More Floyd

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The bike racing web’s crackling with the Floyd news:

American Tour de France favorite Floyd Landis (Phonak) will hold a press conference on Monday to respond to press reports that he is suffering from a degenerative condition that could threaten his career and may undergo hip surgery following this year’s race.

Landis, sitting second in the Tour de France behind race leader Sergei Gontchar (T-Mobile), will meet the press on Monday afternoon at his team hotel in Bordeaux, where the 4500-strong Tour entourage is based for an official rest day.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Since last November, I’ve been spending odd bits of time here and there hanging out with a group of bright teenagers who do math competitions. They’re a wonderful bunch of kids, nurtured by a great group of adults. (Journal photographer Marla Brose has been working on this with me since the beginning, and her pictures are great. Unfortunately not on the web yet.)

My story:

Jack Ingalls jumped up to the whiteboard and grabbed a fist full of colored pens.
“There’s a really elegant solution,” the Sandia Prep eighth-grader said as he began sketching out the answer to a math problem.

Switching between red, green and blue, Ingalls drew a series of circles, squares and triangles and explained the simple way out of what sounded like an impossible tangle of a problem:

You’ve got a deck of cards with a triangle, circle or square on each card, and each one is red, green or blue, and the colors are either light, medium or dark, so how many possible combinations of three cards are there which …

The problem went on, and to a visitor unfamiliar with the terrain, Ingalls’ solution sounded every bit as tangled as the problem.

But not to the students around the table. They grasped its elegance.

“Rule number one,” said Bill Cordwell, a Sandia Labs physicist and the informal math coach for the Saturday morning gathering in the Manzano High School library: “Don’t get intimidated by an impossible-sounding problem.”

The Ride

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We rode one of my absolute favorite stretches of Albuquerque-area road this morning.

It’s in the Manzano Mountains, the road leading east from Oak Flat Picnic Area, a twisting gentle descent through the woods that lets a slowpoke like me feel really fast without being so steep that you end up going scary fast. The forest is beautiful and cool, the road is nicely banked, there’s very little traffic.

Of course you’ve got to climb up into the mountains to get there. Anything else would be a cheat. But the ride up South 14 (actually now numbered 337, but everyone still calls it “South 14”) isn’t all that steep, and the whole thing makes for a pleasant day in the saddle.

The New Mexico Touring Society’s Oak Flat page shows a number of routes in the, area, though you’ve got to head east at Oak Flat – it’s on their map, but not highlighted – for the fun twisty bits.

(Props to the NMTS people for an amazing web resource of Albuquerque-area rides. It’s another one of those fabulous Internet treasures – people who know something useful generously using the Interweb to share it.)

Please Give Blood

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Could one of you please make a blood donation? Thanks.

Here’s the deal. I experienced a bit of a misadventure Wednesday morning when I went in to give blood. I’ve got difficult veins, and the phlebotomists just couldn’t get a good one Wednesday. After ten minutes of so of poking around, with very little blood in the baggie to show for it, they gave up. Which means that they’re a unit short right now of where they’d have been if my veins were a little more accessible.

So if one of you Albuquerque-area readers* could give United Blood Services a call and make a donation appointment, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

* If you’re elsewhere around the world, by all means go ahead and donate too. The more the better.

Floyd

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There’s an interesting article in the August Bicycling magazine that explains how Floyd Landis has done it.

When he was a young cyclist, Landis sat down with cycling doctor Arnie Baker and plotted out an eight year plan. In the early years, he rode as much as 24,000 miles per year – 40 hours a week on the bike, week after week. “That wasn’t designed to give him results that year,” Baker told Bicycling. Instead of worrying about winning year to year, he was building the engine for the future.

We’ll get our clearest picture of how well it worked Wednesday and especially Thursday, when the first serious climbing gets underway, but today’s result sure looked promising.

Wildfire and Climate Change

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I didn’t have a chance to do a story for the newspaper on the new Science paper by Westerling et al.[1] on wildfires and climate change, so I just got around to reading it this evening.

In a sense, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Common sense would suggest that when temperatures are warmer, stuff burns up more easily. But the fire story in the western United States is hugely complicated by the ecosystem effects of more than a century of fire suppression and land use changes (grazing especially), so common sense is a poor guide here, and data seems better. In this case, the data sheds some important light on the sort of question Roger Pielke Sr. keeps harping on as an important goal of relevant climate research: the effects of climate change and variability on “regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance.”

Continue reading ‘Wildfire and Climate Change’ »

El Niño

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Interesting El Niño forecast out today from the Climate Prediction Center:

Most of the statistical and coupled models predict slightly positive SST anomalies (ENSO-neutral to weak El Niño) in the Niño 3.4 region through the end of 2006. These forecasts are consistent with the recent build up in upper-ocean heat content along the equator.

I wouldn’t start buying stock in New Mexico ski areas just yet, but it’s the first ENSO-positive forecast, with the models starting to spread upward toward an El Niño this winter (that favors wet weather here in the southwest U.S.).

Korean Spring

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The azaleas in Seoul are blooming earlier than they used to, according to a report by Chang-Hoi Ho and colleagues in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Climatology. This is one of those wonderful phenological studies in which researchers piece together a historical record of when plants flower, a relatively sensitive indicator of temperature trends. They used goldenbell, azalea, chery, peach and American locust.

Lilacs and honeysuckles have been used in North America, but the records here don’t go back as far as the Koreans’.