Cyclingnews.com reports Valv. (Piti) is back in the pro peloton after serving his ban for involvement in the Fuentes Affair (Valverde: I Didn’t Do Anything Wrong | Cyclingnews.com).  But professing innocence.  Interesting given the match between his DNA and the DNA in the Valv. (Piti) blood bags recovered during Operacion Puerto.

A blood sample taken on the rest day of the 2008 Tour de France in Italy would ultimately prove to be Valverde’s undoing, albeit after a lengthy legal process. In 2009, the Italian Olympic Committee banned Valverde from competition in Italy after matching his DNA to blood bags seized in Operacion Puerto. On May 31, 2010, CAS finally upheld appeals from the UCI and WADA to have his ban extended worldwide, four years after Fuentes was first arrested.

 New Year's Day turned out to be surprisingly warm, which came as something of a relief to me, just emerging from a major cold that had laid me low from taking any exercise since the middle of December.  The cyclists who congregated outside the NBRC clubroom as notified via the club website seemed to me to be rather crocked on the whole - many had been suffering from colds, and Lindz had had a rather nasty prang involving a pedestrian and significant muscular damage to his leg.  Also of note was the complete lack of timekeepers and pushers-off.  Shortly after 9.30, we decided they must have gone straight to the start area of the event, so we all pushed off down there.Fortunately, we did have a start team (Tony and Bryan), and we all signed on.  We were warned about a diesel spill at the first roundabout; in actual fact something appeared to have travelled the entire course slopping diesel all over the place (the smell of diesel was strong, even in the strong wind) and most riders took the event quite gingerly.It had been so long since my last time trial (which I think may have been the Duo Normand back in September) that I quite forgot to check my gears before starting: I therefore ended up starting in the small ring, and then wasting significant time trying to persuade the chain up onto the big ring after I'd started.  We had a significant head wind on the outward section, even after turning onto the dual carriageway section, where there was enough crosswind to make my front H3 rather twitchy at times.  Fortunately, things got a bit easier once round the turn.  I had been nervously eyeing up my HR, and occasionally felt it prudent to ease back when it reached higher levels.Back off the dual carriageway, and I tried to take maximal advantage of the descent (somewhat thwarted by the road diesel) with the tail wind.  I crossed the line in 24:37, which I felt was quite good given the conditions and my recent bout of ill-health.  It was also enough to take the win.  Just in case, I had taken note of Team Grumpy rules #1 ("Remember to make your excuses before the race, not after. Otherwise it will just sound pathetic". - specifically noting the first ride with the Pro Disc wheel and my recent illness)  and #5 ("Never train or race with a bad cough - it will destroy your entire season." - if I'd still had that racking cough, I would certainly not have raced).Results are at the NBRC website. 

Frankly, I have little interest in the overblown spectacle that the modern Olympics has become.  I will of course try and watch the cycling events on the TV, but otherwise it leaves me rather cold.  Over at road.cc, I see the headline Ninety-two-year-old who helped bring women's cycling to Olympics to carry London 2012 torch.  An interesting headline, so I popped over to read the article.  It turns out that the 92-year old is none other than Eileen Gray.  Oddly, the article is written as though the author hadn't heard of Eileen Gray before!  Indeed, I noticed the omission of her name from the article title, which relegated her to the description "ninety-two-year-old".For what it's worth, I'm delighted at this news.  Gray was particularly important in the development of international women's cycling, and this is a deserved honour.  Here's an interview at the British Cycling website.  

New Statesman - Richard Dawkins to guest-edit the New Statesman Christmas issue

In a 100-page special issue, the evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins brings together some of the world's leading scientists, thinkers and writers.

Xkcd's cartoon today on Christmas songs and baby-boomers in the USA.  But of course we in the UK favour Slade!

Ove the last few years, I've dabbled in Facebook, but frankly never really wanted to share all the trivia of my life with others, and nor did I want to know the trivia of other peoples' lives.  Periodically, Facebook seemed to make changes to the privacy settings of the system, and therefore my account, and I have been getting increasingly annoyed at having to delve into what's frankly quite an arcane settings system to rectify the situation.So after news reports of what seemed to me to be a rather intrusive set of changes to the way Facebook streams trivia and tittle-tattle between users, I decided to suspend my Facebook account.  In part this decision stemmed from the stories about Facebook's cookies tracking users' web activity in a way that was rather difficult to close down.  I chose to suspend rather than delete my account because I thought that perhaps I would want to return to the fold, and read updates on peoples' lives, their travails, and above all their bonkers Facebook games.  Well, perhaps not the latter.It's been over a month now, and I've not missed Facebook at all.  But.  I notice that some web companies such as Spotify now require a Facebook account to register.  This is no big deal to me, my music listening habits aren't really going to benefit from Spotify membership - while I think I've increasingly embraced the digital music era, the way I think of and listen to my music collection is somewhat rooted in a vinyl LP mindset.However, during my daily perambulations round the internet I follow a good many links, many of these to news sites where the comments are often of interest.  In general, I tend not to leave comments of my own (unless it's a subject I'm particularly interested in), but I often like to see what the regular readers of the site have to say.  Some sites I've visited recently have required readers to have a Facebook login - not only to post comments, but in some cases to read comments.This is a little sad, I think.  It's assuming all internet users are going to buy into the loss of privacy that the Facebook mindset leads to.(The links to Facebook on this site currently point to a page saying "This content is currently unavailable" - if and when I finally knock my Facebook account on the head, those links will go).

The New Humanist magazine reports that Nadine Dorries has won their 2011 Bad Faith award by a landslide (Bad Faith Award 2011: it's Dorries by a landslide).  As New Humanist says:

It's been a fascinating race for the award this year, as for the first time in its five-year history one of the candidates took note of the fact that they had been nominated and began a campaign to ensure they emerged victorious. As many of you already know, Dorries, who was nominated on account of her twin attempts to change the law on abortion counselling and introduce abstinence-based sex education for girls, noticed she was in the running shortly after we opened the poll, and published a post on her infamous blog ("70 per cent fiction and 30 per cent fact") stating that "it's scary to think how many people out there hold such extreme views dressed up as acceptable in an online glossy magazine". 

This week, Cyclingnews provided an update of the much-delayed CAS hearing on Alberto Contador's doping 'positive' (Contador Doping Verdict Expected In January | Cyclingnews.com).  More delay in finishing with this bizarre case:

Alberto Contador’s fate should be announced in January, according to AP, who reported Monday that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) would reach a verdict in the first month of 2012.

The UCI issued a statement reporting that the concentration was 50 picograms per millilitre, and that this was 400 times below the minimum standards of detection capability required by WADA, and that further scientific investigation would be required. Contador was provisionally suspended from competition, although this had no short-term effect as he had already finished his racing programme for the 2010 season. Contador had been informed of the results over a month earlier, on 24 August. Later the amount discovered was clarified as 40 times below the minimum standards, rather than the 400 times originally reported by the UCI. Contador's scientific adviser claimed that he would have needed 180 times the amount detected to gain any benefit in his performance.

The infamous pepper-spraying of protestors at UC Davis has gone a bit viral it seems. Here's a video of the cop casually spraying peaceful protestors. This isn't some harmless spray.  On the Scoville scale of chilli heat, where the pretty damned hot habenero chilli scores around 350,000 Scoville units, these sprays deliver a whopping 2,000,000 to 5,300,000 Scoville units. It's not trivial.Anyway, some rather wonderful photoshop images are doing the rounds.  Here's a favourite:

This is like a scene from my life with computers...