Kevin Coombes

Sounds like he has decided to be the second best cyclist of all time, leaving Merckx as the GOAT.

How many people are booking a visit to the North Spa? And what is the water temperature like?

Leadouts matter. How many of those "older" sprinters had their best year following Michael Morkov and the Quick Step train?

Nutcracker (bird) - Wikipedia

@jezcox.bsky.social

There are birds called nutcrackers: Nutcracker (bird) - Wikipedia share.google/yHdK5TdFiFtF...

Okay; one more connection to the Wellcome Trust. In 2010, Magi and Morris published a paper in BMC Bioinfo describing a software package called GWAMA. They used the term Manhattan; they were at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics; their S/W had a support page there that has vanished.

A paper by Forer et al (BMC Bioinfo 2010;11:318) uses the term "manhattan plot" without a citation. They don't cite Gibson for anything.

A paper by Samani et al (NEJM 2007;357:443-453) calls them "signal intensity plots".

Scite AI pointed me to a "foundational paper" from the Wellcome Trust in 2007, but it refused to give me an actual reference. I finally found the paper in Nature (2007;447:661-678), which includes such plots but (not surprisingly) doesn't use the name "Manhattan".

Seeing the US national championships, in person, at the Trexlertown (Lehigh Valley) velodrome back before any other Americans knew anything about cycling. And standing an arm's length away from top riders.

#stats question: I have data w/3 categorical variables: 3-level copy number (CN) of a gene, 4-level tumor stage, 7-level histology. Both stage and histology are related to copy number, and to each other. Best model/test to see if stage or histo is a more direct driver of CN?

Why nothing for Laurenz Rex of Intermarche, who appeared to blast Coquard away from himself and (eventually) toward Philipsen?

What would the contact hypothesis have told us about Kent State in 1970?

... 2011 TdF ...

On the stream, Sean Kelly puts the error on not riding hard on the descent after topping the Finestre. I think the resl mistake was on the lower slopes when he chased down Carapaz alone. Looked like the mistake Thomas Voeckler made in Stage 18 at the TdF, leaving his domestiques 30-60 seconds back.

Both today and in his stage win last week, Carapaz looked an awful lot like it was 2019. And both days, the leading competitors looked at each other instead of him.

Surprised that you didn't post an image of Jake Stewart handing a bidon to a young fan after his win at Dunkerque.

But it probably beats the alternative.

It's obviously the same as Tweety Bird from Warner Bros Looney Tunes. Just bigger.

My wife and I took a trip to Puglia a few years ago and visited the towns for the start, finish, and intermediate sprints. So, I enjoyed the scenery. But within five minutes after the start (with only a one man breakaway), I told her most of the stage would be pretty boring.

@jezcox.bsky.social, I am just watching the replay of Tro Bro Leon. Heard you talking about Breton teams in green. Europcar was one of those in the early 2010's. Started as Bonjour; now TotalEnergies. A couple of years ago, B&B Hotels-KTM was in green and the "team de glaz".

@antmccrossan.bsky.social goes to the other extreme. Italians often add vowels to the ends of English names: Cadel Evans-a, Simon-e Yates-a. At last year's Giro team presentation, I swear that Ant added an "a" to the end of a Spanish rider's name that already ended in o.

@jezcox.bsky.social , while I enjoy your commentary, the mispronunciation of Italian names is grating. "C" before E or I sounds like English ch. That's true of cello and Marcellusi. If you put H between the C and the vowel, it is pronounced hard, like a k. This is true of Chieti and Vecchio.

I'm not convinced. The object is to win. If you think your chances of winning are better if you pull, then pull. If not, don't pull. If the other rider doesn't like it, he has two choices. Ride him off your wheel. Or stop pulling himself, saying you'd rather lose to someone in the chasing group.

In an interview many years ago, Fabian Cancellara said that when training alone, he preferred riding into a headwind on the way out. (But not for a reason most mortals would understand.) That way, there was a chance he could also ride into a headwind on the way back!

Vincenzo Nibali with Lars Boom, 2014?

Apparently, since today.

Why the fuck are we allowed to discriminate against everyone except Jewish people? The same people trying to ferret out antisemitism are racist misogynists that claim DEI is horrible.

@carltonkirby.bsky.social ,
While watching the replay of today's stage at the Itzulia, I heard you ask about "Burpellet", a cosponsor of Burgos BH. So, I looked them up. They are a Basque company, SE of Burgos, that manufactures fuel pellets from sawdust and other sawmill residue.

I don't disagree that a bigger peloton likely leads you more crashes, but the implicit independence in your binomial model is clearly unrealistic. A better model would probably include an n^2 term to account for cyclist interactions, along with a density-of-cyclists factor to cause crashes.

Baby killers gonna be baby killers.