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

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.

There’s a microprocessor in there, so that if you wanted to do something interesting, maybe you could. The microprocessor has the option to control a voltage doubler (PD2), to turn on a battery for a standlight (PD3), to count wheel spins (PD6 and PD7), to monitor voltage (PC5) and current (PC0), and to control both the steady light level (PWM on PB2), or to jam it hard on to prevent overvoltage (PD1).

I did a mess of simulation first, then built a simple test circuit, and it seemed to work; in particular, it pulled a steady current across a change in the load, and it did not put a big AC signal on the power control (i.e., it was not oscillating; that’s what the little feedback capacitor on the op-amp is for).

The constraints of stuffing it in a tube gave me some incentive to get all the wires at one end, but I couldn’t get them all there. Spare microprocessor pins couldn’t all fit at the end, and there’s a regulated pin that shares current with the LED supply. You could use this to run another supply, say a 5V supply to charge a USB device. The lights would dim as necessary to maintain a healthy current and voltage from the hub.

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?

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.

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.

That they even had to think about this is appalling.

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.

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.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/your-money/why-drivers-get-more-commuter-tax-benefits-than-bus-riders.html

Of course, the bicycle subsidy is all of $20/month, only eligible if the bike is used for a “substantial portion” (majority?) of your commute, and cannot be combined with any other commuting subsidy.

$230/month is $2760 per year. At a 25% marginal tax rate, that’s $690 a year in federal subsidy (taxes not levied) on driving. For comparison, per-mile, for the average US driver (13476 miles per year), that is over a $.05 / mile federal tax subsidy (it’s not entirely fair to call this a per-mile subsidy, since it is for parking, not travel, but it gives a sense of the magnitude — working only from direct costs, some people like to claim that the government subsidy for “driving”, meaning roads, is only about a penny per mile.)

At this point, I think I’d be happiest if all these subsidies were just dialed down to zero. If parking’s expensive, let it be expensive. If people don’t like that, there are other choices. Why not let the invisible hand do its work?

Normal rates are 15mm per year. Where weather was warmest and ice melted most, the bedrock rose 20mm in only 5 months (over 3x the normal annual rate).

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/greenlift.htm

Comments on the news reports are (as usual) polluted by dumbasses who think they know more than a tenured professor in Earth Sciences.

The only point missing is how dangerous (to others) it is to “fudge” the speed limit. 22 in a 20, that’s not really speeding, is it? Use a very conservative estimate of increased risk for small speed increases (exponential between 20 and 30mph), each 2 mph increase in speed compounds 55% onto the risk — so 22mph has a 7.8% risk, 24 has 12%, 26 has 19%, and 28 has 29%. It’s a big deal.

The flip side of this is that adding safety is really cheap; just establish low speed limits where cars might crash into pedestrians, and enforce them, and you’ve made the roads far safer.

The Urban Country describes an experimental bike lane made by anonymous stencil artists and other people working with a small collection of trash to mark the “lane”. A woman died at this intersection because a truck lazily cut the corner close and crushed her. Yet, with paint and trash, we discover that there is plenty of room for traffic and trucks, and there is plenty of room for them to turn with space reserved for bicycles, and people will pay attention to an incredibly ad hoc bike lane. It’s sadly late for her, but now that we know how easy it is, what’s stopping our allegedly safety-minded road departments?

It’s some sort of a Brazilian ag firm: http://www.sinueloagropecuaria.com.br/. I’m willing to give them a link, because wow, Portuguese spam for cattle IUDs, who knew?

Of course, for Brooks, this is just an excuse to riff on how defective and self-congratulatory our modern culture is, because “We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness.”

Sadly, this must also have been true back in 1961, when Stanley Milgram began his experiments. Pre-experiment, people predicted only 1.2% of test subjects would go beyond a strong shock, but in fact, about 2/3 did.

The lesson I draw from the Milgram experiments if that you expect people to do the right thing, you had better look to people who are not quick to respect authority, and people who are not quick to conform. I don’t recall seeing much praise for that sort of riff-raff in his columns, ever.

Idiot Brooks. I don’t know why the NYTimes continues to pay him.

Unfortunately, we had some sort of power failure last night weekend nide days ago ago that left the verizon router in a borken state, and I could not unbork it until I had done a factory reset. Having it in default state seemed to interfere with our use of OpenDNS, so I had to restore bridge mode.
That was a pain.

Actually, it may have been the Linksys router that was borked. I have a spare router (doesn’t everyone?) that is a monster upgrade.

The two sets of instructions that seemed to work (that is, after trying A, then trying B, it worked) were these two:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1145636

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r17679150-Howto-make-ActionTec-MI424WR-a-network-bridge

Some of the steps seem to be timing dependent, meaning, do them quickly, then check afterwards to see if they took.

Screen shots below from a working configuration:

“Archive does not exist: /Users/dr2chase/worksapce/PFC/default_repository/caches/bytecode_cache/*”

I had to type that in by hand because the Eclipse guys have not yet mastered the art of rendering selectable text that I can copy and paste in their little alert windows. (That’s another bug.)

Of course, the archive does exist; that character string is the convention used by another part of Eclipse to designate “all the jar files in this directory”.

Their error message is doubly bogus, because the line I am clicking corresponds to a file that appears somewhere else on the debug classpath. It could simply skip the error and carry on to see if a later entry succeeds. A likely workaround would be to reorder the entries in my classpath, but that is not an option here because we have duplicated class files on the path, and order matters.

This is not a showstopper by any means, but it is tedious, and removes a feature from Eclipse that I normally use and expect to work.

Eclipse version:

Version: Helios Service Release 2
Build id: 20110218-0911

MacOS version 10.6.8

And why I am blogging this, instead of entering it into their bug database? I’ve tried that in the past; they yield equally satisfactory results, but this is easier for me.

(Lack of) timely service. Automobile service is usually make an appointment, then same-day. A really big job takes two days. Thankfully, I do most of my own repairs, but I can’t do everything (yet). Wheel-building seems to take weeks. I had to send a hub away for warranty service, and it has been almost a month, with no certain word that it has been sent back to me yet.

Thankfully, most things that usually go wrong, I can fix.

Maybe this is an artifact of cycling still being mostly recreational in this country; rather than an even distribution of failures and services, it is instead clustered around weekends.

The Waltz from Rosemary’s Baby — Brave Combo does a nice rendition.And then there’s a great huge list of all the rude songs we never seriously considered. We made a mix tape for some friends who were getting married, they were very fond of it. Some of it is still trapped on vinyl.

And since then, so many new, excellent songs that belong on that playlist. Love me some Beautful South, hard to top “Don’t Marry Her” and “Song for Whoever”.

(Yes, I was a college DJ. Did a Heart of Darkness set once, was very proud of that.)

Manitoba wants you to ride your bike, too (pdf). Has a great picture of a trail-next-to-rail.

If a car runs you down and puts you in the hospital in NYC, don’t expect much from the police.

(He put it on SlashDot, I presume that means he doesn’t want to keep it a secret.)

The grey dots are individual datapoints, the pink line is the average. Looks pretty flat, so clearly, no warming, right? It made the poster “not sure”. Grizzled internet veterans recognize this as concern trolling, mixed with weasel words, so that when the poster is accused of being a denier, he can (correctly) proclaim that he said nothing of the sort, he was merely unconvinced by the data, and wanted to share his concern, and I am clearly a Very Bad Person with An Agenda who Jumps To Conclusions and Makes Arguments in Bad Faith, and I Didn’t Read His Post Carefully Enough. (Golly, you think maybe I have heard this before?)

But look at the graph more carefully (click for higher-res, at least till the image disappears). It’s plotted on a Kelvin scale, and the Y-axis spans 130 degrees Kelvin. Could you spot a 1-degree Kelvin rise in that pink line, especially given the blizzard of grey dots? It’s there — lay another window edge across it, to see if the pink line is really flat. And how much warming has been claimed, for a global average? 0.74 degrees Kelvin in the 20th century, which is just about what we see here. The graph refutes nothing at all.

One could similarly plot a graph of ocean depths, and then take the average, and then proudly proclaim that the average is flat. Suppose it rose by 1 part in 1000, that cannot be much, can it? Ten times that didn’t look like much here, after all. But the average depth of the ocean is 12400 feet; 0.1% is 12 feet of water, yet it wouldn’t show up at all if graphed like this.

For the denier crowd, this is the sort of “science” and “analysis” that “refutes global warming”. (Oh, but he said nothing of the sort, he was merely “not sure”. Right.)

Per capita, oil consumption is down since 1973.

In 2005 we hit our all-time peak oil consumption of 20.8 Mbbl/day — but with a population of 296 million. Per capita, 0.07 barrel/day of oil, or 14% less. Imports are up (13.7 Mbbl/day), partly because of increased demand, but more because domestic production is down (5.2 Mbbl/day)

Obtaining actual energy independence is indeed a difficult job, both because our population continues to grow, and because we have consumed much of our easily-available domestic supply. We can see that this will be difficult, not because our imports are increasing, but because imports are such a large fraction of our total consumption.

Nonetheless, failing to perfectly achieve our goal can still have good effects. If we had maintained 1973 per-capita consumption, we would import 3 million barrels more each day. That consumption would drive oil prices even higher, further compounding the damage to our trade balance. There is room for improvement, and the new efficiency goals recognize this, and our experience since 1973 demonstrates we will not convert all this additional efficiency into an equal amount of additional driving. Driving takes time, and there are only so many hours in a day to drive.

We can certainly do more to cut consumption. More efficient automobiles help, but better yet is to use them more efficiently. With the advent of social networks and more cars appearing that are linked to the internet, “casual carpooling” could be made easier and more organized. This provides a quick, low-cost, and ample boost to passenger-mpg. There are already startups attempting to make money on this opportunity. Another choice is to avoid driving altogether for shorter trips. This doesn’t work for everyone, but many cities and towns within 128 are quite dense and manageable on smaller, slower vehicles such as bicycles and scooters. This has the additional advantage of reduced traffic and parking demand for people who are still stuck in cars. What lacks there is the infrastructure and driver awareness necessary to make more people feel that this is a safe and comfortable option. If we are sincere in our intention to achieve energy independence, we’ll do all these things, and more. Domestic production might still fall short, but we’d be better off for trying.

yours,

David Chase

If we were serious about energy independence, we would in fact need to do “everything”. Bicycle infrastructure to get people out of cars altogeher, more efficient cars, ubiquitous ride-sharing, congestion charges, and as many costs amortized on a per-mile basis as possible (auto insurance is a large cost, per-mile, but you could also accumulate money in a “repair account”). Double the efficiency, double the passengers per car, convert 20% of “trips” to bicycle or electric scooters. Convert cars to e-cars wherever possible, turn those into smart-loads and storage so that they charge when energy is available, and supply energy in a pinch when it is needed. Revert to trains for long-haul containerized cargo as much as possible, use trucks for short-haul at the end-points. Don’t bet on ethanol till we get cellulosic conversion working, on some crop that we can grow sustainably with little water and fertilizer (not corn).

(Image credit: Robin Utrecht/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

Look at all those bikes. Imagine how much space they would take if they were cars. Think of all the other things that cities get to do with that extra spaces, or of all that economic activity that is only possible because bike parking is so compact.

The new trick, is to use a long skinny funnel, and to put the dye base in a squirt bottle. This lets me dump the powdered dye in the funnel, leave the measuring spoon there, and then carefully squirt the base on the funnel and spoons to rinse it all down into the bottle I am filling. As soon as the funnel is clean, remove it, rotate the bottle being filled as you squirt down the side to bust up all the little dye clumps. Works great, I did eight bottles this way, only had to rinse the funnel twice, and my hand once, and then it was only little drops, not huge splashes of dye.

And one prop already went awry, and a medium-sized limb is cracked, though not detached.

Many pictures below.

Here’s the boingboing article, which references this NASA science brief, which in turn references these two(PDF, melt rate) articles(PDF, paleoclimate), which contain the real meat, which of course is not discussed in the “popular” articles (or even really in the NASA Science Brief).

The fast explanation is that paleoclimate shows, in times with climates similar to our new and predicted one, ice sheets melting significantly (meters of sea level rise) in as little as a century’s time. That doesn’t match our currently observed melt rates, Greenland and Antarctic icecap melt is projected to only contribute 10 centimeters by 2100 (from 2011).

How sure are we of a constant-rate ice melting? With what little data we have, if you choose to fit a quadratic melt (melt rate increases linearly with time) we already get a better fit than if linear. (This is a conservative, simple choice for increase melt rate. Why not cubic, or quartic, or exponential? Quadratic will give the least-alarming answers of the bunch.) A quadratic fit predicts between 58 and 98 centimeters of melt, with an expected value of 78cm. That’s a lot more than 10.

But James Hansen is a bit more alarmed and a bit less conservative, because of the paleoclimate data. Even the high-end quadratic estimate is not quite a meter, even starting the century at 2000. He sees measurements implying multiple meters, and either we need a corresponding multiple of the quadratic acceleration term (because perhaps our temperature estimations are buggy) or we need a melt rate that grows more quickly than just linear in time (perhaps meltwater makes glaciers move faster, smaller sea ice caps reduce albedo, allow more circulation of sea water to the glacier face, who knows?)

So at this stage, we don’t have a physical model that would justify a particular melt rate that is faster, but we do have measurements that suggest it could be quadratic, and we have paleoclimate that suggests it could be faster than that. Big fun.

Even a meter starts to cause a few problems. If nothing else, it backs up the flood plain by 3 feet for serious storms. At 3 meters, part of Cambridge’s fresh water supply (Fresh Pond) goes below sea level. Where I grew up, 3 meters cuts all but one road out of the county, for a county of about 900,000 people.

There’s no excuse for any of this — not for the road (mal-)design, not for the ludicrously high speed limits, not for the idea that cars should not stop, ANYWHERE, when a mom with small kids needs to cross a road, not for the coddling of drunk drivers, not for the idiot who decided to prosecute the victim, not for the members of the jury who voted to convict. This is an insult to moms, to blacks, to people who take the bus, and to pedestrians. This is an abomination.

We have similar crap infrastructure here in Massachusetts. That section of road is part of my daily commute; the crosswalk-less section extends off both ends of the photos shown, for a total length of 2.4 miles.

And cyclists read this and think “you are SO right, we do agree.” Yes, we are smug, and somehow we stay smug, no matter how often it is pointed out. If you take the trouble to think it through (quite an imposition for some people, I know) there’s a bunch of good reasons to ride a bicycle, and not too many good reasons for driving a car, mostly boiling down to saving time, avoiding sweat, and worries about the careless way that “other people” drive their cars.

So if you are tempted by one of those products online, Just Say No. Get a professional to repair it instead. Learn from my mistakes.