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Thursday, October 5th, 2006
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1:27 pm - Ah, nuts
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I'm hopeless at putting stuff in LJ. Sorry everyone.
But I wanted to have a place to just write about my bike rides, and doing long-distance rides, and routes for riding long distances in the Portland area, so I started a seperate blog over at blogspot. I figured that some folks might want to read about that without wading through all my political noodling.
So, that new project has pretty much been consuming my bloggy time and thinking lately.
But there's a big piece of cycling news over there now that people reading this may enjoy hearing about. And, you might like reading about my cycling adventures in general.
If so, point your browsers to The Long Haul.
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| Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
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9:48 am - Joementum!
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From yesterday's Connecticut primary:
Precincts Reporting: 95.45%
# votes %
Lieberman 129,271 48.10
Lamont 139,496 51.90
Can I get a hallelujah!!
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
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1:52 pm - Oh teh noes!
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With some small assistance from a soldering iron, my best friend Jeme has spawned a kind of all-purpose omni-media entertainment unit that has its (distant) ancestry in an X-Box. Through it, one has access to audio tracks (accompanied by visualization), video tracks, and of course, X-Box games. These collections of binary digits waft through the very aether between his and fellow geeks' house next door courtesy of a small wireless transponder, giving the unit access to several hundred gigabytes worth of hard drive space. A few weeks ago, Jeme realized that the unit had gone out and retrieved some useful piece of data without his express command. I pointed out that such behavior, while useful, was also kind of creepy. It's as though when James Cameron imagined SkyNet in the original Terminator movie 20 years ago, humanity took it not as a warning, but as a goal.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Those several hundred gigs of drive space contain, among other delights, the complete collection of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show, seasons 1 through 7. Jeme has insisted that I give the show a fair shot, and even though the first season has had the unevenness that one expects from a show that has yet to find its legs, I'm finding it charming and strangely compelling. The last episode I saw, "The Puppet Show", was quite good by any standard.
Except of course, with a little more than 6 full seasons left to view, I've got over 130 episodes to go. I am lost.
Postlog: Jeme convinced me to undertake this endeavor by exposing me to several later episodes to give me a taste of the character that it developed later on (including the delightful "Once More, With Feeling"). It is an indication of Jeme's utter tone-deafness, though, that one of the episodes he chose was "The Body". I believe my exact words after about 15 minutes of watching were, "Jeme, you fucking asshole!"
current music: Credence Clearwater Revival -- Chronicle
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| Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
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3:54 pm - Our story so far...
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So, sometimes I get to thinking that maybe I should use this space to actually, you know, talk about what has been going on in my life. Usually, inertia keeps me from acting on the impulse, and it subsequently passes.
Well, it's happened again, but this time, I've realized that it's possible that anyone who is still out there reading might potentially be interested in hearing what's been going on in my life.
So, to catch up, here are some of the high points of the last 6 months, in no particular order:
( Read more... )
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| Friday, June 2nd, 2006
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10:22 am - Wacky Races
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Okay, time to dust off the old imaginations. We're going to do a story problem.
Ready?
Imagine that you are doing a 1 hour (bicycle) road race on a track that is a 2 mile loop. The rule is, if you cross the finish line on or after 1 hour, you get a checkered flag, and you are done. Otherwise, you just keep riding.
Also imagine that your goal as a racer is to use the motivation of competition to try to bring out of yourself the very best performance that you can give. Winning is good, but it is secondary. The motivation to win combined with a set of strong fellow racers is what will allow you to be at your very peak. To finish the race knowing that you reached down deep for every last resource at your command, and that you left it all on the track.
Now, skip ahead. It's nearly the end of the race. Don't even worry about where the competition is, they're irrelevant to this discussion. You have been on the track for 58 minutes and you have 1 mile left in your current lap. Up to this point, you have been averaging lap times around 4:30 for every 2 miles. Here is the word problem: given the conditions set up in the previous two paragraphs, what do you do? Do you sprint for the finish line, or do you continue at your current pace?
Here is the answer key.
If you sprint for the finish line, your speed increases to above 30 mph. This means that you are covering a mile in under 2 minutes. You reach the end of your lap gasping, rubber legged, and broken. But since 58 plus under 2 minutes is less than 60, you now have to do one more lap in that condition. The finish line has moved 2 miles down the road.
If you maintain your current pace, you reach the finish line and the race ends, and you still have plenty left in the tank.
In a nutshell, if you do your 1 mile pace, you have 3 miles to go. If you do your 3 mile pace, you are done in 1 mile. Does either outcome sound to you like it would be satisfy your goal of performing at your very best, highest level? Your choices are either limping across the line exhausted or limping across the line with plenty left in the tank. Either way, you are forced to limp across the line. And the competition comes down to, who recovers the fastest after blowing himself up.
To me, it sounds like a no-win situation.
On top of that, if, in another race, you happen to find yourself with 1 mile to go and only 30 seconds left, then you can sprint with impunity. So if you're just a little bit faster or a little bit slower in the first 58 minutes, everything works out. Again though, if you have around 2 minutes left in that last mile, you limp in, one way or another. But so then how are these two races even comparable, if we're holding the same event from one year to the next? It's basically random. Might as well draw straws.
What is incredibly frustrating about the situation above is that it's so easy to avert. All the race director has to do is pick a lap, either figure out what kind of lap times are being turned over and give a bell on the last lap before an hour (and just live with it if the final time comes in a couple seconds early) or give a bell on the first lap after an hour. Then the racers can have a nice, satisfying big finish, and know that they left it all on the track.
I hate stupid race directors.
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| Thursday, February 16th, 2006
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3:39 pm - Bye
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| Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
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3:14 pm - Car Culture Still Sucks
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| Monday, February 13th, 2006
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11:36 am - The Miracle of the Wheel + the Inclined Plane
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My friend Jeme recently scored an '83 Specialized Sequoia. Which Grant Peterson says is the best production bike ever made.
Jeme rides a fixie currently, but has been wanting to add a multi-geared touring oriented bike to his stable for a while. He was in the local bike coop (Citybikes) a few weeks ago, and they mentioned that they had just gotten in a Sequoia in his size. I urged him to consider it very seriously, and he ended up buying it.
He's rebuilding the bike to suit his own needs and preferences, and part of that has included replacing the drop handlebars with moustache bars. It's a sensible setup, and should work well for him.
One decision he's had to make is what he should do for shifters. The bike came with downtube shifters, but barcons have a great deal of appeal on moustache bars. In the interests of frugality, he's keeping the downtube shifters.
But that left open the question of what to stick into the ends of the handlebars. The usual solution is a little plastic cap from Cinelli (or whoever), but Jeme was going to wrap the bars in cloth tape and shellac them, and a black cap would be somewhat incongruous. His roommate had the ingenuity to suggest wine corks.
Jeme was telling me about this on the phone the other day, and describing how sharp the finished product looked. In the back of my mind, I was considering how he would work things out if he eventually wanted to change to bar-end shifters. In a moment of inspired silliness, I said to him: "...but Jeme! What if it doesn't work out, what if you decide the corks are a mistake? How will you get them out? If only there were some method, some device, for extracting a cork from a cylindrical opening!"
current mood: silly
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| Friday, January 20th, 2006
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4:04 pm - Got A Letter...
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...from the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at PSU yesterday.
Did I get admitted? Will I be going to school to get my Master's in Civil Engineering?
The answer:
In like Flynn, motherfuckers!
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| Tuesday, January 10th, 2006
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11:05 am - True Progress
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I want to expand on my last entry. One of the things that I tried to do in it was to posit a series of questions. The purpose of those questions was to apply them to ensure a balance between the three pillars of the Democratic party (populism, progressivism, and liberalism) in policy and rhetoric. I came up with questions that combined these concepts in various ways to give a different emphasis to each, with the idea that by asking these questions we could avoid sacrificing one pillar for the sake of the others.
I was never very happy with the question that I came up with for progressivism ("Are there consequences to corruption? Is the government accountable?"), however. I didn't and don't feel that it really captured the entirety of what progressivism is about. I came up with it by thinking about the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which took up the mantle of fighting corruption and un-democratic concentrations of power. Teddy Roosevelt did more for the word "progressive" than anybody through his work fighting trusts and monopolies, and his Progressive Party's agenda included direct election of senators, process for the recall of elected officials, and the creation of initiative referendum. All of these ideas fall pretty neatly under the aegis of anti-corruption and accountability.
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| Saturday, December 31st, 2005
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3:16 pm - Democratic Trinity
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I hate to focus so exclusively on making comments on the work of a single writer, but I must say, I've been from one end of this grand ol' interweb to the other, and I haven't found another person whose views are as interesting and illuminating as Stirling Newberry's at The Blogging of the President. And he's as prolific as he is insightful, which makes it a full time job for a hack like me to keep up with him. So, while I apologize for my what can appear to be monomania, I'm probably not going to change it anytime soon.
Today's subject is the philosophical and rhetorical foundation of the democratic party. Not what it is, but what it should be. What it has to be. Stirling isolates three forces that compete and cooperate in the strategy, policy, and rhetoric of the Democratic party. He identifies them as populism, progressivism, and liberalism, and provides taxonomic distinctions between them that make sense. More than make sense, really -- his explanation makes sense in such a way that it answers questions I didn't know I had. It's a good article. I highly recommend that you follow the link earlier in this paragraph and read it. The rest of this won't make much sense unless you do.
( Read more... )
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| Tuesday, December 13th, 2005
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11:32 am - Wow...
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| Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
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4:03 pm - Opportunities
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There's a concept in economics called opportunity cost. The idea is that part of choosing to take one course of action means paying for your choice by losing your opportunity to take other actions. This is most commonly thought of in terms of money; you spent the money here, so you can't spend it there. But there are all kinds of things that you could be spending (time comes to mind), it doesn't have to be money. If you spend all day in bed, it's not just a neutral activity; you've paid for your sloth by not baking a batch of bread, working in your garden, going to a movie, or riding your bike. Of course, if you go on a bike ride, you pay the opportunity cost of not lying around in bed all day. Anyway, I think it's a fascinating concept.
Every Labor Day weekend in Seattle they hold a famous arts & music festival called Bumbershoot. A dozen musical stages, jugglers, dancers, acrobats, and poets vie for your attention. There are booths selling crafts. And then there's the food. Rows and rows of vendors, from which all kinds of pleasing smells waft down the midway.
I've attended Bumbershoot probably 6 times in the last 10 years, and strangely, I always have trouble when it comes time to get something to eat. And I realized last time why that was: it's because the opportunity costs in that environment are so high. Eating one delicious item means that you are sated, and no longer have a chance to enjoy any of a dozen other tasty things you could have eaten. Having realized this, I imagined a situation where, if there were enough options and they were outrageously yummy enough, one could starve to death in the midst of a multitude of things to eat because the opportunity cost of choosing any of them would be higher than getting a little bit hungrier, until you were too weak to eat anything.
I thought that was a pretty funny, if slightly morbid, joke. I guess one has to be at least somewhat subject to analysis paralysis to see the humor in it.
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| Wednesday, November 9th, 2005
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4:45 pm - A Few Links
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4:26 pm - Fear and Loathing in the Upscale Retirement Community
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This is by Maynard Hershon. I've reproduced it without permission (sorry!)
It's a club ride, and the club has split into three groups. They're riding on a roomy, safe-seeming road that runs into and out-of a large retirement resort village. There's a wide, clearly marked bike lane. This morning there's virtually no traffic.
A car passes the third group on the long climb out of town. Ignoring the three feet of clearance the law specifies, the woman driving skims the edge of the group, alarming the riders in it.
As they watch, she passes the second group, barely missing the riders on the left side. From the back group you could see surprised cyclists reacting to the threat of a car so close. Luckily, she misses all the riders. No one falls.
After cresting the grade, the front-group riders beginning the fast, pretty straight descent are seeing an almost effortless 30 on their cyclometers. Riding two abreast, all are within the generous bike lane, presumably safe.
As the woman passes them, she leaves no margin on the right side of her car. The car's fender bangs into a rider on the left, midway back in the group. He and his bike cartwheel through the air. The rider behind steers onto the gravel shoulder and manages to stay upright but shreds both tires.
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| Saturday, October 29th, 2005
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11:24 am - Ignorant Denial
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There are all kinds of reasons to object to the fallacy that is I.D. There is the matter of teaching religious doctrine in the classroom. There is the purely pragmatic objection on the grounds that turning our backs on evolution (the basis of genetics) reduces our nation's ability to compete in the emerging biotechnology industry. There is the paradox of claiming that holes in a scientific theory can be used as evidence in favor of their faith when evidence is the death of faith -- if something can be proven, then there is no need to take it on faith. These are all perfectly reasonable and compelling arguments which have been made elsewhere. My own personal objection to I.D. occupies some of the ground between them.
I object to I.D. because it explains the holes in evolutionary theory perfectly. When you bring God in to explain why certain things are the way they are, then there is no more to explain. You are done, effectively. If you're a scientist, it's time to get another career.
You see, no scientific theory is perfect. Even the set of theories that kicked off our current golden age of scientific enlightenment, Newtonian Mechanics (which are probably some of the most beautiful models for explaining the observable universe ever created) are incomplete. They are utterly insufficient to describe what happens at very large scales and very small scales. We needed to come up with Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, respectively, in order to accurately talk about phenomena that happen there.
Every scientific theory is incomplete in this way, there are always special cases that require us to refine our models. If you think of the truth as a horizontal line, scientific theory is a function whose value approaches that line asymptotically. We get better and better, but we will never get there exactly.
What lets us keep getting better is the doctrine of the scientific method, which acknowledges that scientific theories are incomplete and gives us a process for refining them. Theories are tested by empirical observation, and where that observation is inconsistent with the theory, the theory is amended. This is the engine that drives us closer to the asymptote that is truth.
It is also the engine that drives the advancement of human capability. If we had called Newtonian Mechanics "good enough" and dictated that the micro- and macroscopic were the provinces of God, then we would not have come up with Quantum Mechanics. Without Quantum, we would not have transistors, microchips, or computers. Closer to the subject of this post, Mendel "massaged" the data in his experiments with peas, because while his genetic theory did a startlingly good job of predicting the characteristics across each generation of plants, there were still some quirks. It took Watson and Crick's working out the idea of recombinant DNA for us to understand the peculiar molecular mechanics that introduced the odd exceptions that Mendel swept under the rug.
I.D. jumps right to the asymptote. When you bring God into it, everything is explained and there is nothing left to investigate. When there is nothing left to investigate, then what you are saying is that humans now are as good as we're going to get. There will be no next transistor, there will be no next theory of DNA. I.D.'ers see the eye and throw up their hands. "Evolutionary theory is completely insufficient to explain how an organ with such narrowly specialized parts came to be!" they cry. "It must be God! Or aliens!" Well, screw that. If our theories can't explain an eye now, then that must be a whopper of a new idea waiting to be discovered. Imagine, if we fully understood what processes brought about such a wonderful piece of biology, what amazing things we could do!
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, October 27th, 2005
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11:39 am - Serene Dean
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I've mentioned my fanhood for the late series Firefly here before. So of course I went and saw the movie, Serenity (twice, in fact, though one was a free preview screening.) I enjoyed it very much, though I would quibble with a couple small things (the mise en scene in the final battle in the corridor was atrocious, and the soundtrack needed more of the wonderful melancholy banjo and guitar from the show (which, where it is present in the film, actually has almost an eastern inflection as much as a western one, appropriately enough), and less lugubrious cello.)
The film cost $40 million to make (a paltry sum by Hollywood standards), and the poor, brokenhearted browncoats have been watching the box office returns creep along all month in hopes of getting an eventual greenlight for Joss to do a sequel. It's not looking too promising so far, though.
Something very interesting to me though, has been the marketing campaign that Universal used to try and sell the film. They recognized that they had a corps of intensely passionate supporters, a broader audience that did not yet have any reason to care about the film, and a story that began in the middle of things (making it a harder sell for newcomers). So they took a guerrilla approach, advance screening the film all over the country, creating a "viral marketing campaign", recruiting prominent blog writers on both the left and right to mention the film, and generally doing what they could to get the "base" mobilized. The hope was that this would cause enough activity to become a story in its own right, and once the gravity of that was established, that it would continue to attract attention. The base responded very favorably to this, and many in effect let themselves become volunteers in the advertising effort. Some did a huge amount of street work on their own to try to make the film a success, recruiting friends to see the film, making posters, and even buying tickets for strangers. For a while, up until opening day, it looked like there was some momentum there.
In the end though, it was for naught. There was more sizzle than steak there.
What I found fascinating was how much this whole dynamic reminded me of the nascent Dean campaign in early 2004. That situation also featured a top-down organization trying to come up with creative ways to utilize a small group of true believers to make the sale, when a majority of the population had little or no familiarity with their product. In that case as well, the converted used their energy and creativity on their own initiative on behalf of Dean, and things seemed to be going very well right up until just before the Iowa caucuses. But once again, when D-0 rolled around, things didn't go as planned. Reality can be a harsh mistress.
The lesson seems to be, the internet is a magnifying glass. Just as you can use Google Earth to start in space and zoom right in all the way down to your house, so too can the internet make a vocal minority seem like it has much more substance than it really does. For all the good will and energy that a core group of passionate supporters can give you, that might all just be fool's gold -- no one has yet learned how to harness that to make the sale to the mass market.
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| Friday, October 14th, 2005
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3:46 pm - Why the Laffer Curve is a Joke
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Has everyone seen "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"? Assuming yes, you'll certainly remember Ben Stein's iconic turn as the affectless economics teacher, punctuating his monotone lecture with half-hearted invitations to class participation. ("Anyone? Anyone? Raised/Lowered? They raised tariffs...")
What's less commonly remembered is the substance of the Stein character's lecture. Interestingly, in real life, Stein is (in addition to being a hack writer and game show host) a hack economist, and he used his role in the film to expound on one of his favorite ideas: supply side economic theory. ("Anyone? Something-doo economics. Voodoo economics.") The ideas of supply side economic theory were used as window dressing by the Reagan administration to justify doing what they wanted to do anyway (that is, slash the marginal tax rates on the upper income brackets).
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current music: Okkervil River -- Down the River of Golden Dreams
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| Monday, July 4th, 2005
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2:13 pm - Happy Birthday to me!
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| Monday, June 6th, 2005
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10:52 pm - Human Power Challenge 2005
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Just like last year, I did the OHPV human power challenge at Portland International Raceway this most recent Memorial Day weekend. Here's what I wrote up about the races for a recumbent rider forum that I read.
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