fitness – Ryan's Blog

There is only one more stage in the 2020 Tour de France, but there’s still time to catch up on the action before the final leg.

Here’s how to get up to speed on this year’s race, the sport, and the history of the tour:

Watch or read to learn the rules of the race, what the green, polka dot & white jerseys mean, and why the overall winner may not win a single stage of the race.

Stage info including distances, elevation, and routes, can be found on the Tour de France website (spoilers if you’re catching up, each stage shows the winner).

You can follow many of the riders on Strava, and realize how much faster they are than you.

Watch extended race highlights (without spoilers in the video preview) on the NBC Sports YouTube channel. The 20 to 30 minute recaps make for a riveting daily tv series. Plus, Phil Liggett is a legend, and his commentary with Bob Roll will make you consider watching each stage in full.

The Tour de France channel also has race highlights, but they include the stage winner in the video title and thumbnail, so it ruins the fun of not knowing who wins before watching.

The history of the race, and its most renown scandal, is well told through the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, LANCE. While the Tour de France is exhilarating to watch, there is always a hint of controversy lingering in the background, and this doc helps explain that feeling of uneasiness.

(If you sign up for ESPN+, also be sure to watch O.J.: Made in America)

Other random TDF trivia include the cost of bikes in the tour, the exertion to ride at world record pace, riders’ power output on a bike, and the amount of food riders eat to stay fueled.

🚲

Read

The Handmaid’s Tale (no, don’t just watch the show)

Write

Book or blog? Unfinished and developing thoughts fit best in a blog. Plus one can use WordPress and Stripe for subscriber payments.

https://stratechery.com/2017/books-and-blogs/

Because aggregators deal with digital goods, there is an abundance of supply; that means users reap value through discovery and curation, and most aggregators get started by delivering superior discovery.

Then, once an aggregator has gained some number of end users, suppliers will come onto the aggregator’s platform on the aggregator’s terms, effectively commoditizing and modularizing themselves. Those additional suppliers then make the aggregator more attractive to more users, which in turn draws more suppliers, in a virtuous cycle.

This means that for aggregators, customer acquisition costs decrease over time; marginal customers are attracted to the platform by virtue of the increasing number of suppliers. This further means that aggregators enjoy winner-take-all effects: since the value of an aggregator to end users is continually increasing it is exceedingly difficult for competitors to take away users or win new ones.

https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/

Sleep

This article was popular this week: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Why do we sleep less?

We electrified the night, and light is a profound degrader of our sleep.

There is the issue of work: not only the porous borders between when you start and finish, but longer commuter times, too. No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead.

We have stigmatized sleep with the label of laziness. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we’re getting. It’s a badge of honor.

You should sleep more

I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night, and I keep very regular hours: if there is one thing I tell people, it’s to go to bed and to wake up at the same time every day, no matter what.

Hey, you know who else says that? Ray Dalio. He says it helps keep an even keel.

Take away?

Need to wake up at 7. Go to sleep at 11 sharp. Recently, 11 PM turns to 11:45, so 7 AM becomes 7:30.

Speak

Here be Sermons from Melting Asphalt

Thoughts

Is a blog a sermon or a lecture? Does the faceless audience denote a congregation or group of individuals?

Suppose Feynman’s physics lectures were never recorded, and you were (somehow) the only person in attendance as he was delivering them. In other words, he’s lecturing to an audience of one. Well, you might feel sad for everyone else who’s missing out — but at least you’ll learn some things, and Feynman is probably happy to teach you. (It might even be a competitive advantage for you to learn directly from the master

How does aggregation theory apply to sermons?

Moral communities often benefit from upholding a so-called meta-norm: an injunction to punish anyone who doesn’t punish others for their transgressions. As you can imagine, this kind of recursive rule requires commensurately recursive knowledge in order to get off the ground.

Ride

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