Floyd doping?

I heard on WJR this morning that no testosterone doping allegation has ever held up when taken to the sports "court" that decides these matters. This could be the first one, but that's not likely.

From what I understand, the current testing for testosterone is flawed. It tends to produce falst positives and with the reduction of the tolerance is going to produce more false positives than the old standard used to.

This article was helpful:
Inferences about Testosterone
Abuse among Athletes

I found it through this post. (referenced in my previous post.)

I cannot imagine why Floyd would dope with testosterone in these circumstances. I've read that it aids recovery, that makes sense considering what happened in stage 16, but the typical application would be for strength bulding during training, not for race day. Could he have had so much recovery benefit that he could ride away from all the others by 6.5 minutes? Also, if you do take testosterone using a patch, it leaves your system within 40 minutes to an hour so it would be gone from his system after riding for four or five hours like they did in Stage 17.

In addtion to all of this, I understand Floyd's actual testosterone level tested quite low. That it was only high in proportion to the epitestosterone level. It seems that the way they are measuring testosterone doping needs some significant improvement. At least, that's what I've read.

I'll be quite interested to see how this plays out.

Floyd news and non-news

The reporting on Floyd's alleged doping is pretty curious. One headline read.

"Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has tested positive for the male sex hormone testosterone."

Gee. Is someone, ever so slightly, uninformed about male biology? Most of the stories I can find, leave me with a lot of unanswered questions and also take a guilty approach to the reporting. (There is still the second sample to test. That will happen on Monday.) I bring this up because testing regulations only consider a positive test valid if both samples test positive.

Here's the best information I've found.

This Malcom Gladwell piece, Drugstore Athlete, I discovered via the above article, was the best explanation I could locate on doping tests and how athletes can avoid detection. Section 3 addresses testosterone specifically. This quote sums up doping pretty well.

"The bottom line is that only careless and stupid people ever get caught in drug tests," Charles Yesalis says. "The elite athletes can hire top medical and scientific people to make sure nothing bad happens, and you can't catch them."

If the tests caught Floyd doping, it was a stupid mistake by his support crew. I don't consider that likely at this high level of cycling.

A Piece of Landis

Outside magazine has a piece on Floyd Landis . He's definitely no Lance clone.

Excerpts below, You should really read it all. Dave Zabriskie and Floyd are quite the pair.

. . .
LANDIS ADORES logic. There is no easier way to infuriate him than to say or do something that does not make sense. We are in a Girona restaurant drinking beer and shooting the breeze with the Z-Man when I begin a sentence with the phrase "Of course, it could be worse . . ."

"What does that mean, really?" Landis wants to know. "Of course it could be worse. If you are alive—if you are standing up and have breath in your lungs to say those words—then, yes, I agree, you're definitely right, it could be worse."

Or later, when Z-Man mentions an athlete who spoke about "giving 110 percent."

"Well, why not 112 percent?" Landis inquires, eyes widening with burning incredulity. "Why not 500 percent or 1,300 percent or 38 billion percent? I mean, if he can crank it up beyond 100 percent, why not? What's stopping him, exactly?"

. . .

"Everybody wants to say, 'I couldn't win because of this or that,' " he says. "To my way of thinking, it doesn't matter if your goddamn head fell off or your legs exploded. If you didn't make it, you didn't make it. One excuse is as good as another."

Landis takes a sip and leans forward in his chair. "There's only one rule: The guy who trains the hardest, the most, wins. Period. Because you won't die. Even though you feel like you'll die, you don't actually die. Like when you're training, you can always do one more. Always. As tired as you might think you are, you can always, always do one more."
. . .

via Kottke

Guessing Game: Kid Rock or Floyd Landis

Test your cycling knowledge of recent evetns with the new Guessing Game, Kid Rock or Floyd Landis.

A Bike for Seven

Wow. The Minneapolis updates keep coming. Today the girls were in a parade in Minneapolis. Kimmy and friends got to ride this conference bike. The bike is provided by Cycle Seven. You can rent one to tour the town.

Becky had to dress up as a radish. ; )

Doggie Goggles = Doggles

On their ride to Minneapolis, my girls saw a dog with goggles. I wonder if they looked like these. Doggles are a real product.

On the Road to Minneapolis

Thanks to Noel, you can see the white vans that are coming to take Becky and Kimmy, and another 19 or so high schoolers and volunteers, away to Minneapolis. Looks like an upgrade from last year.

When I was in college we made these trips in old school buses, complete with a storage and sleeping loft and bad brakes. How things change.

The Proof is in your Shorts

From the San Franciso Chronicle.

King of Beer

Jesus endorsing Beer? We all know he favors wine.

Where is God?

Instead of spamming all my firends, I'm posting a joke Bob e-mailed me. Read at your own risk.
---

A couple had two little boys who were always getting into trouble.
Their parents knew that if any mischief occurred in their village, their sons
were probably involved.

The boys' mother heard that an elder in town had been successful in
disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her sons.
The elder agreed, but asked to see them separately.

So, the mother sent her youngest son first, in the morning. The elder,
a huge man with a booming voice, sat the boy down and asked him sternly,
"Where is God?" The boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response.
So the elder repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God!!?"
Again the wide-eyed boy made no attempt to answer.

The elder raised his voice and bellowed, "WHERE IS GOD!?" The boy
screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into a closet,
slamming the door behind him.

When his older brother found him hiding, he asked, "What happened?"
The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, "We are in BIG
trouble this time. God is missing, and they think WE did it!"

For my programming buddies

O'Reilly has a brief piece on the distinction between engineers and software developers, Why We're Not Really Engineers (via reddit.com). I'm not a coder, but I can appreciate the programming process being improved. Better development processes, better software. More productivity for the rest of us.

While wer'e on the topic, Oracle Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson recently criticized the software industry and its culture of "patch, patch, patch."

"What if civil engineers built bridges the way developers write code?" she asked. "What would happen is that you would get the blue bridge of death appearing on your highway in the morning."

Hopefully tools like Alloy will lead to less "blue bridges of death".

If you want cheap gas . . .

. . . move to Venezuela. It's only 15 cents a gallon.

Andrew and Jacob's 15 minutes of fame, Part I, Collectors Edition

I'm a little delinquent in putting this up, but this fort, modified slightly to have a greater resemblance to King Kong, made the Novi Commnity newspaper in December of last year ('05). This is the missing (from this blog, anyway) part of Andrew and Jacob's 15 minutes of fame.

Jacob is pictured here. The picture in the paper included Jacob , Bethany, and Elise, plus other neighborhood contributors and of course, Andrew.

Andrew and Jacob's 15 minutes of fame, Part 2

My brother, Andrew Schmid, and his son, Jacob, are getting all 15 minutes of their fame out of the way this year. First their King Kong snow fort landed them in the Novi paper in January, now Andrew's expert commentary on Pine Derby vehicle design and manufacturing has him being quoted in the Free Press. Jacob and his car get a mention, too. Didn't he have a Batmobile design?

You can read it here.

I guess all of that schooling and time at Ford taught him something about cars. Here's an excerpt from his e-mail.

I guess this is my year. I got quoted in the Detroit Free Press Newspaper's Community section. For those who do not know, a Pinewood Derby is a race conducted by Boy Scouts. Basically, cars are made out of a piece of pine wood that is formed into the body. The plastic wheels are installed into the body with nails. They roll down a ramp and the fastest wins. I was put in charge of the vehicle design competition.

P.S. No Schmids are visible in the picture.

Davin, Adam says you need this

Adam tells me that Davin needs a good uninstaller. He has an insatiable appetite for installing applications. So do I. Now, if we can get enough people to blog about AppZapper 1.3, we can both get an easy to use uninstaller (AppZapper 1.3) for free via MacZot! (A mac sofware Woot-like site) .

What's the catch, you ask? They are lowing the price $0.05 for every blog post link and will thus require 293 blog posts to reach free.

Get the details and post a comment with your blog post link here.

P.S. I tried out the demo version of AppZapper recently and it is quite simple to use. It has cool sound effects when you Zap an App, too. Fun!

Really Dealing with Stress

Tom Asacker is smart enough to see that the usual advice for stress relief has us running from the problem instead of addressing it head on.

Most people, Americans at least, do the same thing with their debt load. Instead of spending less they think a new low interest rate, debt consolidation or lower monthly payment will solve the problem. For most, it doesn't. More on this later.

And while we're on the topic of relieving stress, isn't it fear we're trying to deal with? What is stress, but fear? More on dealing with fear later, too, maybe.

Joke of the month

I received this from Blinker Bob. It was the best laugh I've had in some time.

---------
Paddy had been drinking at his local Dublin pub all day and most of the
night celebrating.

Mick, the bartender says, "You'll not be drinking anymore tonight,
Paddy!"

Paddy replies "OK Mick, I'll be on my way then."

Paddy spins around on his stool and steps off and falls flat on his
face.

"Shoite," he says and pulls himself up by the stool and dusts himself
off.

He takes a step towards the door and falls flat on his face again.

"Shoite, Shoite!" He looks to the doorway and thinks to himself that if
he can just get to the door and some fresh air he'll be fine.

He belly crawls to the door and shimmies up to the door frame.

He sticks his head outside and takes a deep breath of fresh air, feels
much better and takes a step out onto the sidewalk and falls flat on his
face.

"Boy... I'm smashed," he says to himself.

He can see his house just a few doors down, and crawls to the door,
hauls himself up the door frame, opens the door and shimmies inside.

He takes a look up the stairs and says "No way."

So he crawls up the stairs to his bedroom door and says "I can make it
to the bed."

He takes a step into the room and falls flat on his face.

He says, "Dang it" and ultimately climbs into bed.

The next morning, his wife, Jess, comes into the room carrying a cup of
coffee and says, "Get up Paddy. Did you have a bit to drink last night?"


Paddy says, "I did Jess. I was smashed. But how'd you know?"

"Mick phoned, . . You left your wheelchair at the pub."

Moore's Law applied to razors

Did you ever wonder why Gilette tells you you need five, no six blades to get a clean shave? It's because of Moore's Law . Thanks to Gordon Moore, other technologies must constantly increase thier complexity and capabilities. Don't believe me? Then check out this piece in the Economist.

Getting the best value from a one-trip salad bar

Warning. You may want to do some strength conditioning and check with your doctor before you try this.

Maximizing your ROI at the Pizza Hut salad bar

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

If you liked Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or the Six Degrees of Separation idea in general , you'll love Six Degrees of Wikipedia.