It will last for years, include bad jokes, dark humor, pre-dawn meetings in parking lots, post-dusk rides back into parking lots, pain, sweating, suffering, freezing, whining, complaining, smiling, laughing, getting lost, headwinds, and talking about how fun it all was later.
And that’s just for starters…
Enjoying the Ride: Weighing In:
And how about these half-assed confessions? “I only took EPO a few times and never consistently”, “Johan made me do it”, “Lance is a big, scary, 150 lb bully”, “I took PEDs but I didn’t inhale” (I paraphrase). It all smells to me. Self-preservation is the name of the game. There was nothing altruistic in these half-truth confessions. Tell me Hincapie, Vande Velde, Danielson, Zabriskie, and Leipheimer: if you chose to cheat and lie through your Postal years and then continue to lie a further 6 years later, why should we believe you when you say that you’ve been racing clean since 2005/2006 (or that you weren’t cheating before your Postal days)? I have a really hard time believing that. I hope it’s true but if the risk of being caught continued to be low and the lure of results, money, and adulation continued to be high, it would have to be quite the sudden alignment of their respective moral compasses. Okay, so say that everyone one of the confessors stopped taking PEDs in 2006 as they claim, what about the residual effects of drugs? Their level of training and racing on PEDs was so much higher than what they could achieve sans that the benefits of that could last for years, right? There are no studies about this that I know of but I have to believe that the Grand Tours, training, etc. that they did on the juice had to be beneficial to the body for years to come. Not to mention the confidence and other mental aspects gained while riding/racing better than you’re capable of naturally. In all, it seems like a pretty sweet deal for these guys.
[There’s always another side.]
It’s far less important how one author feels about the iPhone 5 than the alarming fact that Slate let this author publish a 1,200-word essay about a device he hadn’t used, nearly three months before it shipped. Why? Because shouting creates pageviews and clicks, and…well, there’s nothing more to say: shouting sells. If this author or another wants to be in the game, sooner than later, he or she will have to start shouting, louder and louder.
[snip -ed.]The un-digital camp is far from relinquishing their power. Models that can replace them aren’t here. Advertising online has been corruptive of user privacy and editorial integrity. I’m afraid it’ll be a miracle if the shouting subsides anytime soon.
[It’s a problem for sure. But it is rarely as stark as the images at the top of this article.]
Source: counternotions
CURL: Crowley skews hard for Obama in disastrous presidential debate – Washington Times:
Then Ms. Crowley jumped in to do her own fact-check, on the spot. “It — it — it — he did in fact, sir. … He did call it an act of terror.”
The truth is, he didn’t. The day after the attack, he said only this: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” It took another two weeks before the White House would label the attack an act of terror.
[I thought it was tough job until I learned that she controlled the questions as well… what a mess these dabates are. So phony. How is it (according to CNN) that the Democrats have had more speaking time in each debate? 8% in the first Presidential debate, 11% in the this one. Biden got 3% more time. Just an edge given to anyone in office? I can’t find numbers… pathetic.]
Portrait of a young boy and wheels made of clay | Political Insider:
For all those reasons, Douglas intends to keep those three autographed photos of himself as a flag-draped kid. As for the one in my office, it is important to note what happened after that moment was frozen in time.
Not in Armstrong’s world, but the world of Samuel Douglas.
That photo marked him, but did not make him. Since then, his father has taken him and his brothers — he is the oldest of the trio — on charity missions to Honduras and Africa. His mother has insisted that the brothers engage in public service at home. Meals on Wheels, in particular.
Samuel Douglas is an Eagle Scout, and he’s now headed for med school. To become a pediatrician, perhaps. We need more in Georgia.
So that photo will remain in the office, in its place next to Sarah Palin. It still contains heroic possibilities — just not from the man clipped into the pedals. Samuel Douglas has promised to sign it next time he’s in town.
[It’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to hate. And then there’s folks like Samuel Douglas.]
Lance falling « The DYNAMITE! Files:
And we all know the aspects of Armstrong’s story that fascinated us: beating cancer and then beating everyone, a singular character with a single ball. Personally, I loved watching his movements on the bike, swaggering when he was out of the saddle, and the robotic, propulsive, high cadence when he was seated – a contained, measured ferocity. Yet most of the conversations that night weren’t about Armstrong or pro cycling, but about our own, more modest, adventures: where we had been riding, where we planned to ride or race, each of us glimpsing the others’ characters and experience (invariably much greater than mine) by learning about their cycling history.
[And so it remains. Whether you love or hate, care or not, the real gift of cycling is that you can climb on yourself, and sometimes fall off, pick yourself back up and continue. We make our own adventures.]
So what can one conclude from all of this information?
The fact that the performance of cyclists exhibits a broad peaking in the mid 1990’s is consistent with IPETs being used extensively in cycling during that period. The use of IPETs was not isolated to individuals, but appears to have been pervasive throughout professional cycling. The fact that speeds and climbing rates are reducing as a function of time points toward the success of stricter doping controls in the sport.
The reduced variability in performance indicates that natural ability, while obviously required, has been reduced in its impact upon determining success, and this appears to have been the case since the beginning of the 1990’s. (Comments about how EPO can reduce the impact of natural differences on performance among different riders, along with other discussions, can be found in Ref. [11].)
The data are consistent with Armstrong, upon his return, not doing anything obviously different from other elite cyclists in the TdF, though obviously, he just did it a little better. This is the “level playing field” scenario.
The data are consistent with the assertions made by LeMond regarding doping in cycling.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the data analyzed in this work is but a small fraction of what could potentially be analyzed. One of the interesting features that was touched upon only in the analysis of the TdF prologue data, is the complete distribution of riders speeds in each event. If, in fact, IPETs that minimize the impact of natural ability in performance are being used, this trend should be clearly evident in the distribution of speeds in any given single event.
To close, the data that has been analyzed in this work points to the combined natural ability, race preparation and recovery of post-1999 Armstrong being consistent with, but slightly better than, other elite cyclists competing at that time. The strength of Armstrong’s performances in the collective events suggests that his preparation and recovery methods were shared with his team-mates.My Thoughts (given these observations and conclusions)
If one is convinced that IPETs were used extensive during the period from the late 1980’s forward to today, it makes little sense to remove titles from those who confess to using IPETs, as there is a high probability that the runner up, who would be awarded the title, was also using IPETs in essentially the same way. I suggest that it was a mistake to strip Riis of his 1996 TdF title because each of the 9 riders below him in the general classification (GC) were also likely using IPETs. Further, it is likely desirable to create an environment in which offenders from the past can confess to using IPETs in past events as this may help in the development of future anti-doping protocols.
Stripping Armstrong of his titles, and awarding them to the runner ups, has the same problem discussed in the previous bullet-point. Given the data as presented here, and the fact that multiple members of his teams have admitted to using IPETs, it seems that there is high likelihood that the runner’s ups (through many placings in the GC) were also using IPETs.
If titles are stripped from Armstrong, then, in fairness, similar investigations should be launched against Indurain, as his performances have similarities to those of Armstrong. This could be generalized to all TdF winners since 1990.
[Fascinating stuff if you like charts and graphs. I’m left with a bunch of questions (about the analysis and some of the data).]
Did Apple and Google really spend more on patents than R&D?Technovia:
Read the NYT piece, and you would think that the technology market has shifted from being about research and development of new products to being about acquisition of patents. Given that this is based on a single year, when some very big patent portfolios came on the market in one-off deals that aren’t likely to be repeated in the future, that’s a long way from the truth.
[I sincerely dislike when agenda is written as news.]
I also love open source, and guess what? It’s not a license. It’s a process of exchanging ideas, code, and information, freely. In short, I don’t want to be part of what I saw yesterday, ever. For me open source is a lot more than a job. For me the ability to express my ideas is more important than smiling to the community and accept the new rules I’m seeing in place.
As you guess, not everybody reacted like that. Actually most of my 10000+ followers either said nothing or encouraged me by private email or direct messages. Thank you, I don’t want to claim that everybody is like what I saw yesterday. However among the people that over reacted there were also well known figures of the programming community.
So what happens now? That I’m done with Twitter. I’m going to close my accounts, and I’ll use only the @redisfeed account to provide information to the Redis users about what happens about Redis. Releases, critical bugs, anticipations. It will be low traffic, and should be make more people able to be subscribed to that account.
I’ll still write about everything I do about Redis and about anything else I like or think and I want to share with the world, here in my blog. I’ll modify the blog code in the next days to make it better for short posts, that will be presented as short messages with a date directly in the front page. I’ll study a bit what is the best solution to have an easy to follow blog about development, with small continuous updates and bigger posts from time to time.
[So much for the twitterverse. One day people will see the incredible value of blogs. They’re not passé, done, dead, or over. They’re one of the single greatest things since Gutenberg. ]
Source: antirez weblog
Reply to an open minded reader:
The second is even more important, and is about the data model. Redis is not the kind of system where you can insert data and then argue about how to fetch those data in creative ways. Not at all, the whole idea of its data model, and part of the fact that it will be so fast to retrieve your data, is that you need to think in terms of organising your data for fetching. You need to design with the query patterns in mind. In short most of the times your data inside Redis is stored in a way that is natural to query for your use case, that’s why is so fast apart from being in memory, there is no query analysis, optimisation, data reordering. You are just operating on data structures via primitive capabilities offered by those data structures. End of the story.
However, I would add the following perspective on that.
If you do judicious use of your memory, and exploit the fact that Redis sometimes can do a lot with little (see for instance Redis bit operations), and instead of just have a panic attack about your data growing outside the limits of the known universe you try to do your math and consider how much memory commodity servers nowadays have, you’ll discover that there are a tons and one more use cases where it’s ok to have the limit of your computer memory. Often this means tens of millions of active users in one server.
And another point about the data model: remember all those stories about DB denormalisation, and hordes of memcached or Redis farms to cache stuff, and things like that? The reality is that fancy queries are an awesome SQL capability (so incredible that it was hard for all us to escape this warm and comfortable paradigm), but not at scale. So anyway if your data needs to be composed to be served, you are not in good waters.
[No comment. Very important stuff, because the notion that you are composing for retrieval is very foreign to a lot of devs (seemingly).]
Source: antirez weblog
