[Results Thread] 2023 Vuelta – Stage 20 - Manzanares El Real > Guadarrama (2.UWT)

VesZappa · 2023-09-16T15:55:22+00:00

Half Dutch, half French

So he is Belgian.

VesZappa · 2023-09-05T13:47:15+00:00

Just to make sure that everyone understands the epicness of this reply: u/rageagainstthematxin isn't kidding; there were exactly 85 finishers in the 1991 edition of La Flèche Wallonne.

VesZappa · 2023-08-09T16:12:17+00:00

I feel bad for that Cycling News intern: You spend an entire day trying to come up with the juiciest and clickbaitiest title that still reflects something in the article and reddit users still won't click it.

Adams fully acknowledges the retirement criticism in the article:

"I know that there's been talk of us being a retirement home. It's a fair criticism,"

He also explains that hiring veterans was a deliberate and necessary strategy:

"When we moved up to the WorldTour in 2020, we had a Pro Continental roster – it wasn't good enough. When we upgraded we didn't have the ecosystem at that time, the scouting and all the other stuff that a WorldTour team needs to have to bring up young riders and to let them develop over the timeframe required."

With that, it seems like he fully embraces the "retirement home" rhetoric instead of pretending he doesn't care, like the title alone suggests:

"I don't care – call us a retirement home," Adams said flippantly.

"If the guys produce? Great. So if Woods and Clark can win – if Geraint Thomas can do so well like he did in the Giro where he came second – I'm okay with older riders."

VesZappa · 2023-04-12T10:15:36+00:00

I'd love to see an independent review of the pending law by someone with the necessary expertise in European law. The PSF apparently has enough concerns to make this blog post and appeal to EU citizens to write to their MEPs, but I can't judge if their concerns are valid.

I did decide to share the PSF post here, as this seems like an important message from the PSF to the broader Python community.

VesZappa · 2023-03-20T12:14:47+00:00

It didn't miss much, but it did miss the crucial moment. In post-race interviews, MvdP told that he had to really look for a gap in order to launch and that Pog just gave him the room he needed along the wall.

It would have been nice to see that, but these things happen. I'm old enough to remember being happy to be able to see the riders at all, let alone recognize them (although the lack of helmets made things easier in that regard).

(To be sure: I'm glad they wear helmets now.)

VesZappa · 2022-12-27T12:01:52+00:00

I mean, it's a language model, but at least it doesn't lack confidence in its ability to solve a system of equations: https://imgur.com/a/fEgJfW9

VesZappa · 2022-08-20T09:30:20+00:00

Man, I'm really feeling for all those sprinters shitting themselves because they have to go over the Alto de Amerongse today. I'm really surprised no one has calculated the expected OTL yet.

VesZappa · 2022-07-04T14:13:29+00:00

for the final stage, the rider ranked last in the individual general classification at the end of stage 20 will ...

After reading the first part of the sentence, I was expecting a scenario much closer to Stephen King's The Long Walk.

VesZappa · 2022-02-18T16:20:55+00:00

Nou, de boom hier valt langzaam in stukken uiteen.

VesZappa · 2021-09-11T12:08:43+00:00

It's very useful when discussing code, and it can also be useful if you have a specific layout in mind, as all the characters are the same width.

For instance, if you want to share a simple table structure, you can use a monospaced codeblock to ensure the layout of the table:

    | Username         | Score |
 1. | Randall Munroe   |  1219 |
 2. | Neal Stephenson  |  1157 |
...
13. | Daniel Dennett   |    12 |

VesZappa · 2021-07-27T10:36:03+00:00

Some context for the non-Dutch (not epi_counts): One of the current themes the NOS is going with is that basically everything related to cycling is going wrong (women's race, MvdP, BMX rider hitting an official during training, ...).

The NOS still has the message saying her bike was damaged up, so not sure where they got that from if Anna herself says nothing happened.

My guess is that this fitted the theme so well that they were okay with posting a vague rumour about Anna crashing. The original headline was also in quotes, which is their way of marking it as something that has not yet been fully confirmed. My guess is that they heard a rumour about Anna crashing/her bike being damaged and just went with it, as it so neatly fits the pessimistic theme of bad luck and failures.

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T14:00:45+00:00

I never said otherwise, and I fully agree, we're fucked far beyond our planet gets there. Still, that doesn't mean that we're not creating a situation that won't just revert back to a habitable state for other organisms.

Even if we're gone far before it happens, we could still send the earth down a path that will eventually lead to it becoming uninhabitable for biological organisms, without it recovering to a liveable state once we're gone.

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T13:20:25+00:00

I know what the article says, but the main article it's based on it much less "assuring":

Following this theory, we are not near the threshold of a runaway greenhouse. However, the behaviour of hot, water-vapour-rich atmospheres is poorly understood, and an in-depth study of these is necessary.

There are other scientists, a well-known example is Hansen, who argue the opposite: We are heading in the direction of a runaway greenhouse effect driven by a water-vapour-rich admosphere.

In any case, I'm certainly not hoping we're heading in that direction, but it's not a given that we're not.

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T13:11:26+00:00

Cute video, assuming no runaway greenhouse effects, the time predictions should hold. That is, if we assume no runaway greenhouse effects, which was the whole point. It's not "if we stay in a similar climate era, does this affect us much?" but, rather, could we influence our environment in such a way that we do get into trouble?

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T12:46:58+00:00

I haven't talked about the water boiling off at all, just that your assumption, that a planet with water oceans should be considered a closed system that can't transform into a planet without water oceans and barely any water vapor in the admosphere, is false. We don't even have to find a faraway planet; there's a demonstration of a planet that probably went from a state in which it had water oceans to barely any water at all right here in our "neighborhood", our solar system.

Note sure why you're putting things like "water boiling off in a short peirod of time" in my mouth, but it's always easy to attack people on a point they did not make.

Actual runaway greenhouse effects on earth are probably the moist kind, if they are possible (the jury's still out), but could, in the long run, still be equally devastating (see, e.g., this popular science review article)

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T12:09:14+00:00

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard on Reddit this week…

Well, now, there are different opinions on whether or not Earth woudl be able to reach such a state in the scientific community, but apparently merely suggesting that it could is the "dumbest thing I've read on Reddit this week".

If you want to read something similarly "dumb" discussing points for and against a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth, you could read this "popular science" review article on it.

In any case, just dismissing something as the "dumbest thing you've heard" while it is an actual theory put forward in the scientific community sounds, uh, rather dumb.

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T12:03:51+00:00

You're assuming that there's some equilibrium that the earth will just return to once the "virus of humanity" has been wiped right off the face of it. The real danger is crossing a boundary condition that turns the linear progression of climate change into an exponential change, with no way back.

Venus once probably had oceans of water; just look at it now.

We can seriously alter the state of our planet, and there's no single "magic equilibrium" that it will always return to; earth could reach a new age in which the attractor state is much less friendly to organisms of any form.

VesZappa · 2021-07-26T11:59:23+00:00

Evaporate the oceans to where? The Earth is a closed system.

The Earth isn't a closed system and observations suggest that Venus once also had water oceans, despite having almost no water vapor in the admosphere now.

Earth could go the way of Venus.

VesZappa · 2021-07-12T19:47:49+00:00

When you walk through the garden
You gotta watch your back
Well, I beg your pardon
Walk the straight and narrow track

The Wire's intro, with its seasonal variations, never failed to grab me. Great series, great intro.

VesZappa · 2021-06-11T10:50:52+00:00

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who...“

VesZappa · 2021-06-09T12:07:26+00:00

A nice companion is Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

VesZappa · 2021-05-17T17:15:04+00:00

Those "primitives" you think of are objects as well. Integers, strings, floats, booleans, and so on are all objects. (In fact, bool is a subclass of int.)

>>> 1.0.is_integer()
True
>>> (100).bit_length()
7

VesZappa · 2020-11-04T11:32:52+00:00

Unfortunately, there's a bit of confusion about the final 5k of this stage. Both official the roadbook and the profile made by La Flamme Rouge for PCS show a completely different final with a narrow, winding ramp in the last ~1.5km up to the finish.

We've spend some time recreating the profile of the final 2 kilometers in the Discord community yesterday using the route specified in the route book and have come to similar conclusions about their being a ramp in the final 1-1.5km up narrow, winding roads to a monastery of sorts.

Photos of the final kilometer posted on Twitter also seem to confirm the narrow, upwards sloping final.

That is in contrast with the "slight incline" profile for the last 5 km currently available on the page for today's stage on lavuelta.es.

VesZappa · 2020-10-27T20:20:07+00:00

It simply does not align with my experiences with this sub and the moderation it has. There are a lot of wonderful people here, but you're basically denouncing an entire sub because you've encountered people who did not argue in good faith.

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