DaddyDear

Today marks the first day of my 18-weeks training program for the Sundown Night Marathon 2008 to be held on 31st-May. Here’s my training goals for this week:

Mon: Badminton game
Tue: Rest
Wed: 5km run
Thu: Rest
Fri: 5km run
Sat: 10km run
Sun: Swimming

I’ve substituted one of the weekday short run with playing Badminton, otherwise too much running may be a bit boring. I’m also considering signing up for a Yoga session to add in some stretching component to complement my training.

Starting a training program one week before Chinese New Year has it’s pros and cons.

Pro: More off days means better chance to stick to the schedule
Con: Will be eating too much during the festive season
Pro: The training will help cut down some of my fats due to excessive eating

Hahaha … …

Hooray! Just noticed that DaddyDear has just been upgraded to PageRank 1.

Ashley asked me some questions on “Living Things” last night. Though I answered her questions based on my personal “experience”, I wasn’t too convinced of what I had said myself. Hence, I spent some time today to do a little research on the internet.

Here’re the Seven Characteristics of Living Things from “The Open Door Website“:

1. Feeding – taking substance from the environment to survive
2. Movement – internal and/or external
3. Breathing or Respiration – exchange gases with their environment
4. Excretion – removal of waste from the body
5. Growth – in size and/or complexity
6. Sensitivity – react to touch, light, heat, cold and sound
7. Reproduction – produce young

The confusion comes in when some living things do not exhibit one or more of the seven characteristics, and some non-living things exhibiting some of the characteristics.

I’ve found a simple online quiz to help student understanding the differences between living and non-living organism. There’s another quiz that also differentiates between living thing, non-living thing, and “Non-living but once part of living thing”.

I strongly agree with this article by David Goldstein: “… It is in the nature of man to want to organize, classify and name anything that we study and a complicated system has been developed to try to match the extraordinary complexity of nature. We want to know how living things are related to each other and to things that once lived but are now extinct. However, any system we devise is manmade and will always in some sense be arbitrary. No matter how many levels of classification we have or how many divisions within each level are assigned, there will always be those who argue for different or fewer or greater divisions …”

For example, this is the full classification of a human:

• Domain Eukarya
• Kingdom Animalia
• Phylum Chordata
• Subphylum Vertebrata
• Class Mammalia
• Order Primates
• Family Hominidae
• Genus Homo
• Species sapiens

Now I know where the words “Animal” and “Mammal” come from. Learned something new today.

I’ve signed up for the Night Marathon 2008. It was a regret that I’ve missed the Standard Chartered Marathon 2007 due to bad cough. Good thing I don’t need to wait one full year to fulfill my last year’s resolution.

Here’s the race details:

Date: 31 May 2008
Time: 12 pm
Venue: East and North-East, Singapore
Race Route: