Mistah Kurtz – he dead

I am really enjoying this Romney vs Gingrich contest in Florida. Romney is one of the Hollow Men, willing to say or do anything to get the nomination.

But Gingrich? Mr. Kurtz, clearly. “Are my methods unsound?” “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

This time for sure, bicycle light design

Not to be confused with this post.

Trying two new things, and one of them certainly worked in a prototype.

Thing #1, is to make the printed circuit board fit in a 1-inch tube. That means I can stuff it either in my steerer tube, or in my seat tube, out of sight and mostly protected from the weather.

Thing #2, which is a little bit trickier, but made a little bit easier by the amazing op-amps we can buy nowadays, is to build a current monitor that works from a few-millivolt signal above ground. This means that no matter what is attached in the way of lights, it will pull “the right amount” of power from a hub dynamo.

Two cycle tracks

One is officially inbound to Cambridge, the other is officially outbound from Cambridge. The two tracks are on opposite sides of Concord Ave.

On one side, we have an almost completely unbroken cycle track adjacent to a sidewalk. There’s only one place on the whole stretch where a car might drive across it. Together they make a great wide flat space, and when it snows, it is plowed.

On the other side the cycle track is cut several times by cross strets and driveways, and sometimes it is level with the sidewalk, sometimes it is level with the street. It is not plowed.

And they could have plowed it, but just decided not to:

The plow didn’t fit on the sidewalk, so they plowed the cycle track here, but only as long as they were forced to.

I have to wonder, what they heck were they thinking when they built this second cycle track? Running bicycles across driveways and cross streets is a recipe for accidents, and after spending all the money to build this thing, they don’t even plow it (and when it’s not covered with snow, it’s often full of gravel and sand). Why waste the money? Why put those arrows on both sides to attempt to guilt cyclists into doing something unsafe? The inbound side is safe and attractive, why not just shift the whole road a few feet and put both directions over there?

Cargo experiments

I rescued an antique Raleigh from someone’s trash a few years ago. I tend to ride it into Cambridge when the conditions are not-too-bad, because it is (far) less valuable than my cargo bike. However, I get tired of carrying stuff on my back, so I decided to add some cargo ability to it. This turned into a slightly more involved project than originally planned.

Step one, after some research into bike racks, was to buy an Azor/Steco pickup frame rack.

This took some fiddling to shim between the down tube and the rack. It eventually fit. Unfortunately, the rack would interfere somewhat with the front brake, and it was clear that on a bad day it might activate the brake for me. This could be very bad. I had been thinking about an upgrade to a front dynamo; this forced the issue, and I bought a Sturmey-Archer X-FD dynamo hub and drum brake and built a wheel around it. I had to spread the fork; the (very) old original front hub was only 86mm wide, not the current standard of 100mm. In hindsight, I might have been better off with the XL-FDD (bigger, stronger drum brake), but I’ve also heard that drum brakes need to wear in for a while and get stronger after they do.

This gave me power for lights, too, which is a good thing.

I had bought some dry bags for my big bike on sale, and decided to try one for cargo, since I had seen one used like this with a CETMA rack.

This is what it looked like on the CETMA rack:

His bag was not quite so huge, and because the CETMA rack turns with the handlebars, can be cinched to them more tightly. The “right” way to attach the non-steering cargo to the steering handlebars, I think, would be with a loop around the bag and a little attachment at the back. Plan B is to just get a great big box.

Riding a bike in the snow

It finally snowed, and I had put on snow tires yesterday because of the weather report. I put this off as long as I can because it adds a ton of rolling resistance and messes up the handling, but it’s nice to have traction when things get messy.

Snow tires, for bicycles, are different in three ways. First, they have studs, and the better ones (the ones that last) have studs made from carbide. These dig into the ice, if you hit ice. Second, they look a lot more like offroad tires with tread and lugs for digging into the snow. This varies; snow tires for on-road commuting may not have much extra tread, because the assumption is that the roads are good except where water got on the road and froze. Third, snow tires often use a grippier rubber compound. I notice this on the Nokians; when new, they smell funny.

This time around, it seems like I finally got things figured out. The front wheel (Nokian W240) has better grip on ice (if the front slips, it’s easy to fall down). The rear wheel (Schwalbe Snow Stud) has studs that hit the ice if the bike is tilted (if it is going into a skid), but otherwise has a pretty aggressive tread, because it’s often the case that you don’t have enough traction in the rear to push the bike through heavy snow. Today, I was able to easily ride through three-inch deep snow, which is more than I recall handling happily in the past.

I have a chaincase, which keeps snow/salt/grit off the chain. This is good. Just like snow-ice builds up on the bottomside of cars, it builds up on bicycles:

The bike also has lights run from a dynamo for daytime use, because visibility is less good, and because windshields may be foggy on the inside or iced on the outside.

Actually riding in the snow does involve some extra tricks. At least today, on not very well-plowed roads, the rear end broke loose a couple of times. Just like in a car, you turn into the skid, and just keep going. Good thing about a bike is that (unless you are foolishly bombing downhill), if the snow is deep enough that you are skidding a lot, you won’t be going very fast anyhow.

Cars are a bit of a pain. Their drivers tend to overestimate their traction, so you’d like a little extra space just in case. You also want to stay clear on slushy roads because they spray slush sideways, and who wants that? It might be unacceptable to throw filthy snowballs at strangers, but if you’re in a car, it’s a-ok to spray them with gunk.

For the cold, you want good gloves. I also wear a thin sock hat under my helmet, and grew a beard for the winter cold. For shoes, nothing fancy, just winter boots (I ride a bike with “normal” pedals).

But otherwise, biking in the snow works pretty well.

Apparently the New York Times acts as a stenographer for propagandists

Public editor asks: “Should we not do this?“

That they even had to think about this is appalling.

Insincere “skeptic” shills

Interesting BBC article, on how, if it were not for our CO2 emissions, we should expect another ice age in 1500 years. It includes some discussion of how low CO2 would need to be for this to occur — one estimate is 240ppm, others are as high as 270ppm. Our current levels are 390ppm, and we passed 320ppm in 1965.

Yet the reporter manages to find (why?) people who insist that this means that our current unrestrained CO2 emissions are a good thing. These presumably are the same people who end up overdosed on medicine — because if a little is good, why not take a lot?

They also have a blinkered view of planning for the future. Once we dig/drill all the carbon and burn it, it’s out of our control. Eventually it will be reabsorbed into the oceans and other carbon sinks, and we’ll have deprived ourselves of a handy knob for warming the planet. If CO2 levels sink below the ice age threshold while we are still in a glacier-friendly part of the Milankovitch cycle, we’ll be up a frozen creek without a paddle. You can tell these guys are insincere shills, because if they really cared about preventing the next ice age, they’d be in favor of throttling emissions back to much lower (but non-zero) levels, and preserving our ability to inject CO2 into the atmosphere in the future.

Mandatory helmet laws

Mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers, of course. Why?

Cars crashes are a significant source of serious head injuries:

almost half of all brain injuries severe enough to require hospitalization (49%, 145,000 people) are the result of motor vehicle accidents. These injuries frequently result in death (56,000) or lasting disability (99,000).

There’s little downside.
Unlike motorcycle helmets, car helmets need not be heavy because drivers are somewhat protected by their cars. Drivers, unlike bicycle riders, are not engaged in significant physical activity, so they don’t need to worry about getting a sweaty head. Some people may be deterred from driving by a mandatory helmet law, just as cyclists in Australia were deterred by their mandatory helmet law. However, while reduced cycling is bad for public health (39% higher mortality rate for non-cyclist commuters — a catastrophe), reduced driving is not; if anything, by displacing people into other forms of transit (walking, cycling, possibly to/from mass transit), it can be a public health benefit.

It is certainly true that some people may not like the idea of wearing helmets to drive or ride in cars, but the same is true of some people riding motorcycles, and some people riding bicycles, yet helmet use is mandatory in most places for motorcyclists and some places for bicyclists. A helmet law for cars would be relatively convenient (just leave the helmets locked in the car when not in use) and less of a burden than the laws that already exist for two-wheeled transportation, and would save more lives.

Bent the needle on my irony meter

Someone commenting on some article about Ron Paul was complaining that the bought-and-paid-for media were not giving him the serious coverage that he deserves. This could easily be true, but I thought that bought-and-paid-for was exactly what Libertarians liked best.

Shiny new borked infrastructure in Burlington

Burlington (Massachusetts) or perhaps Nordblom (owner of a good-sized office park in Burlington) has been upgrading some of their roads. Overall, I cannot complain, it is better for me than riding on the Middlesex Turnpike (which is a terrible road; no crosswalks, insultingly incomplete sidewalks, crap in the road, and rumpled pavement).

But, at a shiny new rotary, with shiny new granite curbs and correctly painted crosswalks and yield teeth, they botched the accessible crosswalk:

It’s about a 4-inch step, where it should be flush instead. Maybe there’s more asphalt coming? Or maybe the asphalt will be raised later, in a crosswalk hump? Both sides have the step, so it seems to not be an accident.