Breaking Bad

[Breaking Bad] is designed to take a guy from his beginning point to his end point and transform him from a good guy into a bad guy.

That's from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan in a revealing interview in Grantland. I wish he hadn't come out so definitively with this thesis with the show still on air, but the quote does leave little doubt as to the course Gilligan is steering the show, and it's better than feeling like you're watching a show that's open-ended simply to maximize revenue from additional seasons (I won't name names, but everyone knows a few). It's a unique premise for an American television show, where even the darkest of protagonists in the past were intended to be sympathetic (Tony Soprano, Don Draper). Walter White's soul grows darker by the episode, making the show simultaneously more unique and yet harder to watch.

[possible minor spoiler ahead as I offer a general prediction for how the series will end]

Take the premise above and fuse it with Gilligan's statement that his personal belief system centers around karma, and it's not hard to imagine that Walter White and Jesse will meet with a tragic reckoning by series end (not that they haven't already suffered a huge toll already).

"I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell." - Vince Gilligan

A natural question for Gilligan is whether a good man turned bad was the premise from the very beginning, and he offers not only an answer to that but names the moment he thinks White passed the point of no return, and it's not the one most would expect.

I think Walt reached the point of no return was actually before that, as early as Season 1, and it might have been the moment in which he was offered financial salvation. He was offered some sort of deus ex machina salvation in the form of his former partner coming to him and saying, "Listen, Walt, I've heard about your situation, and I'd love to give you a job, and I'd love to pay your bills, and I'd love to give you a free hand here." And Walt, out of pride, would rather cook crystal meth than take the help.

I was about as proud of that moment as I was of any we've had since, and I'll tell you why: My first inclination for this show was that this was a good man — fundamentally good — who was doing a really stupid thing, cooking crystal meth, and was ignorant of how terrible this world was and would quickly be in over his head, and quickly forces beyond his control would make him continue cooking. Perhaps he'd be held in some sort of bondage by some kingpin and made to cook meth. It occurred to us early on, "You know what? We don't want to see that. No one wants to see that.” They want to see this guy, right or wrong, have the will to go forward in this thing. That's a much more interesting character than a character who is forced simply by dire straits.

Last season, the show's third, Breaking Bad was the best show on television, with at least two of the most memorable episodes of TV, and if people argue it's the best show on TV, or the GOAT, I don't blink.

Is outboard memory so bad?

The Internet is changing our memory, but perhaps not by weakening it (as some have surmised, most notably Nicholas Carr).

A new study led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, cited by both Discover Magazine and Silicon Valley Mercury News) suggests that people are just adapting to the availability of the Internet by spending less time memorizing things better retrieved through a Google search.

In a series of four experiments at Columbia and Harvard, Sparrow and her team found that students are more likely to recall a trivial fact if they think it will be erased from the computer -- and forget it if they're assured it will be there.

Similarly, the team proved that people are better at remembering where to find facts, rather than the facts themselves. The students, they found, recalled the names of files where information was stored, rather than the information itself.

In the same way that painters shifted from realistic representations to impressionism when the camera was invented, people may just be optimizing their mental processing for tasks a computer isn't able to do better yet.

Why spend time memorizing thousands of digits of pi when you can look up as many digits as you'd like with one simple Internet search? Chuck Klosterman posed a similar question in sidenote #3 in this Grantland article about the limits of human speed.

We should not overlook the large contingent of long-distance runners who find the whole question of "the fastest man alive" patently ridiculous, simply because humans are all relatively slow (at least compared to most other major mammals). Humans are designed for distance running. Christopher McDougnall, author of the best-selling book Born to Run, actually thinks this debate is borderline sexist. "My bedrock feeling about sprinting is that we only get excited about it because boys are better than girls. Men set the entertainment agenda, so we pick the events that give us an edge over women. As a species, we're awful sprinters. Really bad. The average amputee dog can hold his own against any high school track star. … It takes a really prosperous, secure society to perfect frivolous pursuits.

While this sounds good in principle, I'm not sure that being outdone at the extremes minimizes our appreciation of relative differences further away from the margins. Humans are, of course, most empathetic to the limits of human achievement, so I compare Usain Bolt running a 9.58s 100m dash to my own time in the same, and I compare someone memorizing 67,890 digits of pi to the number I can recall offhand, and I'm suitably impressed.

Related: lmgtfy and The Most Human Human

The Tour

In recent years, I've wanted to give up on watching the Tour de France. What has dominated the headlines of the sport are allegations of doping, or reports of yet another rider testing positive and having his past wins thrown out. If Contador and Armstrong were to be found guilty of using banned substances, you might have to go back to the early 90's to the days of Miguel Indurain to find a Tour de France winner that hadn't been caught in one doping scandal or another in their career.

I've never been that interested in watching the flat stages of the race. Most consist of long stretches where nothing visually interesting happens. The peloton chases some breakaway group consisting of some riders with no chance of winning the Tour, riders hoping to win some TV coverage mindshare for their sponsor or to gain some points for one of the competitions within the competition (the Tour gives out jerseys beyond the yellow jersey for the Tour leader; there's a green, white, and polka-dot jersey, too). Most breakaways are caught, leading to a furious sprint finish in the final minute or two of the race. Even during these brief peak moments of the stage, it's hard to see what's going on. Shot head-on, it's hard to discern who's ahead of who until they show the replay from overhead or the side. Without names on jerseys, and with most teammates decked out in the same sponsor gear, it's often hard to see who's who unless someone's clearly wearing the green jersey.

This year the early stages were more eventful than others, but only because of a multitude of crashes, including one spectacular but unfortunate confrontation between rider and car. In that, the laws of physics held: size matters (this image of the aftermath is not for those who are squeamish at the sight of what happens when human flesh in motion meets barbed wire). The crashes were most interesting consumed in hindsight in highlight form, like hockey fights or soccer goals breaking up long stretches of jockeying for position best appreciated by those with a deep knowledge of the subtleties of the sport.

But despite all that, the mountain stages of the Tour always draw me back in. In part it's because I've ridden many of the Alps and Pyrenees myself, but for the most part it's the pure competition of it all. When the road kicks up, the riders slow up, to the perfect speed: just slow enough that you can see each attack, but not so slow that you lose interest. When TV coverage goes commercial-free for the last half-hour of Tour de France mountain stages, the results is one of longest stretches of uninterrupted but dense drama in sports. The ascent of the final climb usually takes 30 to 45 minutes, and even the moments in between attacks are fraught with questions and possibility. Who will be the first to attack? When? Who will respond first? Who just got dropped?