TNC #5

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Let’s see, how to strike the appropriate tone here. I don’t want to get this wrong, to create the wrong impression, to sound immodest. It’s been easy and fun to describe my cycling exploits with self-deprecating humor when I get spit out the back of a pack of racers and trounced, or get dropped, gasping for air, on a long climb with my much stronger training buddies. Modesty as schtick. Let me keep that tone for a moment here, then, by pointing out that the race was just the Cat 4, for beginners and old farts, and that the effort by several of us on the last lap to pull back a three-person break and set up a bunch sprint was a complete failure. The breakaway guys were all tremendously stronger, and were gone before we could even think a second time at pulling it back together.
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Which Sport?

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Glynn: Your fascinating account of the struggle between The Possibles and The Probables leaves this ignorant American puzzled as to the sport involved. I’m assuming it’s not cricket, since I can’t imagine one would “come out fighting” in that gentile battle. And perhaps not tennis, since that requires fewer players. Perhaps rugby? Here in America, we have National Anthem at the start of every baseball contest, but there is no holding of hands. And, given the martial nature of our Anthem and the current political complexities of our place in the world, the song carries a bit of extra baggage right now whereever one stands on the underlying geopolitical questions.

Hollyhock

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Lissa’s garden goal is to have something blooming throughout the year. It’s rather an evolutionary process – each year some experiments, with the things that survive seeding or being replanted the following year, and the things that don’t being replaced


blooming hollyhock

It’s like a big game of Sim Yard – add water here, some seeds there, then let the game run for a cycle to see what happens.
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The Nuke Beat

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere:

The bunker-buster is the most visible of a number of growing nuclear weapons programs, including a proposed plutonium bomb factory, that are under attack in Congress.

“Congressional support for these programs is not very strong,” Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., warned Bush administration officials during a March 23 hearing on the nuclear weapons budget.

AdTI

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Re the Alexis de Tocqueville screed, Tim Lambert is on the AdTI case. For you free software types in the audience first making the AdTI’s acquaintence, Tim has a helpful history. (Note to self: when engaging in skullduggery, avoid attracting Tim Lambert’s attention.)

Also Martin Pool dissects AdTI.

Dolphins and the Tuesday Night Crits

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Dolphins, it turns out, apparently understand instinctively and from the beginning what I am only beginning to grasp.

A new paper by Daniel Weihs (free, reg. req.) calculates that baby dolphins swimming in mom’s slipstream gain between 30 percent and 60 percent of the force required to keep up. Weihs, of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, calculated the hydrodynamics, then looked at aerial photos. He found the dolphin calves swimming in exactly the spot his equations predicted would be the most efficient.

Which brings us to the Tuesday Night Crits, and Aaron Wilson’s explanation that I needed to learn to listen to the wind. The quiet spot, he explained, is the place you wanna be when you’re trying to draft off of another rider.
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On Media Bias

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From the right, the middle looks awfully far to the left, and vice versa.

Mike Fancher, executive editor of the Seattle Times, had a column Sunday about readers complaining the newspaper showed a liberal bias. And other readers complaining the newspaper showed a conservative bias.