“Tweet of the day,” notes a colleague, forwarding this:
lancearmstrong Happy hour w/ the whole @LIVESTRONG team here at the house. For those who think we’ll be distracted, think again. We’re here to serve.
The old Million Pound Yellow Shithammer of Denial just ain’t what it used to be, hey? Not as long as Big George Hincapie may be one of the moles in need of a stout whacking. This shot will require some finesse, muses Big Tex, consulting his caddy: “What club do I use here, do y’think?” All the anticipation makes one’s putter flutter.
I get a feeling we’re on a rest day here on the Tour de Lance. But sometime soon it’s gonna be game on and Big Tex will have to start taking some very long pulls indeed, with the Devil running alongside him. And I ain’t talking Didi Senft here.
Meanwhile, I awakened to the sound of rain, thunder and hail at Chez Dog. I think I’ll sell all the bikes and buy a submarine. A yellow one. I bet I know where I can get one cheap, and all the rats should be out of there momentarily, if they haven’t all leaped overboard already.
Mad Blog Media 
Tell you the truth, its been a while since I’ve even read an article about a major bike race (sorry, VN.com). I’ll be working the Tour de Los Alamos in June and may race the Citizen’s field if my creaky knees (chronic patellar tendinitis) hold out. Otherwise, its much more fun to be riding up in the mountains, spinning a high cadence on a low gear on a spring day rather than spending time following the Tour de Testosterone Patch.
Here’s a 12 oz salute to all those in the pro peloton who are turning this doping thing around.
So that’s where the “cure cancer” donations go: to support happy hour?
LIVESTRONG seems to distancing themselves from their namesake.
If Jivestrong’s Q factor gets any lower, we can expect to see him on next year’s Dancing Mit Der Stars.
Rating, not factor.
SteveO, regarding Dancing With the Stars, a year or so ago Tom Delay participated. Indeed, the participants must dance the Jive and wear spandex and sequins. No tans lines permitted – spray tans are a must!
Not great, but decent line here: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/05/say-it-aint-so-lance-armstrong.html
For now, I am left to wonder how many memories of Richard Nixon a man must stir in me before I give up on him completely. One more ought to do it.
Our fire fighters are thinking Einstein was full of shit when he said Gawd doesn’t roll dice with the universe. We get this rain two months ago instead of now and we’re spared tens of millions in wild fire property damage. Of course, takes a certain amount of egocentrism to nitpick about the rain, given the tornadoes and earthquakes and all, so I’ll shut up for a while ..,
I wish we didn’t have to hear Verbruggen yap that Armstrong ‘never doped’. If he wants to trot out ‘never tested positive’ that’s one thing but it’s putting his imprimatur of ‘never doped’ is wrong in so many ways.
Herr Verbruggen doesn’t know the difference between data and interpretation. Or, doesn’t care. Actually, the hypothesis being tested is “the athlete has measurable drugs in the system indicating ingestion” and the measurement is taken. A positive result confirms the hypothesis. A negative result simply provides no evidence to support the hypothesis.
The negative measurement result does not prove the alternative hypothesis, “the athlete has never doped”. Its really tough to prove a negative. Hence the verdict is always “not guilty” rather than “innocent”.
(can you tell I’d rather talk about anything besides whether a certain retired bike racer doped, and who saw him if he did?)
Khal: Sorry, my bad, but I can’t remember: are you a physicist or engineer? Reason I’m asking, the “can’t prove a negative” thing always makes me scratch my head. Doesn’t exist in mathematics — lots of things out there that one can prove are not true, not equal, not whatever. And it doesn’t exist in philosophy. And legally, it’s not we can’t prove the negative, but more of an assumption that we can never definitely prove either side, and we deliberately chose to err on the side of innocence.
But there’s the whole Heisenberg thing, yeah? Is that where “can’t prove a negative” came from?
I can prove that I didn’t win the Tour de France, or the Tour d’Altoona for that matter, just as I can prove I didn’t shoot Lincoln. So it’s not the negative per se that’s difficult. Instead, it’s a matter of singularities vs events of extended duration. I can prove that I didn’t dope at exactly high noon on Bloomsday, 2010, but I can’t prove that I didn’t dope during the collective Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, because I can’t document the entire time frame.
Sorry, but I hear “can’t prove a negative” so many times, I have this paranoia that I’m missing something that everyone else intuitively gets.
Geez, I really don’t want to talk about doping in the pro ranks, do I? :^)
I’m a geologist. But you are absolutely right. Two cases are evidence of absence and mathematical proof of impossibility.
If one is asserting that if X existed, one should unambiguously be able to measure something that is confirmatory to X, its consistent absence in spite of repeated measurements could confirm the alternative, that X did not happen (or that your measurements are not sensitive enough). If someone hit my car in the dead of night, I should be able to find damage. Even a scratch. Finding none, one could conclude the car was not hit. Except, perhaps, with a feather.
But absence of evidence confirmatory to X may mean X didn’t happen. It could be that the quantity that is confirmatory to X is transitory (such as the passing of metabolites of drugs out of the body). Hence “I never tested positive” doesn’t mean “I never doped”.
I mentioned jury cases because they can be foggier. I was on a jury once where we held our noses and voted “not guilty” in a domestic violence case. Not because we were confident the event never happened, nor that it did. Because the foggy nature of the testimony resulted in an insufficient burden of proof far short of “beyond reasonable doubt”.
Hey Steve, you bring up a couple interesting points I never considered: that a negative can be proved if the negative in question is tightly constrained enough. It helps when the negative being proved is something that is unique or exclusive: we can prove that Steve didn’t win the Tour de France in 2010 because someone else did and only one person can be the winner in that year.
As for Heisenberg, what he said (if I understand it correctly) was the the actual act of taking a measurement in iteslf alters the result, therefore invalidating the results, as is well illustrated in this Google search result: http://jennyty.multiply.com/video/item/33/Futurama_clip_on_Heisenbergs_uncertainty_principle
// If someone hit my car in the dead of night, I should be able to find damage. Even a scratch. Finding none, one could conclude the car was not hit. Except, perhaps, with a feather.//
Similarly but completely different …
I think it’s Bryan/Brian Green/Greene who always uses the dropped coffee mug. You cannot rule out the possibility that if you drop a ceramic mug infinite times, there will be one iteration in which the mug shatters and the flying pieces land in such a manner that the mug reassembles.
Two monks were arguing about a flag.
One said: “The flag is moving.”
The other said: “The wind is moving.”
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: “Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.”
—from “The Gateless Gate,” in “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.” (Sorry, but I couldn’t tell from the comments whether I was in an AP science course or a zendo, though of course both are the same thing.)
Two economists are walking down the street. One of them says, “Hey, is that a hundred dollar bill on the ground?”
The second economist replies, “It can’t be. If that was a hundred dollar bill, someone would have picked it up.”
Heisenberg works on the quantum scale. At that scale, the act of measurement itself affects the results of the measurement. Hence, at the quantum scale at least, there is always a residual uncertainty in the measurement. I suppose it would work at any scale, but the effect on the measurement is at some point utterly inconsequential.
Its been too many years (1978) since I took or used that level of QM, so I’ll not go farther out on a limb. There are experts out there.
We all need to have a Chautauqua up at O’Grady’s with plenty of food and beer. And, of course, riding.
As far as mugs. There is also the possibility that a mug will not shatter if dropped. Hence an intact mug does not perforce prove it has never been dropped.
(Sorry, but I couldn’t tell from the comments whether I was in an AP science course or a zendo, though of course both are the same thing.)
Which, i believe, was the premise for an episode of Northern Exposure. The circus came to town, and the ring master was a former physics professor, so the poet/deejay guy got into the duality of light, how it can be both wave and particle at the same time. Funny how much of our theoretical physics sprung from 3,000 year old philosophical musings.
Hey Khal, this is off topic but may affect your cycling far more than Armstrong, EPO, or a yellow wrist band ever did. I had a hell of a lot of problems getting patellar tendinitis for years until I finally tracked down what’s doing it: a tight IT band that was yanking my knee around and overly and repeatedly stretching the pattelar tendon. I got a Retul fit from a physical therapist/bike fitter here in GJ a couple years ago, and problem solved. No guarantees, but maybe this is something that could help you out too. Drop me a note if you would like more info: deinonychi at hotmail dot com.
Thanks, John.
I’ll look into it and may give you a buzz.
Actually, I never had problems until 1991. One day I was hiking up Manoa Falls Trail with my fiance and hopped down from a ledge and had a strong pain sensation from the patellar tendon. I raced/trained on that knee, compensating to the other knee, until both were swollen and ached constantly. My sawbones put me in a rehab program of swimming and no load bearing. Another orthopaedic surgeon suggested my knees needed surgery to properly align my biomechanics. I decided instead to stop racing and do less stressful cycling. But a good biomechanical eval would definitely be a good idea. So are Speedplay pedals. I’m using X2’s on my road bikes and am probably going to put Frogs on the tandem, since I aggravated the knees again using SPDs on the tandem during the Century ride.
Hey Khal, that all sounds eerily similar. I too started having problems in the mid 1990’s. I also found Speedplays to be pretty much mandatory since I needed not just float but float that had minimal friction. Using Zeros on my road bikes and Frogs on my touring/towner bike, I was still having occasional trouble. Hiking was also iffy: very rough trails, or blazing cross country was fraught with peril (not good for a field geologist). I’d see a couple physical therapists and narrowed the problem down to my IT band, and even had custom footbeds, but nobody had a really good, permanent solution. Then about three years ago it got injured pretty bad, and it looked like I was done riding, when a friend pointed me to a local (!) guy, John Weirath, who is a physical therapist, coach, and bike fitter (http://www.thresholdsport.com/). A Retul fit, some fit adjustments, and some specific post ride stretches and my knee hasn’t been a major factor since.
There’re people out there doing fits using Retul and other fit systems, but how often can you get fit by a guy who is a physical therapist first and a bike shop guy second? For the price of a real cheap set of wheels, it’s an absolute no-brainer.
Let me know if there’s any way at all I can help you out.
Geeze. Grand Junction ain’t too far away.
The guy is super cool. I had an advantage in that I already had a diagnosis in hand from other PT’s, so we already had an idea what the problem was, just not a solution. But still, for my initial fit he spent somewhere around 3.5 hours with me, the first hour was just to further diagnose and confirm the cause of the problem. We didn’t even look at the bike for for the first hour. He did a complete motion capture to find the “hitch in my git-a-long”, first one side then the other. We did a couple minor, but effective changes to my fit, added a couple new stretches to my daily routine, and I was set. Six months later I had a recheck and everything looked much better. Since then, no major problems (I still need to take an Alieve occasionally while on a ride, but that’s nothing compared to how it used to be).
A friend of mine went to him for a nagging knee problem and come to find out that she had one leg 2mm shorter than the other. There was no way we could have figured that out just by looking at her pedaling stroke. A couple spacers underneath one cleat and all has been fine ever since (as far as I’ve heard).
The Retul provides a three dimensional representation of how you’re pedaling, and any problems become obvious; but it takes a PT to figure out a solution, so I wouldn’t trust just any shop with a Retul in the back room. And this guy really seemed to know his stuff. There are a couple others in Colorado who do this, Andy Pruitt comes to mind, but I really liked the personal service I got from this guy. Can’t argue with the results, that’s for sure.
You might want to give him a call or send him a note and see if he can help. Doesn’t cost anything to ask. Also, I think he used to take his show on the road, occasionally heading down to Aspen and other parts of the state. I don’t know if he still does the traveling thing but it’s worth asking about, you might be able to catch him in Durango or somewhere closer to you.
I’ll be up in Fanta Se the weekend of the stage race, but I have to leave before the road stage so there isn’t much point. I think I’ll rent a cross bike and do that little Tesuque trail up to the ski basin again.
Yes, fearless leader, it is quiet out there…too quiet. Is it time to fill the flask on the Saint Bernard and send him out?
News from Italia. Van’s all prepped and most of the other work’s done so we’re off tomorrow to see the final big Giro stage climb Colle Finestre. Clients start arriving next week so we’re trying to ride ourselves into a bit of condition so we can keep up with ’em! Our Italian Mamma scored a bag of black truffles the other night and shave some of ’em over our tagliatelle. With a bottle of Dolcetto to wash it down we were pretty close to “in heaven”.