Clean? Or just cleaner?

Pro cycling has tried to tighten up its doping detection processes in the past decade. In 2001 or 2002, it introduced a urine-based test for one of the ​biggest scourges in the sport, artificially synthesized EPO, a hormone used to boost red blood cell production. In 2008, it launched biological passports, a method for testing markers in an athlete's blood in search of statistically  anomalous spikes.

Has it worked?​

​No one knows for sure, but one measurable difference is that pro cyclists have slowed down. This article analyzes results of biological passports in pro cycling and points out a decrease in the number of anomalous results since these tests have gone into place. In Lance Armstrong's heyday, an oft-quoted magic number that a cyclist needed to attain to ascend the podium at a grand tour was 7 W/kg. But the scientists behind this article find that figure to be beyond the reach of a clean cyclist.

That all began with the hypothesis that the power output achievable without doping was limited and could be predicted based on physiology, and that any cyclist who went above this on a long finishing climb in the Tour was probably doing so with the benefit of doping!  That "limit", I suggested, was about 6.2 W/kg, a climbing power output that was very common in the 1990s and early 2000s, but which has NOT been seen since about 2006.

In this Finnish cycling forum, someone published what I believe are top-ranked average power outputs for cyclists racing grand tours from 2000 on (if you can read Finnish and translate, let me know; Chrome's Google Translate function made a mess of the formatting). The last cyclist to achieve an average power output of 6 W/kg or higher was Alberto Contador in the 2009 Tour de France. He won this year's Vuelta Espana with a power output of 5.88 W/Kg.

It's not definitive. Anomalous spikes in energy late in mountain stages would still seem suspicious. But anecdotally, we have seen fewer of those.​ Many people found the Tour de France boring this year because we did not have as many late mountain stage duels between the race leaders, as in years past. Is clean cycling doomed to be less dramatic a spectacle?

Whether it's because cyclists are racing clean now, or whether they've had to significantly cut back their doping, is unclear.​ They are measurably slower.

I personally believe that at least half the professional athletes I watch on TV across all sports are on ​some banned substance of some sort. I thought this during the Olympics, and I think this whenever I watch any professional sporting match (this is just the latest anecdotal evidence). While many of the athletes who've fingered their peers are not seen as trustworthy because they themselves doped, I personally suspect so many athletes dope that it's unlikely that it's clean athletes will be the whistleblowers. The threat of retaliation for a clean athlete who is still competing amidst a pool of dopers is high, but once someone's already been caught and banned, they have much less career risk.

If there's one lesson of economics that has proven solid over the years, it's the theory of incentives. Considering the minuscule odds of succeeding and the power-law distribution of income in professional sports, the economic incentives for doping are enormous, and selection bias would argue that the people we do get to see succeeding on TV are disproportionately weighted towards those who have used such substances. Even if the physical edge granted by such substances is small, the placebo effect and mental edge may be just as valuable. In Tyler Hamilton's book, Lance Armstrong is constantly on edge over what new doping techniques other cyclists might be using to achieve an edge over him.

The larger question at play is whether the social norm of sports as a competition between "clean" athletes competing on some some arbitrarily defined level playing ground is outdated or perhaps even a pipe dream. If clean competition is an unattainable ideal, a farce we've believed in for decades and decades, how far are we prepared to go, how much money are we prepared to spend, to chase after it? Is the reinforcement of fair play in sports so powerful an idea because we think it affects the moral fabric of the rest of society?

Herzog on...The Killers?

So bizarre that Werner Herzong directed this mini-documentary on The Killers in advance of their online concert a week ago.​ What are the odds Herzog had heard any music by The Killers in advance of this gig? I say 2%, plus or minus 2%.

Even if you're not a huge fan of The Killers​, it's worth watching if you're a fan of Werner Herzog's voiceover narration, and really, who isn't? Leave it to Herzog to inject himself in what should be a puff piece for The Killers and questioning the reality of their hometown.

"But this is all fake, this town here, is it? And Las Vegas itself? The Strip? Does it look real to you?"​

At times it feels like Herzog is playing a joke, but it's hard to tell if The Killers were in on it.

I would create a Kickstarter project to raise money for Herzog to narrate my childhood home videos.

Andrei Tarkovsky on FOMO

Andrei Tarkovsky is asked to give advice to young people. This is what he said.​

[It sure seems like he says a lot more than the put into the subtitles, but the brevity adds power to his words. Maybe Russian and English language densities just vary a lot.]​

By the way, you can watch Andrei Rublev online at Hulu.​ I know most of you won't. But for the few of you who do, or who have...right?

Patents and Magic

Chris Jones' article in Esquire about Teller and magic and idea theft is fantastic.​ I'm skeptical of the value of software patents on innovation, but in the person of Jim Steinmeyer, Jones makes a case that "patent" infringement in magic has had a depressive effect on magic trick innovation or R&D.

Steinmeyer is a magic trick inventor. He comes up with ideas for magic tricks, then sells them to magicians like David Copperfield to perform. He's like a screenwriter, but for magic. Few people realize how many magicians like David Blaine purchase the ideas for the tricks they perform.​ Steinmeyer even has the equivalent of production designers (like Bill Smith) to build the contraptions for his tricks. I imagine Steinmeyer with a warehouse like the one in The Prestige, just brimming to the ceilings with coffins, tanks, saws, top hats, and cages. The overlap between magic and movies shouldn't be surprising; both are performance arts, and movies are a form of a long con.

​According to Steinmeyer, patent theft has taken its toll on the economic viability of his trade.

At least another thousand magicians have bought knockoffs built by a man in Indiana, and a guy in Sicily, and a team of reverse engineers in China.

"Things are just out of control," Smith says. "It's the world, and it's getting worse. There have always been thieves in magic, but thievery has never been so bad as it is now. The biggest shame is, guys like Jim — Jim is retreating. I'm sure he has tons of other good ideas, but he's not making them, because it's not worth it. He's writing books instead."

"Invention is all fuzzy, sloppy stuff," Steinmeyer says. "I have patents, and I have had patents that have expired. Everything has a limited lifetime. But when a person can't make a living by coming up with new material, that's when you have to wonder about the system. I would say that over the last few years, the last ten years, it's a net zero. I'm putting as much money into it as I'm getting out."

The article does say Steinmeyer has never sued someone who has stolen one of his tricks, so maybe his economic argument is just supposition. There are other considerations, though. A cruel irony with magic is that suing someone over one of your patented magic tricks may mean revealing how the trick is done in court, "making the very act of protecting magic one of the easiest ways to destroy it."

But the article has more of note than a dive into the world of patents as it applies to magic. It is canny about magic. For example:

The secret to a great trick isn't really its method; the method behind most tricks is ugly and disappointing, something blunt and mechanical.

That's something my brother James and I learned every time we purchased a magic trick off of Penguin Magic and realized how it was done.​ As with sausage, it's best not to tour the factory.

And then there's the time the article spends with Teller. Among non-magicians, Teller is a person often cited as an inspiration because he's an obsessive artist. ​He's perhaps the most well-known high priest of the craft and upholder of the magic's unwritten code.

There's a story in there about a long con​ Teller constructed around a short story called "Enoch Soames." It could only ever be performed once. And the description of a magic trick called Honor System that's less an illusion than a test of faith.

Oh, just go read it.​