Filed under: Misc
Okay, so this is probably very old, but I found it today using StumbleUpon, the extremely addictive plug-in for FireFox. Steve Jackson’s version of "Politics Explained."
I especially enjoyed this one:
BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
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Filed under: Uncategorized
I apologize for the lack of posting these past few days. I’ve been moving from South Carolina to Virginia where I’m set to begin my new job at Emory & Henry College.
Today, via cdharris, I found this neat story about a photographer who uses old flatbed scanners to make unconventional large format photographs. Check out this mirror of his site – fascinating stuff, although it takes a bit of technical skill to take the scanners apart.
Filed under: Sports
Apple’s web site has a profile of cycling photographer Graham Watson. Apple Pro Profiles – Graham Watson.
What’s even cooler is that they have a gallery of his images from this year’s tour available to view (link). There are supposed to be new images every day.
In other tour related news, the New York Times reports that Floyd Landis is looking at hip replacement surgery after the Tour.
CHÂTEAUBOURG, France, July 9 — Second over all in the Tour de France and a strong favorite to win the race when it ends July 23, Floyd Landis confirmed on Sunday a report that he had been riding in severe pain for four years because of a degenerative hip condition he had kept secret. He said he was planning to have his right hip replaced in an operation.
“If I hadn’t had a bicycle-racing career, I would have had the hip replaced two years ago because I don’t really want to deal with the pain,” said Landis, the 30-year-old American leader of the Phonak team from Switzerland.
Describing the pain, he said in an interview at his team hotel in Châteaubourg before the Tour’s eighth stage, “It’s bad, it’s grinding, it’s bone rubbing on bone.
“Sometimes it’s a sharp pain,” he continued. “When I pedal and walk, it comes and goes, but mostly it’s an ache, like an arthritis pain. It aches down my leg into my knee. The morning is the best time, it doesn’t hurt too much. But when I walk it hurts, when I ride it hurts. Most of the time it doesn’t keep me awake, but there are nights that it does.”
He said he intended to compete after the operation.
If Landis were able to come back and seriously compete in the Tour after having hip replacement, it would be almost as impressive as Lance Armstrong’s return from cancer treatment.
technorati tags:tourdefrance, floydlandis, grahamwatson, photography, cycling
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Filed under: Sports
My friend Eric Siegmund reminds us that the Tour de France starts today, and it’s off to an inauspicious beginning, as this AP story details – Doping scandal strips Tour de France of its favorites:
STRASBOURG, France (AP) — A doping scandal knocked Tour de France favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso out of the race Friday and threw the world’s most glamorous cycling event into chaos.
The decision to bar Ullrich, Basso and others implicated in a doping probe in Spain also sent a strong signal that cheating, or even suspicions of cheating, will not be tolerated.
Tour director Christian Prudhomme said organizers’ determination to fight doping was “total.”
“The enemy is not cycling, the enemy is doping,” he said the day before the start of the Tour.
Riders being excluded will not be replaced, meaning a smaller field than the 189 racers originally expected.
Spanish rider Francisco Mancebo (4th last year) was also pulled from the race.
All in all, that’s a huge chunk of the top crop of riders who won’t be riding in the next few hours. Add that to the absence of the greatest of them all – Lance Armstrong – and the TdF organizers surely are hoping for a miracle winner to redeem this year’s race.
Eric sums it up well in an addendum to a longer post about the TdF – But…what a black eye for the world of professional cycling.
Filed under: New Media
Lost Remote, a great resource for video and broadcast-related news, writes about Comcast’s move into the online video space – Comcast to build web video portal.
The original story is from the Wall Street Journal, which means it’s not available to those of us who don’t subscribe. But this is the key quote for me:
… writes WSJ’s Peter Grant. “They raise the prospect of two cable companies competing against each other for viewers, one providing traditional TV and the other offering videos to computers. Indeed, some cable operators have expressed concern about Comcast’s plans, noting that cable operators currently work on ventures together and don’t compete with one another.”
(emphasis added)
That seems to really be part of the problem. Cable operators operate in what amounts to a competition-less vacuum. I’m think of the word “collusion.” And it’s been that way ever since the mid-70s when Cable began rolling out and locking up monopoly licensing deals with local municipalities.
As Eric Frenchman wrote earlier this week, the solution to “Net neutrality” is to break the stranglehold on the “last mile” of Internet access, the point where the Internet enters your home.
What this should be about is the competition for the last mile to your household. That’s what the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) promised us a long time ago per the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The first paragraph on that link says it all: “The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business — to let any communications business compete in any market against any other.”
Ten years later, this is still not true. I live 35 minutes in rural NJ from the former HQ of the Old and Better AT&T’s and Verizon’s current HQ in Basking Ridge NJ and I still have no real competition for local. I can either choose Comcast (bad service and constantly changing fees) and Embarq the local phone company formerly known as Sprint. That’s it. What we have now is nobody trying to enter local because the RBOCs and Cable companies protect their ownership of the last mile to the house.
What does this have to do with Net Neutrality? Everything. Since the duopoly of cable/RBOCs control the last mile we are held hostage to whatever rates they want to choose for access. Since they can’t or won’t squeeze consumers anymore they are going after the big content providers. The problem is that since they wiped out real competition, we have no upgrades to our access and they can charge whatever they want, all the time protecting their turf.
What is even worse is that some of us are limited by pitiful rural access. For the past five years, I have lived in an area where Cable does not reach, and BellSouth has not upgraded the telephone service to allow for DSL. The only way I could get high-speed access is by satellite, which is ridiculously expensive for the limitations on uploads and the delay that prevents online real-time activities (like gaming).
Here’s hoping the cable companies begin to get a taste of real competition, as the result can only be an improvement.
