Training - "Choose to be Positive and Choose Your Fate."

9/11 - press, chins, dips

"Whenever I realized my opinion of myself dictated what I could accomplish I slowly started to change my opinion of myself positively...  when you feel like you're nothing and you feel like you have nothing the smallest things just make you feel incredible...  and as you accomplish more and more in your own eyes... everything improves...  You like yourself better.  And when you're confident and you like yourself you achieve more.  You're happier.  It builds on itself...  If you're negative only more negative shit comes.  If you think you suck, it really only continues 'cause you'll act that way.  When you like yourself, when you're positive, when you work towards good things you only get more of it....  Instead of just being set in stone - 'I'm me and I suck' - whenever I realized that I could control it then my life got better...

If other people could do it that I could as well if I was just willing to not give up, to keep trying, to keep working towards it...

The reality of the situation is, when you view the world for what it is, it's fucking amazing.  Because there's so much opportunity it's, like, ridiculous.  No one actually stops you from moving forwards in life...

So thankful for my girlfriend, who pushed me...  without her I wouldn't have been able to do it...  Without her support, helping me eat and drink and making me meals and getting me to drink water when I felt ill... massaging my injured body parts and telling me I'm going to do well.  Encouraging me, believing in me...  Life couldn't be better."

46 to 51.  Never too old, never too late, never give up.  Michelle Rabe - Mobile Uploads: "Almost 5 years now since I changed my lifestyle! A lot actually changed for me besides my transformation and getting healthy! Some rather bitter/sweet but I am happy to say I have become alot stronger And a positive can do attitude....So for this I am blessed. Without your HEALTH you have nothing! 46 years old when I started and will be 51 in November! Boom!"

The Allegory of the Cave makes way more sense now.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

"One look at their faces, and I could tell the Good Lord was using my prayers to wipe his ass."

Preacher is coming.  Seth Rogen on Twitter: "...to AMC! The beginning is nigh!!!":

Forensic Science often isn't/Stop thinking CSI is real.

Seventh Circuit grants immunity to bite mark ‘experts’ who put innocent man in prison for 23 years - The Washington Post: "Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit granted qualified immunity to Lowell Thomas Johnson and Raymond Rawson, the two bite mark specialists whose testimony helped convict Robert Lee Stinson of raping and murdering an elderly Wisconsin woman in 1984. Stinson spent 23 years in prison before DNA testing exonerated him in 2009. Further testing implicated a man named Moses Price, who then confessed to the crime. The only real evidence against Stinson was the testimony of Johnson and Rawson, who claimed they could match bite marks on the victim’s body to Stinson, to the exclusion of everyone else. Johnson claimed that the marks on the woman “had to have been made by teeth identical in all of these characteristics” to Stinson’s. Rawson claimed the marks matched Stinson’s teeth “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty.”

I wrote a bit about Stinson’s case in my series on bite mark evidence that ran in February. The particularly remarkable thing about Stinson’s case is that in his appeal, he challenged the validity of bite mark analysis, claiming that there’s no scientific research to support its claims. In 1986, the Wisconsin Supreme Court conceded in a footnote that without the bite mark evidence, the state’s case against Stinson “may not have been sufficient to convict him.” But the court not only rejected Stinson’s appeal; the justices also spent a dozen paragraphs meticulously explaining why bite mark evidence is sound."

...this is almost entirely due what you might call a judicial echo chamber that began with the 1975 case Marx v. California. In that case, a California appeals court admitted testimony from bite mark analysts who had done their analysis six weeks after the murder victim had been autopsied, embalmed and buried. Even so, the court did not perform an analysis of the scientific validity of the evidence. Indeed, it conceded that there was no scientific evidence to analyze. Instead, the California court simply stated that the trial judge had eyeballed the evidence and found it persuasive. To overrule the trial judge, the court concluded, “would be to abandon common sense.” As one critic of forensic analysis put it, Marx became a “global warrant” for bite mark evidence across the country...

The problem is that this case didn’t exist in a vacuum. The courts allowed fraudulent experts to put a man in prison. But the courts now say that because the courts made that mistake, the man who was wrongly imprisoned can’t sue those experts...

It took more than three decades, but over the past several years, actual scientists have finally started testing the claims of bite mark analysts. And as we’ve pointed out on several occasions here at The Watch, those scientists are showing that bite mark analysis is a fraudulent field. Even the ABFO’s own effort to show that its accredited analysts used sound science backfired and showed precisely the opposite. When given photos of marks on human skin, the analysts couldn’t even come to a consensus on whether marks were made by human teeth. Last July, a senior-level science adviser to President Obama said that bite mark evidence should be “eradicated” from the courtroom. The same month, Judge Gary Feinerman of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois found that “There appears to be little, if any, scientifically valid data to support the accuracy of bite mark comparison, and the data that does exist is damning.” He went on to call bite mark analysis “transparently fraudulent” and compared the field to astrology."

Radical Empiricism, FTW.

Weird and stunning all at once.

Richard Kadrey's Damn Tumblr — A beautiful piece of art given to me at Dragon Con...: "A beautiful piece of art given to me at Dragon Con by Creepyscape."

"...I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." - Heinlein

"...people want an outsider."

Point.

Epigenetics & environment affecting gene expression.

Gene leads to nearsightedness when kids read -- ScienceDaily: "Vision researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered a gene that causes myopia, but only in people who spend a lot of time in childhood reading or doing other "nearwork.""

Training - "...if you can deal with it, you can do it."

9/8 - squats, knee/leg raise

We Mirin' Vol. 122: Labor Of Love - Bodybuilding.com:

Ryan Kicked Junk Food And Dropped 50 Pounds! - Bodybuilding.com:

What It's Like to Be The World's Strongest Man - Brian Shaw Interview: "In 2012, I detached my bicep. That was on the first event of the contest. There were four more events we had to do after that, and I did the rest of the contest with my bicep torn off. There have been other guys that have torn biceps, and they normally just stop immediately. But I went and got it checked out, and I asked the doctor, "Can I still compete?" And he looked at me like I was a little bit crazy, but he said, "Well, it's already torn off. You're probably not going to do much more damage. So if you can deal with it, you can do it."

"It was one of those things where it was almost more mental to overcome that and push through. But you train so hard to win that contest, and I wanted to win. You just do everything you can to go for it. And that's what I did."