Best of the Week #65

In workout news for the week:

• I climbed three 5.10-rated routes Wednesday night;
• Played pick-up soccer on the Ellipse last night (!!! I know, right? Who is this person I’m becoming???);
• And ran 6.3 miles this morning. 

So basically what I’m saying is that summertime = outside-time and I love it.

My most popular post this week was a random flash-back to last summer: Going to India, which I published the day before Sister2 and I began our epic Indian adventure...that was FUN.

I want to go to this restaurant for amazing Korean food. STAT. Whyyyy is Annadale so far from DC???? (And by that I mean more than a walk/metro/bus ride from my house.)

Interesting: "One One-Hundredth of a Second Faster: Building Better Olympic Athletes"

• For elite athletes, traditional training is no longer enough. To go from great to the best in the world, it’s now essential to optimize every bit of performance, even if the gain is just a hundredth of a second. So in addition to relying on their coaches and teammates, they work with biomechanists, physiologists, psychologists, nutritionists, strength coaches, recovery experts, and statistical analysts. 
• Jones is attended by 22 scientists and technicians, paid for by Red Bull, her sponsor. 

I’ve never made a cold soup before, but with summer in full force maybe it’s time I try. This NYT Magazine interactive feature has good-looking recipes. 

This has been my gchat status all week: “Hire good people and leave them alone.” (It’s a short article about introverts.)

Aah FP and your photo essays: “Life Inside Little America in Afghanistan.”

• Photos from a time when tiki bars and afternoons at the pool dominated the lives of Americans in Afghanistan. 
• "It was an enchanting time," remembered Rebecca Pettys, who lived there for six years starting in 1958, when she was 12 years old. Her father, an Afghan who received a doctorate from the University of Chicago and married a Finnish-American woman he met in Illinois, moved his family to Helmand so he could participate in the development effort. "We had parties and danced," Pettys said. "Everything about our lives was American."

Language lesson of the day: "Defining the perimeter of our parameters."

• It's when people use parameters to mean "limits" or "characteristics" that they get into trouble with the usage cops.
• A usage note in the American Heritage Dictionary reads: "The term parameter, which originates in mathematics, has a number of specific meanings.... Perhaps because of its ring of technical authority, it has been used more generally in recent years to refer to any factor that determines a range of variations and especially to a factor that restricts what can result from a process or policy....

Well this is kinda depressing: “Now or Never? Nine Places to See Before They Slip Away.” Topping my list are Glacier National Park and Mt. Kilimanjaro...is it vacation time yet???

"Killer Whales 'Wave Wash' Seal."

• A pod of orcas, or killer whales, cooperate to wash a Weddell seal off an ice floe. This sequence, filmed for Frozen Planet, marks the first complete filming of killer whale "wave washing" behavior. 

This is just silly but I like it: "Dogs Who Like to Surf: Photos"

• Dog surfing trainers say the dogs who like the water and the beach are in the sport and that dogs who fear the water are not even trainable.

Happy 4th of July warm-up weekend! I will be at the pool, per usual.