Original source
An anonymous reader writes with word of new movement on an old front: namely, the rule that makes it hard for sports fans to see coverage of local teams. The 39-year-old blackout rule basically “prevents games from being televised locally when tickets remain unsold.” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in response to a 2011 petition by consumers, has decided to consider abolishing this rule. The National Football League (NFL) has of course objected, claiming that the rule allows it to keep airing their games on free TV. If that were to change and they would have to move to cable, they argue, the “result would represent a substantial loss of consumer welfare.” In their petition to the FCC, consumers point out that the NFL charges “exorbitant prices for tickets” which results in lower attendance. The blackout rule, they claim, therefore punishes fans by preventing them from watching the game if the NFL can’t sell enough stadium tickets. NFL yearly profits reportedly number in the billions. Even if the FCC supports the petition, however, sports leagues can and probably will privately negotiate blackouts to boost their revenue.
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cartechboy writes Self-driving cars are coming, that’s nothing new. People are somewhat nervous about this technology, and that’s also not news. But it appears self-driving cars are already here, hear, and one idiot was dumb enough to climb out of the driver’s seat while his car cruised down the highway. The car in question is a new Infiniti Q50, Q50 which has Active Lane Control and adaptive cruise control. Both of which essentially turn the Q50 into an autonomous vehicle while at highway speeds. While impressive, taking yourself out of a position where you can quickly and safely regain control of the car if needed is simply dumb. After watching the video, it’s abundantly clear why people should be nervous about autonomous vehicles. It’s not the cars and tech we need to worry about, it’s idiots like this guy.
Take 3 pounds off your bike, pedal at a constant rate of 200 watts, and you’ll get to the top of a 7 percent climb a whole 7.5 seconds ahead of the competition. A 1-pound advantage only puts you ahead by 2.5 seconds.
Editor’s Note: This excerpt is adapted from the book FASTER: Demystifying the Science of Triathlon Speed by Jim Gourley and republished with permission from VeloPress. Learn more about the science of triathlon at freetrispeed.com.
Let’s clear something up. There is no such thing as a “fast bike.” Bikes are neither fast nor slow. Bikes are shiny or expensive. Bikes have a lot of mass or a little. Without a rider, they are stationary. Physics holds a bike in place until you get on it and start pedaling. Even then the bike may not necessarily be fast. Of all the equipment on your bike, your legs are the most critical component. There are plenty of nice bikes on the road that are being ridden slowly.
But more insidious than inaccurate vocabulary is a simple overestimation of how much bike weight matters for most riding.
In FASTER, I show the math that explains why just a degree or two of incline makes riding a bike feel so much harder. Riding up a hill, it may seem more important than ever to dump any and all extra mass we can from our bikes. That’s the allure of a carbon fiber bottle cage, an upgrade to carbon fiber cranks, handlebars, stem, carbon saddle rails, or wheel spokes. Five grams here, 10 grams there, it all adds up, right? Pretty soon, you’re 500 grams lighter. That’s half a kilogram!
True. But such upgrades could easily total $500 or more, which is also half a grand. Is it worth it?
Not exactly.
A good approximate difference between an entry-level aluminum bike with a decent set of components and a top-of-the-line carbon model with some of the lightest components on the market is just shy of 3.25 pounds.
Was the weight loss worth it?
Let’s find out. Take a hypothetical rider and have her ride two bikes up a hill at the same speed. The first bike weighs 15 pounds and the second bike will shave off the 3.21 pounds to weigh in at 11.79 pounds. For each test, we’ll have her ride at 15 mph. Everything is constant, except for the bike, so what we ought to see is a reduction in the power required to get up the hill. That’s the real test of your savings.
Refer to the second image, above, for a graph of the results.
If you’re having trouble telling what the difference is, save yourself the eyestrain, because there isn’t much — that’s the message.
But pro athletes use the lightest equipment they can, so there must be something to it, right?
Remember that professional athletes operate in an entirely different environment than the rest of us. They are all very close to each other in terms of fitness, and they are also all very close to being the absolute best a human being can be.
Beyond that, our result also makes intuitive sense: 3.21 pounds is just over 2 percent of the total weight of our 150-pound cyclist and 15-pound bike. Ten watts is 2 percent of the 500-watt power requirement to maintain speed up a 10 percent grade. Because the weight-to-power savings ratio is linear, we should expect that one-to-one relationship.
The implication is a bitter pill, though. If you want to reduce the power requirement by 1 percent, you have to reduce the total mass that’s moving up the hill by 1 percent. And because you’re moving both your body and the bike up the hill, a measly 1 percent equates to a whole lot of grams before you see returns on your carbon investment.
In short, you’re much better off upgrading your legs and dropping body fat through proper training and diet. In fact, losing unnecessary weight would have a dual impact on your power and speed. As weight decreases, the amount of power required to maintain a certain speed will also decrease. At the same time, the amount of power you are capable of generating should actually increase. This is because oxygen uptake is related to body mass and improves as fat is lost.
Wattage vs. time
If the power argument doesn’t quite satisfy you, we can look at it another way. Let’s answer the question you really care about: How much faster does it make me? After all, you win races by saving time, not watts. Let’s see what will happen when our hypothetical rider rides bikes of varying weight up different hills. We’ll hold power at a constant 200 watts and have her ride up a 1-mile climb at seven different grades (1–7 percent).
Let’s look at the difference between 15-, 16-, 17-, and 18-pound bikes, with the 18-pound bike serving as the baseline. Because of the complexity involved, we’ll eliminate air resistance and analyze the impact of weight reduction only. How much time do we save?
A graph of the results is in the third image above.
Read it and weep, weight watchers.
Look at the far right of the graph. Take 3 pounds off your bike, pedal at a constant rate of 200 watts, and you’ll get to the top of a 7 percent climb a whole 7.5 seconds ahead of the competition. A 1-pound advantage only puts you ahead by 2.5 seconds. Over the course of an hours-long race, a few seconds per climb is not a significant advantage.
Keep in mind that the advantage only holds when the climbs are long and steep. Courses with fewer and shorter ascents will keep the difference small.
Olympic and world champion on the track, top classics rider, stage race contender….. what can Geraint Thomas achieve for himself if he stops riding for others? He’s approaching the prime of his career, so we asked him.
Joaquim Rodríguez rode himself onto the final podium in stage 20 of the 2013 Tour de France, pulling away from Alberto Contador with best young rider Nairo Quintana and overall winner Chris Froome.
Three big names that crashed out of the Tour de France are likely to race the Vuelta a España (August 23-September), race officials confirmed Monday.
Chris Froome (Sky), Andrew Talansky (Garmin-Sharp), and Mark Cavendish (Omega Pharma-Quick Step), none of whom made it to Paris, will likely line up for the season’s third grand tour later this month in Spain.
Froome crashed out in stage 5 while Talansky pulled out after an agonizing ride to make the time cut into Oyonnox. Cavendish crashed in a sprint finish in the opening stage.
All three are part of a stellar preliminary start list, revealed by Vuelta officials Monday, of riders expected to start the Spanish tour in less than three weeks in Jerez de la Frontera. Illness or crashes could knock them out, of course, but it looks likely all three will be racing in Spain.
Other big names include Peter Sagan (Cannondale), Giro d’Italia winner Nairo Quintana, 2009 Vuelta winner Alejandro Valverde (Movistar), Tom Boonen, Rigoberto Urán, and three-time defending world time trial champion Tony Martin (all Omega Pharma-Quick Step), Robert Gesink and Laurens Ten Dam (both Belkin), and Haimar Zubeldia (Trek Factory Racing).
Other GC favorites include Joaquim Rodríguez (Katusha), 2011 Tour winner Cadel Evans and 2008 Olympic champion Samuel Sánchez (both of BMC Racing), and defending champion Chris Horner (Lampre-Merida).
Other top Vuelta-bound riders include the Tour’s best young rider and third-place finisher Thibaut Pinot (FDJ), Giro podium man Fabio Aru (Astana), Dan Martin (Garmin-Sharp), and budding GC candidate Warren Barguil (Giant-Shimano).
Other top sprinters penciled in to start include Nacer Bouhanni (FDJ), Michael Matthews (Orica-GreenEdge), while Philippe Gilbert (BMC Racing) and Fabian Cancellara (Trek Factory Racing) will use the Vuelta to hone their form for the world championships, set for a week after the Vuelta in Ponferrada.
The Vuelta starts with a team time trial in Jerez de la Frontera on August 23, and ends with an individual time trial in Santiago de Compostela.
Marquee riders of the 2014 Vuelta a España
Chris Froome (Sky)
Mikel Nieve (Sky)
Nairo Quintana (Movistar)
Alejandro Valverde (Movistar)
Joaquim Rodríguez (Katusha)
Chris Horner (Lampre)
Cadel Evans (BMC Racing)
Samuel Sánchez (BMC Racing)
Philippe Gilbert (BMC Racing)
Peter Sagan (Cannondale)
Mark Cavendish (Omega Pharma-Quick Step)
Rigoberto Urán (Omega Pharma-Quick Step)
Tom Boonen (Omega Pharma-Quick Step)
Tony Martin (Omega Pharma-Quick Step)
Thibaut Pinot (FDJ)
Nacer Bouhanni (FDJ)
Warren Barguil (Giant-Shimano)
Fabio Aru (Astana)
Dan Martin (Garmin-Sharp)
Andrew Talansky (Garmin-Sharp)
Michael Matthews (Orica-GreenEdge)
Fabian Cancellara (Trek Factory Racing)
Haimar Zubeldia (Trek Factory Racing)
Laurens Ten Dam (Belkin)
Robert Gesink (Belkin)
Original source
An anonymous reader writes A $400 million partnership between the NFL and Microsoft that replaces the old method of studying opponents from the sidelines using printed black-and-white photos with tablet computers is just one of the hi-tech upgrades to the NFL this year. From the article: “The referees are also going wireless so they can talk with each other without huddling, and coaches will sport new Bose headsets. But the appearance of Microsoft Surface tablets marks the first time players and coaches can legally use such electronic devices on the field during the game. The tablets will come into play for the first time Sunday night, when the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills play in the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio.”
I’ve written about balloon placement in my book, The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics and also on my website. blog. When I started in comics, lettering was laid out on the art by the penciller, at least at DC Comics. Artists like Curt Swan would pencil in all the dialogue so he and the letterer would both know where everything should go, and that it would fit. The Marvel style of comics creation spearheaded by Stan Lee started to change that. Marvel artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko would lay out an entire story from a plot, and Stan would write the dialogue afterward. This was fine with experienced artists, but later ones using the plot-first system didn’t always have a good handle on how much space to leave for lettering, and the situation has only gotten worse since then. Today many letterers are expected to do their own lettering placements, and often have a tough time of it. Newer comics writers and artists who don’t really understand the medium and how it tells stories both contribute to the problem. The writer will try to do too much in one panel: multiple actions, back and forth dialogue. Artists struggle with that, and also make basic storytelling mistakes like having the first character speaking on the right side of the panel instead of the left, or filling the panel with large close views of character heads, leaving no room for dialogue balloons.
I have to say I’ve often been lucky enough to work with writers and artists who understand comics, and what I need to do my part of the job. Here are a few examples. Above, two panels from DC’s DEAD BOY DETECTIVES. Artist Mark Buckingham does layouts in pencil, and often lightly indicates where lettering should go. Either the editor or assistant editor marks up a copy of the pencils with clear marker indications for placement, usually following Mark’s lead. The storytelling is clear, so when I get the finished art by Ryan Kelley I rarely have trouble fitting the lettering in where requested, though I will move it around if I need to, as in the second panel above.
Here’s a section from THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: CENTURY: 1969. Often artist Kevin O’Neill will mark balloon placements on a photocopy of his finished art, but on this page he didn’t have time to make a copy, so he put a sheet of tracing paper over the art and rough-sketched a layout with balloon placements. This is fairly complex storytelling, and quite a few balloons, but Kevin knows how much space to leave, and I was able to get everything in as requested.
Finally here’s an example of an artist going above and beyond the call of duty! For TOM STRONG’S TERRIFIC TALES #11, artist Bruce Timm did a story featuring Tesla Strong. For lettering placement, he sent me photocopies of his finished art, and taped over it were his own hand-lettered balloons! Bruce made it very easy for me in this case, even with fairly heavy dialogue in the last two panels. And I had fun lettering the story in the style of Ira Schnapp to match the 1950s feel of the piece. By going the extra distance, Bruce Timm has sort of recreated the way comics were laid out by the artists when I first began lettering them, except that I couldn’t letter it with pens and ink, as I did back then. While I don’t think artists today need to go this far, they and the writers both need to think about how and where the lettering will go to help tell their stories.
