The Fount of Useless Information

I admit that I am a Cadel Evans fan and was hoping he would repeat. He prevailed last year in a very strong field and while he doesn’t show the explosive accelerations that many of the other favorites have shown, his dogged persistence was a joy to watch. However, this year Wiggins and team Sky have shown clear domination. I haven nothing against Wiggins other than I haven’t really seen a lot of him, but in many respects we had such long domination by Lance that made the whole race about second place, I am a little reluctant to cheer on another such dominant performer. Team BMC is clearly much weaker than Sky as evidenced by how many times Evans has been abandoned going up the mountains. Since BMC was built to exclusively back Evans for a second yellow in Paris, it is very hard to believe their poor performance. That Sky has such a strong team (with Froome not only pacing Wiggins, but being a powerful second on the GC) that it makes BMC look like a bunch of sprinters. Unless Cadel manages to somehow pull some dramatic attack that Wiggins (and his team!) can’t respond to, I think the tour (baring accidents, of course) is over but for possibly third place (I don’t know a lot about this Nibali fellow but if he is even OK on the time trials Evans looks like he won’t even be able to get on the podium).

I have followed the TdF now for about a decade and while there are almost always a series of crashes on the very early stages, this year seems particularly violent. A year or two ago there was a big pileup in the peloton as the screamed down a mountain, but that was due to a motorcycle accident spreading oil on the road (or that is how I remember it). This year it seems that half of the race favorites are already gone (some to hospital for surgery!) and there is one team down to 4 (from 9) and several down to 5 and we are only just past the half way point. I have read and listened to some analysis of this and can’t agree that this year is any different than earlier years. In the past when there were pileups there were reasonable arguments that the route had unfortunately timed pinch points or poorly located tight corners, but many of these pileups just seem to be from either unwillingness to give an inch or simply loss of attention. Since the TdF is always made up of a huge collection of hyper aggressive riders, unwillingness to give an inch seems like something that would have been present a century ago and since all of these guys are long-term professionals lack of attention doesn’t seem reasonable either, so perhaps it is just a statistical fluke and we can hope that future races can be decided by rider performance rather than being lucky enough to avoid crashing out.

So far, there hasn’t been much on the doping front. While I have come to believe that Lance was probably doing some doping (like probably everyone else), I have also become very convinced that the level of doping is so low that the only effect can be through the placebo effect. I have tried to interest people in doing actual experiments (see http://rant-your-head-off.com/WordPress/?p=2322 if you are interested and be sure to read the comments), but there doesn’t seem to be any. Humans seem very willing (nay, eager) to believe things without any evidence and decisions are made based on who has the best story, evidence be damned. This thing against Lance is so clearly purely political in nature that it is hard to take it seriously, but the anti-doping world is so completely slanted against the athlete (I very closely followed the Landis affair and while he admits to doping, he clearly wasn’t guilty of the charges against him based on the evidence presented) that it is almost nonsensical to muster a defense (again, see Landis) no matter how innocent you are.

There is still a solid week left of the Tour and hopefully there will be some interesting events for the podium, but I still love to watch, even on those flat stages where everyone knows the breakaway will be caught in time for the sprinters (man, watch that Sagan go!) to do their thing. This year it is hard to get coverage, OLN, which became Vs which became NBC doesn’t repeat the showing as much as it used to and I am not constitutionally suited to staying up past 9 to catch the replay. In any case, I follow it live via a blog so I already know the results which does make watching the replay somewhat anticlimactic.

The TdF has got to be pretty close to the hardest thing any human can do, check it out if you aren’t already a fan.

A wee bit of a follow-up for my earlier post on the storm. Maybe I have got soft from all this computer work, but I recall working in upper 80’s and even low 90’s before (though I think I recall on the latter days we took a several hour break in the middle of the day), so think that this additional 10-15 degree increase really does matter. The only thing we did construction-wise was to build a couple of 16 ft platforms to (ideally) help when we do get back to work. I did that work in the shade on the side of the house that tends to be breezy and I believe it was before 11 when I finished, but I was almost incapacitated by the time I was done. The thought of working directly in the sun (and largely without the benefit of any breezes) was such a problematic one that once the sun had been up an hour or so it was automatically rejected. Fortunately my wife also went along with the idea of staying inside and I was able to relax mostly guilt-free.

It is more than a bit irritating that the temps drop 20+ degrees the very day we go back to work!

I have been thinking a bit more about the concept I briefly mentioned in the post above. I am almost curious enough now that I might eventually be motivated to do some research, though our weather records are likely not good enough for meaningful extrapolations. I suspect that these 100 year events that have been crowding us lately might actually be clustered for real reasons and not just a happenstance of reporting bias (or global warming). It is difficult to cull out the reporting bias, people only tend to talk about exceptional events and in places of the country where upper 90’s in temps and humidity are routine, then those events are not going to be remarkable at all. Neither would the storms that happen there either and even then, because of the regular occurrence the storms that do for might not be as violent as what the 100 year event produces because of the regularity. Further, because the infrastructure (and flora and fauna) are adapted to such storms, violence like we recently experienced might also be routine and unremarkable. As such, only routinely recorded weather data would be of any value. When we were doing some research on the ‘derecho‘ we experienced last week most of us (myself included) were amazed to see that these sorts of events are quite common (hardly 100 year events, though indications are that for our region this might have been such due to the severity).

A lot of the more rigorous research I read (the stuff that makes it through peer review processes and isn’t just babble of talking heads and thus all about reporting bias) that looks into past weather records (one of the reasons why I know that the records are rather poor) indicates that the sorts of ‘anomalous’ events we are experiencing are not really that anomalous to begin with and are certainly well within the range of conditions that are considered historically normal. Indeed, I was talking with someone the other day that was amazed to hear that tornadoes in our area are rather routine with several occurring each year, though they rarely do much damage (the one that happened on the Maryland Eastern Shore was exceptional in that regard). I personally experienced a tiny one when I was 15 or 16 at our house in Manassas. The twister was grabbing trees about tree-top level, twisting them off and dropping them and I was fortunate to not have one drop on my pointy head. Except for the damage the falling trees did to houses, other than a few lost shingles it was quite unremarkable. Since the vast majority of twisters are deep inside thunderstorms, few people see them and thus until the advent of Doppler radar they were only visible by their damage. Reporting bias once again!

People also tend to forget things pretty quickly. It is amazing to me how many people need to be reminded of the ‘snowmageddon’ that happened back in ’96 (in the DC metro area, of course, I am no less guilty of reporting bias than any other human). I distinctly recall being trapped in an apartment for 3 days (fortunately we had power the whole time) with a 4 year old (you could almost set your watch by his tantrums) and digging a snow cave in a drift that was probably more than 6 ft deep. Earlier still I was trapped with an old girlfriend (sadly, none of the romantic stuff happened) for a couple of days in a 30 ft travel trailer and made a rather insane trip back to Virginia Tech from Northern Virginia on Interstate 81 which had several inches of icy packed snow almost the entire route. Of course, those who are totally convinced that all ‘abnormal’ weather is related to human impact will arbitrarily set the dates when human activity overtook nature’s might to accommodate whatever weather event that is under consideration, so they already have a ready explanation. To me, ‘abnormal’ weather _is_ normal weather. ‘Snowmageddons’ are not unusual based on my recollection (indeed, cold winters are not unusual either, I recall very clearly when I was in middle school (so the late 70’s) being able to walk on the Occoquan reservoir and the ice being over a foot thick) and neither are heat waves. If you look at the jet stream last week it makes this huge loop up into Canada and thus ‘pulled’ the heat from the gulf into the heartland and above (indeed, years ago I recall reading about ‘routine’ summer temps in the mid west and making firm decisions based on them not to ever live there). That it happened for a relatively long time and was accompanied with a derecho also wasn’t that unusual (derechos tend to be triggered by exactly such events).

So, I figure that ‘adverse’ weather events (so-called 100 year events) tend to cluster for no other reason that the conditions that favor one type of 100 year event also happen to favor another (derecho, flooding, wild fires (why do they build such combustible houses in well-known wild fire areas anyway?), etc.). I figure (which, I suppose, makes me the global warming denialist mentioned in the previous post) that we are just in a cycle of climate that favors somewhat (but only somewhat, as I tried to impress above) extreme weather and I figure that we are just as likely to drop back into a less extreme cycle than we are to continue with extreme weather.