http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060829/pl_nm/nuclear_iran_dc_92
"TEHRAN (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday challenged President Bush to a televised debate and voiced defiance as a deadline neared for Iran to halt work the West fears is a step toward building nuclear bombs. "
My guess: Ahmadinejad will offer to put Iran's nuclear capacity in a lockbox.
He can get a deal on cheap lockboxes from Al Gore.
I was interviewed by a free-lance writer earlier this year, who didn't get proper contact information from me. I'm quoting from his request:
" The editors I'm working with need contact information for
people I'm quoting, just for fact-checking purposes. Can I get phone
numbers from : Joe ____, Dave ___, Mike Kruger. I moved all the way up here and then realized I didn't have their info. My fault entirely. ... I've got a good shot
at getting this ... story published in a local magazine this
fall. .... I've recently moved to Madison to take a job with the Onion."
Is he hinting I'm about to be in The Onion? Surely he can't. That would mean The Onion does fact-checking! I thought that was the type of thing only the Boston Globe and the New York Times and such did -- or maybe now it is only The Onion that fact-checks?
Of course, I didn't see anyone else with this story: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51848
UPDATE: Scott informs me that, while he works for The Onion, the story is being written for a Chicago-area magazine.
"A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact."
(Jeff Hecht article in New Scientist based on surveys by Jon Miller of Michigan State University)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125653.700?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19125653.700
"Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice."
I'd earlier noted that while the majority of people SAID they were cutting down on gasoline usage, gasoline usage was actually up slightly. [ http://journals.aol.com/mikekr/ZbicyclistsZlog/entries/2006/08/09/watch-what-we-do-not-what-we-say/783 ]
Here's more proof Americans are still only talking, not acting from this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial:
"The Environmental Protection Agency reports that 2006 model vehicles sold in the U.S. average a tepid 21 miles per gallon, the same as in 2005. ...
For all the fuss about increased energy costs and Middle East turmoil, the 2006 fleet average for all makers is 5 percent below the peak of 22.1 mpg all the way back in 1987-88. Despite a worsening energy picture, fuel economy seems to be locked in reverse."
I bicycle a lot, but don't race. Oh, I've gotten a day license for a cyclo-cross race or two, but I'm much too slow to dream. With 30% below normal lung capacity due to sarcoidosis there's not much hope of competing with my age group.
Nevertheless, I follow racing a bit, and acquaintances ask me what I think happened with Floyd Landis. Here's my theory.
Only a tiny bit separates first from not-first at the top level of competition, and that difference is worth a lot of money. Plus, there are a lot of races, and so there's a lot of need to recover as fast as possible. Under these conditions, there are huge temptations to cheat. It's also hard and expensive to test. The testing protocols are statistical, and even the first level test for the A samples cost $300 each, so the testing is hardly continuous. At low levels of drug, the type that fly below the testing radar, you probably aren't doing much damage to your body (relative to what you are already doing by a career as a professional athlete).
So, temptation$ plus low likelihood of being caught plus little physical risk... that adds up to a high likelihood that there is a lot of cheating. There's evidence posted on this site http://www.cycling4all.com/index.php?content=d_news12.php that cycling and baseball have the highest rates of positive drug results.
Without any evidence whatever, I would guess that Landis was taking a complicated pattern of doping with testosterone (perhaps to improve recovery) and then adding epitestosterone as a masking agent to hide this (since the screener, $300 test, measures whether the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone is above 4:1). In Landis's disappointment at finishing stage 16 so poorly, and perhaps because he had too much alcohol to drown his sorrows, he did not follow this regime to the letter.
The next day, he may have realized this might have been the case, which is why he drank so much water during the stage (a count of 70 water bottles either drunk or poured over his body was noted). This may have been an attempt to flush. In addition, a rider from the T-Mobile team drafted him during his entire ride, up until the final climb. The T-Mobile rider wasn't helping Floyd because his teammate Kloden was one of Floyd's rivals. The T-Mobile rider was trying to hang on to Floyd in hopes of having morestrength at the end and winning the stage in the final sprint. If so, Floyd would have had only a 1 in 70 chance of being tested (they test the winner, the leader, and two other random individuals) and would probably have gotten away with it. But the T-Mobile rider couldn't hang on and Floyd was tested.
So, my guess is Floyd was moderately doping, but messed up and got caught.
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I just cleared out all the messages from an e-mail account I seldom use. It's mostly used to provide an e-mail address when I'd really just as soon not provide one, and mostly accumulates spam. After clearing it out, I re-checked the in-box to be sure it was empty. It was, but the empty spot contained 3 ads -- all for lonelyhearts services. Asian women look for men - Women from Philippines, Thailand, and other asian countries |
Today's fun pair of facts, from the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/us/09gas.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
"In the Pew Research survey of 1,182 Americans — 1,048 of them drivers — 55 percent said they were driving less because of the recent increases in gasoline prices. The poll, taken from June 20 to July 16, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Yet Americans’ overall gasoline appetite has barely budged. Total use this year is up about one-half percent to 1 percent compared with 2005, according to federal figures — a slower rate of growth than in the past, but hardly the mark of a nation with its foot fully on the brake."
Today's fun fact, from Dannon:
Did you know you have over 100 trillion bacteria cells living in your body right now?
In fact, you have about 10 times the number of bacteria in your intestinal tract as you do cells in your entire body!
(OK, that's two facts.)
This instance is less important, but this time we also include a comparison to another bank.
Some 12-15 years ago I purchased some state of Illinois bonds from First Chicago (now JP Morgan Chase). At some point, they sold the rights to service some of these bonds to US Bank in Minnesota. Two bonds matured this year on the same day, August 1, one from JP Morgan Chase and the other from US Bank.
I mailed them both, registered, on Friday July 28.
I mailed one to US Bank in St. Paul, MN. I received a check Wednesday, August 2, which is as soon as it would be possible to receive a check. That's good service.
I mailed the other to JP Morgan Chase in Chicago. I just received the check today, August 7th -- 5 days later. Where has this check been? It's been on a long tour. I mailed the bond to Chicago. The check was issued in Dallas. The check was mailed from zip code 35210, somewhere in Alabama.
The net effect of this cross-country tour is that a bond that should have been paid out August 1 gets paid out August 8th -- one week later (since the banks are already closed tonight -- it won't be credited until tomorrow even if I use an ATM).
This is called cash flow management. I know what it's called, but I don't have to like it.
Earlier installments of this series:
http://journals.aol.com/mikekr/ZbicyclistsZlog/entries/750
The obvious question is: when am I going to move banks? It's a pain to move an account -- especially one with several automated payments. So, I only want to do it once. The nearest US Bank branch is 3.5 miles away, which is possible. Maybe I've found a candidate.
Interestingly, in a Velonews article on Floyd Landis's problems (testing positive for testosterone doping at the Tour de France) there's a Google ad -- for testosterone usable for doping! Velonews probably just agrees to let Google post ads in this area and has no control over their content. Google just matches up key words. The result is, unfortunately, embarrassing.
The ad's in the lower left corner of the picture. The screen print transferred poorly to this journal page, due to AOL's limits on the size of images.
I wrote Velonews about this, but they didn't reply and it wasn't one of the letters to the editor they posted on the website.
