From my work blog, on how not to make national non-proliferation policy.
Testosterone Patches
Some useful background for those cycling fans in the audience trying to understand the context of Floyd’s test results. Turns out Malcolm Gladwell spent the necessary time getting on terms with the subject some years ago:
Athletes have now switched from injection to transdermal testosterone patches, which administer a continuous low-level dose of the hormone, smoothing over the old, incriminating spikes. The patch has another advantage: once you take it off, your testosterone level will drop rapidly, returning to normal, depending on the dose and the person, in as little as an hour. “It’s the peaks that get you caught,” says Don Catlin, who runs the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory. “If you took a pill this morning and an unannounced test comes this afternoon, you’d better have a bottle of epitestosterone handy. But, if you are on the patch and you know your own pharmacokinetics, all you have to do is pull it off.” In other words, if you know how long it takes for you to get back under the legal limit and successfully stall the test for that period, you can probably pass the test. And if you don’t want to take that chance, you can just keep your testosterone below 6:1, which, by the way, still provides a whopping performance benefit.
How Floyd Might Have Done It
Stegner
Last fall, Lissa and I spent a couple of days in and around Lee’s Ferry. As the linchpin between the upper and lower Colorado basins, it’s central to storytelling about water, drought and the west, which is part of my attraction to the place. But it’s also magnificent country in a stark and powerful way. Making a life in Utah was a tough go for the Mormons who immigrated in the mid-19th century, but nowhere was it tougher than the dry canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. It’s beautiful country, unless you’ve got to grow your own food to make your own life there.
I’m no Wallace Stegner, so I’ll defer to this description, which I ran across last night in his Mormon Country:
The tiny oases huddle in their pockets in the rock, surround on all sides by as terrible and beautiful wasteland as the world can show, colored every color of the spectrum even to blue and green, sculptured by sandblast sinds, fretted by meandering lines of cliffs hundreds of miles long and often several thousand feet high, carved and broken and split by canyons so deep and narrow that the rivers run in sunless depths and cannot be approached for miles. Man is an interloper in that country, not merely because he maintains a toehold only on sufferance, depending on the precarious and sometimes disastrous flow of desert rivers, but because everyting he sees is aprophecy of his inconsequent destiny.
It is a big place, and we are small.
Thanks
If you’re the mysterious Garden Fairy who left that bag of delicious home-grown tomatoes on our porch, thanks.
Why Floyd Did It
We’ve discussed in the past here on Inkstain how Floyd did it. Now from Robbie Hunter, we get a better idea of why:
Eddy Merckx has spent a bit of time with us over the past weeks because of his son’s attachment to the team. Yesterday we found out that the night after Floyd lost the jersey and 8 minutes to the leader, Eddy went to the bookies in Belgium and bet 100 euro that he would win the tour anyway.
75 to 1 were the odds and he is laughing so hard now that the possibility is really there. The way Floyd raced today was like the way Eddy used to race in the old days, and he said it was the best races he has seen!
Naomi Oreskes Answers
Naomi “Don’t Call Me Nancy” Oreskes responded yesterday in the Los Angeles Times to Richard Lindzen’s Wall Street Journal claim that her Science magazine review of the climate change literature had been refuted:
My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.
Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
(Hat tip Ken.)
Yachting in the Desert
As I’ve mentioned previously, we don’t have a lot of water here in the desert. But we desert dwellers are people of vision. We build ponds. We race boats. (Well, they race boats. I just watch.)
As yacht racing goes, the new pond at the north end of Tingley Beach is a small setting, but the sailors of the Duke City Model Yacht Club were up to to the challenge Saturday afternoon.
Sunday Afternoon Crits
It’s a bit long for a crit course, but it was fun watching the boys have at it on the Champs-Elysées today. Great to see Ekimov hold the flag for us old guys, leading the peloton in, and even greater to see him bust a move there at the end to try to set up Popovich. I love watching the guys ride the gutter, looking for that little edge of smooth concrete. That’s bike racing, for sure. And, oh yeah, Floyd won the Tour.
Go Floyd.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
One of the fundamental public misunderstandings about science, I think, is the difference between textbooks full of answers known and scientists poking blindly out at the fuzzy edge. That’s why the latest dietary study (“But I thought they said coffee was good for me!”) always causes such public puzzlement.
That’s the premise I was trying to get at in the climate science story in this morning’s paper, taking the outliers seriously while at the same time trying to place them in a broader context:
Contrary to the common perception of textbooks filled with fixed knowledge, real science is a tangled process fraught with uncertainties, and such debates are common in any field.
“Science,” said Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, “is this turbulent interface between what we know and what we don’t know.”
But if all science is turbulent, then climate science, because of its political dimensions, is all the more so.