Class of '60

I've been invited to a party celebrating the 45th anniversary of my high school graduation. There's a web page with some photos contributed by Jon, one of my best friends of the time. I can't resist giving a couple in which my juvenile self appears (one with my baritone sax and the other looking (un)tough in football uniform.


Click here for a full-size version of the photo.


Click here for a full-size version of the photo.

The Demise of the Book (1894)

Another light-hearted post from the work blog -- put up on a Friday, the traditional day for less serious stuff:

Imagine yourself in 1894. Would it be reasonable then to predict the demise of the printed book? In an article that appeared in Scribner's Magazine that year, Octave Uzanne did just that.

Here's a citation: The End of Books by Octave Uzanne, Illustrations by A. Robida, Scribner's Magazine, Vol. XVI, No. 2. August, 1894, pp. 220-231.

For a little background and brief summary of the article see Engines of Our Ingenuity, No. 2009, a radio program produced by the University of Houston College of Engineering.

Some highlights of the Scribner's article:

At a late-night dinner party, the protagonist, Arthur Blackcross, tells his listeners: "reading, as we practise it today, soon brings on great weariness; for not only does it require of the brain a sustained attention which consumes a large proportion of the cerebral phosphates, but it also forces our bodies into various fatiguing attitudes. Our eyes are made to see and reflect the beauties of nature, and not to wear themselves out in the reading of texts."

Basing his ideas on the miniaturization of the bulky phonographs of his day, he predicts that the printed book, he says, will die, and, after some technical advances have been achieved, "the author will become his own publisher."



He goes on:

"Libraries will be transformed into phonographotecks, or rather, phonostereoteks."



"Fortunate hearers will experience the ineffable delight of reconciling hygiene with instruction; of nourishing their minds while exercising their muscles; for there will be pocket phono-opera-graphs, for use during excursions among Alpine mountains or in the canyons of the Colorado."



Working people and the poor "may intoxicate themselves on literature as on pure water, and as cheaply, too, for there will then be fountains of literature in the streets as there are now hydrants."

With broadcasting or any form of electronic transmission had not yet been foreseen, Blackcross predicts transmission by: "infinite number of small tubes connected with [an author's] auditory shop, by means of which his works may be wafted through the open windows to the ears of such lodgers as may desire amusement in a moment of leisure, or cheer in an hour of solitude."



The same sort of technology will enable dissemination on mass transit and thereby "cause travellers to forget the weariness of the way while leaving their eyes free to admire the landscapes through which they are passing."



All will not be simply text: "illustrations will be abundant and realistic enough to satisfy the most exacting. You perhaps forget the great discovery of to-morrow, that which is soon to amaze us all; I mean the Kinetograph of Thomas Edison, of which I was so happy as to see the first trial at Orange Park, New Jersey, during a recent visit to the great electrician."



He sums up: "books will be forsaken by all the dwellers upon this globe, and printing will absolutely pass out of use except for the service it may still be able to render to commerce and private relations; and even there the writing-machine, by that time fully developed, will probably suffice for all needs."

Who gave the Muj the Stinger?

Juan Cole's Fisking the "War on Terror" is partisan -- he's a partisan writer -- and it seems barely to conceal a passionate disgust. But the content suits the topic, its presentation is unusually concise, and the style surprisingly free of heavy-handed rhetoric.



Cole has a current column in which he says, in essence, that there's no way to implement Iraq's permanent constitution without violating its temporary one: Now They're moving the Goalpost.

An appearance aristocracy

This long essay in the Wilson Quarterly reminds me of a time in my Junior year of high school when I competed in an election for editor of the yearbook. I pretty much insured my defeat by announcing that I favored a book with no photographs, just text. So, here is this very serious discussion of physical attractiveness notable for a complete lack of images. I've supplied some Vanity Fair photos at bottom just to show that I've evolved somewhat since I was 19.

Looks Do Matter
by Daniel Akst

extract:

To a bizarre extent, looking good in America has become the province of an appearance aristocracy—an elect we revere for their seemingly unattainable endowment of good looks. Physical attractiveness has become too much associated with affluence and privilege for a country as democratically inclined as ours.

Elle Macpherson

Kierkegaard!

My RSS aggregator helps me keep up with a couple dozen blogs by librarians and folks who work in the LIS arena. One of my favorites is written by Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC's Chief Strategist (his actual title). He blogs about tech developments and research proejects, but he also ruminates on all kinds of other things. One of the best is on a favorite passage from Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities.

He recently did a post called QOTD containing all of the following: "Kierkegaard: Take away the paradox from a thinker and you have a professor. [Jonathan Rée on Kierkegaard. LRB 4 August 2005]" to which I felt inspired to reply in the following comment:

Posted by Jeff on August 3, 2005

Kierkegaard! I was trying to guess what cultural giant would next appear in a Dempsey blogpost. We've had representatives from the best of geek intelligentsia (Tim Bray), current academia in the US (Tim Burke), the Middle-European literary sphere (Robert Musil), and the high end of British scholarship (Anthony Giddens). Not to mention Marx and Engels, John B Thompson, John S. Rigden, and Manuel Castells, and leaving aside Thomas Friedman since it's hard not to write about him and his work.

I was thinking Gerald Chapman would be appropriate, for his too-little-known work on Edmund Burke, or Burke himself, whose contributions to the history of ideas are too easily distorted and probably not given their full due. Or, maybe Tim Caynes, since he's so tantalizingly allusive he must be profound.

But Kierkegaard will do just fine. Thanks very much. I do appreciate the breadth of your reach, keeping us aware of the noble intellectural context in which our LIS labors repose.

Guns, Germs, Steel, and ..... Friesians

We had a dinnertable discussion of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel the other day. Nick outlined the argument from the PBS series as outlined to him by Chris. We all chipped in with our thoughts on the basic premise:

Diamond presents a materialist view of history based on geography. He says the peoples of the Eurasian continent were lucky in their location, their luck producing a slow accumulation of advantage which by 1500 permitted them to amass an unassailable concentration of wealth and power compared to the rest of the world, and so, in turn, permitted them to overwhelm other peoples across the continents and oceans.

I vaguely recalled a more complex view from my reading of Durkheim and books whose authors and titles don't readily come to mind (note to self: fill in later). This view includes cultural determinants that can't be entirely traced to geography. One of these explains European advantages in terms of the relative difficulty of farming in Northern Europe -- great forests, heavy soil, short growing seasons. Where Diamond would say that's a disadvantage my (unremembered) author said it resulted in relatively small, highly competitive states. The author said the main determinant was thus competition among aristocratic land holders that made Europe the springboard to modernity.

Because competitive, these warlords were more opportunistic than the rulers of large states to the south and east. They glommed onto advances like the stirrup and the breeding of "great horses," tank-like animals that could be armored and could carry armored warriors. They subdued a peasantry (feudal serfs) and developed a (very relatively) advanced intensive agriculture that produced sufficient surplus not only to support the development of towns and trade, but also to support the feeding of the great horses over the long, hard winter. In fact it's arguable that the warlords cared more about keeping the horses alive to fight summer battles than tolerating the trading centers that grew up in their domains.

Whether there's merit in that argument or not, here's to the great horse (alternatively war horse, shire horse, cold blood, and, descending, draft horse). Prince of the breed, of course, is the Friesian:




Notes on this animal:

The Friesians are a cold-blooded horse. The original foundation Friesians can be traced back to a cold-blooded native forest horse. The remains of such a horse have been unearthed in the Fries an area of North Holland. During times of war, Friesians were influenced and refined with barb blood. Later, during the crusades, with battle mobility in mind, Andalusian blood was added. The Friesian in its turn has provided the foundation blood for many European breeds. Some samples of which are: The Shire, Gelderlander, Olderburger, Fell ponies, Old English Blacks, Dutch Warmbloods, The Holestiner, to name a few and here in American they are thought to have been the ancestors of the Morgan horse.

Here's an excellent
posting on the Cliopatria blog
in which Ralph Luker points to some good discussions of Diamond's book:

More Noted Things ...


I'm a little hesitant to do this, because the conversations have sprawled all over the place, but as best I can tell the salient discussions of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel take place at:

Cliopatria, cross-posted from Easily Distracted

Crooked Timber

Frog in a Well

Brad DeLong


Political Animal

Savage Minds: One, Two, Three

The debate has been lively and it's good to see two fine, young academic blogs, Frog in a Well and Savage Minds, at the heart of it.

More Friesians (who could resist?):





A bit more from the web page on the Friesian Breed

Movement:
The Friesians trot with extreme power and action, bending well and deep at the joints. Steps are high and long with lot of "air time'. The walk is straight, forward and springy.the canter is lively with a strong pushing power from the hindquarters this creates a thrusting, jumping canter.

Temperament:
The temperament of the Friesian horse is loyal, Willing, placid and cheerful. Friesians are very people oriented and highly intelligent with an uncanny ability to retain knowledge.

Spooking:
Friesians tend to spook much like a cat, they stand stock-still puffing themselves up the look "big". Friesians do not tend to bolt but they can sometimes spin slowly in a circle always coming back around to face what they are afraid of.

Traits:
Friesians enjoy shoving you with their nose, this is not a personality fault. This is the way Friesians say I love you, refrain from reprimanding your horse or you may lose his or her loyalty.
(You can however, shove them back.)

globalful

I keep Tim Bray's weblog bookmarked and check it from time to time. I've written about his work before. His interests range wide, his expert knowledge is awesome, and he writes well.

It's time for me to own up that -- more than bookmarking -- I've put in my RSS aggregator the blog of Tim Bray's fellow Sun-worker, Tim Caynes. TC works out of Norwich, UK, while TB works out of Vancouver, CA, and they both work for a company headquartered in Irvine, CA (for California, this time, not Canada).

Tim Caynes' blog has less breadth than Tim Bray's; no interesting photos, no reviews of Isabel Bayrakdarian, no astute political observations, no insider's look at xml. But Tim Caynes has a captivating style. His posts are puzzling and have a breezy slacker charm. Here's a sample:

did you see that?,

that's horrible. I didn't mean to do it, but I just kind of forgot that I'd set up a webcam. I mean, I've done worse things but not captured quite like that before. I really am working, by the way. these phat headphones are for conference calls, I'm not doing a dave doubledecks down here while paul talks about globalization design docs and we check on status. I'm not really hoofing around the gulf of oman in an APC in battlefield2 while you're talking about user-friendliness and reordering things in the authoring temaplates. look, I even sent out some kind of document or other to make it look like I was prepared. admittedly, I put it in the collaboration space so that it will time out before you can load it, but it's there, really. it's got knobs on

I watched 2 guys in space do some repointing on their mobile home on the internet today, which I was quite blasé about really. I mean, they're 224 miles above the coast of france, hovering about on a giant white fork-lift truck contraption, picking out little bits of plastic from between slices of fiber cheesecake with their huge white fingers and I'm seeing this live, as it happens, because they're got helmet-mounted (careful) cameras that are transmitting wirelessly to tracy island or something which is hooked up to some webserver or other that's streaming stuff under the atlantic to the BT infrastructure that's doing better for me today than chris and I'm sat here looking at a 4 inch square streaming video on my monitor in the upstairs office in norwich watching their every move. so that's amazing, right? but am I bovvered? not really. it's sunny outside and I'm leering out the window at 20 year olds on their way to top shop to get a new crop top for saturday cos gary's takin her dahn Lava, innit?

so what I do on the webcam is really not very significant. unless my mum's watching. she'd be horrified.

Incidentally, Sun Microsystems offers blog space to all its employees and many, including the Chief Operating Officer, take advantage.

Anne and Isabel

In another post I observed the breadth of Tim Bray's interests, from software (his home turf) to photography, to politics, to family, and to culture high and low. Click here for the Wikipedia entry on him. There's a 2003 interview with him here, focussing mostly on his work.

In the high-culture area, he writes about classical concerts in his area of the world (Vancouver, BC). In the past couple of years, he's done pieces on both Anne Sofie von Otter and Isabel Bayrakdarian. I mention this, and have written this post, just so I could have an excuse to reproduce these two photos:


Anne Sofie von Otter as Carmen at Glyndebourne in 2002. Photograph: Tristram Kenton


Isabel Bayrakdarian

A knight on two wheels, brief celebration of Tour '05

Just some photos to commemorate this year's Tour de France. Michael Rasmussen was my favorite. He aimed to take a stage if he could and ended up taking the prize as best climber, earning a high place in overall competition, and also winning a stage. At one point commentators thought that he might gain a podium place -- one of the top three finishers after three weeks of racing, but that was never more than a dream.

As you know from a previous post, I also respect Pieter Weening for his stage win.



Lance is deservedly champ. A man who lives up to his cliché of a name. A figurative knight with lance and a (figuratively) strong arm to hold it. (Who knew that there was bicycle jousting?)

Graham Watson photos:

Weening has attacked at the front of the race and is building a steady lead over his ex-escapers...


Michael Rasmussen wins into Mulhouse to take his first-ever Tour de France stage-win - he has been out in front for the entire stage, over 170-kilometres!


Stage 18, Rasmussen is in trouble on the finishing climb and will lose 37-seconds to 4th-place overall, Ullrich


Lance Armstrong rode his last time trial stage in his last Tour de France - and won in convincing style!

Handwritten catalog cards, a fit of nostalgia

Another in my continuing series of re-posts from my work blog, this one shows a couple of pages from a short guide to library handwriting. It was prepared by the New York State Library School for its students and published in 1911.

Instructions on handwriting from an 11-page pamphlet for library school students:





Source: New York State Library. School. Library handwriting; a guide for the use of students in the New York state library school.
[Rev. ed.] ([Albany] State of New York, Education dept., 1911.)

As a bonus, here's an image from a guide to library handwriting published in Moscow in 1927:



What's so interesting about these items? For me, they show the "craft" side of librarianship, showing the aesthetic aspect of a profession that is predominantly intellectual. The whole idea of handwritten cards is also poignant viewed from in an era of wild information overload. Today we'd be lost without computers to capture, process, share, and make searchable our cataloging.

It's also interesting that the instructions are given in a direct and unambiguous style. Compare the following extract from our current rules for the (very librarianly) practice of "dotting." [Dotting, once universal but now done only for part of our workload, is one of the few cataloging tasks that requires use of a writing instrument.]

Use the following guidelines to provide the dotting and other information.

• a. Main entry. Using a pencil, place two dots under the first letter of the entry word of the main entry heading on the title page. (For publications classified in a collected set, the main entry to be dotted is that for the collected set, not that for that individual piece.) If the main entry heading does not appear on the title page or if it appears in a nonroman script, print it (using pencil) in catalog entry form near the top of the page (the title page of the monograph or of the collected set, as appropriate) and then dot it. For personal name headings, do not fill in initials if the name is on the title page, and omit dates and added designations when writing in the name. For corporate name headings, if the corporate body is present on the title page in any form, simply dot under the entry element. It is not necessary to give the established catalog form. If the title page cannot be written on (e.g., it is glossy and pencil marks do not show), print the main entry heading on a page as close to the title page as possible, e.g., the page facing the title page or the title page verso.


• b. Volume number. If the book is unnumbered but volume numbering has been assigned by the cataloger, write (in pencil) the assigned volume number on the title page enclosed within square brackets.


• c. Nonroman script. For publications in nonroman scripts (excepting Cyrillic) and certain other languages, also write (in pencil) on the title page the following information needed by shelflisters:


• 1) the main entry, as noted in section a. above;


• 2) the volume number, if a multipart item is involved (including the last volume of an open entry now being closed);


• 3) date of publication, etc.




• d. LCCN. Insure that the LCCN used in the bibliographic record appears on the verso of the title page, either printed in the book or on an LCCN barcode label pasted in the book. In the absence of an LCCN in one of these forms, write in (in pencil) the LCCN. Do this for all single part items and for the earliest volume of any group of multipart volumes being processed together.

Chinese astonishment at US undiscipline

I haven't written about the US and Chnia recently. There hasn't been much to say since things remain as they were. If there's a surprise, it has been a mild one and not really unexpected: interest rates have remained low in the US and the US economy seems strong enough to keep them down for the time being. There has been jaw boning about the huge growth in Chinese textile exports to the US, but that too was expected. Finally, the Chinese did change the ratio of their currency to the US dollar, but not by an unexpected amount. The grand-standing by some members of the US Congress hardly deserves notice I believe.

Still, though there's little to say, a paragraph in an op-ed piece caught my eye and seems worth repeating. The piece itself is a breezy and somewhat glib overview which makes some ok good points; nothing profound. The author asserts that Chinese determination and self-discipline give them a competitive advantage over our self-indulgence and lack of focus. Like other critiques of US policy, it overlooks the bargaining strength that a debtor has over a large creditor. But that's not what I wish to write about. The bit that I think worth repeating is the depiction of Chinese astonishment at US priorities, how we allow ourselves to "drown in debt" and care not about what matters in the world, but rather indulge ourselves in "fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat."

Here's the citation to the article and a brief extract:

Advantage, China
In This Match, They Play Us Better Than We Play Them
By James McGregor
Sunday, July 31, 2005; Page B01

The Chinese government today understands America much better than our government understands China.

Chinese government officials and business executives admire, fear and pity the United States. They admire our entrepreneurial culture, free markets, legal system and ability to unemotionally discard what doesn't work while our best-in-the-world universities and enormous R&D capabilities create new products and services. China's economic reforms over the past 25 years have been aimed at creating a Chinese variation of the U.S. economic system and its ability to unleash entrepreneurial instincts and harness markets to build a world-beating economy.

Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline. More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are equally astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat.

The toughest athletes of all

I ride my bike most every day. Weekdays it's 9 miles of commuting each way; Sundays, if I feel like it, I might do 30 miles on roads through Rock Creek Park. I keep up the daily commute through heat and cold, but take a break when there's snow & ice, when it's raining, or when the ozone pollution is up in the red zone. Despite the regularity my fitness seems to rise and fall. Some days are good others not.

On the good ones I breeze by riders who are appear a good deal younger and fitter; on bad ones, some of these guys breeze by me. Every once in a while I catch a compliment from a racer type (well-developed leg muscles and a bike jersey identifying a local team). As my family knows, I caught a couple of them on a ride a month or so ago; one on a hill climb when, as I passed a guy who was steaming along pretty well, I heard a "way to go"; another later on that ride when a guy who had been riding with me said I should leave the motor home next time so other riders could keep up. On the really bad days I feel like I'm coming down with the 'flu: hot, weak, and entirely unmotivated. These feelings are not very predictable and even can change during the course of a ride (usually from bad to good) so that I've pretty much concluded they're mostly mental. The only more-or-less sure thing is that I have to recover after a really hard day; I don't do two strong days in a row.

I bring this up because professional riders, like those who ride in the Tour de France, do much harder days much more frequently. So much harder that I can't imagine the effort.

And over a big tour, like the Tour de France, they are doing these big-effort days for weeks on end. They use up as much as 12,000 calories a day, which means they're ingesting some kind of "food" fairly continuously, even while on the bike. I put food in quotes because they use specially-formulated energy drinks, gels, and bars during races and eat regular food (mostly carbs) in big meals during the rest of their waking hours.

And they expend huge amounts of effort. I suppose I'm using less than 100 watts of power at peak output (that's a guess based on the fact that one horsepower is 736 watts). In contrast, riding up the big cols in the Pyrénées and Alps, professional bike riders each exert 350-400 watts. And they do this day after day.

This VeloNews photo shows the peloton (the main group of riders) beginning to work its way up a high col. Forming a fairly compact group over flat terrain (ignoring the break aways), the hundred riders spread out as the climbs intensify.

This shot gives an idea of the magnitude of the big climbs. There will be four or five mountain crossings when the Tour is in the Alps and Pyrénées, with thousands of feet of climbing in each.

This image shows Jan Ullrich at full-strength effort trying to keep up with Lance Armstrong on one of the high cols.

You get some idea of the hugeness of this effort when you realize that Tour riders maintain an average speed greater than 30 MPH over many miles of riding. What's hard to realize is that the effort required to push against air increases dramatically as you increase your speed. I don't know the exact figures, but it feels as if it's twice as hard to increase from 18 MPH to 22 MPH as it did to increase from 14 to 18. My highest average speed in good conditions is not much more than 20 MPH. On smooth flat roads with no wind, I can sustain 23 to 25 but not for very long.

This image (from VeloNews as are the previous ones) shows a leading group of riders at high speed (though of course you can't actually see the speed).

You might say that most of the riders in a race are drafting behind others, but they can't all be drafting; quite a few area out there in the blast. And, every stage race includes one or two time trials when they have to race as individuals with no help from others. In those conditions, the best of them are still able to average more than 30 MPH.

You might say that professional riders use scientific training to achieve their goals and, beyond that, many of the use performance-enhancing drugs. This last bit is true, but not universally true, or at least, many riders, though frequently tested, do not get caught cheating in this way.

Take Lance Armstrong as an example. He's clearly the best rider in many respects, but the difference between the best and worst rider in the Tour de France is not as great as you might expect.

What's different about Lance and me? Well he's a superbe athlete, one of the best endurance athletes who's ever lived. And he's built perfectly for cycling. In addition, he has enormous dedication, training discipline, and race discipline. And, not least, he's supported by a very expensive and very talented team who dedicate themselves to his victory.

An article in the New Yorker back in 2002 lays it all out:

THE LONG RIDE
by MICHAEL SPECTER
How did Lance Armstrong manage the greatest comeback in sports history?
Issue of 2002-07-15

Do read the whole thing. It's high-quality New Yorker workmanship and very informative.

Some highlights:

On Armstrong: Armstrong has never failed a drug test, however, and he may well be the most frequently examined athlete in the history of sports.

Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than that of an average man. During those rare moments when he is at rest, it beats about thirty-two times a minute—slowly enough so that a doctor who knew nothing about him would call a hospital as soon as he heard it. (When Armstrong is exerting himself, his heart rate can edge up above two hundred beats a minute.)

Physically, he was a prodigy. Born in 1971, Armstrong was raised by his mother in Plano, a drab suburb of Dallas that he quickly came to despise. He never knew his father, and refers to him as "the DNA donor." He has written that "the main thing you need to know about my childhood is that I never had a real father, but I never sat around wishing for one, either. . . . I've never had a single conversation with my mother about him."

Not only has his cardiovascular strength always been exceptional; his body seems specially constructed for cycling. His thigh bones are unusually long, for example, which permits him to apply just the right amount of torque to the pedals.

On the Tour de France: The peloton (or pack of riders) can cover up to two hundred and fifty kilometres a day without stopping, like a rolling army; there is a "feed zone" about halfway through each stage, where cyclists slow down enough to be draped with a cloth pouch, called a musette, which is filled with fruit, power bars, and other high-carbohydrate snacks. The team members take turns "working," or pulling, at the front to give each other a rest. (Even competitors, when they ride together, take turns out front, sharing the advantages of drafting.) In some ways, cycling retains an odd chivalry that is more readily associated with the trenches of the First World War. During last year's Tour, for instance, at a crucial moment in the Pyrenees, Jan Ullrich veered off the road and into a ditch; Armstrong waited for him to get back on his bike and catch up. Ullrich almost certainly would have done the same for him.

Since individual excellence can get one only so far in a race of this magnitude, it is also crucial to have the right team, to provide organization, finances, and experience. U.S. Postal has all that; it is, in its way, pro cycling's Yankees—with climbing specialists, sprinters, and a powerful bench. This is why so many cyclists agree to work as domestiques, putting their success second to Armstrong's. "You work for a teammate who is older and more experienced," Victor Hugo Peña told me late one day between stages of the Dauphiné.

I was curious why a talented cyclist would agree to play such a role. "It is an apprenticeship—you have to learn the business," Hugo Peña said. "If you get respect, work well, and are good, you move up." Armstrong himself worked as a domestique when he was starting out. He told me that he finds the system reassuring.

The physical demands on competitive cyclists are immense. One day, they will have to ride two hundred kilometres through the mountains; the next day there might be a long, flat sprint lasting seven hours. Because cyclists have such a low percentage of body fat, they are more susceptible to infections than other people. (At the beginning of the Tour, Armstrong's body fat is around four or five per cent; this season, Shaquille O'Neal, the most powerful player in the N.B.A., boasted that his body-fat level was sixteen per cent.)

The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty marathons in twenty days. During the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Wim H. M. Saris, a professor of nutrition at the University of Maastricht, conducted a study of human endurance by following participants in the Tour. "It is without any doubt the most demanding athletic event," he told me. "For one day, two days—sure, you may find something that expends more energy. But for three weeks? Never."

Saris compared the metabolic rates of professional cyclists while they were riding with those of a variety of animal species, and he created a kind of energy index—dividing daily expenditure of energy by resting metabolic rate. This figure turned out to range from one to seven. An active male rates about two on Saris's index and an average professional cyclist four and a half. Almost no species can survive with a number that is greater than five. For example, the effort made by birds foraging for food sometimes kills them, and they scored a little more than five. In fact, only four species are known to have higher rates on Saris's energy index than the professional cyclists in his study: a small Australian possum, a macaroni penguin, a large seabird called a gannet, and one species of marsupial mouse.

Bone-deep solipsism

Here are two items on "the mundane indignities and brutalities of class."

I got the first of them from blogdex. It's a newspaper article about the district manager of the Wal-Mart in Pensacola removing the paper's vending machine from local stores. The cause: unhappiness over a piece that points out how Wal-Mart is subsidized by government in the sense that its employees get paid enough to afford medical care and the like. A nice quote from the newspaper: "Pensacola should be more than the Wal-Mart kind of town we're becoming - cheap and comfy on the surface, lots of unhappiness and hidden costs underneath." The AP is now reporting that the local manager has backed down and the papers are again available at the stores.

The second item comes from Arts & Letters Daily. Their squib reads: "You’re in the religion biz and you discover one day that your company’s oldest, most trusted product doesn’t actually exist. What do you do?... "

It's from the July/August issue of Books & Culture, A Christian Review:


The Confidence Man

Meet Mark C. Taylor, the virtuoso of Nietzschean boosterism.
by Eugene McCarraher

My favoritie paragraph is this one, noting the absence, in the book under review, of any awareness of those who are not primary players in the dominant activities of the global economy:

This bone-deep solipsism, increasingly endemic to the suburban middle class, follows directly from an inability to acknowledge our humble and fragile materiality, the substance of which involves us, on this side of paradise, in painful and exploitative bonds as well as connections of felicity and flourishing. As Barbara Ehrenreich has observed, "to be cleaned up after is to achieve a certain magical weightlessness and immateriality." Such indifference to the world without quotation marks enables palaver about the capitalist economy as an "information-processing machine" of "complex adaptation." In the same vein, exotic pedantry about the joy of untrammeled desire conceals the coercive nature of capitalist markets and workplaces; marvel at the insubstantiality of money deflects attention from the commodification of activities once performed without pecuniary exchange; pabulum about "webs" and "processes" camouflages the mundane indignities and brutalities of class, power, and war.

War on Terror - greatly condensed, in Geek-speak

Here's another frivolous post from my work blog. It's the War on Terror as a computer program. Actually not really a computer program, but a series of commands in the Bourne Shell, the standard user interface to the UNIX operating system, having some programming capability.


I doubt that this will seem funny or even interesting to most readers. As a sometime Unix user (though hardly one at all), I liked the original post when I saw it yesterday. It comes from a blog by a programmer at Sun Microsystems as you can tell from the url: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ThinGuy . "Thin Guy" doesn't refer to the author's anatomy (or not just to it) but to a Sun product line: some network software and a "thin client," vaguely akin to our old Comterms, for use on the network. The following is quoted from the blog; to make it easier to read, I haven't done the usual indenting.

---

The War on Terror - For Dummies

This one is for all the folks who read this and said "I don't get it".  Like my wife...So if you couldn't stop laughing and people around you just didn't understand, send them here.  Remember the humor is in the fact that you can make history look like a computer geeks daily job, not in the war.

As viewed through the thingy you type commands into on a non-microsoft operating system. (Kind of like a DOS prompt, but different)

$ cd /middle_east  [Change Directory , i.e. go there]
$ ls [Show files/directories]
Afghanistan   Iraq          Libya         Saudi_Arabia  UAE
Algeria       Israel        Morrocco      Sudan         Yemen
Bahrain       Jordan        Oman          Syria                          [Countries in the Middle East]
Egypt         Kuwait        Palestine     Tunisia
Iran          Lebanon       Qatar         Turkey

$ cd Afghanistan [Go into Afghanistan]
$ ls [Look around Afghanistan]
bin  Taliban     [We see bin (bin usually contains binary or executable programs) and the Taliban]
$ rm Taliban [Remove the file Taliban ]
rm: Taliban is a directory [Whoops not that easy]
$ cd Taliban [Go into Taliban Structure]
$ ls [Look around]
soldiers [OK, we find soldiers]
$ rm soldiers [Smoke 'em out!]
$ cd .. [Job done, let's get out of there]
$ rmdir Taliban [Let's try to remove the Taliban again, this time we're smarter]
rmdir: directory "Taliban": Directory not empty [Damn!  I thought we got everybody]
$ cd Taliban [Goin' back in!]
$ ls -a [Let's look in hidden places i.e. caves!]
.            ..           .insurgents  [Crap who are these guys?]
$ chown -R USA .* [ Let's make them ours.  Off to Gitmo!]
chown: .insurgents: Not owner   [They're not talking.  We can't make them.  Damn Amnesty International!]
$ cd ..      [OK, let's back up a bit - up one directory to be precise]
$ su         [Super User!  He can do anything, even if it's not right.  Kind of like a President.]
Password: ******* [Super Secret Code word]
# mv Taliban /tmp [Super User aka "root" moves the "Taliban" problem to the back burner]
# exit    [Can't stay invoke all my super powers at once, people will talk.  Will somebody please shut up that fathead Michael Moore!]
$ ls   [Let's look around Afghanistan again]
bin [Geek joke coming from thinkgeek.com shirt - apparently out of print]
$ cd bin [wait for it]
$ ls [wait for it]
laden [Ha ha...Get it bin/laden.  Bin Laden.  Usama?]
$ cd .. [We know where he is, let's regroup and do this right]
$ rm -r bin/laden [Remove everything]
bin/laden: No such file or directory [Doh! Where'd he go?]
$ find / -name laden  [Let's search everywhere!]
$                             [Crap.  A blank line can't be good.  We can't find him]
$ su   [Here we go again. Super User!  We'll find him.  But we won't think about him that much]
Password: *******
# mv bin /tmp [Back burner the whole Bin Laden thing]
# exit
$ pwd    [Where are we again?]
/middle_east/Afghanistan [Oh yeah]
$ cd /opt/UN  [Off to the United Nations!  We're all Americans still right?]
$ ln -s /Bad_Guys/Al_Qaeda /middle_east/Iraq/. [Let's try to create a link to Al_Qaeda in Iraq]
ln: cannot create /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda: Permission denied [Stupid French, Germans, and Russians!]
$ su   [We'll make a link.  Remember root can do these things]
Password:*******
# ln -s /Bad_Guys/Al_Qaeda /middle_east/Iraq/.  [See I told you root could do anything.]
# cd /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda   [Let me show you the link]
Al_Qaeda: does not exist  [Ah, but just because you make a link, doesn't mean it's real.  Broken Link.  Dang!]
# rm /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda  [Crap.  New tactic]
# mkfile 100g /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda  [Try to make a very huge case.  Those "converted" vehicles, those WMD's?]
mkfile: No space left on device  [Whoops, out of disk space.  Stupid French, Germans, and Russians again]
# rm /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda [Let's just pretend I didn't try to make that case]
# cd /opt/Coalition/Willing [Psst.  Hey guys.  Who's gonna get all that oil.  Wanna trade?]
# mkfile 1b /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda  [ Make a 1 byte file.  That's really small i.e. a shred of evidence.  Some meeting in a hotel?]
# chown -R USA:Proof /middle_east/Iraq/Al_Qaeda   [ Make it our own.  Our cause.  Our evidence.]
#exit
$ cd /middle_east/Iraq [We're going in!  Lock and Load!]
$ ls
saddam                       [We're Looking...]
$ ls
saddam                       [and looking...]
$ ls
saddam                      [and looking, but only find Saddam.  Didn't we used to like him?  Iran/Iraq war anyone?]
$ ls -a                        [Let's look *real* hard]
.            ..           saddam    [Crap.  Where's that evidence we created...er...found?]
$ find / -name [Ww][Mm][Dd]    [Where are those Weapons of Mass Destruction - Any shape or size will do]
/Korea/North/wMd  [Crap.  Someone get the Chinese to handle those guys OK?  We're busy making the world safer.]
$ wall Propaganda.txt [Send out a message.  Election time is coming soon]
Broadcast Message from USA (pts/1) on USS_Abraham_Lincoln Th May 1st
Mission Accomplished! [Yee-ha!...But sorry brave soldiers, you don't get to go home]
$ rm saddam [Let's get him out of there.  The world will be a better place.]
saddam: No such file or directory [Crap.  Not again!  Did you check the palace?]
$ find / -name saddam [He can run but he can't hide]
/var/opt/dictators/spiderhole/saddam [We found him in a spiderhole.  Never heard of a spiderhole before though]
$ wall NewsWorthy.txt [Another Message.  Let's get excited.  Election is getting close!]
Broadcast Message from USA (pts/1) on Time.Magazine Sat Dec 13
We Got Him!  [Yippeee.  I feel safer!]
$ mv /var/opt/dictators/spiderhole/saddam /opt/jail  [Saddam is jailed.  Is it me or does he look like Buddy Hacket?]
$ cd /opt/USA [Go home for some meetings to consult some smart people.  The Plan?  "Install Democracy"]
$ cp -Rp Democracy /middle_east/Iraq [Copy our democracy to Iraq.  Well sort of.]
$ cd /middle_east/Iraq/Democracy [Alright, it's there.  Let's get this party started!  Let Freedom Reign Condi!]
$ ./install [How you run a program in *nix.  No double clicking allowed.]
Install Error: Install failed.  See install_log for details.
$ more install_log [Look at the install log]
Installed failed!
Prerequisite packages missing [Other things must exist before Democracy can take hold]
Conflicting package Wahhabism found in /midde_east/Saudi_Arabia [Opinion - The birth of radical Islam]
Packages Church and State must be installed separately [Opinion from stable democracies]
File System /PeakOil nearing capacity [Opinion.  Scary crap.  Google Peak Oil]
Please read the install guide to properly plan your installation. [Read the f*cking manual and learn from history.]
$

A Google logo maker - fun!

logogle is a Google logo maker. Try it and see.

"To die and go we know not where"

If you open my current reading box on the right, you'll see that I've devoured Joe Simpson's Touching the Void (well literally, you'll see that I've finished reading it and recommend it, but understand that I devoured it. The link here is to the Wikipedia entry. The one on the right is to Amazon.

Simpson's narrative is powerful. The language is appropriately direct & unflowery. Literary images are few. There's frequent blunt confrontation with imminent death. At one point, Joe recalls a speech from Measure for Measure that he memorized as a teenager in studying for his O-Level exams. The speech is a good one. I've copied it below with a little context by Seamus Cooney.

From Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene I:

Seamus Cooney: "Isabella, a nun, can save her brother's life by yielding her chastity to the wicked ruler -- which she refuses to do. Here she brings Claudio the news that he cannot expect a reprieve."

CLAUDIO: Has he affections in him,
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose,
When he would force it? Sure, it is no sin,
Or of the deadly seven, it is the least.
ISABELLA: Which is the least?
CLAUDIO: If it were damnable, he being so wise,
Why would he for the momentary trick
Be perdurably fined? O Isabel!
ISABELLA: What says my brother?
CLAUDIO: Death is a fearful thing.
ISABELLA: And shamed life a hateful.

CLAUDIO: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

Nederlanders in La Grande Boucle

I'm sure you've all been waiting for my report on riders from the Netherlands in this year's Tour de France. These riders generally do well in the Spring Classics -- one-day races and short stage races before the big national tours of which the Tour de France is one. They peak relatively early in the year and don't have the form for top placings later on. On the other hand, Rabobank, the principal Dutch team, does boast this year's winner of the King of the Mountains jersey, Michael Rasmussen, also winner of Stage 9 of the race, and a man who was able to hold a top placing, 7th overall, despite some bad luck and absence of the physiology needed to do well in the individual time trials. We enjoyed cheering him on during our viewing of mountain-stage videos, but that's another story.

So, with no more ado, here are the NL riders' Tour placings, Frieslanders first:


72.
Pieter Weening
(Harkema, Friesland), Rabobank, 2:24:16


83.
Joost Posthuma
(Hengelo, Friesland), Rabobank, 2:33:59


109.
Erik Dekker
(Hoogeveen, Friesland), Rabobank, 3:03:36


111.
Bram Tankink
( (Haaksbergen, Friesland), Quickstep, 3:05:12

And the other lowlanders:

94.
Michael Boogerd
(Nl), Rabobank, 11 Pts.

135.
Karsten Kroon
(Nl), Rabobank, 3:42:03

149.
Servais Knaven
(Nl), Quickstep, 3:59:07

DNF
Gerben Löwik
(Nl), Rabobank

I don't mean to suggest that the flatlanders did not distinguish themselves in the Tour. Simply finishing the race is a huge accomplishment and one of them, Weening, won himself a stage:

Dutchman Wins in Photo Finish

Weening edges Kloden in sprint duel
By Joe 'Lindsey, Contributing Writer
July 09, 2005

Today’s report on Stage 8 was written by Justin Davis of AFP

extract:

Weening, who came through the Rabobank team's under-23 program, began his professional career in 2002 but since has been searching for the first big victory that would confirm the potential which some in his native Netherlands feel will one day lead to him winning the yellow jersey.

Today, the 24-year-old from Harkema in the northern Friesland region of Holland decided it was time to show what he can do.

The passing months in Sockholm

I'm copying from the work blog I run at the Library. That blog consists mostly of administrative and library tech stuff, but I indulge in an occasional diversion like this. We've been suffering from a heat wave with afternoon temperatures touching 100 deg. and the temp-humidity index maxing at 110 or so. It's comforting to contemplate Sweden's much more temperate climate: 64 deg. F. at present with an expected high of 73.

I like the seasonal graphic that appears on the home page of the Swedish national library, changing each month. I don't see a credit line on the home page that says who made these pictures. Here's the full year's worth, starting with July and ending with June.