I’ve put up some photos from our trip to Seattle, here. Enjoy!
Seattle
August 30th, 20092009 Tour Pool Wrap-Up
July 28th, 2009
The 2009 Tour de France pool is over, and Team Storky came in fifth. In terms of the time gap to the winner, this team did better than any I’ve been part of before. But it lacked several things: luck and winners.
The team lost Levi Leipheimer, a nearly-guaranteed top-five finisher, Jens Voigt who always finishes tours well-placed and is capable of winning a stage, and Robert Gesink, a promising young Dutch rider who has won a Tour of California stage ahead of Leipheimer and finished seventh in the 2008 Vuelta a España. No other team in the pool lost a single rider of the caliber of Leipheimer, nor three riders of such skill and ability.
The team also got exactly two time bonuses, for a total of 25 minutes of bonus time. This put Team Storky as the second-lowest team in terms of accumulated bonus time, ahead of only the astoundingly unlucky Team John Arnold. Team Wells got over eight times as much bonus time as Team Storky. On one stage, a group of eight escaped from the pack and reached the finish before everyone else. Of those eight, three were on Team Storky. Time bonuses go to first, second and third. The Team Storky riders got forth, fifth and seventh. That outcome is emblematic of the kind of luck the team had throughout the tour. It appears that to win the pool, a team needs at least a sprinter or two that can finish well-placed on a number of stages reliably, something my team didn’t have.
Above: The fire department was training across the street from my apartment on Sunday, in no way related to the Tour de France. I just wanted to share that.
2009 Tour de France Pool
July 4th, 2009
It’s Tour time again, and I’ve posted the team rankings after today’s prologue in Monaco. You may remember this from last year, when I didn’t do very well. I hope to do better this year. For once I actually put some thought into my choices.
I’ll update the rankings every day after the stage as quickly as I can!
Pareidolia
June 20th, 2009For a few months I have subscribed to Shorpy, a site that posts high-quality scans of historic American photographs. I save the ones I like, and I’ve set my computer to rotate randomly through them as my computer desktop picture. This morning I saw something I couldn’t ignore! Take a look at the photo below of the French Market in New Orleans in 1910:
What do you see just above and to the right of the wagon wheel? You can click on the image for the full view, or look at a zoom-in below:
It’s Che Guevara, of course! You can clearly see an eye, his beard, two nostrils and hat. He even appears to be sticking his tongue out. I am forced to wonder how his image ended up on a horse-drawn cart in New Orleans eighteen years before he was born. But clearly it’s a sign of something profound and mystical. Any ideas?
At SciPy 2009; Caltech
August 21st, 2009I’m at the SciPy 2009 conference at Caltech in Pasadena today and yesterday. It is an amazing collection of nerds and questionable facial hair styles. There have been some interesting talks.
I like this ’snub cube’ fountain:
The SciPy crowd:
A fountain in front of the building the conference is in:
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