Best way to brake with carbon rims

This won't apply to too many of you unless you run carbon rims on your road bike, but since I recently switched to riding those, this was a useful factoid to file away, potentially a life-saver: it's best to brake more powerfully in short bursts than to brake lightly over long periods when riding carbon rims. 

It's comforting to get such consensus across all the leading carbon rim manufacturers. The next time I come bombing down the Marin Headlands, I'll be at less risk of a warped rim launching me over the cliffs into the ocean. 

blah blah blah

The Bert and Ernie New Yorker cover celebrating the Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and Prop 8 drew much praise online this week, but not everyone loved it. June Thomas in Slate wrote what is the leading dissent, and it contains this immortal question (eyemuffs, children):

Bert and Ernie clearly love each other. But does Ernie suck Bert’s cock? I don't think so.

Critics Round Up

For those for whom Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are too inclusive of critics, there is a new movie review aggregator: Critics Round Up.  From its About page:

GOAL #1

To provide an alternative to the aggregated numbers of more popular sites. Rotten Tomatoes is good for people who want to see the highest number of critics included, but standards need to be applied. Not everyone should be counted. Metacritic works for people who are mainly interested in well-known publications, but they ignore many of the best sources for film criticism because they aren’t as recognizable (no MUBI, no Cinema Scope, no more J. Hoberman since he left the Village Voice). My idea was to synthesize the approaches of these sites: to filter out the majority of the online discourse, but also to be plugged in enough to include smaller sites that have valuable things to say.

I seem to be in the target demo based on that description.

Here's the list of critics included. A lot of the movies I perused didn't differ in score too much between Metacritic and CRU, but it's interesting to find ones where there is a meaningful delta. CRU could do some work to make it easier to scan a list of movies and scores, but a quick glance revealed a few meaningful deltas. For example, CRU gives Spring Breakers an 84, much higher than Metacritic's 63. CRU also prefers Monsters University by a score of 77 to 64 and The Lone Ranger 48 to 37.

As always, it's at the margin, where we see the deltas, that I find meaningful information. I wish there was an easier way to just scan for movies where CRU diverges from Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes by some threshold. 

From whence he came

[SPOILER ALERT: a minor one, but if you haven't seen the last episode of this season of Mad Men, I discuss the last scene.]

Whatever you thought of this season of Mad Men (it was not my favorite, it seemed to drift sideways a lot despite having so many of those oddly paced moments I love) , I loved the final shot of the final episode: Don and his children looking at the whorehouse he grew up in. It felt like the series ending shot, in a way.

This is where America comes from. This is where advertising comes from. This is where I was born. From vulgarity and nothingness and human relationship as commerce, I constructed this beautiful self, and maybe it's an illusion, or maybe it's the truth, or maybe they're one and the same.

What matters

Sorry for the slow rate of posts here recently. Events in the real world recently have reminded me that while we can all nod our heads in agreement at the idea that the things that matter in the end, when we're on our deathbed, are simple ones, like having spent as much time as possible with the people we love, we are ill-equipped as humans to realize that often enough.

Perhaps it's because something like spending as much time as possible with loved ones is so readily available it doesn't feel like a stretch goal. Or perhaps it's only the people who are closest to us who really can drive us crazy and thus we feel the impulse to flee them more than we would acquaintances, who have only the power to bore us.

I've just started Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, and one of the eye-opening charts in his book listed things that are fragile and their corresponding antifragile counterparts. The row that caught my eye was not one about institutions but about human relationships.

In the antifragile column: attraction.

In the fragile column: friendship. 

Friendship is more fragile than attraction. It seems like some deep truth, hard earned. 

The other realization: our scarcest resource as humans is our time, so how we choose to spend our time is the single most important indicator of what matters to us. This is why it should be the thing we dole out most carefully.

Recall James Carville at the end of The War Room, speaking to the volunteers on the Clinton campaign:

There's a simple doctrine: outside of a person's love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor. And somehow or another along the way, we tend to forget that. Labor is a very precious thing that you have. Anytime that you can combine labor with love, you've made a good merger.

Relationships with those we love can be harder work than more casual ones, and yet they will pay us back in unanticipated multiples for the rest of our lives.

Here's hoping you're all able to share time with the people you care about most this Independence Day.