I should be reading, not blogging

So I'd better make this quick!

So not only will our kids never know the joys of travel toothpaste, they'll never know the joys of playground tag either. I'm nearly speechless after reading this. Only two thoughts come to mind: A) are you kidding me? B) seriously, are you f%&king kidding me!

The principal of this school that's banned playground tag, supports it by describing the game of tag as "a time when accidents can happen". Shall we then limit our kids to activities with no risk of accidents? I argue that that activity does not exist, so I'll go with no we should not do that.

Have our teachers lost sight of why the kids are there? To learn. To be exposed to new things, and to learn coping skills. Whether in the schoolyard or not, our kids will encounter accidents. If we truly believe that they can't handle tag-related accidents, how can we expect them to handle automobile accidents? Having minor accidents happen in a controlled environment is healthy for children, and will prevent them from more serious accidents in the future.

This anti-tag school is following the lead of another nearby school that recently banned dodgeball which it described as "dangerous" and "exclusionary". Sometimes exclusion happens at school, but not just at school. It happens in the world. Do you know what's even more exclusionary than having to deal with 30 minutes of a game you're not great at? Having to deal with an entire lifetime without developed social skills.

I think this type of prohibition does such a disservice to the young generation. They're being robbed of the opportunity to explore the world with the help & supervision of a teacher, and the luxury of that safety net isn't there very long.

Thanks to Calvin for this one... back to work!

HEY HEY HEY Does correlation imply causation?

The above diagram is the product of the Eyetrack 3 project in San Francisco. It took a group of people and tracked their eye movements as they viewed webpages. The goal of the study was to identify a person's habits when viewing websites, so they can design more ergonomical sites in the future.

Among other things, the pattern shown above was identified. This was the most common pattern the study identified in its subjects, with the first area to be viewed starting near the top left at the square, and ending in the top right, at the arrow.

When I see this pattern though, I wonder how much have we truly learned about our 'instinctual' viewing habits? I imagine what our stereotypical San Franciscan study subject might be thinking as he/she goes through this pattern:

Here I am just to the right of upper left... seems like a good place to start as I've just typed in the url blackcoffeeblues.blogspot.com. Let's peruse the top corner here to check out the new headlines.

Well now that I know the new headlines, I'd better head to the navigation bar if I'm going to get anywhere on this site. Is this nav bar in the far right column or far left column? I can never remember, I'd better check both just in case.

Aha, here's my article! Now I'll just start at the top and work my way down, as I so often do whilst reading.

Great post, another head scratcher. I'm going to need some time to think about this one. I'll come back to this later, but for now I'll just go up to the top right corner to close this browser window.

What a coincidence! It seems to me like I could pretty easily navigate any website intuitively if I followed that pattern. It also seems to me like we're much more likely to be using a visual search program that has been determined by the way websites are designed, than that we are designing websites that conform to our visual search patterns. We're very adaptive creatures, which is one of the reasons we're still around.

If things do happen the way I've suggested, I don't mean to say that Eyetrack 3 was a waste of money. Empirical confirmation that indeed we do look for important information in the places that we most often find it is an important step in understanding how our decision making really works. It's also a confirmation of how malleable our minds truly are. In relatively few years, the internet has become so integrated into the lives of so many people, largely because we are so very good at adapting to our environments. Intuitively, we now know exactly where to look to quickly evaluate where the important info can be found.

There really is some good interpretation of results in the article as well. For example, because how long does a person look at a headline? Less than a second according to data collected by Eyetrack. So for me, I probably won't attract as many people by simply titling my post 'Does correlation imply causation'. Admittedly, a little dry. Most will probably get as far as "Does correla---" and have already moved on to MTV.com. But HEY HEY HEY.. now that's an attention grabber! And just to the right of top left, why that's the perfect spot!

"Cool Tags" for sale!

Buying "Cool Tags" is not the latest thinly-veiled attempt to capitalize on our nations's insecurities. Rather, it's a great initiative, as the team says, to help Start Global Cooling.

In particular, the TIAA-CREF/Clif Bar Pro Cycling Team are selling Cool Tags at each of their races. Really, a Cool Tag is a $2 donation to Native Energy which goes towards clean wind-powered energy. Your $2 donation will produce enough energy cleanly to offset about 300 miles of driving emissions. The idea behind this particular promotion is that if everybody who came to the race purchased a Cool Tag, they could offset their emissions by funding an equal amount of clean energy.

Now, by purchasing the Tag you don't 'unburn' the gasoline you spent getting to the race. Still, I think it's a great way to raise awareness, and it gives people a way of associating their impact on the environment with their daily activities, and to give them a dollar cost associated with living a sustainable lifestyle.

In 2006, for the third year running , the TIAA-CREF/Clif Bar Pro Cycling Team purchased purchasing enough credits to offset the carbon footprint they created over the course of the entire year. Additionally, they planned ahead so that they would be able to buy the as much of their cyclists' food as possible from local, organic farmers. Check out the team's blog for more info on current and future initiatives.

I like the paradigm shift these groups encourage us to take on: not to aim for a reduced carbon footprint, but to aim for zero carbon footprint.

Floyd Update

Okay, so I've had a chance to read the Powerpoint presentation that Floyd and his team presented to the ADRB, and to browse through some of the paperwork used to process Floyd's samples.

First of all, I don't know enough about the process to say with 100% certainty that the claims Floyd are either legit, and if so whether they exonerate him or not.

However, within the realm of what I do know about the process though, the claims he makes cast the whole testing procedure into serious doubt.

Throughout the documents, Floyd's sample is referred to using 4 different identification numbers. The lab's identification number is mislabelled in one spot, and unidentified alterations have clearly been made to Floyd's sample number.

In addition, the A sample is tested a second time to confirm the result of the first test. The confirmation test returned a similar T/E ratio. However the results that are similar relative to one another, but the absolute results are significantly divergent, to the tune of ~300%.

I could theoretically interpret these results as meaning Floyd had a 3.5 : 1 , or a 28 : 1 T:E ratio, just as easily as he had 11.5 : 1 as the lab reported.

I certainly do agree with some of the conclusions drawn in the report, and even regarding the ones I'm not confident in, I don't have much more confidence in the conclusions the lab drew from the same information. There's more to the report, but suffice to say it makes adherence to lab procedures, and interpretation of results seem somewhat loose.

More than likely, I won't ever truly know whether Floyd won the Tour while doping, but I do know that whether he was clean or not, this whole debacle is a shame. If he was clean, it's a crime that the career and reputation of such a talented rider have been dragged through the mud. If he was doping, it's my opinion that Floyd was the strongest rider in the Tour anyhow, and would have won the Tour clean if he'd played his cards right.

Tour de Floyd

For those who haven't been following the Floyd Landis doping scandal, allow me to start by informing you that it's a debacle of the highest order.

The latest news comes as Floyd presents his defense case to the Anti-Doping Review Board (ADRB). In an unprecedented move, Floyd has made the details of his case, and its presentation, available on his personal website.

As it's a huge file to download, it's still on the way to me and I've only read summaries so far. Still, I can comment (both as a cycling fan, and someone that wants to see justice served) that I'm very happy Landis has done this. The World-Anti Doping Agency, and the Tour de France organizers have both weakened thier cases by failing to live up to their own protocols for how a positive result is handled, and have on multiple occasions given us all reason to question their testing procedures.

Landis, infuriated no doubt by the lack of honesty and transparency from his accusers, is using their weakness to strengthen his defense by making the press and public privy to the same information that he is.

One factor that contributes to this scandal (and has contributed to nearly every TdF scandal over the past 10 years) is that the Tour is run by French sports magazine L'Equipe. Without fail, the first source of scandalous accusations regarding the tour, comes from L'Equipe. The magazine's their anti-American slant is painfully obvious, and they have accused every successful American rider since 1990 of doping. Many see the domination of the Americans, and the perpetual failure of French riders to win their own race as a source of frustration and bitterness from French cycling beaurocrats.

In the particular case, scandal began when an employee at the testing lab leaked confidential information to L'Equipe. Two samples are taken from each rider during drug testing. If the first one (A sample) returns a positive result, then the second (B sample) is tested to see if it returns positive as well. One positive is an erroneous result, two positives is an indication of doping. For this reason, the lab isn't allowed to report anything until both samples have been tested, both to protect the rider's career, and to protect the lab's credibility. Still, L'Equipe reported that Floyd's A sample was positive before the B had even been started. In fact, L'Equipe likely knew about the A sample result before Floyd did. Landis had been widely judged as guilty in the court of public opinion before the results of the test were even in.

I'm not so sure it will affect the decision reached in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion Landis has presented a public defense to the very public way he was accused. I'll admit my bias: I'm a big fan of Floyd's and would like only one thing more than to find his innocence proven; I'd like to see the correct verdict reached after all the bungling I've seen thus far. I hope this example of transparency will be followed from here on.

Have I made some Aussie enemies?

I'm not 100% sure what to make of this, but somebody in Melbourne, Australia reached my site yesterday by googling the following:

Cam Smith Eat It

Apparantly there is a Cameron Smith who plays rugby league for the Melbourne Storm, and is thier hooker and captain. I'm guessing she was googling him, not me. However, the fact that I have been to Australia, and that I've got both a healthy ego and a vivid imagination allow me to retain some thought that Australians are googling me.

Still, whoever this is doesn't seem to have good feelings for my namesake (or myself), and I'm pretty sure I take offense to that!

Edit:

Wow, I may need to take a look at what readers I'm targeting my material to. Here's another google search that will lead you to my site:

Why does black coffee give me significant flatulence

Dear loyal reader,
Without having too much information about your colon (and virtually any could be considered too much) I'd say eat more fiber and yogurt/raw milk & your flatulence should be much milder & more pleasant.

Legalize Marijuana?... how 'bout no!

Over the last few years, I think my opinions on marijuana use have been quite galvanized.

I used to think it was something I just wasn't really into, but that it was a fairly recreational drug without any real long-term effects.

I definitely do not believe that anymore. I'd like to see more information compiled on the long-term effects of pot smoking, because:
A) Anecdotally, I know people who have used the drug for a long time and whose personalities have changed significantly more than that of my drug-free friends.
B) I have a hard time believing that any frequent use of any complex mind-altering drugs has no long term effects.
C) I see glimpses of very scary information that we do have, and it makes me think we need to find out more.

For example, I came across the following study by Lane et al which demonstrates a few unexpectedly marked responses to pot smoke.

I'm primarily interested in how physiology changes when a person is high. For example, just by smoking and then sitting on the couch, a person's heart rate goes up by approximately 32 bpm. My resting heart rate is close to 50, so for me that would be a 64% increase in HR. For the average Cheech or Chong, resting HR is probably more like 70-75, so just by smoking, they've entered into a very light exercise HR zone without even moving.

If they then decide to wrestle their buddies & get a bit of exercise, HR's were found to be elevated during recovery from exercise by an even wider margin, to the tune of 50%. Now an unfit person could be in the same HR zone as some of the riders in the Tour de France find themselves during the race.

Lane was primarily interested in pot's effect on a person's decision making. I'm not sure which results were scarier, but after exercise, sober and high subjects were asked to make a series of decisions which were determined to be either risky or not risky. Compared to decisions made before the test was conducted, sober subjects made on average one less risky decision after exercise. High subjects? They made on average 28 more risky decisions than before smoking. if the placebo is any indication, the exercise they conducted before decision making caused underestimation in judgement impairment if anything.

Living in a society

In what is at least 50% coincidence, Matthew's return to the blogosphere has prompted me to share some of my ideas with you all (is anybody still reading this?) again, and the title of his blog seems appropriate to what's got my attention tonight.

Prologue: my soccer season has just ended, and my cadaver anatomy class has just started. I stopped to read my soccer league's forum after the final game to see what people had to say: a tremendous volume of posts communicating virtually no comprehensible thoughts. Very shortly afterwards, I'm standing in my anatomy class in front of a preserved body that I and two other people will dissect over the course of the next 8 months, and will use to gain a truly unique insight into how the human body works its magic.

This got me thinking about what a waste of my life it was to have read that stupid forum. Not because reading, or the internet are a waste of time, but because what's been posted contributes nothing at all to my life. Really, nothing posted there contributed anything to anybody (including the author!)

In stark contrast, some woman that I never knew in her life, will change mine by having contributed her remains to science. Her donation will give me the opportunity to learn what I never could have otherwise, and will drastically improve my education and my career.

I don't want to get too zen with this little nugget, but anytime I can get myself, or anybody else to remeber the following, I think the whole world benefits: whenever you can, make a contribution. Even if it's something as simple as your next soccer league forum post, just think: what can my post contribute to the people who will read it?

The next day:

Okay, I realize now that I never did explain how the title of Matt's blog fits into the topic of this post.

I believe that the reason we all choose to engage in society rather than live in the mountains, is that other people in society contribute to our lives. However, the rest of society don't want parasites feeding off all of their hard work. So I believe the understood trade-off is that the price of membership in society is that you must contribute something to the rest of its members.

It's a reciprocal relationship. The more you put into your society, the more you will get out of it. That means: whatever you choose to do, give it some effort.