Month: February 2005

Train Short, Go Long:

UNLESS YOU JUST BIKED the Tour de France, few cycling experiences inflate an ego like watching a bike’s odometer hit triple digits on the same day it registered zero. And cycling into shape for those 100 miles takes less time than you think. Try two months.

Well, there is plenty of information on improving endurance (VO2 max) but this one looks more reasonable than some I’ve seen. It doesn’t assume you don’t have anything else to do but train, for one thing 😉

Not as hilly, more chilly. It didn’t seem as rigorous (not that I didn’t end up walking up some of the steeper inclines, for various reasons), but my it was colder, especially at the end while waiting for the return ferry (imagine standing in a fogbank being wafted on a cool breeze after having ridden about 33 miles — damp clothes and fatigue make it worse).

Rather than ride my road bike — a Fuji Finest, now sitting on a training stand — I took along a hybrid I picked up a while ago, serviceable with the addition of a chain. Not a bad bike, aluminum frame, Shimano drivetrain, etc. That may not have been the best decision, though in the grand scheme of things, I doubt it made that much difference. A broken pedal that I didn’t know about — the platform is cracked and the axle is threaded cockeyed, making it lean down and away — was an annoyance that became a real nuisance. Losing my footing, banging my heel into the chainstay, getting a cramp in one calf, all bad things and all preventable. I was reluctant to really push on it on a grade: if it broke, it could either prevent me from pedaling on the flat and/or make the crank unusable.

Still, it was a beautiful day to be out, the ride along the shoreline was pretty, even in the fog, and as always, the people of Bainbridge Island open their community to us, all 5000(!) or so of us, and that makes it worthwhile. We saw numbers in the low 4000s in our group, and as expected the number 666 I wore was a great conversation-starter. It seems to me Cascade could auction off desirable numbers (1, 7, 13, etc.) with the proceeds going to benefit their foundation.

My main problem with opportunities like this is not a lack of strength, but a lack of endurance and experience: I run out of gas too early in the climbs both from lack of a solid physical foundation and any real experience with climbs (I spent my formative years in Florida, a state no known for its uneven terrain). So I don’t always know how to attack: letting my knees or my lungs tell me makes sense but by the time they make their feelings known, I’m not able to act on their advice. Maybe I’ll add something about that to my not-quite 43 Things.

On the Badness of Classic-Rock Radio

Most classic-rock stations are pretty lame; formulaic, trashy, yappy, dumb. I have developed a deterministic method for measuring this badness, and it has to do with Pink Floyd’s execrable The Wall. Radio stations that never play it are almost always quite good; ones that play it a lot are the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. The correlation is, in my experience, pretty well infallible.

Hmm, I usually use anything by the Doors as my gag-o-meter, and it too works quite well for my tastes.

Boing Boing: Why Wikipedia works, and how the Britannica bully got it wrong:

Aaron Krowne has written a stunning refutation of [Robert] McHenry’s piece and published it in Free Software Magazine. This thoroughgoing debunking not only shows how shoddy McHenry’s reasoning is, but it actually goes some way toward a general theory of why and how Wikipedia-like projects fail or thrive. Best article I’ve read all week.

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him…

What would McHenry’s metaphor apply more fittingly to?

Why, a traditional print encyclopedia, of course. If I wanted to analyze an arbitrary Britannica article’s evolution over time (for example), I’d have to somehow acquire the entire back catalog of the Britannica (assuming older editions can even be purchased), presumably reserve a sizeable warehouse to store them all, and block out a few days or so of my time to manually make the comparison.

Even the electronic forms of traditional encyclopedias are sure to be lacking such reviewability features. This makes sense, as public reviewability would be embarrassing to traditional content creators.

Some may remember the schoolboy who found errors in the latest edition of Britannica . . .

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Boy brings encyclopaedia to book (75):

A schoolboy has uncovered several mistakes in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – regarded by readers as an authority on everything.

Lucian George, 12, from north London, found five errors on two of his favourite subjects – central Europe and wildlife – and wrote to complain.

The book’s editor wrote back thanking him for “pointing out several errors and misleading statements”.

My guess is that he encountered a different editor: I don’t see McHenry admitting to an error, based on what his article in Flack Tech Central Station said.