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Just a quick note on Contador’s behavior in the Tour de France when he took advantage of Schleck’s mechanical failure on a mountain stage. Schleck caught Contador napping and managed to break free of the group with only Alexander Vinoukorov managing to keep pace. He was free and clear of the group and riding like a man possessed; it’s hard to say how it would have ended, but it certainly looked like Schleck was about to build on his lead over Contador.

Instead, his chain dropped and clamped between the front sprocket and the crankshaft and he lost precious time freeing it and getting it reset. Contador blew by him and took the advantage for himself and took the Yellow Jersey at the end of the day.

Many think this was very unsportsmanlike and fondly remembered how Jan Ullrich waited for Lance Armstrong when they were both climbing together and Lance was knocked from his bike by a spectator.

I personally think it was poor form for Contador to take advantage of the mechanical failure, but it’s hard to judge in such a high-stakes race where very little separates the two at the top.

However, in his interview immediately following the race, he claimed that he was not aware that Andy had any mechanical problems.

Really.

• Did you think he’d stopped to let you catch up?
• Did you think he’d gotten tired and was catching his breath?
• Did you think he’d seen a pretty flower by the side of the road and wanted to get a picture?

What did you think he was doing when he stopped in the middle of the Tour de France just as he was kicking your ass?

That Contador took advantage of a mechanical difficulty in order to gain the yellow jersey does not make him a jackass. That he lies about doing so is what makes him a jackass.

It would have been far better if he had just been a man about it and admitted to what he did. Instead, he lied about it, gained the well-deserved scorn of the biking world and further cemented his reputation as a purely egocentric idiot.

He changed his tune the following day, admitting that he probably shouldn’t have done it. That’s even worse. Be a man, for God’s sake and at least stand for something. He can’t even commit to being an asshole because it hurt his feelings that everyone thought he was a jerk.

Man up, Contador. If you’re going to win races by the skin of your teeth, at least own your strategy and tell people to kiss your ass because now you’ve won the Tour de France three times.

I’m not really enjoying Spain ruling the sports world: we now have a world cup champion that can barely score goals and a Tour de France champion who lies and lies badly.

In the category of font-geek humor, the perennial whipping boy of the font stable fights back in the essay, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher (McSweeney's Internet Tendency).

“Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

“[…]

“While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I’m shredding “Reign In Blood” on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I’m racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who’ll kill me if I don’t cross the finish line first.”

Trust me, this is hilarious to font geeks.
 

Sporcle has a lot of fun quizzes, but my favorite is Countries of the World. After you start the game, you have 15 minutes to type in the English names of all of the internationally recognized states in the world. Not only do you have to actually know them and be able to recall them just by looking at the political boundaries on the map, you have to type pretty quickly to get them all.

A while back, I (well, the wife and I) used this game to try to learn all of the countries. We did pretty well, as you can see from the progression of screenshots below (click to enlarge), but still couldn’t get a perfect score—not because we didn’t know the country, but because we drew a total blank when trying to figure out which of the 195 countries we’d forgotten.

Feburary 7th, 2010Feburary 8th, 2010Feburary 9th, 2010

In order to get that far, we’d basically worked a blocking system, where we filled out all of the South American countries, then Caribbean, then European, then African and so on. The problem with that system is that, if you forget a country, it’s really hard to see that you did. In the end, we were missing “Thailand”.

Reading this article, This Is Your Brain. Aging. by Sharon Begley (Newsweek), reminded me of some notes I scribbled down and never posted, because I was actually doing something else at the time.

Does our capacity for learning grow or shrink as we age? Some things seem easier to grasp with distance: E.g. in school certain concepts just needed to be learned, but didn’t necessarily fit in with anything else—with age, these concepts are more evidently revolutionary. The light is a wave/particle experiment, for example. In college, it seemed to be just something else to learn. Now, it is clear just how important proving that light is a particle was. Age in this case seems to help understanding. Is that perhaps what the wise call wisdom? Or is does context (or degree of inebriation or alteration, no matter the substance) perhaps have something to do with it? Or is it just the brain fooling itself? It’s all subjective, isn’t it? How can you really tell whether you’re actually objectively smarter or wiser than you once were—and do you really want to find out?

What if you’re actually learning less, but happier with it than before and thinking you’re smarter than you actually are? Does that matter? Does even asking these questions make me more philosophical and superior to my younger self, to whom these questions would never have occurred? If there is a decline instead of improvement, is there any way to avoid it? Can someone even hope to notice such a decline in themselves? That is, if the decline is engendered not by a drastic disease but by age.

Is there any way to remain vigilant enough to get better every day? To be not just subjectively, but also objectively better? To become that which would be envied by a younger self?

There are a few (relatively) popular sites that do not even attempt to provide unique page titles for article pages. For example, Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon.com or 3QuarksDaily both use the same title for all pages.

This is a huge pain in the neck if you have multiple pages from those sites open in a browser. It would be much more useful (for bookmarking, etc.) if the page title included the title of the primary content on the page.

For example, instead of simply using

Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

for every page, a unique title that gave a hint to the contents

Follow-up on the Citizens United case − Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

would be much better. Sites can feel free, of course, to limit the number of characters of the post’s title to use in order to retain the section (Glenn Greenwald) and site (Salon.com) when creating bookmarks. For example,

Follow-up … Citizens United case − Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

or

Follow-up on the Citizens… − Glenn Greenwald − Salon.com

would both be much more user- and SOE-friendly.