, check it out on Youtube.com.

Here’s what others think:

Better to keep your mouth shut
Townhall
Brainster

It just is amazing how out of touch some rich guys are… they forgot their roots. After all, it was my daughter in Iraq… and not his.

Roger Freberg

 

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USC over Washington in last 2 seconds!

USC Beats Washington in the last 2 seconds! NOTICE: everyone stayed well past the end of the game to celebrate!I’ll leave all the forecasting and second guessing to the ‘pigskin prognosticators’ and the ‘experts’ everywhere. All I can say is that it was a great game to watch… especially if you were lucky enough to be in the historic Los Angeles Coliseum!

I took this picture right after the game ended and if you check out the giant screen, you will see a close up of the two opposing coaches after a tough fight.

I guess the picture of Coach Pete Carroll really impressed me… in fact, most ‘SC coaches show real class in handling victory or defeat… of course, at a top division 1 school like USC and Washnigton Head Coach after the Game‘SC, you don’t get your contract renewed if you don’t win…. and as they said in ‘Ghostbusters’, “I’ve worked in the private sector… they expect results!” Nevertheless, having coaches who show class and win is a real credit to the guy doing the hiring.

It does look like Pete Carroll is giving the Washington Coach a kiss on the nose… but the noise level necessitated close contact. It felt like row 2 in a Rolling Stones Concert… only louder!

There were plenty of complaints from bloggers who thought some of the new rules sucked… but then it was their team that lost. Some complained about the officials… but I observed something else.

Southern Cal has been hampered this year by a wide range of penalties… and it just seems to me to be a way that officials are using to ‘level the playing field’. If you add ‘SC’s penalties back into the mix… the games aren’t close. For example, if you were a Washington offensive lineman, you never got called for ‘holding.’ Hmmmm…. I haven’t seen this sort of thnig since the ACC officials won the Florida game for Florida State some years back.

Here’s what others think:

Fight On!

Roger Freberg