Cycling, Science and Sustainability

Federalist #63 and the House debt ceiling debate

2011-07-29T21:47:00.002-06:00

"... so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?" http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa63.htm

Save the Leyden Road

2011-07-25T19:57:00.000-06:00

If you only ride in Jeffco, you may have no idea how much better the roads are in Boulder county. We have redneck death traps like Golden Gate Canyon and Coal Creek Canyon. Boulder has Left Hand, Sunshine, Sugarloaf, Flagstaff. QED. East of the mountains North of Boulder there are roads like Nelson, Hygiene, Nebo, St. Vrain (all east-west), and all the connecting north-south roads. Fantastic scenary and modest traffic. What do we have in Northern Jefferson County? the Leyden Road. That's pretty much it. The creeping Kudzu of Arvada is bent on covering every blade of grass with concrete and filling every open vista with office parks and Taco Bells. Evidently Arvada has not been sated by the Candelas eco-cide. The signs shown are new. They were recently planted on the Leyden road and suggest that Arvada has turned its rapacious attention to this last lovely vista. if you blow this up, you'll see the details of the "planning" commission meeting. Here is a link to the full-sized picture

on the joys of icebaths

2011-07-25T19:36:00.003-06:00

I first head about ice baths from Tim Ferriss' book.   For a vegan, his diet is completely insane and not worth discussing. But he has some interesting training/recovery tips, the ice bath being one of them. Since then I've noticed lots of reputable physios recommending ice baths or other cryotherapy (even LN2). So, earlier in the summer when I ramped up my steep climbing and noticed that I was having a hard time recovering from super-intense workouts (15-25% climbs at altitude, near threshold, rinse repeat, puke) I decided to give it a shot.

I fill up the tup with cold tap water (about 11-12 C where I live) and dump in 10-15 lbs of ice. No problem putting the feet in, but sitting down (to cover the legs), involves a millisecond or so of intense, well, pain.   After that it's a piece of cake. In contrast a cold shower feels much more painful since you skin is constantly exposed to cold/warm/cold. Once I'm in the cold water, I could easily sit there and read for half an hour.

Once you get out you have the novel sensation of not knowing whether skin is cold or wet: it feels the same. And for a while everything you touch is very warm.

The bottom line is the ice therapy has dramatically improved the recovery of my legs. I find it refreshing too. (We have no AC and it's been above 32C every day for a week now.)

Try it, you'll like it. Or you'll hate it. Who knows.   Google "ice bath" for the science. The cold also speeds up your metabolism, so some people use this technique to loose weight. No opinion.

It's no surprise that Norway's mass murderer was white

2011-07-25T13:38:00.001-06:00

Having spent much time this past year reading the books of the great Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, not to mention Eva Gabrielsson's fine memoir of her 32 years with Larsson, it was hardly a shock to hear that the perpetrator of Norway's killing spree was a home-grown terrorist. The Neo-Nazi's and right-wing xenophobes are sufficiently powerful and violent that Gabrielsson and Larson lived in constant fear for many years before his untimely death. And did we not just read last week that Germany has been forced to obliterate all remains of Rudolf Hess and his grave, since the site had become a perverse locus of pilgrimage for neo-nazis? On our last trip to Germany I was surprised by the popularity of New Balance sneakers, only to be shocked by the widespread symiotics of their trademark letter "N".

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that we need to support courageous journalists like Larsson and Gabrielsson who risk their lives to expose the truth of these hate groups. We could start by refusing to call these terrorists Christians. Hate, violence and intolerance are not what the New Testament teaches. We should also support organized efforts such as those by the Southern Poverty Law Center, who, among many other good works maintain a nation-wide list of hate crimes and groups. But perhaps most importantly we should remember that we are all immigrants (unless your family has lived forever in the African rift valley). I suspect the only countries without racial tension are those that are racially homogeneous.

If you want to find out about particular group, such as the California Coalition for Immigration Reform or the American Family Association, look them up here. It's really appalling how many of these groups exist in the US and the extent of their vile emanations.

no good deed goes unpunished

2010-01-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

I was riding north from Golden through Arvada to do tempo around the Koppenberg circuit.    On Quaker a Land Rover going the opposite direction stopped abruptly and shouted some question. It was too windy to hear, so I decide to do the nice thing and pull around to see if I could help. Since he was stopped in the middle of the road, I decided to make a U and pull up on his passenger side for safety.    As I'm crossing his stern (about 1-2 car lengths back) he suddently puts it in reverse and hits the gas.

A few seconds later I pull myself out from under his SUV with my Look in one piece.   He apologies but I tell him I'm going to need him to write down his name and number. Still slightly disoriented. He gets out a matchcase to write on but, alas no pen. He goes back to the car for a pen and the next thing I know he's speeding off into the distance. I got his license number though. dial 911. JeffCo Sherriff showed up in short order. License number doesn't seem right, but I remember one other fact; the road the guy was looking for.

This area is apparently the State Patrol's bailiwick so I had to wait a long time for the trooper to show up. In the mean time the JeffCo Sheriff's officer went and actually tracked the guy down. So at least 15 minutes before the State Trooper showed up, the Sheriff came back with the malefactor in tow.

Turns out I had the license exactly right but it was a vintage plate which didn't show up for some reason and the guy admitted instantly that he had simply booked it. Needless to say this doesn't change my already abysmal opinion of Arvada drivers, but I was greatly impressed by the speed and initiative of the Jefferson County Sherrif's office.

Bottom line? who knows. I ache a lot. I landed on my right side which has the new clavicle and bad shoulder. The Land Rover hit just below my left knee, which is pretty sore. I'll have to go over the carbon frame carefully for cracks. Could have been worse.     Will I stop to help a driver in the future? Good question. I violated my own basic rule with cars however, which is to always assume that drivers are either completely incompetent or homicidal maniacs.

But I rode the 20 km home and did a quick tempo climb of Lookout Mtn, just to make sure all the bits were working.

the 'problem' of global altruism

2009-12-26T09:54:00.001-07:00

Biological explanations of altruism will naturally start with a parent's sacrifice for its offspring. This is not difficult to understand by utilitarian arguments and is readily extended to family, friends, even members of the local group (a tribe, for instance). Beyond this, it gets difficult to imagine any kind of biological advantage for altruistic behavior. Richard Dawkins stretches this to the point of a sacrifice for someone you may see again. OK, difficult but not impossible.

But now consider what I would call 'global' altruism. This is altruism of the very highest order--A Raul Wallenberg, for instance. Wallenberg put himself at great and immediate personal risk for tens of thousands of people he had no connection with; nor was he likely to benefit from his connection to these people in any way. I've never seen an even mildly convincing evolutionary explanation for this sort of behavior. It's quite possible that global altruism exists in other species, but I am unaware of any examples. Does this bahavior separate humans from other animals? I don't know. For me, the existence of global altruism remains one of the perplexing puzzles of evolution.

A reality check on health-care costs

2009-12-25T15:00:00.003-07:00

Journalists tend to be a bit credulous when it comes to large numbers. Thus we are told repeatedly that the House or Senate health-care bills will cost (fill in an astronomical number here), as if such a statement actually conveyed information. I saw a graphic on TV news recently that said the cost would be $32,849 per family--I don't remember the actual number, which is beside the point; it's the implied 1 part in 30,000 accuracy that you should be scratching your head at.

An estimate with no uncertainty assigned to it conveys no information. 0 is an estimate of Pi. A poor one, but still an estimate. Secondly, we don't have any real idea what the CBO (or whoever came up with the 871 bogo-dollar number) is trying to convey or what parts of the pervasive and normally hidden health-care costs are included in the calculation.

So here is the reality check: given that the US spends far more (per capita or as a percentage of GDP) on health-care than any other country, and achieves a system that is, on average, one of the poorer ones in the industrialized word, is it not obvious a priori that we could improve our system AND reduce costs? How about adopting the system used by any of the 36 countries ahead of us on the WHO listing for starters You don't need the CBO to tell you this. I'm not saying it would be easy, just technically possible. It's as if someone told you that an obese family of 4 spending $100,000 a year on food would need to spend an extra $100,000 per year to get healthier food. Does it even make sense?

In fact, what I really want to know is:

How much will total health care costs change as a result of a new bill? Will they go up or down and roughly by how much? This requires you to use the same measure for the before and after calculation.
How much better or worse will the new system be compared to the old system, using some reasonably objective metrics. I'm not picky about which ones. Just be up-front about it.
And finally, what are conservative uncertainty estimates for these two numbers?

If we can't do this, then we should stop pretending to be quantitative about the whole thing and admit we're just flying by the seat of the pants. This is better than just fooling yourself.

more on the titanium single speed cross rig

2009-12-13T15:05:00.003-07:00

Warning: likely only of interest to cyclocross geeks and weight weenies.
Here are the details of the build. The frame was made in Russia from a cad file that Scott Mares of Sibex Sports came up with from my geometry. With Sibex I was able to get a custom frame at less then the cost of a typical stock titanium frame. The goal was pure cyclocross and single-speed from the beginning. So, for example, horizontal fork ends were used and there is no extraneous cable routing hardware. The crankset and BB are Campy Record. I used road cranks with a 42 chainring on the outer position to get the proper chainline for the 135 mm spaced rear fork. Record headset, with Deda Newton stem and handlebars.

I've tried two different style single speed hubs. The first is a Phil Wood track hub spaced to 135 (the kiss-off should work nicely too). With this I can use the White Industry freehub which has a cog nearly as wide as a track cog. The other is a DT240S splined hub but with Surly cogs which are also nearly as stout as track cogs. My experience is that road cogs are too light and 3/32 chains brake too easily. So I only use 1/8 track chains. You might think this wouldn't work with Record road chainrings, but it does. Perfectly as far as I can tell. I've never had trouble dropping chains on the Phil hub, but I have on the DT, so to be safe, I use extra road cogs as chainguards around the cog. You can see these in the picture.

Record brake levers work fine with the TRP Mag brakes. The levers came without the shifters, so nothing to do but install them. You can see the stout titanium fork from Sibex. What you can't see from this angle is the huge mud clearance. Even with these 34 mm Tufo flexus primus tubulars. The front wheel here is a standard road 303. The rear wheel is a cross version of the 303 custom drilled by Zipp for 32 hole hubs. This wheel was built by Excel Sports in Boulder.

Looking down the San Marco Concour saddle. Titanium is certainly not as light as carbon, and apart from the Zipps, I didn't bother too much with lightweight components. Further, it's a fairly large frame. I'm 1.90 m, and seat tube is 60 cm (C-T). Still the whole thing, even with the big tufos is only slightly over 7.5 kg. If you used lightweight components (saddle, pedals, etc) you could easily shave a few hundred grams off. These pedals are Time atac (not the carbon ones).

FInally, here is the Phil Wood hub laced to a Mavic Reflex. You can see the White Industries freewheel here. The spare front wheel is an ancient Mavic SSC hub (still smooth as silk) laced to another Reflex. This hub is the oldest component I have still in daily use. It will likely outlast the uranium at Yucca Mountain should it ever be stored there.

Climate fallacy #1

2009-12-08T07:09:00.001-07:00

Small changes in inputs lead to small changes in ouputs.

This assumes the Earth is a linear system. But it's not. There are many climate-related feedback mechanisms which, once excited, can lead to unstable, out-of-control changes. For example, ice-albedo feedback. A small rise in termperature is not just a small rise in temperature. It can result in reducing the reflectivity of the Earth's surface (the albedo ) by melting ice. This in term increases the absorption of sunlight, which leads to more ice-melt and off we go. It works in the other direction too. Decreasing temperature causes the albedo to increase as ice forms. This can lead to uncontrolled cooling.

It is a respectable, if not uncontroversial, hypothesis in Earth science, that at several points in the past (roughly 750-580 MYA) this uncontrolled cooling led to massive ice formation around the entire planet. This is the snowball Earth hypothesis. Here is a paper by Paul Hoffmann, a major snowball Earth proponent.

These snowball events may have also led to immediate and rapid heating. Can you imaging sea temperatures of 50C at the equator? Or global sea ice thickness of hundreds of meters melting in barely 100 years?

So the next time someone says that a few degrees warming won't be a big deal. Be sceptical and question assumptions of climate linearity.

Climate Scoreboard

2009-12-08T06:30:00.001-07:00

N simple, inexpensive things to reduce our carbon footprint

2009-12-01T06:03:00.019-07:00

These recommendations were written in the context my local campus community but I'm sure they apply, mutatis mutandis, more generally. Send me your ideas, I'll be happy to include them.

Expensive remedies such as PV and wind are great, but it is much easier to conserve energy than to produce it. For some reasons we Americans tend to seek solutions that are expensive and sexy but require no individual effort or commitment. Oh, and by the way, we have no money so let's do nothing. Some people will think these suggestions are too hard. But hard is curing cancer. Hard is stopping domestic violence. Using a broom instead of a leaf-blower? Requiring campus vendors to provide healthy food? Trivial rewards for people who walk or ride their bikes instead of driving? It's slightly embarrassing that we even have to discuss these things. Embarrassing or not, here goes:

Make recreaction center shower facilities freely available to anyone who commutes on foot or bike. Every little bit will help encourage those considering more healthy commuting alternatives.
Intramural lawns are fine, but haven't we heard of xeric landscaping? Ditch the water-hogging bluegrass around buildings. Bluegrass in a semi-arid climate? Plus this reduces the need for smoggy lawnmowers (see below).

Ban leaf-blowers. They do nothing but pollute. Brooms actually work, don't pollute and are quiet. Hey, if it's good enough for Paris (and Rome, Madrid, etc) it should be good enough for us.
No parking on campus if you live within, say, 1.6 km, of the campus (with obvious health/disability exceptions). No more streams of healthy people from on-campus housing driving the entire 500m downhill to park on campus or, worse, work out at the gym.
Back off the air conditioning. I'm tired of freezing my burgers off just so, it would seem, folks can wear suits and ties. It's slightly insane that in 2009 I have to hope it's hot enough outside that opening my (surreptitiously unbolted) windows will actually provide a little warmth. Otherwise I hug my computer to prevent hypothermia in July/August. We could simply regard suits/ties in the summer as environmentally inappropriate attire.
Increase the albedo of the roofs. E.g., paint them white. no-brainer. Remind me to tell you my idea for albino buffalo some time.
Provide covered bike parking, bike lanes and other similar amenities that people at CU, for example, take for granted.
Close off central campus to cars. This helps get people in the habit of walking and allows for CO2 reducing xeric plants and trees.
Replace gas powerd lawnmowers by rechargeable electrics. 2-stroke engines contribute as much pollution as all cars combined. Of course, once we get with xeric landscaping their won't be much if any grass to mow.
Design buildings for passive lighting, heating and cooling. It's not rocket science. This is the problem with separating the construction costs from the maintenance costs of new buildings. Build for the future.
Promote healthy, local, carbon-reducing food on campus.

"The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." ref at HuffPo
"refusing meat" is the "single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint." ref at goveg.com
the web site Veganfacts estimates that If all Americans became vegan it would free enough grain to feed 600,000,000 people.

Encourage people to install instantaneous gas mileage meters in their cars (about $100). This is like bio-feedback for conservation. Average MPG doesn't help change your driving habbits. Once it's a game, men will compete.
Make the cost of parking proportional to the weight of your vehicle and give discounts or prime spaces to HOV. I heard it costs around $35,000 to build one covered parking space on campus. As someone who works in an asbestos filled 1950s science building and has to dumpster dive to find desks for students, this makes a whole lot of sense.

all tubulars all the time

2009-11-29T08:21:00.004-07:00

This is my fixed-gear commuter bike (a Surly Cross-Check frame/Reynolds Ouzo pro fork) And when I say commuter I mean everything from riding to the office, to shopping, going to Boulder for meetings or throwing it on a plane for a trip to the East Coast. I've done everything from the Black Hills around Mt. Rushmore, to muddy Vermont single track on this bike. One of the best investments I ever made.

The one thing I want to point out is the Mavic Reflex tubular rims. Tubulars for commuting? I hear you scoff. Yes, in this particular case, Veloflex Roubaix, which are wide, durable and incredibly comfortable. I can't remember the last time I flatted on these. I.e., more than a year ago with daily commuting on normal roads.

Plus you are to consider, how else can you get a bomb-proof 1450 gram wheelset, with Campy Record hubs for under $500? Beats me, but it won't be clinchers. When I first started racing, I would race on tubulars and train on clinchers. But in my own apples-to-apples comparison (tubular vs the open version of the same tire, Vittoria or Veloflex) I got far more flats on clinchers (yes, proper inflation and the same roads). So it simply wans't worth the trouble to have two different flat repair systems. I gave my son my Record/Mavic-CXP33 wheels and haven't looked back. If I ride through glass accidentally, of course, I will stop if possible and wipe of the tires, but I don't baby these things.

Except for cyclocross, my current favorite tires are Veloflex. I use the Criterium and Service Corse for racing and the Roubaix for training. And the training includes quite of bit of dirt/gravel roads up in the mountains (e.g., the Gross Res road above Boulder).

Discussions involving tubulars vs clinchers invariably descend into the theological. My only point is to answer a question I get all the time: you train on tubulars? What, you live inside a velodrome? Plus, I actually kinda like gluing up tires. It gives me a chance to spend quality time in my garage inhaling solvent fumes and communing with the gods of cycling yore.

the flatbed scanner as a cheap digital microscope

2009-11-28T18:57:00.002-07:00

Just got a new HP Photosmart all-in-one (scanner/printer/copier) etc. Kudos to HP for producing the powerful open-source tools that let Linux users get the most out of their hardware (HPLIP). For years I have used flatbed scanners for all sorts of microscopy and measurement applications in my lab; applications that have lots of folks scratching their heads when they see the results that a few hundred bucks of hardware can produce if you let it.

Consider this. At 4800 dpi (what xsane lets me do with the new scanner), that works out to 189 dots per mm. Or a pixel size of 1/189 mm, which is 5 microns! To measure something small, just scan it and count the number of pixels. The 'n' pictured is from from e pluribus unum on a US dime. The image is 159 pixels across, so at 4800 dpi, that is .84 mm wide. Not bad for something you can pick up at the corner big-box for a lot less than $200.

the three laws of inference

2009-11-24T13:23:00.004-07:00

If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it --- Anon

The problem of making inferences in the presence of uncertainty is ubiquitous both in science and in society. Just look at the controversy over the trends in Earth temperature and how such data influence public policy. What most people don't realize is how uncertainty permeates even the simplest measurements (which are almost never direct) and hence the whole chain of measurements that goes into even the simplest problem. Here are some simple ideas to keep in mind when interpreting claims in the news

1) with big enough error bars, any model will fit the data.
2) with enough degrees of freedom in the model, you can fit any data.
3) it is impossible to achieve finite uncertainty without using quantifiable prior information.

Here's a simple example. If you see a bunch of points on a graph with no error bars, and someone claims that 'a straight line fits the data', then without an explicit account of the uncertainties, it is impossible to verify the statement. The straight line WILL fit the data, by definition, if the error bars are big enough. On the other hand, if the error bars become negligibly small, then the straight line CANNOT fit the data, unless the data were constructed directly from the straight line, which, of course, won't happen in practice.

Further, to say that you believe something, in itself carries no quantitative significance. This is the problem Bayesians run into all the time. They make so-called a priori assumptions but rarely try to justify them rigorously. The results can thus be highly misleading. Some even believe, for instance, that knowing a parameter is between a and b, is equivalent to saying it's equally likely to be any number between a and b. Obviously this is absurd. So, if you want to play the Bayesian game, you need to a) verify your prior rigorously, or b) make sure your posterior inferences don't depend strongly on the prior.

Definition: a priori in this context means whatever information you have before you analyze your data. After you've analyzed your data in the light of your prior, it becomes posterior.

the problem is not too little energy

2009-11-16T12:47:00.001-07:00

Jared Diamond, January 2, 2008 New York Times: "Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures."

Diamond also does a great job explaining why the problem is not too little energy but too much consumption. He points out that if the developing world were brought up to the standards of consumption and waste of the developed world, it would be as if the Earth's population were 72 billion people!

7.5 kg custom single-speed cyclocross

2009-11-16T07:42:00.001-07:00

When you remove all the mud, this bike weighs 7.5 kg. Some nontraditional features. Single speed. Campy Record crankset (42 chainring), hs, bb, brake levers, etc. Custom Zipp 32h tubular rear wheel with a DT 240 s hub. Training rear wheel is a Mavic Reflex tubular with a Phil Wood ss hub. I worked with Scott Mares of Sibex Sports to design the geometry. He sends the Cad file to Russia where the thing is CNC'd from titanium and presto you have a frameset. It was fun putting together. TRP says not to use road levers with their brakes, but it works fine. The Zipps are really stiff and light. Excel got the custom drilled 303 cyclocross rim from Zipp and built the wheel. The front wheel is a standard road 303. One thing I discovered the hard way: don't use a 3/32 road chain for single speed cross. They break. So I use thick 3/32 cogs like the Surly or a White Industries freewheel. These are much stouter than road cogs and they work with a 1/8 track chain. This chain works fine with the Record chainring.

There is so much clearance, it has been suggested that I could run it with 29er MTB wheels. May try that over the summer.