Internally inconsistent

The Times has a "medal chart" for the Olympics, giving a partial order on the countries based on the number (and type) of the medals they've won. The sidebar says "The rules used to generate the diagram were laid out by Simon Tatham, who assumed more medals are better, gold is better than silver and silver is better than bronze. Beyond that, the chart accounts for any possible weighting scheme, including counting all medals equally, counting gold medals only, or assigning different points for gold, silver and bronze."

But the chart cannot simultaneously assume that gold is better than silver and also account for the possibility that all medals count equally. You need "at least as good as," not "better than" there.

micromultitasking

The video player on my phone will now play on an overlay if I switch to another task. Thus, I can have multiple windows on a screen the size of my palm. It would be nice if I could say that this clearly ridiculous feature isn't something I had wished for, but I'm apparently just that ridiculous.

losing chains

The westernmost point in continental Europe is in Portugal, and I've started bringing visiting friends there, usually by bike. It's around a 26-mile total trip, with some significant hills (although through judicious use of train stations, you can make it an overall downhill trip). After a vandalism incident, I'm bikeless, so usually I rent two bikes in Lisbon and then go out with them by train. My friend Ely and I were doing this on Wednesday, and as we were struggling along a short bumpy dirt road leading to an outlook near the westernmost point, her chain snapped. This seemed like a total disaster. While the bike shop had given me a simple toolkit, it didn't include a link tool, and I didn't know any other way to deal with the problem. My first guess was that we would need to take a bus back, assuming they let the bike on, and if not pay an arm and a leg for a taxi. However, I decided to see if the chain could be repaired somehow using my tools. I was rather ineffectually pushing at one of the link axles with an allen wrench when a man from another group approached and offered his help. He had a Leatherman, but, more importantly, had a better idea of how to do these kinds of things. We put the chain on the ground and started hitting the allen wrench with a rock in an effort to pound the axle through. This wasn't successful, so finally he just pounded on the axle directly with the rock until it was flat, and then we eventually managed to get a few direct blows with the allen wrench, creating a depression that allowed us to easily push the axle through. Putting the chain on, we then pounded the axle back in with a rock. I rode the bike carefully the rest of the trip (mostly downhill, fortunately), but when returning it, I noticed that at least one link was stretched, with the hole visibly enlarged. Presumably the already poor condition of the chain wasn't helped by being pounded with a rock. However, it made it. I have a new-found appreciation for the importance of carrying a link tool with me when on long bike rides, since I have no idea how to evaluate chain health.

Cheaper to text from Poland

Once again, European regulation coupled with my poor phone plan choices has led to the paradox that I pay less to text when I'm in Poland (13.5 cents/text) than at home (16.5).

nextbus

My street has an iconic funicular/tram, but it was recently removed for (I hope) maintenance. Nobody seems to have anticipated the logical consequence, which is highly confused tourists hanging out at the top of the street waiting for the tram to come up the hill, peering at their guidebooks to make sure they're in the right place. Somebody should put up a sign. Or at least film the tourists to see what's the longest they've waited.

Mixed nuts

NY Times: "In a nutshell, we think that the Europeans have cracked open more doors than we thought, but they still have a lot on their plate,” said Gilles Moëc, an economist at Deutsche Bank.

Why do Europeans have doors on their plates (in nutshells)?

Greek elections

Looking at the Greek election results, it's tantalizingly close to a majority for the austerity parties -- the center-right and center-left have 108 and 41 seats respectively, for a total of 149 with 151 needed for a majority. It seems like the EU's money would be best spent just bribing 2 MP's to support the austerity regime.

calling me

646-397-9496 should reach my mobile in Portugal (price of a call to a NY number for you). Unfortunately, there remains a different number for texts -- 415-680-3612, which I've had for a while. Both of those should work all the time. I'm normally 5 hours ahead of East Coast time, so midnight for you in NY is 5 am for me.

And yes, I acknowledge the inappropriateness of this blog's url.

tour de paris

In 24 hours, I did the following by Velib: http://j.mp/b2YeDj (22 miles) preceded by http://j.mp/b4bgPl (9 miles). That is what happens when you bike happily around the city, go to a restaurant in the southwest corner, lose your keys to your apartment in the west at some point during the night, spend the night in a friend's hotel room in the south, go back to the restaurant in a fruitless effort to find the key the next morning, and then get the spare from someone in the northeast corner.

Brooklyn

I went to "Nuit Brooklyn" last night -- 4 bands from Brooklyn who came specially to Lyon to perform for me, since I won't be back until the end of August. Thanks to Artem for bringing me. They were all pretty good -- we missed some of St. Vincent, but Dirty Projectors were great, The National was too, and Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, while kind of a stylized genre thing, were as active as one can be without exploding. The trumpet player's shirt was translucent halfway through.

The National's singer left the stage at one point. Not to crowd-surf -- he just climbed halfway up the Roman amphitheatre that the performance was in, and sat on a step, singing, while a crowd of people held his mic cable aloft. Not to be outdone, Sharon Jones brought up a nattily-dressed young Frenchman out of the audience to sing a love song to, and to dance with (rather well, I must say). Must have made his month. Exemplary quotes:

From The National frontman: This next song is called Ohio, which is a nice place, a lot like this area. Lyon is a lot like this town in the song, this town Cincinnati.

If more of the audience had spoken English, it's possible he would have been lynched. As it was, the crowd was unnaturally silent. He probably didn't know there's a song called "Ohio" which starts "Je suis dans un État proche de l'Ohio//J'ai le moral à zéro". Or that the Lyonnais don't realize how provincial they are, although to be fair, I think that Boston is a better comparison.

From Sharon Jones, during a strange, somewhat racially charged discourse on how dancing was in her blood, speaking as a Native American: The white man has killed all our buffalo. The buffalo is our main source of protein!