Dangerous game

According to Reuters, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg "vowed to resist any pressure to retire that might come from liberals who want to ensure that Democratic President Barack Obama can pick her successor before the November 2016 presidential election."

I love Ginsburg (Jeffrey Toobin's profile of her in a recent issue of The New Yorker, locked behind the paywall now, is a good place to start if you want to learn more about her), but if this report is true Ginsburg is being shockingly reckless. We've seen how quickly so much can be undone in a short time by the Supreme Court having Roberts replace O'Connor, I'd be stunned if Ginsburg didn't ultimately realize how much of her life's work could unravel in just a few years if her seat was vacated with a conservative President in office. 

Lots of ifs, but that's just the point: Obama is President now, she is still healthy now, these are things we know. 2016-2020 is an unknown. 

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. 

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.