If you haven’t seen this video before you are likely going to find it difficult to believe what you are seeing.  This little girl from South Korea who has been blind since birth makes her debut on a South Korean television show called Star King and stuns the judges, guest and studio audience.

Yoo Ye Eun has had no formal training in music, yet, according to her adoptive mother, she can hear a piece just once and immediately find the melody and principal chords on the piano.  Watching her tiny hands find the keys is truly remarkable.  How often in one’s life do you truly get to “see” genius in such a visible and graphic fashion?

Editor’s Note: Here’s the long-awaited third installment to my series on Floyd Landis and his epic Tour de France and subsequent doping controversy. While I don’t claim to have all the answers, I do have a unique perspective that is based in part upon my career as a professional cyclist and in part upon my education and work in biochemistry and exercise science. If you’re just finding this article for the first time, you might want to read Part I and Part II first. You might also find my views on pharmacological sport performance enhancement interesting or amusing. That post is here.

In part two we talked a bit about doping in cycling and how it is a systematic program and not a fly-by-the-seat of your pants (or fly with the help of a needle more accurately) athlete-as-physician circus act such as the press and the sports governing bodies would like to, and would also like the public to believe. We discussed the stage and how hard the GC contenders had to go on the final climb and finally we saw a quote from Floyd that I believe was an overlooked but enormously important indication of why what happened next well…happened next.

TDF Stage 17 a Miracle on Two Wheels or Something Else?

The 200 kilometer stage 17 from St. Jean de Maurienne to Morzine was the final day in the Alps and represented the last chance any serious TDF contender had of making a significant move in the overall general classification.

On paper this stage didn’t look like a monster.  Unless, of course your perspective was colored by the fact that you’d already raced sixteen previous stages including monster climbs in the Pyrenees and the Alpes, and particularly if you’re perspective was also determined by the fatigue you’d added to your already acumulated fatigue by virtue of a leg shattering, lung searing effort on the final climb to the finish at La Toussuire.

The Role of Cumulative Fatigue and Superlative Effort

On the other hand, if your perception was colored by the facts above the seventeenth stage looked like one to be survived - to be endured - it was a perfect stage to let a bunch of no-hopers role on up the road and gain fifteen minutes and suck up all the points for the KOM and the Green Jersey along the way.  It looked like the perfect stage to have your lieutenants ride “tempo” all day - just fast enough that no one got any ideas but not so fast that the leaders would have to call upon those weary legs to do anything more than the minimum required to just finish the day in the same GC position as from the day before.

If you’ll recall in Part II of this series I wrote about the effort that the leaders must have made up the final climb to La Toussuire.  As you might imagine you pay a price for an effort of this magnitude, a price that is made all that much steeper by the previously acumulated fatigue, by the fact that it was made at the end of a long, hot stage, by the fact that every rider was dehydrated before the effort began and of course by the fact that the following day they had to get back on the bikes and race once more.

You might also recall that I pointed to Floyd’s statement the he could “only go one speed that wasn’t very fast” on that final climb.  In other words his bad day - whether he was bonking, fighting a virus, or whatever - so limited his performance that even though he was trying as hard as he possibly could he simply didn’t have the strength or the energy to go any faster or - and this is important- to hurt himself very much.

This last may seem counterintuitive so let me try to help you understand it.  Lets say you lift weights.  Lets also say you have a coach that is a few points shy of having a genius IQ and he has you do biceps curls every day for a month.  Then, on the 31st day he has you try and do your 5 rep maximum.

Now you might try very hard, but if your arms are trashed from the 30 prior days of lifting your five-rep max isn’t going to be all that impressive.  What’s more, since you’re probably sore as hell already you’re not going to be able to push yourself so hard that you’d make yourself all that much sorer.  In fact, the impact of your five-rep-max effort would probably be so minimal that on the 32nd day you wouldn’t be any more sore than you were on the 31st day, follow?

Now on the other hand, lets say you have a coach that’s a bit more capable and he has you train biceps only once every five days - he knows that your maximum strength and recovery capabilities are going to be on the fifth or sixth day post your last effort. So he has you train biceps only five times during that same month and then on the 30th day (which will be five days after your most recent biceps workout) he has you do a five-rep-max.  I can guarantee that you will absolutely crush your five rep max from the prior coach.  Your arms will have been fresh, but well trained and totally recovered.

Fresh enough and well enough recovered in fact that they’ll be strong enough to allow you to do an awful lot of damage to yourself in those five reps. I can also promise that you’ll be sore beyond belief on the first and second days after your big effort.

This same principle is at work in the tour.  Floyd was too fatigued and flat on the stage to La Toussuire to do himself much physical damage, but the other riders, the ones that were taking it to Floyd on that final climb felt better and they had the adrenaline of a cracking tour leader coursing through their veins.  They buried themselves.  In fact they did themselves so much damage that I am surprised that more of them didn’t crack completely the following day.

To Drink or To Chase, That Was the Question

But that’s not all by a long shot.  If you look at the route on the seventeenth stage you’ll see that it was tailor made for a long break by a small group or an individual.  The course was serpentine and undulating with small, winding roads that make it especially hard for a team to get a big chase organized and rolling.  It’s also tough on a course like that to see what is happening up the road.

The old saying “out of sight, out of mind” is really true and on a course like the seventeenth stage it was possible to get out of site almost right away and from then on the peloton never saw the leaders again the whole day.

The other thing that the seventeenth stage made difficult was for the riders in the peloton to get enough to drink.  With the small narrow roads the cars couldn’t come up next to the peloton which meant that the domestiques had to keep dropping back and ferrying water to their respective team leaders.

This was also a difficult situation - if the same guys that you need to be up front chasing are constantly going back to fetch water they aren’t going to have enough left in their legs to mount an effective chase.

Plus, with that many riders packed together and people getting nervous about the rider up the road the pace was probably very uneven which meant that there were likely brief accelerations where everyone was going nearly flat out followed by extended lulls where the pace dropped to barely 22 miles per hour.

In contrast Floyd, alone in front, had a car right there feeding him water whenever he wanted it.  In fact you saw on the coverge that he was actually dowsing himself with water - you won’t see any footage of the guys in the peloton doing that.  They needed every ounce of water they had just to keep minimally hydrated.

The same thing goes for food.  When you’re alone or in a small break, it is a lot easier to get the food you want and to eat it without worrying about someone crashing next to you or someone attacking just as you grabbed a musette bag full of snacks.

Floyd was also able to ride at a steady tempo.  No huge accelerations, no big lulls, just a steady, AT effort for several hours.

These Guys Forgot Who They Where Dealing With

It’s important to mention something else here too.  Did all the guys in the peloton forget Floyd’s background?  A moutain bike world cup race is basically a two kilometer sprint flat out, followed by blowing up and then scraping yourself together and riding at your AT for the next three to four hours.  Funny, that sounds a lot like the way Floyd rode the seventeenth stage, doesn’t it?

When you take all these factors and add them up, it doesn’t take illegal drugs to balance the equation - it seems to me that it balances pretty nicely all by itself.

Let’s examine it in summary, shall we:

1. The riders that rode away from Floyd on stage 16 nuked themselves in the process
2. Floyd was so flat on the final climb of stage 16 that he couldn’t hurt himself nearly so much
3. The peloton rode a very uneven pace on stage 16 while Floyd was able to ride steadily
4. It was nearly impossible for riders in the peloton to stay hydrated during the 17th stage
5. Floyd was able to hydrate very effectively during the 17th stage
6. Floyd was able to get and stay out of sight easily on the 17th stage
7. The domestiques that had to fetch water were also the ones that were supposed to be mounting a chase on the 17th stage, a task that was all but impossible given their own fatigue, the small winding roads and their leader’s need for water that they had to fetch from the cars following the race
8. Floyd was a pro mountain biker, very familiar with and exceptionally well-suited for an effort just like the one he made on the 17th stage.

In summary it seems to me that when you take all these facts and lay them out before you on the table, any rational person is going to see that there are  plenty of reasons to explain the respective performances of Floyd and the other riders in the Tour.

Yes, it was an exceptional effort. But was also the culmination of a series of factors and events that created a “perfect storm” for a miraculous solo win.  Also, don’t underestimate the fact that this was an enormous tactical blunder on the part of all the teams that should never have let Floyd gain so much time.  By the time  these guys realized that they had an emergency on their hands it was already too late to do anything about it.

Honestly - and I hope by now you can see that I really do call it the way I see it - I don’t see how you need doping to explain Floyd’s results on this stage.  Far from it.  I think that the facts that are readily apparent to all concerned, facts that can be conclusively demonstrated to be true, definitively prove that Floyd’s performance can be completely explained without resorting to speculation about doping.

Needles?  We Don’t Need No Stinking Needles

I’ll save the lengthy explanation about why using testosterone would have been one of the most ludicrous decisions imagineable for another post as I’m sure I’ve given you plenty to think about already today.  Before we wrap this up though let me remind you of what I said before: that on a Tour team of the caliber of Floyd’s the doping is not left up to the riders.  The doctors know this stuff as well as anyone - certainly as well as I do so I am absolutely certain that no one on Floyd’s team stuck him with testosterone before the stage.  I think that Floyd would have had a pretty tough time finding testosterone to shoot up with too.  Remember that in previous tours teams and riders had been raided in the middle of the night - recall people even going through the garbage in Lance’s room after he departed from motels during his final tour.

I hardly think that Floyd (as the American leader who was clearly under the microscope) would have been wandering around with syringes and testosterone in his bag or some tube of transdermal testosterone gel in his personal effects. Puhlease.  Why didn’t the “investigation” into his alleged doping ask any of these sensible questions?

Anyway, I’ll delve into the myriad reasons why only a moron would have used testosterone in my final post on this topic.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this one.  Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Oh- and I promise I won’t take another four months to write the final installment.  Oliver

Editor’s Note:  This is from an email I just received from a friend of mine, Gary Burton.  I was pretty shocked to see the images he’d sent me.  I can’t fathom why these kids would affront the very place that is providing them with the amazing opportunities that our country has given them - the predominantly welcome embrace that people from other countries have been shown by the US and all the benefits that they gain simply by crossing the border.

How many of these kids have their education subsidized by the taxes that you and I pay?  I don’t even have children yet I know that some portion of every dollar I earn goes to pay for schools that educate some of these thankless little brats - many of whom have parents that have never paid a dime into the system that is now providing an education for their offspring.

 Well, I for one am appalled at this lack of respect as demonstrated by these fools.  If they hold this country in such disdain, they really should return to their ancestral domain and make the best of it that they can.  Let them spend four or five years trying to make ends meet in Mexico and lets see how they feel about the US then.

I don’t usually promulgate propaganda but this is simply too much and any American that isn’t shocked and appalled by this image needs to spend a few months living abroad to gain a more realistic perspective.

Sent: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 6:46 am
Subject: Fw: This is absolutely disgraceful!

SEND THEM ALL BACK SOUTH OF THE BORDER.

I guess they already finished their  English homework!!!

Montebello High School in California

You will not see these heart-stopping photos on the front page of the NY Times, nor on the lead story of the major news networks.
The protestors at Montebello High School took the American flag off the school’s flag pole and hung it upside down while putting up the Mexican flag over it. (*See pictures below*)

I predict this stunt will be the nail in the coffin of any guest-worker/amnesty plan on the table in Washington..
The image of the American flag subsumed to another and turned upside down on American soil is already spreading on Internet forums and via e-mail.

Pass this along to every American citizen in your address books and to every representative in the state and federal government.
If you choose to remain uninvolved, do not be amazed when you no longer have a nation to call your own nor anything you have worked for left since it will be ‘redistributed’ to the activists while you are so peacefully staying out of the ‘fray’.
Check history, it is full of nations/empires that disappeared when it s citizens no longer held their core beliefs and values. One person CAN make a difference.
One plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one…….. .

The battle for our secure borders and immigration laws that actually mean something, however, hasn’t even begun.

If this ticks YOU off…PASS IT ON!
IF IT DOESN’T IT SHOULD!

I’m not a guy that’s driven to review movies. Generally speaking, I figure that my taste and my opinion don’t matter much to other folks when it comes to cinema; and when you consider that I’ve lived in LA for the better part of the last decade yet still regularly fail to identify celebrities when they’re sitting at the next table in a restaurant there are certainly loads of people better qualified than I to provide general cinematic criticism.

So why this film?  It isn’t the special effects. They’re only average. The dialog is decent but by no means exceptional.  The score is very good - perhaps a bit too noticeable at times but well chosen and interesting. The casting is good - the characters seem to fit the roles and vice-versa.  The plot is definitely clever and the pace is reasonable.  Hancock is smarter than your typical comedy too.  There’s an emotional undercurrent in this movie that makes it much more interesting than your run of the mill summer comedy.

So why, given that what I’ve written above seems to indicate that this movie is perhaps just slightly better than average would I  offer a sincere recommendation to you to see this movie - even if it is the sole move you see at a theatre all summer?

There’s a simple reason, really.  Will Smith.  Make no mistake about it.  Will’s potrayal of this lonely, conflicted, non-communicative super hero is an acting tour de force plain and simple.  If this moview were of a more dramatic rather than comic bent Smith would be on everyone’s list for an Academy Award.  As it stands, in spite of the problems presented by giving the best actor nod to a lead in a comedy, he still might get the Oscar.  He’s that good.

Smith is so good in fact that I realized while I was watching the film that I was seeing a truly great actor at the peak of his skills.  His scowl, his puzzled expression, the waft of his hand under a barrage of critism, his look of puzzlement when he’s complemented instead of derided - the small gestures, the pursed lips, the furled brow- they simply work and make this film so much greater than the sum of all of its other parts.

I’ve always enjoyed Will Smith.  His easy, engaging, accessible humor and the fun, avant garde roles he selects have kept him within striking distance of my favorite actors and films for years but with this role he makes the leap from near the head of the line to far beyond it.

This is a movie well worth seeing in the theatre.  It’s a film that you can enjoy with friends or with your kids.  It’s lighhearted and silly but deep enough that you get to see what a master craftsman does with a role that requires extreme overacting yet subtle, nuanced acting in the same role at the same time.  Few people could pull off such a task yet Smith does so brilliantly.

It’s so good I’ve already seen it twice and it was even better the second time.  As I said at the beginning of this post, I don’t make a habit of reviewing films  or even making reccommendations to friends - but then again, I rarely see a movie where I was so impressed by an individual actor as I am with Smith in Hancock.  Hopefully, those of you that take my advice and see this movie will enjoy it asuch as I did.  Either way, please let me know what you think in the comments.

So ends one of the most ludicrous, unfair, illegitimate and biased trials in the history of professional sport. According to CNN, a three person committee meeting in Lausanne Switzerland has issued a 58 page ruling denying Floyd’s request to be heard on appeal.  In addition to upholding the previous decision of WADA (the World Anti-Doping Association) the committee criticized Landis harshly and fined him an additional $100,000 to go towards covering a portion of the expenses accrued by WADA and USADA (the United States Anti Doping Association) while they prosecuted Landis for his supposed use of synthetic testosterone during the 2006 Tour de France.

From my perspective as a biochemist and a former professional cyclist who raced many times with Floyd this is a sad day for Floyd but also for the sport of cycling.  This ending - in my opinion- is the culmination of a witch hunt that has been going on ever since Lance Armstrong donned  his first yellow jersey.

This is much less about a true agenda to keep the sport clean and much more about retribution for having the temerity to win the Tour de France seven times and never come up positive for drugs.  Only they couldn’t nail Lance (and I’m not saying that Lance took drugs, either.  In fact if there was any single human being capable of doing what he did without drugs, it was Lance who could do it).

So Landis gets to take the fall, payback from a frustrated country that hasn’t had an athlete capable of winning their own national tour since Fignon lost to LeMond back when EPO couldn’t be detected and amateurs were dropping dead like flies from the drugs they were using.

So Landis is now out of options, out of a job, a title and apparently out of money too.  What really sucks about this is that I’m still not convinced that he was positive for synthetic testosterone that he ingested the day he staged his miraculous comeback.  The numbers for that never added up in my mind, the case was based upon data that was clearly flawed and the court that arbitrated the hearing was so intent on nailing Landis to the proverbial cross that they overlooked the half dozen obvious flaws in the testing, the analysis, the reporting and even the disclosure of the test results.

Any one of these issues should have been sufficient to have this whole thing tossed out and the fact that it wasn’t is prima facie evidence in my opinion that they never had any intention of giving Landis a fair trial.  It was a forgone conclusion from the start that Floyd was going to be the sacrificial lamb and so he was.

This sucks for the sport.  It’s really too bad that the riders don’t have the initiative to unionize and stand up to USADA and WADA and all the other “ADAs”.  These “ASS-sociations” are the ones that are screwing up the sport.  If I were leading the rider’s union I’d suggest that not a single rider submit to another control until there are better ways so insure that the rider’s rights are preserved during the anti-doping control process and that there is no way that a rider can be arbitrarily called a doper and have his career destroyed when the truth is really that incompetent technicians using flawed procedures are the ones at fault and should be the people held accountable.

I know this sounds like I’m soft on Floyd but that simply isn’t the truth.  I’m sympathetic towards Floyd, it’s true, but only because I know enough about what has gone on and also about what lead to his comeback (See “Floyd Landis and the Magic Water Bottle; Part 1, Part 2)to be certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Floyd didn’t dope on the 17th stage and that the stripping of his title and the destruction of his career are a travesty and an assault on a hard working and  deserving champion.

One of the things that really pisses me off about this is the hypocrisy of the other riders in the race.  If there’s a single professional cyclist in the peloton of the Tour de France that is totally ignorant about which drugs to use and when to use them, he’s both inhumanly gifted and spectacularly naive.   These guys all know that you don’t use testosterone for a single day performance boost.  It simply doesn’t work that way and the doctors, the riders, the USADA and WADA judges all know this.  Floyd knew this too.  In fact, a single injection of testosterone in the morning before a stage would have been among the dumbest of all possible moves.

Not only does it not help, and likely hinder performance, is readily detected and difficult to mask, the shot itself can make you sore too.  Steroids have their place in a properly constructed doping protocol but that place is not 0n the morning of the 17th stage of the Tour.  The fact that all these riders - guys that Floyd has raced with for almost a decade - and guys that I’m sure Floyd treated with respect have been pathetic and spineless.  I guess that’s sort of to be expected. After all, look how these guys fight.

All the same, what goes around comes around and when one of the guys that benefited from Landis ridiculous disqualification finds himself on the wrong side of a bottle of piss there won’t be anyone to stand up for him either.  Of course this sort of thing is relatively unlikely to happen again soon.  There aren’t many Americans with a Tour de France win in their future tearing up the road these days and the one guy that I think has a chance to be that good is still a junior - though with the genetics of David Phinney and Connie Carpenter-Phinney I think you can expect great things from him so long as the doping police leave him alone…

Nokia just launched this new site announcing the very limited availability of their newest multi-media computer, the amazing N96.  We’ve been hearing about this phone since 3GSM…the specifications are basically mind-blowing.  It’s the N95 on steroids, growth hormone, speed and Jolt Cola.  It is THE DEVICE for the UBER-GEEK and the toy I currently want most to add to my collection.

Apparently a select number of people will be able to get these devices via this site - ahead of the device being available in most countries.

Their launch site is pretty cool, too.

I’m offended and you should be too.

I’ve got a $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificate for the individual that comes up with the best caption for this Anne Leibovitz photo of the Dictator in Chief and his Cabinet.

Rules: 

Caption must be posted as a comment on this post

You may enter as many captions as you like but please make each entry an individual comment

No profanity

No racial epithets

Only one winning caption will be selected

Judges (my) decision is final

Point will be awarded for cleverness, humor, satire, relevant historical reference, contextually relating image to current political or world events.

Please feel free to forward news of this little contest - I know it’s not a huge prize but this is not commercially sponsored (I.E. I’m paying for this out of my own pocket just for fun - I chose an Amazon Gift Certificate because I figure that anyone that reads my blog can find something they’d like on Amazon)

Be creative.

Link Love Genuinely Appreciated.

Otherwise how do you explain this odd bit of spam that found its way into my inbox this morning?

Okay,  I don’t really believe that Microsoft is trying to sell me cut-rate Viagra, but you have to admire the “testicular fortitude of the enterprising spammer that is usurping the Redmond Giant’s name and address to try and push penis pills.  They say the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.  I wonder which part of the spammers anatomy Microsoft’s lawyers will want to grind first?

Note: This post is in response to Jeff Jarvis’ suggestion that all bloggers repost substantially all of any AP story to show solidarity and support for their fellow blogger, Rogers Cadenhead’s community-created Drudge Retort, after it was aggressively threatened by the AP. What follows is my show of support. It is also a story that merits posting in its own right as autism is one of the most serious and increasingly common challenges facing children today.

The Zac Web Browser Aims to Focus Autistic Kids; The Associated Press

The Zac Browser is an Web application that helps autistic kids focus their attention and limits their exposure and interaction with inappropriate content. For autistic children, simply concentrating on one situation can be a challenge. Dealing with the multitude of sights and sounds produced by a computer can be even more difficult.

Software designer John LeSieur recognized those frustrations while watching his 6-year old grandson, Zackary try and navigate the Web. LeSieur knew he could help. So he had his company, People CD Inc. design the Zac Browser, an interface geared specifically towards autistic children. The Zac Browser greatly simplifies the Web. It seals off most adult-oriented sites and presents a hand-picked slate of choices from free, public Web sites.

While other programs offer a “walled garden” approach to the Web, LeSieur’s browser aims to go further: It essentially takes over the computer and reduces the controls available. And for children like Zackary, setting those limits and narrowing the focus could help open up a world of possibilities. The Zac Browser can be downloaded or run directly from www dot zacbrowser dot com. ___ ___, The Associated Press.(****END****)