Erik Nilsson

Why We Run

2011-09-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Bernd Heinrich, Why We Run. Bernd Heinrich had a weird upbringing, became a biologist, and had a serious amateur running career. This book is actually a mashup three books, which could be called: My Weird Life, What Animal Physiology Can Tell Us About the Physiology of Human Running, and How I Set a Long Distance World Record.

All three books are pretty interesting, although I did skip some of the biographical material to get to the physiology and running bits. It's not that Heinrich's life wasn't interesting, it's that he doesn't really explain the most interesting part. He was a little boy in a war zone; it's easy to understand how that would affect one's outlook, and Heinrich explains consequences one might not think of. On the other hand, his successful parents abandoned him for most of his childhood at an orphanage, so they could pursue their careers. This I found frustrating. Most parents could not do this. Why did his parents reach this decision? How did Heinrich feel about this? Considering that the orphanage wasn't a particularly pleasant place, what sort of relationship did he have with his parents as an adult? On this, the author is silent.

The best bits are the running bits, which are well-written and fun, and the physiology bits, which are somewhat scattershot but thought-provoking. The book meanders. I imagine it like sitting by the fire with Heinrich on a cold Vermont evening after a few glasses of wine. It's interesting, but I can't help checking my watch.

So why do we run? Heinrich argues that we're built to run long distances so that we can hunt by running prey to exhaustion. Despite his interest in animal models including migratory birds, Heinrich doesn't consider that being able to cover great distances would be equally useful in foraging and migrating.

Regardless, the idea that humans are built to continuously run distances beyond that of almost all land animals was controversial when this book was published, and less so now. Why to Run is still relevant despite its problems because its key message is an important idea.

Paris-Brest-Paris - the full report

2011-08-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

Here's the full story on my experience at Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP). Or at least a fuller story. So much happens in 80+ hours of bicycling like mad, the full story would be unbearably long, like PBP itself, in a way.

In short, PBP is the oldest bike event in the world that is still run, dating from 1891. Run every four years, it is now a timed "event," technically not a race, but everyone gets a time, and there are people who care a great deal about the finishing times. The course is from Paris to Brest, mostly along secondary roads, then back to Paris. Total length is 1230 km. (764 miles.) The course must be completed in 90 hours. Sleeping is allowed, but the clock does not stop for any reason. PBP is considered by many the greatest true amateur bike event in the world, and a stern test of endurance, skill, and determination.

For our trip, we rented an apartment in Paris, a quiet place on an enclosed courtyard, a few minutes' walk from the Arc de Triomphe. I've often wondered what life was like behind the big doors these courtyards have to the street. In this case, life was pleasant and very quiet, a contrast to the vibrant urban scene a few feet away. (At right, the entrance to our courtyard, which has a street address, a bit like a soi in Thailand.)

This meant I took a train to the start. I rode my bike to the train station, down the Champs Élysées. It was great to ride down the street I think of as the finale for the Tour de France. I arrived at the start line about 5:00 PM, by chance ending up in a group of about a dozen Seattle people.

The start of PBP is in waves, beginning at 6:00 PM. We ended up starting at 8:00 PM, and the three hours from when I arrived to the start were actually the hardest, mostly because of the heat. It was about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, with no shade. Friends and family went and got us water, or else we would have used it up and started with no water. (At right: Team Seattle baking in the sun. L-R RBA Mark Thomas, Vincent Muoneke, Dan Jensen in dark hat looking down, Corey Thompson, Andy Speier in green hat.)

At about 7:30, we had our brevet cards processed and we went into the starting chute. There were several speeches. I was next to Narayan Krishnamoorthy, contemplating how long the speeches would last. At long last, the speeches stopped. And then we got a shorter version in English. In fact, the waves had to start 20 minutes apart. A nice jazz band might have been more entertaining, but speeches filled up the time, and the speakers were certainly enthusiastic. Of course, we were eager to be on the road and blow some of the stink off, so it seemed like forever.

Finally, at 8:00, we started. Many riders worry about crowding at the start, but it wasn't near as crowded as the start for STP, for example. I rather enjoyed the start. There were crowds all along, kids sticking their hands out for a side-five, people cheering. "This won't last," I told myself. I was wrong. Except for a few very lonely roads, mostly in the forest, we were cheered pretty much everywhere, day and night. (At right, my view of the starting line.)

They had the roads closed for us for a few kilometers, so as soon as things settled down a little, I started trying to get some work done. The weather report for Paris didn't look good for Monday, so I wanted to bank some miles in good weather. I ended up in a group with some Seattle guys I knew, including Steve DeGroot whom I rode the last day of the Tahuya Hills 600 with, and Ray McFall, whom I also met on that 600. I started pulling a paceline at about 30 km/h. That sounds fast, but conditions were good and I wasn't sure they'd last. Mitch Schoenfeld was right behind me, and pulled the paceline after I peeled off. Wind was light and in fact we had a bit of a tailwind. The weather had cooled to the point where I was comfortable in just shorts and a light jersey. (I didn't add a layer all night.) And no rain. Moderate rain doesn't slow you down much, but even light rain often comes with wind, which in this case would have been a headwind.

I had another reason to hurry: since I had been among the last starters, I had something like 4,000 riders ahead of me. I was worried about lines at controls, and lines for food. I still had my 90 hours to finish, but there is usually a big bolus of riders very close to the time limit the whole ride, and I didn't think I could stay behind them the whole time, so getting out in front of as many of them as possible early seemed like a reasonable risk to take. In retrospect, I'll never know whether it was a good risk to take.

Finally, I wanted to get to the control to change my bike shorts. Three hours sweating in the sun before we even started had left me wanting a fresh pair of bike shorts much sooner than I expected.

Steve had a minor mechanical and fell back without me noticing. (That's pretty normal. Even with a mirror, you spend much more time worrying about what's in front of you in a paceline than what's in back of you.) The paceline shattered when we came to some hills, so after a while it was just Ray and me. Usually there were a few riders around. We'd come up on groups from the previous wave and pass them. Once in a while a fast paceline would come up beind us, probably from the wave after us. Once or twice, we hopped on the back of one of these for a while.

We rode together for a long time, as the sun set on pretty little towns outside Paris, and then on through the night as the country became hillier. At some point, Ray and I got separated, and I rode on by myself.

I reached our first control of Villaines-la-Juhel at 5:00 AM, exactly 9 hours after I started, for an average pace of 24.5 km/h. Lines at the control were minimal. I got back on the road in about 30 minutes, even with a change of shorts.

This first night fit into a pattern. For the whole ride, I felt strongest during the nights, and weakest in the afternoons. I like riding at night, but this is not a pattern I've observed before. Residual jet lag? Side-effect of an evening start? I don't know.

I reached Fougeres, second control, at about 2:00 in the afternoon. I think it was there I saw Drew Buck for the first time. I'd heard of Drew before: for the last few PBPs, he's ridden an antique bicycle, in period costume. This time, he was on a 111 year-old French bicycle. It was a fixie, of course, with large wheels that made the gearing rather tall for the hills we were in. I'm sure it was rather heavy too. Drew was on a fine bicycle, but he was riding a rather different PBP than I was. I told Drew I'd seen his sister at the train station. She was worried about catching the start, since Drew started with the special bikes, 2.5 hours earlier than I did. (Right: Drew Buck's bike. That's my somewhat more modern ride in the background.)

We rolled into Loudeac to a crowd. I'm pretty sure the whole town was there. Shortly after we arrived, the first riders from the 80-hour start came through. The crowd let out a huge cheer. Pandemonium in the control while the race officials got the leaders in and out of the control as fast as possible. I saw Seattle rider Chris Ragsdale, but things were so chaotic that it wasn't clear what was going on and I didn't get a good look at him.

Loudeac was the earliest place I had considered stopping. When I was ready to go, I didn't feel sleepy, it wasn't dark yet, and the weather looked good, so I decided to press on. I had a nice rain jacket in a drop bag in Loudeac, but it didn't seem necessary. I decided to ride on to Saint Nicolas du Pelem, a non-control stop where I could eat and sleep if I wanted. I started out feeling indifferent, but the rolling hills soon put me in an aggressive mood. That, and a guy in a recumbent warning me to slow down because the country ahead was hilly. I'm sure he was just trying to be helpful, but I'm a Seattle boy: hills made me. See you in Saint Nicolas du Pelem if you get there before I leave. (I never saw him again.)

By now, I was seeing groups of 80-hour riders coming the other way, sometimes in large pacelines, sometimes in small groups. I reached Saint Nicolas du Pelem at dusk, hungry. I quickly ate my second dinner. There were beds available, but Carhaix was only 32 km away, and I wasn't really feeling sleepy, and it looked like a nice night.

Pretty much as soon as Saint Nicolas du Pelem was out of sight, a fierce electrical storm blew up. At first it looked like it would stay off to the south, but soon the lightning strikes were closer and I was spattered with rain. It looked like it could get ugly. Fortunately, the bats were out, and bats always lift my spirits, so I tried not to think about how wet I was probably going to be in a few minutes, and pressed on.

There are now many windmills in Western France, and they have red airplane warning lights at night. This stretch of road is memorable to me as lonely, with giant red-eyed cyclopes quite close, swinging their arms in the gloom, as bats flew silently all around. I passed a bike or two, but past Saint Nicolas du Pelem I remember only one person on that road, a man standing alone in the dark, who called out "7 km to Carhaix" in French. Merci. Merci boucoup, l'homme dans l'ombre.

I got to Carhaix just as it started really raining. In fact, I got very lucky. People even 10 minutes behind me had to pull off the road, sometimes with minimal cover, as a full-on thunderstorm soaked the road and anyone on it, while lightning struck frighteningly close.

In Carhaix, I was told there were now no beds in Brest. Not like I particularly wanted to tackle Roc'h Trevezel, the only part of the ride that really deserves the term "mountain pass," in the dark. Furthermore in a downpour with only my emergency rain vest. Furthermore with no sleep. Furthermore during an electrical storm on a road where people have more than occasionally been killed by lightning. But then, to get to Brest, and either have to ditch nap or turn right around and do it again?

Thus began my only experience with PBP organization that was not wholly positive and resembled the stereotype of French bureaucracy. The process of getting a bed in Carhaix, unlike at every other control, seemed to involve a long debate in French among a half dozen volunteers, consultation of both a computer and a paper spreadsheet, and many calculations and incantations on scraps of paper. I am not in the least exaggerating. There were maybe 8 people in line ahead of me, and it took me 40 minutes to reach the front of the line. At which point, there were no beds available. In fact, it transpired that there were dozens of beds available, but no blankets. Most of us had clothing adequate (if not ideal) for a a cold and wet night out of doors. A blanket was really almost a hindrance. Suddenly, the bed assignment process became as efficient as the Paris Metro at rush hour, and I was pleasantly unconscious on an air mattress, sans couverture.

When I woke up 4 hours later, I ran into Steve DeGroot. Steve had been a little behind me, and had been hammered by the storm. He came to a little town, where a cafe was open all night. He got something to eat and dried out a little. The people there offered him a bed in the back, so he slept for a few hours and started out the next morning, meeting up with me in Carhaix about 5 AM on Tuesday. We rode to Brest together. It started out dark and a little foggy. As we got to the peak of Roc'h Trevezel, it became really foggy, to the point where I wondered whether even my big light was enough. I expected the fog to thin once the sun came up, but if anything it got thicker.

We reached the pass in heavy fog. We saw several people asleep (or at least not moving), wrapped in space blankets near the pass. It looked like a miserable if not dangerous way to spend the night. As we descended, the fog thinned enough that we didn't have to ride the brakes the whole way down.

And that was the big Roc, but we still had 30 km yet to ride to get to Breast, and it was coastline, so hardly flat. And by now we had a headwind. Everybody I talked to said the stage into Brest was the hardest.

Brest is a gritty seaport. Refineries and oil and gas tankers seem to be important businesses. Much of the town comprises remarkably tedious buildings in doubtful repair. Still, there is a nice castle, and they're putting a streetcar through town. Plus, I always take a perverse pleasure in filthy industrial districts, so I didn't mind riding through one on the way in to the control.

I saw Drew Buck again at Brest. I think he must have done less sleeping than me. I had made up 2.5 hours on him in the first 400 km, but thereafter our times were similar. Plus, I was always catching up to him after sleeping. Sleep or no, he looked awfully chipper for a guy who had just finished a hilly stage in his single tall gear.

Steve and I ran into Steve Davis. The three of us decided to ride together back to Carhaix and see how it went. We had a pleasant conversation on many things, as I recall.

The ride back to Carhaix was less dire. The route was less steep that way. Also, our headwind was now a tailwind and at the pass it was really blowing. The people coming up the other way looked uniformly miserable. (Except one cheerful fellow, go figure.) Given the time, they were going to have to kick it up to make Brest before the control closed, and now they had to kick it up into the teeth of an awful lot of breeze they probably weren't expecting.

Well, we moved along well enough. From here to almost the end, we were on roads we'd already seen. We were on the way back, a cheerful thought.

Somehow, Steve Davis got ahead, while Steve DeGroot and I thought he was behind. We were worried about him, so we waited about 10 minutes at the bottom of a hill. When no approaching riders reported a crash or mechanical, we decided he must have slipped past us. Back in Carhaix, we saw him, and the mystery was solved.

We had a nice ride back through the hills from Carhaix to Loudeac, getting a look at the country in daylight. I expected the control at Loudeac to be quiet, since the fancy riders were long gone, but was surprised to see the whole town still at the control, still buzzing with excitement. I think I even saw familiar faces. Just like everywhere else, they cheered us wildly, despite us being just another bunch of guys on bikes.

I do not think I will ever get over the enthusiasm of the PBP crowds. Particularly as an American, when people in cars or on the street take any notice of you at all, it's almost always somewhere on the confusion-hostility spectrum. At PBP, cars trapped behind us honked as they passed, and the passengers waved through opened windows and yelled "Bon route!" to us. At PBP, I went from a lynchpin of social confict to a default cultural hero and defender of a grand tradition. Being relentlessly cheered and admired while you ride like mad for what seems like a month does odd things to one's worldview. I can see why people keep coming back to PBP.

By Loudeac, Steve and I had been riding 48 hours on no more than 4 hours of sleep. Naturally, we decided to press on. Tinteniac was 85 km away. That seemed a bit much, but there were beds in Quedillac only 60 km km away, which seemed manageable. We left Loudeac around dark.

Out of Loudeac, we rode with a guy from Japan. He didn't have much English, but seemed to be having a good ride. He eventually fell back on a hill.

It was about this time that my left leg started acting up. I'd noticed a little stiffness, but hadn't thought much of it. Little aches and pains come and go on rides like this. But on the way to Quedillac, it became clear that I was facing a more serious problem. I clearly had an inflamed tendon that was limiting the range of motion of my ankle. If it got much worse, then pedaling would become very complicated.

We made Quedillac, and agreed to stop for 4 hours. I took as much naproxen as I thought I could without it coming back up and keeping me awake. I fell asleep quickly to empty thoughts. The volunteer's touch woke me quickly, and I felt refreshed. My ankle, unfortunately, wasn't much different. More naproxen and we hit the road. At first I was awfully stiff, but felt much better as we got underway. Soon, we were in Tinteniac. I visited the medical tent there. They gave me ice, which probably did nothing, and told me that there was a real doctor in Fougeres, a mere 55 km down the road, who had access to anti-inflammatory cream. That lifted my spirits considerably. (Right: bike at Quedillac. Nice honeymooon. Drew Buck's bike was also here, as I recall.)

All I remember about the 3 hours to Fougeres was concluding that the odds were against me being able to finish. My ankle was generally swollen now, and if trends continued, my options became quite limited. I could pedal one-legged for perhaps 20 km. If it was the last 20 km and I had time, then that would be OK, but I had over 300 km (as long as STP, but much steeper) left to ride. That was too far for me to ride on one leg. If things got even a little worse, then it was over, 60 hours of reasonably good riding and four years of dreams notwithstanding.

At Fougeres, I could barely walk. I hobbled over to the medical tent. The volunteer EMT referred me to the doctor, who conferred with a more senior doctor. (The senior MD looked like 90% of French doctors I've ever met. They must take a class in how to dress and groom so to be immediately identifiable as a French MD.) The senior doctor manipulated my ankle, apparently to be sure it wasn't broken, and said something in French. The other doctor applied anti-inflammatory cream, then she said "well, good luck finishing." Great. Thanks. I'll see about that.

The anti-inflammatory cream seemed to help, so I felt a bit better from Fougeres to Villanes-la-Juhel. I went to the medical tent, but they did not have a doctor, and so could not prescribe anti-inflammatory cream. I fell asleep on the grass for 10 minutes waiting for Steve, then we got some food in a school gymnasium. The building was nothing fancy. Corrugated steel roof and walls. I imagine it is bitterly cold and drafty in winter. Villanes has a lovely castle, but not much money these days, I reckon. I looked at kid's art stuck on the walls, some of it quite good. I wondered what kind of life it was living in an ancient hilltop town in "deep France." Anyway, the crowd was crazy. Like everywhere, the whole town was there, watching us adjust our bikes in the control like fans at a formula one paddock. Nonstop commentary over a loudspeaker. It was literally unreal. (Right: "paddock" at Villanes. This picture doesn't really capture the scale and enthusiasm of the crowds.)

Not getting anti-inflammatory cream in Villanes did not improve my attitude, to say the least, but the country was familiar and pretty, and it was evening, so as usual my mood soon improved. As it got darker, I felt stronger. I'm probably lucky Steve advised not pushing the pace too much, as I surely felt stronger than I really was.

Villanes was the first control on the way out, but on the way back there were 3 more between Villanes and the finish: a secret control, Mortagne-au-Perche, and Dreux. We hit the secret control at 11 pm. Free beer! Tempting, but we passed. We got to Mortagne at about 11:30. A short, fierce climb up to the control. Probably not as steep as it seemed, a sign that we were weaker than we realized.

I went to the medical tent. Again, no doctor, so no anti-inflammatory cream. This is the point where people start getting Shermer's neck, and that seemed to be the stock-in-trade of this facility. I gather they go through a fair number of neck braces here. I ran into one guy with Shermer's neck, but that was not the extent of his problems, he was convinced that someone had sabotaged his bike, and very agitated. He had surrendered his brevet card, which means he had abandoned, and was trying to get his brevet card back so he could continue. I tried to convince him that Shermer's neck was a matter of physics, not of will, but it was like two feverish four-year-olds trying to have a conversation. You say some words, and get different words back. I suggested massage of the front of his neck (sternocleidomastoid and scalenes muscles). He asked what else he could do, and I mentioned that, when all else fails, some people prop up their head with a water bottle attached to their stem.

At Villanes, I concluded that if I was finishing PBP, I was committing to between a few weeks and a few months for my leg to really recover. I decided it was worth it, as long as the situation didn't deteriorate too much. By now, I was used to the idea that a hobble was the best walk I could manage, and I was one bad dismount from the bike away from a DNF. I posted the picture at right on Facebook, with the message, "Pain is temporary, quitting is permanent." I made the posting as a personal commitment to press on, despite the difficulties. Several conversations with doctors convinced me that I wasn't doing permanent damage. Pain was information, nothing more. I would continue until I was unable, simple as that.

At Mortagne, Steve convinced me that 2 hours off my feet would do me good, and he didn't mind some sleep either, as he hadn't had three hours in a row unconscious since the morning before we started. No point resting my leg awake, so I rented a cot, promptly fell asleep, and awoke quickly at around 2:00 AM Wednesday.

While I slept, my ankle had become quite stiff. I couldn't even hobble properly. I got something to eat, and ran into some friends of the guy with Shermer's neck. He had succeeded in retrieving his brevet card, and had gone back out on the course. The whole situation seemed foreboding at best. [Postscript: I got email from this guy indirectly after I got back to Seattle. He did go back on the course. His Shermer's Neck did recur after a few hours, but he propped his head up with a water bottle and was able to finish.]

Stopping had been a disaster, it seemed, since I was just getting worse as time went on. But the air was cold, which was good, since I like the cold.

But my ankle seemed unworkable. I prepared as best I could and got back on the bike, Steven and I headed down a long descent into the night. So far so good, but you don't pedal steep descents.

The one rule for me on this PBP is that everything goes better at night. So for whatever reason, I loved that descent. I loved the old stone walls and the trees. When it came time to pedal, I discovered things were much better than I had realized. I had stiffened up as I slept, but apparently healed some as well. As the night wore on, I felt stronger and stronger. We rode through what seemed like a very remote forest, and some old, quiet towns, finally too late at night after too many days for many people to be out. Except, two boys in the dead of night handing out sugar cubes. And a child who I think snuck downstairs to watch the riders from a window. When I waved, the child waved back wildly. By the last 30 km to Dreux, I felt a fire in the furnace. I got down in the drops, and started pulling pacelines at 25-30 km.

We ran across Drew Buck one last time. I asked how he was feeling, and he said "up against it." He asked how far to Dreux. When I told him 24 km, he didn't seem pleased. (Drew ended up digging deep and finishing with less than half an hour to spare.)

It started getting light as we approached Dreux, our fourth sunrise since we started. At this point, I was beginning to believe I was going to make it. With 10 hours of sleep total, I felt focused and alert. We had 8 hours left to do less than 4 hours of riding. My ankle wasn't getting better, but it didn't seem to be getting worse, either.

Dreux is an old Roman town, with some quite old bits, and some newer development that appears nicely done. It's a small town like those we went through to the West, but there is obviously more money here. The control was a sports center. At Dreux, we met up again with Steve Davis. Mark Thomas, our RBA, was there, as was Andy Speier (who didn't sleep a wink during the whole ride), Joe Platzner, and Corey Thompson, all Seattle boys. We decided to ride to the finish together. (Right: Dreux control.)

We started out on the road. I quickly pulled over to call Aki and tell her my estimated finish time. In my haste and confusion, I called my Paris landlady by mistake, but she seemed not at all distressed, and promised to call Aki and tell her.

The last 65 km is comparatively flat, through pretty forest and a few small towns. It was mid-morning. The sun was out. Conditions were beautiful. My ankle was flexible enough that I could stand on the pedals for the few hills, which were short and mostly in the shade. There were even a few fun downhills to carve through. We passed old (Roman?) roads with straight lines of trees, fields, and forests. And still, of course, groups of people on the side of the road, clapping and cheering like mad.

The suburbs right around St Quentin en Yvelines are not the prettiest, but there are some nice parks, and besides everything was wrapped in morning sunshine and soon to be done. We finished as a group in 87 hours, 31 minutes, almost 2.5 hours to spare. Not as fast as I'd expected, but a finish is a finish, and under the circumstances, I was very happy. (Right: finishing as a group with friends from Team Seattle. You can see my bike headlight.)

I'd wondered how I'd feel at the end, either overwhelmed with emotion or calm with exaustion? I ended up somewhere in-betweeen, pleased by the good fortune of finishing with friends.

Aki and Sven saw me finish. I didn't know for sure if they'd be there, and there was a big noisy crowd, so I didn't pick them out. But they found me in the control and helped me get everything sorted.

Then I got a glass of wine from the finishers tent. I missed the closing celebration, because it was logistically too much, given my ankle, so I missed the jersey trade and still have my Seattle one. Oh well, I didn't go to Paris to trade jerseys, I went to see if I had an ancien in me. Turns out I did. So there's that.

Follow me at Paris-Brest-Paris

2011-08-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

Some of you have asked how to follow me live during Paris-Brest-Paris.

The short answer is, you can follow me on the PBP web site, on this blog, or on Facebook. There is also a live webcam of the start.

If you want to see the route, a rough map of the course can be found here. Scroll down the page for links to detailed maps of each stage, with elevations and so on.

The event starts for me at around 18:00 French time on 21 August. That's 9:00 AM on Sunday, August 21 in Seattle. I will finish between 70 and 90 hours later, probably sometime on Thursday, Seattle time.

I will have a chip on my shoe. Every time I pass a control, my time at that control will be recorded, and you can view the results online here. You will be asked for my frame number, which is 4470

Update: you can follow all of the Seattle riders here.

The first control is the start. They start us in waves of 500 beginning at 18:00 (French time) and lasting for about 2.5 hours. You have 90 hours to finish, based on the time your wave started. I'm not sure how this will be reported on the web site. If they give you my elapsed time, it's simple. If they just give you the time at each control, you have to look at my actual start time and do a little math.

About 9 hours after I start, I should roll into the next control at Villaines-la-Juhel. After that, I should clear a control roughly every 4 to 5 hours until I stop for sleep. Unless there are problems, I'll sleep somewhere between Loudéac and Brest, most likely either Carhaix or Brest. I'll try to blog and put something on Facebook when I stop to sleep, but I may not be able to, so absence of an update just means I'm sleeping and wasn't able to conveniently provide an update.

Wherever I sleep, I should be leaving Brest and on my way back somewhere between the 37 and 47 hour marks. This should be late Monday or early Tuesday, Seattle time.

From Brest back to Paris, my plans are less definite, and depend on how I feel. I plan to stop once or maybe twice on the way back to rest, most likely at Loudéac and/or Villanes-la-Juhel. So once I reach either of these places on the way back, it could easily take me 7 or 8 hours to reach the next control.

There are two more controls on the way back: Mortagne au Perche and Dreux. Mortagne au Perche is only 140 km from the finish, so if I get there with 7 or more hours left, it's looking pretty good. Dreux is a mere 65 km from the finish. If I have 3 hours left at that point, I should be able to do it, assuming I'm not completely spent.

There is a live webcam of the start. Select the "Web TV" menu and then the option "Live." There may also be other live coverage at this address.

Since this is France, there is an official pastry for Paris-Brest-Paris, called the Paris Brest, first made in 1891. Here is a recipe. To the right is a picture of the pastry, which my colleague Natalie brought to work, in celebration of my impending ride.

10,000

2011-08-10T12:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I put the 10,000th mile on the fast bike. This is the bike Aki gave me for my birthday when it was clear I wasn't going to make it to Cuba any time soon. When I got it, I said I'd put 10,000 miles on it.

It's a Trek Madone 5.2. It's a bit like the hatchet that's been in the family for generations, although it's had 3 new handles and a new head. The seat and seatpost were replaced almost right away. The stem and handlebars got swapped out last year for shorter and narrower. Two of the 3 chainrings are new, and I've worn out a bottom bracket and a few cassettes and chains. The wheels are brand new. I finally gave up on the tweaky bladed-spoke racer-boy wheels and built some wheels that are strong and stiff enough not to need truing every 500 miles. They're slightly heavier, but by surprisingly little.

But it's the same frame, mostly the same geometry, and the same basic bike. I've spent a lot of happy miles on this bike, and it's done for me what I've needed. It's been comfortable, reliable, fast, and nimble. It's a good bike.

Now I want at least 760 more miles out of the ol' girl. How many more after that, I do not reckon. Maybe a lot.

RSVP

2011-08-07T22:37:00.000-07:00

RSVP (Ride from Seattle to Vancouver and Party) is the last big ride before PBP (Paris-Brest-Paris). I'm supposed to be tapering. Did I? Average heart rate is a reasonably good way to look at it. Here are average heart rates for recent events:

6/11 Flying Wheels: 130
7/28 RAMROD: 131
8/5 RSVP Day 1: 122
8/6 RSVP Day 2: 111

I was supposed to be tapering already by RAMROD. The evidence is that I didn't, although it's really hard to keep your average heart rate down on a hilly course. But on RSVP, I tapered better, particularly on the second day. I still find going easy a lot harder than just going for it.

Block party

2011-08-02T23:13:00.000-07:00

Today is Block Party day in Seattle. We had a block party. The guys around the corner had a block party with a fire pit and a band. Down the street by Tony's house, they had a block party with a car show (right).

Heather and Team Dey skirted two other block parties to come to ours. We feel so validated!

RAMROD

2011-07-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

With PBP coming up, I said I wasn't going to push it. This is the hardest RAMROD I've done. Sure, the flat tire was a bummer, but the hard part was not pushing it, letting pacelines get away that I knew I could hang on to. (Or at least was prepared to find out if I could hang onto.)

In the end 10:38, finishing almost exactly 100th out of a field of about 800. That's what I said I wanted to do, and that's what I did. So good, right? Right?

Handling debris

2011-07-26T23:01:00.000-07:00

I don't blog every nail and screw I pick up in the roadway. I did that for a little while, but it got to be too much.

Now the only road debris I blog is the weird stuff, such as today's catch: a door handle. Specifically, a late 70's/early 80's GMC van interior door handle. (You can google anything now.)

OK fine, I guess the door handle comes loose, and falls out when you open the door to get into your Luv Van. But wouldn't you notice it was missing when you tried to close the door after you got in?

Faster up the south side of Queen Anne

2011-07-20T20:05:00.000-07:00

6:48. 12 seconds faster. That may not sound like a lot, but it's hard coming up with each second.

I was feeling a little worked on Sunday, so I took two rest days instead of one. Maybe that's part of it.

32 Days to Paris-Brest-Paris, which means about another week of me obsessing about interval training, and then you won't have to read about it.

Another 3 seconds faster up the north side of Queen Anne

2011-07-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

6 minutes, 22 seconds.

Different Intervals

2011-07-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get 2-3 sets of intervals in per week, which means I need to do them mid-week. I could get up really early and do them before work. I could do that. But easier to go out on my lunch break. In this case, my "lunch break" was mid-afternoon, but never mind. After a bit of exploring, I settled on this route up the south side of Queen Anne Hill, which ends not far from my weekend route up the north side of the same hill.

I start at 3rd and Roy, go north a block on 3rd to Valley, then west to Queen Anne Ave. Up Queen Anne Ave. to Prospect St., then spiral up to the top, ending at the water tower.

It's not ideal, because about a third of the route is over 10% grade, which is steeper than I'd like. Also, there's a little bit of downhill where I can't sustain effort. But it's better than anything else I can find right around work, and it's a bit over 100m of climbing in 7 minutes, which is about right.

More Intervals

2011-07-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Compared to June 25, my best time was 12 sec better at 6:25. Max heart rate slightly lower. Recovery startlingly faster, by about a minute. Cadence faster and more consistent.

Intervals are the main training from now until I start to taper at the end of the month. They're simple: ride as hard as possible starting at the bottom of the hill, until there is no hill left. Done right, one has the vague sense of being turned inside-out. Hard work, but over quickly. As the time scale shows, I was done in 35 minutes. Figure 15 minutes to warm up and get out to the hill and another 15 cooling down and getting home, and it's all done in a little over an hour. Tomorrow will be a recovery day, so it works out to less than 4 hours per week. Four hours of hard work are more useful than a month of Sundays riding longer distances at less intensity.

Sven's First Installation Piece

2011-06-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

Sven and Aki went to Golden Gardens with TNT (Team Neil-Toomey) and Sven of course came back with beach-laden pockets. He wanted to show me his treasures. "I bet these are worth five dollars," he said.
"Why? Are you trying to sell your treasures to me?"
"No. Well, at least one dollar."
I said the treasures might be worth more if we made something out of them. So we decided to make art. The first thing we came up with was this dried rose hip (?) on a thin piece of wood, above.

Then Sven took over art direction:

Fair enough. But after I left, Sven did some more, as I discovered later. This is his final effort at right. An artistic statement? Or a way of keeping his treasures from being readily scattered?

For me of course, the real treasure was a magic summer hour with Sven.

Speed Work

2011-06-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Queen Anne wind sprints: 6 minutes 37 seconds up 3rd Ave W from a certain telephone pole near Cremona to Howe, right on Howe and a half block west to the highest point on Howe.

I did it thrice. First good, second better, third not good, so done at 3. The graphs are for the second time.

Last bike workout until I leave for DC.

Driven to Run

2011-06-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.

Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Two books I borrowed from Aki.

Drive is about what motivates people, but even more, it's about what demotivates people. The best way to demomotivate? Take something a person does for the joy of it, and pay them to do it. Getting paid a salary isn't inherently demotivating, but things like giving people a bonus for reaching a sales target or giving a kid a candy bar for completing a homework assignment are inherently demotivating.

Author Pink emphasizes that the basis of his argument is not philosophical, but scientific: over and over, the data show that most of what organizations do to motivate people has the opposite effect, and that most bonus and compensation schemes are destructively counterproductive. People give less blood when you pay them for it. Test scores fall when you reward good scores. Sales force performance falls in the face of quarterly targets. Over and over and over. Ouch.

Pink concedes that some jobs just aren't very much fun, and are going to be done by people who don't enjoy them very much, but even here, he suggests that such jobs can be less dreary than typical if attention is paid to what people find satisfaction in.

What's the connection to a book on ultramarathon running and minimalist footwear? Born to Run is about these things, but also why people run ultramarathon distances. McDougall makes an interesting point on motivation: when American marathon sponsorship enabled runners to make a living running marathons, the effect on performance was rapid and dramatic: while world marathon times got significantly better, marathon times by Americans actually got worse. McDougall argues that turning marathon running into a job caused the performance drop. Pink would approve.

McDougall's book is about what supports running, both biomechanically and psychologically. He describes people for whom running is an escape, a salvation, a way of life, or all of these. Mostly, running happened to people who saw themselves as more than only a runner: nurse, farmer, surf bum, writer, and so on.

I have a little experience in amateur endurance sports. The rewards are the satisfaction of doing the thing, and maybe a bit of ribbon. Getting paid to do it would be very strange, perhaps like getting paid to smile, or getting paid to pray.

These books describe a world that is different than many people think they live in, and maybe a world different than many people want to live in. It is perhaps comforting to believe that motivating people is just pushing the right buttons. The evidence is that the human psyche is much slipperier than that. But isn't it more noble to be motivated best by a desire to do a thing well, just for its own sake?

Tahuya Hills 600

2011-06-07T23:06:00.000-07:00

30 hours 57 minutes. Three minutes faster than my goal, as it happens.

This ride goes nigh well all over northwestern Washington. From Seattle pretty far into Mt. Rainier park, west through Centralia onto the Olympic Peninsula, around Hood Canal to Port Gamble, and finally into Winslow on Bainbridge Island. Whew!

Would I do it again? Yes, I'd do it all again just to ride through the twilight along Hood Canal, as if I and the small group I was riding with were the only people on earth.

As with any ride like this, so many cool things happened. I loaned out tools to people who needed them and got them back. People loaned me things I needed and they got them back. We saw the fans waiting for the U2 concert at 6am. The guy in Seabeck who called us "Marine Tough" without asking us where we were going, because he'd seen our tribe before. Hammering the last 7km to finish in just under 31 hours because we were pretty sure we could so we should try, but only if all seven of us could do it together. And most of all, truly wonderful volunteers, who cared for us as if we were the most important people on earth to them.

Yeah, it was pretty long, but this ride is half as long as PBP. Half. Every time I double the distance, I go about 1.5 kph slower, which suggests a PBP time of about 67 hours. Sweet!

Except, that would mean not sleeping for 67 hours. I don't think I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to get some sleep along the way, probably twice. And I'm not sure the 1.5 kph math holds up anyway. But this 600 was a big confidence booster for PBP. I finished about as fast or faster than a lot of people who are planning to finish PBP and have good reason to believe they can do it.

Today's workout: not much for scenery.

2011-05-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

Riding around in circles in a parking lot. Not much scenery, and what there is, you get to see a lot of.

I think I would have trouble doing this every week, but this week it worked out pretty well. I feel like the engine I need is half-built. From a cardiovascular standpoint, I have what I need, which is good, because cardio capacity doesn't change all that fast, so in the 92 days from now to PBP, my cardio will improve, but not drastically. The two areas I'd like to be stronger are in getting the metabolic furnace able to throw more calories out, and to have greater leg power so I can produce higher power for longer without fatique.

Metabolism comes from doing long rides. I have the miles laid out between now and PBP, so the thing I want to work on now is power. Since going faster requires more power, you can work on power with "speed" work. (And I want the power not to increase my maximum speed, but the speed I can sustain for days on end.)

So, warm up and then go as fast as possible for about 20 minutes, say for 2 reps. This is too long to get through it with an anaerobic sprint.

The other complicating factor is that the replacement for my broken middle chainring won't come in until Thursday, so I needed a pretty flat course that would allow me to stay in the big ring.

So, ride out to Husky statium, and do loops around the parking lot. Good enough.

Yep, a pretty flat loop.

The mother of all road debris

2011-05-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

OK, not as impressive as the truck that dumped an entire rack of window glass in the street in front of my building, but I didn't pick up any of that --the city and the glass company handled it.

This is pretty impressive compared to the normal bits of metal I remove from the streets. Two nine foot aluminum brackets. They had been in the street probably only a few minutes when I came by, but passing cars were already beating them to bits. By the sound of it, some of those drivers will later find out that they damaged their tires. Eventually, cars would probably have smashed them into something like aluminum ninja stars. Nice. It's actually a felony to not secure your load properly in Washington. The meatheads who let these fall off of their truck are why such laws are necessary.

Baker Lake 400: a little damp

2011-05-15T15:18:00.000-07:00

A pretty day riding from Redmond out to Baker Lake on the flanks of Mount Baker, then back to Granite Falls. This isn't the prettiest scene, that would be up in the mountains. But this was a convenient place to stop.

However, while the day ended in Granite Falls, the ride didn't. We still had to get back to Redmond. It started raining. Then raining harder. Then harder still. All together, over an inch of rain between about 8pm and 2am. Total time: 19h 57m. My goal was 20 hours, so I guess that's good.

Oh, and I broke the middle chain ring a few hours into the ride. I could shift through it from the big ring to the little ring, but it took about twice as long as blowing a shift would normally, so impossible in a pace line. Consequently, I spent a lot of time in the big cog and the big ring, not wanting to lose momentum while I shifted up a few cogs, then dropped the chain from the big ring to the middle, then without applying much force shifted from the middle to the small ring. Then shifted up a few more cogs. Then once the hill flattened out a bit, the same thing in reverse. To avoid all that, I ended up standing on the pedals a good deal.

Oh, and I hit a dog in the rain. A big dog. Ran right out in front of us. I hit it behind the shoulder so it might have a cracked rib but at least not a broken shoulder, and the dog ran off, so I think the dog's OK. I was surprised I didn't go down, but I hit the dog dead on and I'd managed to slow down some already, so it all worked out.

Weight Trailing

2011-05-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Lead automobile wheel weight. Removed from Nickerson Street.

Fishermen aren't supposed to fish with lead weights any more. Consumer electronics are increasingly lead-free. Bad for the environment, children's brains, and so on. Not hard to understand.

So why is it still legal to haphazardly smash a blob of lead to the rim of a poorly-made car tire, in the full knowledge that it is likely to come flying off at some point, be pulverized by passing cars, and end up in stormwater, as dust in children's lungs, and so on?

What is the great social benefit from putting these weights on car wheels? AFAIK, basically nothing happens to the car when these weights fall off, and wheels that are slightly above completely crappy can't even have these weights put on them. Why do we tolerate this nonsense?

Must Be Spring

2011-05-05T18:18:00.000-07:00

A shiny new spring, removed from Western Ave at Warren. Sven thinks it's part of a bicycle suspension. Maybe.

Cytokine Storm

2011-05-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

One consequence of the Rainiest Seattle Spring Ever is that all of the trees pollinated at once, namely Tuesday.

When a doctor describes your current health with the term "Cytokine Storm," you know it's a bad year for allergies.

Tree sex season can't end too soon. Really, get a room y'all.

Debris Field Report

2011-05-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

On January 3, I reported spikes in the road at 26th Ave and E. Galer to SDOT. As of this morning, they're still there.

The city puts these spikes into the road to hold down air hoses for traffic studies. They're supposed to pound them down after the traffic study is over. They don't always do that, and based on the number of these I see around town, I think they may not pound them down most of the time. Even when I point them out to SDOT, the crews seem to have trouble finding them. Are they really that hard to see? I don't have any trouble spotting them, and my eyes certainly aren't what they used to be. Maybe SDOT should use nails that are easier to spot, or else keep better track of where they put them. When the crew is pulling up the air hoses, it really should be pretty easy to figure out how many nails they have to pound down.

Look how shiny the heads of these spikes are. Plenty of people have been running over them. This is a designated, signed bike route, and the spikes are about 3' from the curb, where most bikers ride on this street.

Minimalism

2011-04-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

First the bike with one speed. Now running without shoes. There is satisfaction in dispensing with an essential, and finding you don't miss it.

Wind Sprints

2011-04-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

After the climb up Golden Gardens Drive starts getting easier, it's time to move on to the climb up Queen Anne Hill. Starting at the intersection of 3rd Ave W and W Bertona St., head south up 3rd to Howe. Turn right on Howe, stopping at the high point where the alley crosses Howe. Then catch your breath and do it again. Very slightly over 1 mile, with about 390' of climb. This builds power, and covers performance over a size of climbing pitch one often finds, as well as the length of time one typically spends at the front of a paceline.

The grade is around 7%, and doesn't vary much, except where it flattens out at the end.

I ride as hard as I can, for between 2 and 4 reps. Two is all you really need, so that's all I ever commit to when I start, so I don't hold anything back. If I feel great after 2 I might do one or two more, but I doubt there's much benefit from more than 4 reps.

Two years ago, I started out doing it in 8 minutes in the spring, working down under 7 minutes by late summer. This year, I'm starting out at 6:47. So I'm off to an early start, because I have to be. PBP is only 125 days away. I need to start shifting away from strength and power towards endurance training, but the rando riders finishing ahead of me are stronger than me in the hills. I think I have the materials to accomplish PBP, but there's no point taking any chances.

Another way of looking at seasonal weight

2011-04-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

The vertical axis is weight in kg. Horizontal axis is days since New Year. Each line represents weight as measured for one year, beginning January 1 of that year.

The data are incomplete, so the apparent weight gain starting in July is mostly an artifact of not having much late summer data.

This shows that in many years, I put on around 5 kg (~10 lb) over the holidays, then work it off in the spring. In 2010, I started working that weight off unusually late, in April, and I paid for it. This year, I had more physical activity earlier in the year than usual, and I made an effort to watch what I ate. The results show above. My scale's crude estimate of BFI is 13%.

More road debris.

2011-04-15T22:43:00.000-07:00

Some sort of metal plates in the bike lane on Nickerson. Not super sharp, but probably sharp enough to get through a sidewall if you hit it right.

A Prayer to Hypoxia

2011-04-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

In mountain and slope I seek you
To feel you pervade my body
To make you an offering
Of everything I have

Take the breath from my lips
Take the salt from my pores
Take the fire from my hearth
Take the fuel from my stores

Take all I bring you
They are yours already
I never owned them
I gathered them for you

I will meditate
Each journeyed moment
I will turn the crank
Spin my spoked prayer wheel

Race weight

2011-03-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

If your bike weighs less than 10 kg, you probably can't spend your way to a bike that is enough lighter to make much difference. Aerodynamic drag is usually a bigger factor than the mass you are moving anyway. But on a hilly course, weight can make the difference between staying with the pack or getting dropped. Sure, it's not the peloton of Le Tour, but getting dropped still means you'll have to either catch up or find somebody else to paceline with on the next flat bit.

So weight matters. If you can't take it out of the vehicle, then it has to come out of the engine. So far, since the new year, I've dropped my weight by about half my bike weight while adding strength. That was my goal. I have a lot of hills to climb this year.

SIR 200K

2011-03-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

SIR 200K in 8h 54min. That's about 1h 45min behind Jan Heine, the fastest finisher, and in the top 20%. I like to finish in the top 10% of ultra-endurance events, but I woke up at 1:00AM feeling kind of nasty, so I'm not dissatisfied.

Become What You Are

2011-03-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

"Become What You Are" I learned these words from listening to Juliana Hatfield, not from reading Nietzsche. I think critically about how I ride a bike, because that's the only way to improve. I gather Nietzsche deemed critical thought unhelpful. Well screw him.

Regardless, at 46, I'm a little young to grow out my beard grey and ride a steel horse with a bed roll and a frying pan.

But I've become a randonneur. Somehow this has happened. That's not the only kind of biker I am, but I am this thing now.

I have no idea what Nietzsche meant, but I think I understand what Hatfield was on to.

I rebuild the fast bike

2011-03-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

I'm in the middle of my first major surgery on the fast bike.

In the past, I've put on new wheels, replaced the front fork when it got trashed, and put on aero bars. But none of those things really touched the purpose of the bike. Now, I'm taking a Trek Madone, the bike most associated with Lance, and building it up for the least likely thing that it's plausibly suitable for: randonneuring.

That's right: a plastic rando bike. Randonneurs ride steel. (Except the few who spend for titanium.) Randonneurs are required to have fenders, and my Madone doesn't even have the braze-ons to mount conventional fenders. Randonneurs need to carry supplies and spare clothing, sometimes lots of it, and there is basically no way to put a luggage rack on this bike.

So bad idea? Maybe. But I know this bike well. I like the way it fits, and it likes me back. It's been a good ride for 8,000 miles, and I frankly don't think I have time between now and August to build up a new bike from scratch and get it dialed in the way I'd need it. Sure, I rode 100 miles on this bike the morning after I bought it, with a "fit" that was literally by eyeball. But 100 miles isn't very far by rando standards. When you are going to be on a bike all day and all night, you need to be comfortable, and you need to ride and react with the bike as one unit. I'm just not ready to start another relationship like that.

What I've done so far:
- 42cm (2cm narrower) bars (should have done that a long time ago)
- 2cm shorter stem
- aero bars off since the French don't allow them
- Luggage (!) fore and aft
- 26mm tires run at a mere 80psi, replacing 23mm tires at 120psi
- rear fender
- an LED headlight close to what a motorcycle has.
It's a little like an F1 car with a ski rack.

I haven't taped the new bars yet, still tweaking the brake lever position. I need to redo the rear fender and add a front one. I need to redo how the lights are mounted. It's the same bike now, but also very different.

Chilly Hilly

2011-02-27T18:43:00.000-08:00

Did the course only once. Chuck Ayers gave me a sharp look when I told him I did it twice last year. Maybe that factored into my thinking. But a bigger factor was that this year, I did CH on a single speed. With 34/16 gearing into 700C x 32, it's a bit stiff up the hills. After 33 miles of that, I was --What's the word? Tired.

Oh, and it was cold this year. Didn't get rained on like later riders, but did get hail and a little snow. A little windy too, as in fight-to-keep-your-bike-up windy.

A nice day, all around.

An embarrassment of debris riches

2011-02-25T16:53:00.000-08:00

What are these things? They look like springs. They're steel (magnetic), their ends are sharp, and they were strewn in the bike path on Dexter. I picked up all I could find, but I'm sure I missed some.

I'm pretty sure they're the remains of tire chains. People in Seattle get only sporadic practice in snow and ice, but sometimes it's very slippery and Seattle is a hilly town. So people put on tire chains, but because they don't get practice, they buy lousy tire chains and put them on wrong. The result? Shredded tire chains make a wreck of the paint on a quarter panel, before spilling their guts on the roadway. Since the City takes a mild interest at best in street cleaning, late winter Seattle streets are a debris field of tire chain guts. Cars run over them until they end up where? In the bike lane.

So I and every Seattle biker gets to dodge bits of what look like purpose-built malice because why? Two reasons:
- Lousy tire chains that ought not be legal to sell.
- A city that cleans the streets approximately never, despite the fact that it would make the city money to clean.

Grrrr.

More debris, fielded

2011-02-09T18:50:00.000-08:00

More debris. In this case, a nasty piece of galvanized flashing or some such. Lots of sharp edges. I rode around it in the bike path for two days, so on the third day, I stopped and picked it up.

Debris Field

2011-02-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

In winter, Seattle roads are a debris field. The cause is a combination of winter conditions, stupidity, and the City's antipathy towards street cleaning.

As usual, I try to single-handedly make things better, with mixed results.

So I have a personal rule: the third time I see the same piece of hazardous shite in the roadway, I have to stop and pick it up. (Unless it's a broken bottle, in which case I sweep it out of the path of bikes and pedestrians, and hope for the best. I'm just not willing to pack beer-soaked glass in to work.)

Today's find: some weird metal bracket that seems purpose-built to cause flat tires and pedestrian injury. Nasty

More road spikes

2011-01-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

26th Ave E at E. Galer St., Seattle. These two spikes are right where the road bends. Around the corner, south of this intersection on 26th, there is another spike. In the short time I stopped to snap this picture, three bicycles came by. How do these things get left by the city in the road? I think I have an eye for them, but most bicyclists and pedestrians probably don't even see them until they hit one.

Update: They're still there.

My letter to Nicole Brodeur on road diets

2010-08-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Ms. Brodeur:

I read your column regarding the road diet for Northeast 125th Street. Not being familiar with this street, I decided to go out and see it myself. something I hope you get a chance to do.

On my visit, I noted several interesting things. First was how pleasant the neighborhood was, with mature trees lining the street. I can see why folks up there see potential for interesting retail to spread west from Lake City Way.

My impression of the road is that, despite a little rough pavement, it's entirely bikeable as it stands, although to be fair it's probably more challenging during times of heavy traffic. I didn't see any bikes besides me, but on a Sunday afternoon, there weren't all that many cars either. Lots of people waiting for buses though. Not a lot of good places for bus riders to get to or from the required side of the street.

As for the monster 8% grade hill, meh. I assume this is west-bound from roughly 25th to 17th. I rode up it in 2 minutes without breaking a sweat. Literally, 2 minutes. I timed it. I ride my bike quite a bit, but I'm well into my 40s and don't have the strength I did as a kid. Surely, there are some casual bike riders that would have had to work harder or go slower, but a lot of those casual riders ride city bikes or mountain bikes with very low gears (I was on a road bike), so they can comfortably go quite slow. I reckon there are riders that would be intimidated by that hill, but I can't imagine there are very many riders who are not able to comfortably ride up it if they tried.

Why don't more bikers ride 125th? As for me, I ride in this area quite a bit, and I've never ridden 125th because, well, I didn't know it was there. Now that I've ridden it, I'll probably ride there now and again. It's actually better than the other ways I've been getting from Lake City Way to 15th. One thing this controversy might to is get more bikers to try 125th, and when they do, they'll probably like it. Lots of bikers ride Lake City Way, and southbound there are two hills far more formidable than the hill on 125th. Taking 125th replaces the steeper and more dangerous of the two Lake City Way hills with a shorter, easier hill having better sight lines.

So what does SDOT need to do for bikers on 125th? Nothing.

But the road diet isn't for bikers anyway. It's for pedestrians, and those bus riders I saw. 125th today is like Stoneway when I used to cross it walking my son to school. It was scary to cross, especially in the winter. After too many close calls, I ended up carrying three bike flashers with me so that cars would see us in the crosswalk. Sometimes that didn't feel like enough. It's worlds better now.

Businesses were worried about the road diet on Stoneway affecting them too, and it has. For the better. Slower driving speeds make people more likely to notice interesting businesses, and more willing to park. (Ever tried parallel parking on Aurora?) So I hope the road diet is as good for business on 125th as it seems to have been on Stoneway. I can't see anything special about 125th that would keep a road diet from helping business there.

When the road diet goes in, there will be space for bike lanes, and I suppose the city might as well put them in, at least westbound, although eastbound is probably better off with a little bit wider lane and sharrows. A bike lane or sharrows would both signal to bikers that they should give 125th a try. Had I seen such an invitation in the past, I would have taken it, and discovered a pleasant little neighborhood I'm now pleased I know about.

Regards,

- Erik

Nickerson Street Road Diet

2010-08-21T16:47:00.000-07:00

Drove the dieted Nickerson today. (Planned on riding it, but had another errand to run....) Maximum speed: 36 mph, probably a 10 mph improvement. Average range of auto speeds: less than 10 mph. So far, looks like the diet is working.

There are bike lanes, but this clearly is not bike-centric infrastructure. Bike lanes disappear when the space is needed for turn lanes or for room for cars to wait at the 5-way snarl at the approach to the Fremont Bridge. I think that's the right call, though. The road diet as implemented should have negligible impact on car capacity (of which there is excess anyway) while increasing bike capacity and giving a clearer signal to all road users that bikes belong on Nickerson.

As for pedestrian safety, the actual reason for the road diet? Traffic speeds are closer to the legal limit, with ample traffic capacity. The street now complies with national standards for crosswalks, and the street feels less like a waste land and more like a neighborhood. Everybody wins, even if they aren't ready to admit it.

Everybody, that is, except a few people who think that driving 50mph through a college campus is somewhere in the Bill of Rights.

How easily can you be persuaded to surrender personal information in return for meaningless quiz results?

2010-07-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

I've just about had it with quizzes. Can we move on to some other gimmick? Maybe a video game where I try to type my SSN in backwards as fast as possible for meaningless points?

China

2010-07-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

We're back from China, with pictures. It may take a day or two for us to get comments on most of the pictures. Briefly, the pictures are more or less in chronological order. We started in Shanghai. Next we flew to Hunan province, where we saw the fantastical landscape of Zhangjiajie, then the historic river town of Fenghuang and then the provincial capital of Changsha to visit family. We ended with a few days in Beijing mostly seeing the standard sites but also getting off the beaten path.

Tekkonkinkreet

2010-05-25T19:54:00.000-07:00

Aki got this movie at Kinokuniya. It is totally, comprehensively whack. The story is sort of a Wachowski brothers remake of Our Gang in a world built out of Jim Woodring fever dreams. Except not. Maybe more like a mash up of Akira, Star Wars, The Usual Suspects, and The Miracle Worker. Except, you know, weirder.

Go ahead and watch it. I'm pretty sure you can handle it.

BTW, Sven loved it.

Checklist Manifesto

2010-05-23T17:04:00.001-07:00

What if surgeons operated on people like pilots fly airplanes? Atul Gawande's new book answers that question: fewer people would die on the operating table. Atul's new book is about how checklists can make surgery more disciplined without making it less creative or heroic. Atul tells literally gripping stories, among the most visceral writing I've seen on the very visceral subject of surgery.

But this book is about so much more than just making surgery better: it's about how complex processes fail, and the way we can make human processes that are still human, but produce the low rates of deadly mistakes we insist on. Atul is humble enough not to draw broad lessons that his data don't support, but he is bold enough to note that the question should be asked: in all kinds of complex processes, particularly during emergencies, how can we give people the tools they need to take effective action?

Atul Gawande is a great writer, a dedicated surgeon, and a creative health researcher. They are going to name buildings for him and new surgeons will be reading his books for decades. Read this book to learn about the incredibly vital worldwide revolution in surgical care that is going on right now.

Once again, bad driving in front of my son's school

2010-05-20T16:39:00.000-07:00

This morning, walking home with Nick after dropping Sven off at school, a Ford Expedition rolls past the stop line for the crosswalk, starts to head for the parking lane, finally sees us, then decelerates without exactly stopping. At this point I am maybe 8 feet from the driver. who finally stops. I point at the red light and shrug. She starts to drive forward again, still in a red light. When I don't move, she stops again.

"What?" she says.
"Red Light!"
"Why do you care?"

Why do I care? Um, I dislike being run over? Not enough? How about this: it's fifteen minutes until first bell. Dozens of kids are going to cross this intersection in the next fifteen minutes, all of them harder to see than the two adult men you almost didn't see. If one of them was the kid I see strapped in behind you, would you be more cautious? Would you consider the chance that he would end up under your bumper less important than being able to get to the red light at the end of the block a few seconds earlier? I care because you're old enough to have your own child, but you don't seem to have any concept of the responsibility that comes with operating a device with constant lethal potential if not operated carefully. I care because it bothers me that you are willing to put the children of my neighborhood at risk to test your theory that the rules are for everyone else but you.

Floyd Landis comes clean -ish

2010-05-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

Floyd Landis admits he doped. The admission is news. It's not really news that he doped. I think pretty much everybody knew that already.

Do I believe much of anything Floyd Landis says? Not really. It wasn't believable when he had a new story every five minutes for why his test results were positive even though he supposedly wasn't doping. When he stepped up to the microphone, darted his eyes around and said "I'll say, 'no.' " to the question of whether he doped, he looked entirely like a man who made a conscious decision to lie to the entire world. When he drunk-dialed another cycling athlete to harass him for urging Landis to admit the obvious, he went from reprehensible to pathetic.

So Landis' claim that he knows Lance Armstrong doped has as much credibility as most of what has come out of Landis' mouth the last four years: almost none. The evidence is that Armstrong didn't dope. New evidence could change that conclusion. But Landis' claims are not credible evidence about Armstrong's doping. All they are is credible evidence that Landis is still more interested in running and hiding than he is in facing up to the fact that his whole adult life is a lie.

I hated Flash before it was cool to hate Flash

2010-05-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, I wrote:

"Don't use Flash. Especially, not for the home page. Waiting for a flash site to load is like standing in line to watch TV. Even after loading, Flash sites are slower. If you are going to have an HTML option, you will have to develop two web sites. If you require Flash, you will lose visitors. In any case, you will lose visitors who won't wait around for slow Flash to load. What do you hope to gain with Flash?"

I wrote this long before Steve Jobs started tearing into Flash, so I'm hardly shilling for Apple. (And approximately zero people look to me as a tech pundit anyway.) So is Steve following my lead? Not exactly.

I generally agree with Jobs' criticisms of Flash: it's a pig, it crashes a lot, it doesn't play nice with the native OS or user experience. But my main problem isn't even with Flash per se. That's why, a year or two ago, I changed "Don't use Flash" above to "Don't use gratuitous Flash." Sure, Flash is a pig, but it also encourages piggy web sites. Even if you don't use Flash, you can still make your web site suck if you try hard enough. The point is to provide the user with an excellent and supple user experience with as little delay as possible. Any site that feels compelled to put up a link that says "skip intro" is based on the fantasy that there are people out there who are giddy with excitement at the prospect of sitting through a bunch of pretty mood-setting pictures before they get to the reason they visited the site in the first place.

So go ahead and dump Flash. I'll cheer. But for all the people who will use HTML 5 to make sites that need "skip intro" links, sorry about all the traffic you didn't get.

Stones Into Schools

2010-05-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

Greg Mortenson's sequal to Three Cups of Tea continues the story, mostly about building schools in rural Afghanistan.

If you don't know who Greg Mortenson is, you must have been hiding under a stone. Greg Mortenson and the schools his organization builds in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan have been reported everywhere, and Three Cups of Tea is a smash best seller. This book covers some of the same ground, so I approached it with limited expectations. The remarkable thing is that it is a great story that stands on its own. Greg makes you believe that a peaceful world might be remotely possible.

Car driving in a bike/parking lane

2010-03-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

Car driving in a bike/parking lane, blowing through a crosswalk at high speed against the light on Fremont Ave.

This driver pulled out of the car lane to speed through a crosswalk while driving in a combined bike lane/ parking lane. There were children the crosswalk at the time going to school. The crosswalk is in a school zone. This driver committed a bunch of infractions and risked the safety of all around them. Why? So they could speed forward a few hundred feet, slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a parked car (It's a parking lane, remember?) then crowd back into the driving lane. Nuts, just nuts. SDOT has planned improvements to that area, and they can't come too soon. It's bad enough when bikes blow through that crosswalk. That kind of driver behavior is going to kill someone.

This isn't Paris.

2010-03-11T16:04:00.001-08:00

Actual sign in Seattle. Seattle is not Paris. In Paris, people let their dogs poop everywhere, and the city cleans the streets every night. In Seattle, people let their dogs poop everywhere, but the city never cleans the streets. Ever.

Chilly Hilly

2010-03-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

Did the course twice, each time in about two hours. A very nice day.

Logicomix

2010-02-22T21:33:00.000-08:00

A two-pound comic book staring Bertrand Russel? Futhermore, Wittgenstein isn't the supervillain? Unexpected, perhaps, but an entertaining read.

The Outlaw Sea

2010-02-09T05:01:00.000-08:00

William Langewiesche's book on why, in a small world, the sea is still a big place. A melancholy book about how all ships die, salaries go down every year, and the sea is even less safe than it needs to be. A very interesting book. Thanks for loaning it to me, Michi.

Haiti: Partners in Health

2010-01-15T07:44:00.000-08:00

Partners in Health has been working in Haiti for 25 years. They may be the largest heathcare provider still operating in Haiti. My understanding is their infrastructure was relatively undamaged, although of course there is a lot that is unknown. If any organization in Haiti is in a position to help the people of Haiti, it's PIH.

Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains featured this organization and it's director Dr. Paul Farmer. I gave PIH money that this month's budget doesn't really have, because next month there won't be as many people in Haiti to help.

2009-12-29T22:18:00.000-08:00

Just finished David Byrne's book Bicycle Diaries. It's mostly about riding bikes in cities, from New York to Istanbul to London to Manila. It's also about various other musings, thoughts on what cities could be like if we planned for things besides driving, and Byrne's foray into urban planning activism in New York.

It's fun. As a Talking Heads fan, it was interesting to get inside the head of their sardonic frontman. I also found the subject interesting.

From Invention to Startup

2009-11-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

I spoke this week as part of the From Invention to Startup lecture series produced by the University of Washington's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. My topic was bootstrapping a company with SBIR grants. Slides from the talk are available here. There is also video. If that doesn't work, my slides are also available here.

MLS Cup

2009-11-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

Sven, Aki, Sven's friend Simon, and I all got to see our first national championship: the MLS Cup at Qwest field. This was a birthday present for Sven. It was pretty much uniformly fantastic, and a close-fought, interesting game.

It would have been more fun to cheer the Sounders (and we did cheer them a bit anyway) but it was still a great game, and RSL deserved their win. Obviously the boys had a great time.

Thanks for the great tix, Jane! Happy birthday, Sven.

Strength in What Remains

2009-11-14T10:01:00.000-08:00

There aren't any breezy books about genocide. There are such books that are worth reading, however, and Strength in What Remains is one of them. Tracy Kidder tells the story of Deo, who had the misfortune to endure the genocidal violence in both Burundi and Rwanda.

Such an experience damages the individual in a seemingly endless variety of ways. The remarkable thing about Deo is the ways he was unchanged. Who he is, what he values, and even his life goals are essentially unchanged by a vicious catastrophe that changed everything around him. This is a story about the most terrible human actions, but also about the inner strength of one remarkable individual.

Spoke Tension Gauge

2009-10-06T16:17:00.001-07:00

The DT Swiss spoke tension gauge is a thing of beauty for anyone with a serious bike tool fetish. (That would include me.) It feels good in the hand. It does a cool thing. It looks good doing it.

It's also over $500. Oops.

So I have lusted after a DT Swiss spoke tension gauge in vain. But no more. No, I haven't decided to pay more than most people pay for a bicycle on a tool I use for maybe ten hours per year. No indeed. I have done much better.

Bryan found a spoke tension tool from Park that cost only $60. Is it as accurate as the DT Swiss gauge? I'd guess not. But how accurate a spoke tension number can one actually make use of anyway? Plus, the Park tool seems very repeatable, and repeatability is actually much more important than absolute accuracy.

How accurate it is depends on how well it's calibrated and how well it holds calibration. The design looks like it will hold calibration tolerably well, so I think this gauge will serve well.

So far, I find the Park tool positively lovely. I'll compare it to the DT Swiss unit at Wright Brothers' bike co-op and report back.

So what does a spoke tension gauge do? It measures the tension of bicycle wheel spokes. This is useful when building wheels, particularly back wheels, to make sure you have the spoke tension right. Guys who build wheels all day long don't need a tool like this because they can do it by feel. Except there aren't any guys who build wheels all day long anymore. And back in the day, those guys were probably not nearly as good at feeling spoke tension as they thought they were. I'm never going to build 100 wheels a year, or probably even 10 wheels a year, so I do much better with a tool.

Earthquake-Proof Your Wine Cellar

2009-10-01T08:29:00.001-07:00

I added to the new DIY section of my web site with an article on how to earthquake-proof a wine cellar.

Originally, I wrote this for Wired's How-to Wiki. That article got dozens of Diggs, but Wired's How-to wiki seems to be dying a slow death. In fact, my vanity web site has a higher pagerank than the wiki article. So maybe more home handypeople will find this information useful, now that it's in a more prominent place.

DiNotte Light Charger

2009-09-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

Like many, I'm a fan of DiNotte bike lights. They're bright and durable. The Pro series uses ordinary AA batteries, and so can be powered with inexpensive rechargeable batteries. The only problem is prying the batteries out of the battery pack to recharge them.

Not any more. About a year ago, I built a couple of chargers that allow me (and my friends) to charge the battery packs without taking the batteries out. (It was Brian Pratt's idea, so props to Brian.)

I have put up a web page with complete instructions to build your own DiNotte battery pack charger. It's preposterously simple.

High Pass Challenge 2009

2009-09-14T21:45:00.001-07:00

This time, gold! Six hours, 38 minutes. Exactly 40 minutes faster than last year. I finished 57th out of about 500 riders.

Six an a half hours of riding about as hard as possible without bonking. I have trouble imagining anything I would have rather done with that day. So many great things happened, so many wonderful moments shared with other riders, so many friends and casual acquaintances met for one last time this season. It would have been a good day if I had missed my goal of 7 hours. But I didn't miss it; I exceeded my goal and then some.

Also, High Pass Challenge is an absurdly beautiful ride. You get great name-drop views of Mt. St. Helens and Rainier, plus a whole lot of other stunning high-altitude scenery.

Update: Here are the final statistics:

538 started.
Of which 449 finished.
Of which 112 finished within the gold time limit.

High Pass Challenge is a true challenge, and a beautiful day in the mountains.

Spike spiked

2009-09-11T22:18:00.001-07:00

Update: after several conversations with SDOT about spikes in Seattle streets, I marked the location of the spike in the street. SDOT sheared the head off and pounded it down. I think it's going to stay there. Good on ye, SDOT.

An Apple a day

2009-09-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

I used to say life would be easier if I just wrote a check to Hugo Boss every month and a random sport shirt or suit in my size would show up periodically. Now I could say more or less the same thing about Apple. However, unlike products from some other companies (Dell, I'm looking at you and the laptop that needed three motherboards to make it out of warranty) every thing I have ever bought from Apple still runs. OK, I did need to get a $7 battery for my old Fat Boy iPod, but now it runs better than ever. Too bad I have more than 40GB of music. Snif. I'll just have to learn to love my new 120GB iPod classic Aki got me for my birthday. Thanks, Aki.

SDOT promises to address street spike problem

2009-09-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

I received mail from Tracy Burrows at SDOT today. She promissed on SDOT's behalf to address the problem of SDOT crews leaving spikes in Seattle streets. The solution is to leave spikes in Seattle streets.

Well, OK, she did say they'd pound them all the way into the pavement. It sounds scary, but if SDOT actually does it, and the spikes stay there, I'm happy.

Of course, SDOT crews still have to find the spikes. Tracy told me that SDOT went looking for a spike I told them about, and couldn't find it, even when I told them almost exactly where it was. I saw it on the way to work this morning. The spikes can be very hard to see in asphalt, despite their size, because they blend in very well. That's a big part of the problem, in fact.

Comcast: Delivering the Internet even when it isn't really there

2009-09-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

Comcast's roll out of Domain Helper (also know as "DNS Helper") hit us at work this morning. This fascinating typosquatting tool would be illegal if it were done by anybody but an ISP. (And might actually be illegal under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. If it isn't illegal, it should be.) As designed, Domain Helper is a supremely irritating form of network damage that makes complete hash out of DNS. What it's supposed to do is return a paid search page for any URL that doesn't exist. What Comcast is effectively doing here, is giving themselves a free domain name registration for all domains that have yet to be registered. To me, that's stealing. (Comcast isn't alone either, apparently Verizon and Virgin also engage in this nefarious practice.)

That's when Domain Helper works correctly, which it doesn't always. Sometimes, it keeps you from getting to web sites that actually exist. So, possibly because of design errors that Comcast may have little incentive to fix, Comcast users will now occasionally get a search page instead of the legitimate web site they asked for.

To top it off, Comcast doesn't follow their own published rules for Domain Helper. Comcast says they'll only intercept pages that begin with "www." This is important, because it makes it less likely that Comcast will sweep up an obvious typo. But today at our shop, "wwww.google.com" is intercepted by Domain Helper.

Even Comcast wouldn't do something this evil without an opt-out. Except the opt-out is broken, at least for us. The following conversation would be funny if it weren't sad. Apparently, Comcast replaced an earlier opt-out system that didn't work well, with a whizzy new opt-out system that doesn't work well. When people ask what ISP we have at work, I answer, "we don't have internet service at work; we have Comcast."

[Edit: Comcast can't figure out why their opt-out won't work for us, but they did give us URLs for DNS servers that provide the correct DNS service. Since we're geeks, we can hardwire our DNS at the router instead of getting it via DHCP. It's not super-hard to do, but it's pretty ridiculous.

Help Chat room text follows:

user Brian_ has entered room

Brian(Tue Sep 8 16:37:14 PDT 2009)>
wish to disable Domain Helper, but primary login does not display that option below the "Device 1" info. Oddly although I am logged in [...] says "hello, *".

analyst Mark has entered room

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:38:35 PDT 2009)>
Hello Brian_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Mark. Please give me one moment to review your information.

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:38:53 PDT 2009)>
No problem. I can help you with your account.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:39:02 PDT 2009)>
great, thx

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:40:27 PDT 2009)>
What is Domain Helper?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:40:37 PDT 2009)>
it's that whacked out DNS hijacker

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:41:42 PDT 2009)>
Is it a toolbar on your browser or a web site?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:41:39 PDT 2009)>
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?Guid=f134ed32-3ad4-49c6-9864-1dd00689d950

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:41:59 PDT 2009)>
its your web site

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:44:05 PDT 2009)>
Ok. That looks like a feature of the browser..

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:44:32 PDT 2009)>
NO. It's your routers intercepting DNS errors and substituting a search page instead. Bad juju.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:45:11 PDT 2009)>
Let's go ahead and kick this upstairs to somebody who understands the product offerings, shall we?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:49:45 PDT 2009)>
hello?

Mark(Tue Sep 8 16:51:52 PDT 2009)>
This actually can't be 'switched off' because it is on all our servers for resolving domain names and helps get you to a valid page.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:53:01 PDT 2009)>
Do I need to dig up your own FAQ for you on that as well? Search on "Domain Helper Opt-Out" while you're transferring me to your manager.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:53:49 PDT 2009)>
http://customer.comcast.com/Pages/FAQViewer.aspx?Guid=e02580db-8813-43a3-9642-b66d8cfceb1a

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:56:50 PDT 2009)>
That's the FAQ for turnging it off, except of course it doesn't work. The promised opt-out link isn't where it's meant to be. I'm thinking it has something to do with the weirdness in my primary account where [...] it calls me "*".

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:57:15 PDT 2009)>
But really, please just boost me to somebody more senior. This is getting silly.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:58:37 PDT 2009)>
Also you might enjoy https://dns-opt-out.comcast.net/help-index.php

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 13:58:50 PDT 2009)>
sheesh

Mark(Tue Sep 8 17:00:13 PDT 2009)>
You may need to clear the browser temporary files and cookies and set the security levels to the defaults.

Make sure you have the following:

- the latest version of adobe flash and shockwave installed from http://www.adobe.com
- the latest updates installed from Windows Update.

analyst Mark has been temporarily disconnected. Please wait while the analyst attempts to reconnect.

Analyst has left the room. Your problem is being escalated to another analyst

analyst Amber has entered room

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:07:52 PDT 2009)>
I can certainly relate to your needs and to have you in this chat is as good as fulfilling my own. I am committed in wanting to provide you with the best customer service experience. You can surely take your worries out. Let me prove my expertise.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:08:42 PDT 2009)>
OK! Per that last suggestion: Two fully up to date PCs, three different browesers (IE, Firefox, Chrome), same effect. No opt-out link in the CustomerCentral page, and that weird "hello, *" thing.

analyst Amber has been temporarily disconnected. Please wait while the analyst attempts to reconnect.

analyst Amber has entered room

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:10:57 PDT 2009)>
hello again

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:11:05 PDT 2009)>
Is Domain helper installed on your computer?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:11:40 PDT 2009)>
is this the right chat room? Please read the FAQs I've already posted in this chat.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:12:12 PDT 2009)>
Or can you see the previous exchanges?

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:13:04 PDT 2009)>
Brian, is this a business account?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:13:07 PDT 2009)>
Yes.

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:14:41 PDT 2009)>
I apologize Brian, as much as I wanted to assist you with your concern however for Business Accounts, you need to call our Business Accounts Department. I will provide you with their telephone number.

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:14:54 PDT 2009)>
sure, great, whatever

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:15:20 PDT 2009)>
Phone number is 800-316-1619

Amber(Tue Sep 8 17:15:48 PDT 2009)>
It was my pleasure assisting you today. Is there anything else I can help you with?

Brian_(Tue Sep 8 14:17:26 PDT 2009)>
I sincerely doubt it.

SDOT Still Leaving Nails on Seattle Streets

2009-08-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

I blogged last summer that Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is leaving metal spikes in city streets. They're still doing it. This spring, SDOT conducted a traffic study around Univeristy Bridge. On June 5, 2009, I noticed that SDOT had removed the traffic sensor but once again left the metal spikes behind in the pavement. As the picture above shows, they're still there. The spikes are on the southbound bridge approach from NE 40th. This street is marked with sharrows indicating it as a bike route. The spikes are somewhat over a foot from the curb, roughly in the center of the area you'd expect a bike to travel. The spikes stick up out of the pavement over a centimeter. Hitting the spike with a tire would probably cause a flat, and could cause a bike to lose control, even if the spikes didn't cause a flat. Eventually, the spikes will work themselves loose, presenting a hazard to cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

Taking the spikes out isn't difficult. They pop right out with a crowbar. It happens I don't carry a crowbar with me on my bike, or I would have taken them out myself. But apparently, SDOT crews don't bother to take spikes out, at least some of the time.

I'm trying to fathom a situation where somebody thinks it's a good idea to leave a spike in the pavement rather than take 5 seconds to pull it out and dispose of it. Is SDOT doing this all over town? This just seems idiotic to me.

Work: how hard is hard? (Xconomy part 2)

2009-08-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of my Xconomy article is available here.

Xconomista Me

2009-08-13T21:19:00.000-07:00

Last month, I was on a panel with Janis Machala, among others, that peripherally addressed the topic of how hard startups really work, and how hard they optimally ought to work. Luke Timmerman of Xconomy reported it, and set off a minor firestorm.

In one of those 6-degree things, Luke, Janice, and I all ended up face:face a few days later. Luke invited me to make some comments on work/life balance. I guess they turned out well enough, because Luke published the first installment today, with a second part to follow shortly.

All Fun and No Work Makes Jack a B-Lister?

2009-07-31T21:34:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, I was on a panel on "How to Find, Fund, Protect and Launch New Technologies" sponsored by WBBA, University of Washington School of Law, and Fenwick & West. The panel was moderated by Fenwick's Stephen Graham and the other panelists besides me were WRF CEO Ron Howell, supernetworker Janis Machala, and UW Law's Sean O'Connor.

Luke Timmerman reported it under the title "Seattle’s Lifestyle Keeps Us Trailing the Bay Area, Says UW Startup Maven Janis Machala." That pretty much sums up Luke's take-away from the meeting. Luke certainly reported the most newsworthy event of the panel: Janis saying that quality of life gets in the way of startup success in Seattle. “There’s a lifestyle element here. People want balance. People in Silicon Valley don’t know what balance means.” Janis specifically faulted Microsoft Millionaires for not starting enough new companies.

My comments on the panel were in a different direction. A big problem Seattle has starting companies is lack of a ready bench of people in all roles who have started companies. Seattle is just barely big enough to really make it, or maybe not quite big enough. Seattle has bobbled just above or below critical mass for decades without really breaking out or really failing. Also, the current crisis is a potential opportunity for Seattle. The current uncertainty gives us a chance to redefine Seattle's role in the nation’s and world’s biotech community.

RAMROD

2009-07-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

Did RAMROD again. The weather was beautiful, from a scenery standpoint. A little hot, though. Actually, it was pleasantly cool all the way to Packwood. Then it was hot. Then later, hotter, then on the way to Crystal, hotter still. And the last five miles? Even hotter.

I finished in about exactly 11 hours. Considering the heat and that I'm still recovering from being hit by a car a few weeks ago, I was entirely satisfied with that performance.

Sunflower

2009-07-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

Gyula Krúdy wrote 60 novels. He loved at least that many women, and this book, like many of those loves, is intense, abundant, and memorable, but not the labor of many years. Sunflower was instead serialized around 1918 in a Hungarian newspaper.

Sunflower tells the story of a well-born Hungarian woman, her friend, and their mutual and mutually exclusive loves. Also, much is reputed to be lost in translation. If that doesn't sound promising, let me recommend Sunflower as among the most lavish books ever conceived. A meandering plot yields wistful views of a lost Hungary, from sharp, snow-laden nights to hazy, sweltering summer afternoons, and everything in-between. Plus, it's funny and not a little saucy. I think of Krúdy as a kind of Hungarian Czesław Miłosz. Put down that forgettable Harlequin penny dreadful and get your lovin' from the house of Krúdy.

STP 2009

2009-07-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

Took the first 100 miles fast. Too fast, actually, and I spent too much time on the front of pacelines. Got to within 10 miles of Centralia by about 9:00. The next 100 miles were a constant dance on the edge of bonking. Finished a few minutes before 5pm anyway. Had dinner with the family then went out and saw my brother's band. A good day. Thanks to Aki and Sven for meeting me at the finish. It is always nice to see a familiar face after a long day like that.

Three Cups of Tea

2009-04-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

The remarkable story of Greg Mortenson, who got lost climbing down K2, and wandered into a world he could hardly have imagined in rural Pakistan. As Pakistan becomes an increasingly critical key to world stability, Mortenson's book is a fabulous window into some of the peoples who live there, what they want out of life, and how outside forces can change their and our lives for the better or otherwise. (Oh, and Mortenson goes to rural Afghanistan, too.) Read this book as a great human story, and as one point of reference to personalize news from that part of the world.

Tweak

2009-03-16T17:17:00.000-07:00

Nic Sheff is a meth addict. The first 130 pages of his book Tweak detail a harrowing 27-day train-wreck of late-stage meth addiction. (Nic Sheff hadn't actually been using for all that long before this time —apparently meth addiction can come on very fast.) It's remarkable he isn't dead several times over, by the end. It's also remarkable that someone who has messed up their head that badly can still write very, very well.

But that's not the whole way down the rabbit hole. It gets far deeper, and hard as it may be to believe, darker. It's odd that some of the darkest moments of the book are when Nic starts trying to clean up. I won't tell you how the book ends, but since Nic is still alive at the end of the book, the book in any case isn't a whole life story. So however bleak or hopeful the end, it's not really the end.

David Sheff, Nic's Father, wrote Beautiful Boy as a companion to Tweak, but it's really an alternate reality. For one thing, while Nic always knows more or less what is happening to him, David quite often doesn't know whether his son is using or not, or even if he is still alive. David details the pervasive, consuming anxiety that becomes a companion illness to his son's.

Beautiful Boy is a well written book, but surpisingly not as well-written as the best parts of Nic's book. It's almost beyond belief that Nic could macerate his psyche to the extent he has, and still write better than his father. One can't help wondering what kind of writer he could have been.

The other interesting insight that only comes from comparing the books is how comprehensively dishonest Nic's addiction is. Surely, one important point of meth is to try to avoid life's hard truths. The cruel irony is that meth makes those hard truths so much harder. But it seems that meth comprehensively poisons away the truth from every aspect of Nic's life. Nic lies to everyone including himself. In the end, he even lies to us, his readers.

Most of Tweak is flayed down to a raw, festering honesty. Nic does change certain facts to protect the privacy of people who appear in the book. But reading David's book, we realize that Nic changed more facts than he absolutely had to. Perhaps lying is a habit and nothing more, but in a very subtle way this is a window into the Sheff's joyless funhouse. We realize we can't trust Nic as much as we thought we could. Just as David discovered over and over that every time he trusted his son it was a mistake, and just as Nic learned over and over than even he couldn't trust himself.

Day of Empire

2009-02-12T07:18:00.000-08:00

Amy Chua's first book World on Fire, was a fascinating mix of personal and global observations about how small communities make big economic impacts within their larger societies. Here, Chua examines all of the global powers (by her definition) throughout recorded history. Her conclusion is that they all practiced what she calls strategic tolerance: a willingness to embrace new ideas and make use of capable people, whatever their provenance.

Strategic tolerance is an interesting concept. It articulates the self-interested motivations for diversity, as independent from altruistic motives. Chua notes that Genghis Khan didn't form his inner circle from widely diverse ethnic and religious groups because he saw diversity as a social good. He merely wanted the best and brightest people available, so as to be a successful as possible. Diversity has an inherent moral value, at least to some people, including me. Chua articulates the practical benefits that have historically motivated diversity, and documents the world-changing consequences.

Mirroring People

2008-12-23T11:40:00.000-08:00

Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People. I found out about this book through Charles Mudede's review of it. Actually, I didn't read the whole review. I read the first sentence. Halfway through the second sentence, I had already ordered the book from Amazon. Yep, it's an interesting book.

Lakoff and Johnson's 1999 book Philosophy in the Flesh persuades that a philosophy of mind should be motivated by our knowledge of cognitive science and neurology. That is, what we believe about minds should be consistent with what we know about brains.

Iacoboni's work on mirror neurons, described in his book, thus provides a new foundation on which to address critical philosophical questions. What does one person really know about another? How do we know that we understand another person, or have been understood? In mirror neurons, Iacoboni and his collaborators have uncovered the specific neurological machinery by which we comprehend and imitate the actions of others, and by which we empathize.

The answer is fascinating and unexpected: when we perceive an action by others, we experience the action as if we had performed it ourselves. In a real and visceral sense, we empathize with others by experiencing what they experince. We are far less trapped in our own brains than was once thought. Specific neurological mechanisms allow us to understand the actions and emotional states of others as if they were our own. Iacoboni shows us a world far less lonely than almost anyone has ever imagined.

Good Name for a Band

2008-12-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

One of my guilty pleasures is taking the news commentarium as an I Ching of names for popular music acts. Here are new arrivals:

Amish Mantle David Eugene Edwards' hot new Pennsylvania-based band.
Blago Midwestern power punk.
Trample Mart Thrash metal with a pop edge.

Why is Sex Fun?

2008-12-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

Jared Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? My friend Heather Holmback loaned me this book, after a typically interesting discussion. (Aki and Heather are old friends, and used to work together.)

In this case, the discussion was on the evolutionary value of menopause, a phenomenon (nearly) unique to humans. Diamond raises and dismisses some typical arguments that don't make much sense, then advances the one widely-heard argument he (and FWIW I) find sensible: by skipping the last child or two, old women can help raise their grandchildren, and do more to ultimately increase their genes' survival than would a risky pregnancy. Grandmothers help not just with childcare: in some traditional societies such as the Hadza of Tanzania, grandmothers are the most economically productive people.

But then Diamond raises an argument of his own, a very interesting argument at the heart of Heather and my discussion: in traditional societies, old people are the library people turn to in times of crisis.

Any human societies that included individuals old enough to remember the last event like a [hurricane] had a better chance of surviving than did societies without such old people.... At times of crisis... prior death of such an older woman also tended to eliminate all of her surviving relatives from the gene pool.... The importance to society of the memories of old women is what I see as a major driving force behind the evolution of human female menopause.

The book is about a good deal more than menopause. And, like sex, the book is also fun. Thanks for loaning it to me, Heather. I'll have it back to you real soon now.

P4 Medicine

2008-11-14T15:56:00.000-08:00

I maintain a biotech/health blog called P4 Medicine. The name comes from Lee Hood's concept of a new medical practice that is "Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory." (Other people use different combinations of words beginning with P to get across the same idea.)

But, there is a new P4 appearing in the Google rankings, and it's strong medicine: the Cervelo P4 bicycle. It's very nice.

Now, I'm not a time trialist, so there's no chance I'd actually buy this bike. But it's a very pretty bike all the same. If I saw one in person, I would stare at it. For a good long while.

This brings up a point that has been bothering me for some time: how strong a concept is P4 Medicine anyway? Really, it's not a coherent concept so much as a laundry list of objectives (or adjectives). We have a bike, a revision control system, and a medical revolution all competing for the top of the same Google search. That's less than ideal.

But what are the alternatives? Prospective Medicine is a different, narrower idea. Likewise, Personalized Medicine seems to me inadequately ambitious. PM is personalized medicine as opposed to what? Impersonal medicine? Bulk medicine? Medicine is already personalized. Yes, I know, PM is about medicine that is more personalized in very specific ways, but again that's really beside the point. I don't want my medical care to be more personalized, I want it to help me feel better and live longer, for the same or less money. "Personalized" isn't a value proposition, and it isn't a recipe for how to achieve value any more than four copies of the letter P.

Hmm, maybe I just need to go on a bike ride....

Burrill Personalized Medicine Meeting 2008

2008-11-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the Fourth Burrill Personalized Medicine Meeting. I blogged it on my biotech/health blog here.

The conference wasn't exactly upbeat. But given the economic turmoil, it was certainly optimistic. People see a bright future for Personalized Medicine and diagnostics, which is good news both for America's health and for my day job, so I shouldn't complain.

My 150ms of fame on 538

2008-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

I made a comment on that crackpipe of election information fivethirtyeight.com, related to voting and tangentially to e-deceptive campaign practices. My comment elicited favorable response. Believe it or not, there were suggestion that the comment should be its own thread. (No really, more than one. OK, two.) So here it is in all its glory:

@MsMike said...
> Erik: Thanks for the info on vote protection. Very helpful. I will be wathing for more.

OK, the report on deceptive electronic practices is here: http://votingintegrity.org/pdf/edeceptive_report.pdf Non electronic deceptive elections practices are still a danger, but are for the most part understood in the elections community. This report explores some deceptive practices specifically using electronic (primarily internet) means. Deceptive practices are attempts to affect voter registration, turnout, or vote choice by means of deception. I am an author on this report, which was produced by the National Committee for Voting Integrity a project of the highly esteemed Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The Voter Suppression Wiki has a list of list of election protection initiatives and a nice incident tracker page that lists prominent suppression incidents in an organized way.

There is also a Twitter VoteReport Project that looks promising.

The Verified Voting Foundation has a wealth of information on elections technology. This is not directly related to elections incidents, but may be helpful if you are trying to understand what kinds of known problems exist with different voting systems.

To reiterate my previous message, if you personally experience what you consider to be a voting incident you think might be worthy of follow-up or investigation, I recommend you call 866-our-vote or visit voteprotect.org.

In places that permit early voting, you can take stress off of what will in many places be an overburdened elections system by voting early.

Take a minute to visit your county's elections web site (assuming it has one), especially if you're new to the county, and most especially if you're new to the state. Rules vary. In some places, if you go to the wrong polling place, you can vote provisional, but in some places, it's basically impossible to vote in the wrong polling place. Worst of all are places where you can vote provisionally in the polling place, but unless you visit the county elections department in person before the elections results are finalized, your provisional ballot gets thrown out. It's important to know the rules.

If you are voting in person on election day, try to vote early if possible. Mid-day is often a quiet time. The county elections web site may have recommendations. Employers by law have to give you "adequate" time off from work to vote. (I'm not a lawyer and not an expert on this particular law, but if an employer will not reasonably accommodate your voting, then I recommend you call 866-our-vote right now.) Bring ID with you to the polling place regardless of the rules, just in case.

If you experience something bad (an "incident,") try to be a good reporter. Make notes in writing, if you can. Note the names of people you talk to and the time you talked to them. If it's relevant, note precinct numbers, brand names, model numbers and serial numbers. Generally and for very good reasons you can't take pictures inside a polling place, but if you have a camera or camera phone, take pictures outside the poling place and where permitted that might be helpful later. (Long lines, illegal behavior, etc.) If you don't have anything to write with, call yourself on your cell phone and leave yourself a voicemail message. This information can be valuable real time in getting injunctions, and better yet helping elections staff do a better job before an injunction even becomes necessary. Be firm but polite. More elections incidents are caused by bad information than by malice, and even in the case of malice, being hostile probably won't help you gather valuable information.

Do not, of course, forget to vote. If you fall ill or break your leg or something, you can still vote. Have a friend drive you. (Or if none of your friends have cars, contact your campaign to see if the GOTV people can help.) Many places offer curbside voting for handicapped voters, and it is now common to establish a temporary handicapped parking space in front of polling places. Rules vary, but I doubt many places would deny you assistance if you say you need it. I know a poll watcher in South Africa. One of the voters was an elderly, arthritic man who walked four hours one way on a very hot day to get to the polls. Then he waited in line several more hours. Then he walked home again. Oh, and he was carrying his handicapped wife on his back. If they voted, you can get your a** to the polls. Hear? Better yet, help somebody else who might not vote get to the polls.

Finally, as you enjoy the election night drama at an election party or quietly at home, give a moment's thanks to the election workers and election protection volunteers, whose work is not finished on election day. They will be toiling through the night and the next day. Many of them will not sleep for 30 or 40 hours straight, only to grab a brief rest and begin again. All for generally low pay or no pay at all, in the service of our precious democracy.

E-Deceptive Practices: Now with added blogos.

2008-10-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

The report E-Deceptive Campaign Practices Report: Internet Technology & Democracy 2.0 I recently blogged about is getting some traction on the web.

Sarah Lai Stirland at Wired picked it up for Threat Level.
TechPresident's Daily Digest gave us a knuckle-bump.
My man Andy Oram over at O'Reilly Blogged it.
Jon Pincus blogged it too. (Like me, he's a contributor. Actually, a much bigger contributor than me.)

Deceptive Election Practices

2008-10-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

The report E-Deceptive Campaign Practices Report: Internet Technology & Democracy 2.0. has released under the auspices of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The list of contributors is (me aside) quite impressive. This ambitious and useful project was led and pulled together in remarkably short order by the remarkable Lillie Coney, also a contributor. The report discusses how deceptive campaign practices have changed in the age of ubiquitous internet.

Sarah Palin Web Poll

2008-09-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

Well, all the kids are mad for Sarah Palin web polls. Even PBS is getting into the act. I succumbed to the fever and did my own:

High Pass Challenge

2008-09-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

I rode the second annual High Pass Challenge. Pictures here. It is a beautiful ride. I was trying for 7 hours, but didn't quite make it.

Side Show

2008-08-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

The cover story in today's P-I is Evi Sztajno's article on how low a priority sidewalks are in Seattle. My homey Kate Martin is quoted extensively. Pedestrian issues seem to finally be getting some real attention in Seattle.

More spikes in Seattle

2008-08-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

Aki was riding her bike in our neighborhood, and had to dodge some odd spikes sticking up out of our street. The spikes turned out to be masonry nails with a head about the size of a nickel, sticking about half an inch out of the pavement. Such a nail could easily cause someone to trip, or cause a flat tire. Not a good thing to have on your street. Aki assumed that the spikes had been accidentally dropped and driven into the pavement, or the like, although she considered the possibility that someone was being very mean.

I asked our next-door neighbor about them, and he told me that the spikes had already caused a flat tire on a car on our street. It's easy to see how these spikes could cause a flat tire on a bike. A flat tire on a car surprises me a little, but that just shows that these spikes definitely don't belong in the street.

My neighbor told me something else interesting: the City of Seattle Transportation Department put the spikes in the street.

That's right: this hazard is not caused by an accident nor antisocial hostility. The spikes were put there on purpose to hold down air hoses for a street traffic study. After the city came back and took away the traffic measuring equipment, they left two spikes along one side of the street. I got out a pry bar and popped out the spikes. They came out very easily, revealing them to be sharp, wicked-looking, hardened spikes. Given that they were set only lightly into the pavement, they would have worked themselves free, and embedded themselves in something: a car or bike tire, a foot, a dog's paw, or something else. These things were a bad enough hazard in the street, but sooner or later, they'll work lose and pose an even more serious threat.

On reflection, it occurred to me that if my neighbor was right about the city putting in the spikes, there should be two more spikes on the other side of the street. After careful inspection, I found that there were spikes on the other side of the street. Or, there was at least a third spike. I looked for a fourth spike, but couldn't find it. Perhaps it had already come loose, leading to who-knows-what trouble.

It just can't be right for the City to leave spikes all over town. First it was spikes in Greenlake, now spikes in the streets. How does an organization charged with the safety of Seattle streets reach the point where they are leaving sharpened spikes in those same streets? The City should clean up better after traffic studies. Maybe they shouldn't be putting these spikes in the road in the first place.

Flight

2008-08-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

Yet another of the books I find myself reading lately, mostly concerned with identity. (Compare with Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence, for example.) One difference: this is a novel, one of the few novels I've read this year. Alexie's novels are always fictions, but always picking the scab of an unhealed truth. This isn't a breezy summer novel, but it's a quick read and literally a wild ride. Flight is ultimately optimistic about what people are and what they can become.

Earthquake-proof a wine cellar

2008-08-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

[Update: I've updated this article and put it on my personal website here.]

At the same time I was looking for somewhere to share my experiences earthquake-proofing a wine cellar, I ran across Wired's How-to Wiki. So I wrote an articles on how to earthquake proof a wine cellar. Of course, there's no such thing as earthquake proof, but our wine cellar is certainly more earthquake resistant than it was before.

Wired's How-to wiki seems to be off to a slow start, but there are some useful articles in there, mixed in with bar bets and other cruft.

Pedestrians take safety in their own hands

2008-08-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

Kery Murakami quotes me in an article in today's P-I. The article is about the people, including me, who put up and maintain buckets of pedestrian flags in Seattle.

I prefer the title of the print edition, "Pedestrians take safety in their own hands," to the online title which focuses on flag attrition. Flags disappear over time. That's inevitable but just part of the remarkably small expenses of flagging. And anyway, flag attrition seems to be falling over time, so the online title isn't really news.

Regardless, Kery's article is a good reflection of pedestrian flagging in Seattle, why people do it, and how it's working. People flag intersections because they seem to help, and we felt we needed to do something to make pedestrians safer. Nobody's in charge. Nobody called a meeting and got everyone to agree. People just took action. There is some communication between some of the people putting up flags, but it's sporadic. There is some sharing of technical information. Some flaggers talk to the City of Kirkland, which has been flagging crosswalks for ten years.

Greenlake Spikes

2008-07-29T23:57:00.000-07:00

This month, a boater found a bunch of metal spikes in Green Lake, Seattle. There were lots of them, regularly spaced. Who would do such an awful thing? Turns out the Seattle Parks Department put them there as part of a misguided milfoil control program. The City Parks Department said the spikes came as a kit, and the City had "no say" in using the spikes.

I'm not buying it. The City put the spikes in the lake. If the City had concerns about the kit, they should have returned the kit or modified the kit to use sandbags, as in later efforts. It may not have been completely obvious 20 years ago when these spikes were put in that they would become a hazard, but it's still the City's screw up. Fortunately, nobody was seriously hurt, and the city is really very somewhat certain that they have all of the spikes up out of the lake.

Critical Crossings

2008-07-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

City Councilmember Nick Licata has a web site devoted to "critical" pedestrian crossings in Seattle: Critical Crossings. You can add your own crossing with a picture. Cool.

Identity and Violence

2008-06-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen wrote Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny to argue why the conventional wisdom on large scale human conflict is almost entirely wrong. There is no clash of civilizations. Instead, there are people who are happy to speak on behalf of these viewpoints for their own benefit, while actual people are far too complex to be captured in such narrow confines.
Sen repeatedly makes two points: first that people have a variety of identities, and different identities are more or less important under different circumstances. Sen's second point is that opponents of the narrow-minded "clash of civilizations" perspective usually concede too much. It is not just, for example, that the Muslim and Christian worlds are not inherently at odds. Moreover, people who are ostensibly part of these two "worlds" do not see themselves as one-dimensional components of these worlds, and they should not try to see themselves in this way. Sen has a term for the simple-minded concept of identity that makes a "clash of civilizations" seem possible. He calls it the "miniaturization" of identity. But of course, the consequences of this mistaken, miniature view are serious and dangerous. That's where the "violence" part of the title comes in.
Sen's book reminds me oddly of a very different book by a very different author that makes similar points: My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd. Loyd's and Sen's books are mostly about different things. However, particularly regarding religious identity, both Sen and Loyd make similar points about how extremists benefit by destabilizing situations and marginalizing moderates. Loyd makes his point more viscerally, and Sen more scholarly, but both draw on their own horrifying personal experiences to inform their analyses.

Freak Accident

2008-04-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

In a recent New York Times article (requires free registration), Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyze the costs of traffic. The punch line:

Driving costs in the US, per year:

Carbon footprint: $20 billion
Congestion: $78 billion
"Accidents" (crashes): $220 billion

By this analysis, if we all switched to true zero emissions vehicles and somehow eliminated congestion, we would cut the cost of traffic by about a third.

And even that wouldn't really work, because if there was no congestion, people would drive more and have more crashes. That's really the point of the article: America subsidizes driving, so people drive more than they would if they had to individually bear the cost of their driving. The result is that everybody pays.

What does traffic really cost?

2008-03-24T13:50:00.000-07:00

The news media is reporting a new study by AAA on the costs of auto crashes and on traffic congestion. The report is available here (1MB PDF).

Short answer: we worry too much about congestion, when crashes are the more expensive problem. To the left are two graphs based on the report's data. The report also contains a number of nice graphs.

The study compares the economic costs of crashes vs. the costs of congestion. Costs include delays, lost work, and so on. See the report for a complete discussion of the methodology, which looks to me to be thorough and balanced. This study isn't performing a trivial analysis, but I think the work will support some important conclusions:

The cost of traffic is dominated by crash costs. Except for a very few places that manage snarled but not terribly deadly traffic, lowering crash costs is a much more promising strategy than striving for lower congestion costs. This is perhaps most striking in Seattle, my home town. Congestion dominates the traffic discussion, even though congestion is not particularly bad. Conversely, Seattle's streets are among the most dangerous, pushing overall traffic costs near the top in the US. If Seattle had crash costs as low as San Francisco, our overall traffic costs would be the lowest of any major US city.
The smaller the place you live, the more traffic generally costs you. Not because of congestion of course, but because of crashes. Partly because of greater travel distances, the further you get from the city, the more crashes there are. (When looking at major cities, the study includes nearby suburbs. )
It's impossible to build enough roads for everybody to go at full-speed wherever they want whenever they want, but even if we could, it wouldn't have that much effect on the cost of traffic, because as vehicle miles rise, so do accidents and the costs associated with them.
These are just economic costs, not the human costs. The human cost of waiting in traffic isn't much. The human cost of being in a car crash is often extreme. Nor are the environmental costs considered. These are real economic opportunity costs that we pay every year.
Some places are doing much better than others. Miami and Phoenix are just categorically worse than the rest of the country for traffic. Conversely, places as diverse as New York, San Francisco, and Eugene are doing much better than everyone else. It's interesting that the places with low traffic costs are also places that are known as pedestrian- and bike-friendly places. This suggests that effective pedestrian and bike safety facilities are actually profitable: they can save more money in crashes than they cost to install and maintain.

Update: see Erica Barnett's Slog posting here on the AAA study.

Esoteric knowledge of the Blogosphere

2008-03-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

"Actually, before you post to the internet, get someone who passed middle school English class to proof read your witting please. Its riddle with errors and makes my eyes bleed to read it."

Actual comment from here.

Sometimes the truth is right there in front of us. Sometimes its riddle with errors, but its there.

Joe Weizenbaum

2008-03-09T08:40:00.001-07:00

Joseph Weizenbaum 1923 - 2008.

Joe Weizenbaum, pioneering and uncompromising computer scientist, passed away this last week. Weizenbaum wrote the computer program ELIZA, and was a relentless foe of oversimplifications of cognition and a defender of what it really means to think. Weizenbaum was a scientist and a thinker in the truest senses of the words.

I didn't really know Joe well, but we were acquaintances. One time, Joe told me the most wonderful story about his daughter. This is when Joe was at MIT and his daughter was about twelve. A colleague of his, an MIT mathematician, was over for dinner. (I forget who.)

Joe's daughter reached for last piece of bread. Joe said, "don’t take that." She asked why. Joe said, "because you don't take the last piece of bread." Joe's daughter sat silent for a minute.

"Then nobody can have any bread."

Silence around the table.

Finally, the mathematician couldn't restrain his curiosity as to how a twelve-year old would advance an induction proof. "Why?" he asked.

"Well," she said, "if you can't eat the last piece of bread, it isn't really the last piece...."

Joe's delight in this story was not just pride in his daughter, but the window it opened into one of his favorite subjects: the nature of human cognition. Joe will be missed. We'll miss the person, his utter lack of tolerance for convenient and comforting yet wrong explanations, and his unwillingness to keep his mouth politely shut in the face of bullshit.

More on Joe here and here. Terry Winograd's tribute to Joe on his winning the Norbert Wiener award is here.

Sherman Alexie, Insomniac

2008-02-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

Sherman Alexie wrote the perfect prose poem for everyone who's ever had trouble sleeping.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

2007-01-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

If you read regularly, not many of the books you read can change your life much. I read Mountains Beyond Mountains over a year ago, and it clearly is a book that can change your life. It changed mine.
This book tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a specialist in infectious disease who divides his time between Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a rural clinic he founded in Haiti. In his spare time, Farmer revolutionized the treatment of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Farmer is about the hardest-working person I've ever heard of, and a great doctor: brilliant, determined, and compassionate.
Read this book because it tells a great human story, and by the way shows what global health can really be, and how much better life can be for the world's poor, if we are willing to take even a little effort to make it so.
This is the second book by Tracy Kidder that has had a memorable impact on me. His book The Soul of a New Machine was much read by technologists in the 80s. This book portrays the bright, driven technologists at Data General as, well, kind of soul-less. Sure, they were interesting people, but ultimately their work just wasn't very important, or even very interesting. Most of what made the book interesting is their suffering, but since their suffering was ultimately meaningless, it wasn't even redemptive. Kidder's earlier book persuaded me that I did not want to make a career in the computer equipment industry, a career path I was already on when I read Soul. Kidder's later book made me confidently enthusiastic that, if all I ever accomplish is to put moderately better tools in the hands of doctors like Paul Farmer, my career will have been worthwhile.

Pedestrian InRoads

2007-01-07T22:35:00.000-08:00

Check out my friend Andrea Okomski's blog Pedestrian InRoads. Andrea's son was run over in a crosswalk three years ago. He survived, but his life was turned upside down (along with his mother's). Andrea's boy spent four months in a coma. If you know anything about head injury, you know that's a very serious situation. I've met him, and his life seems to be like some sort of fever dream. Not what his mother hoped for. Not what he was entitled to. He's a good kid, but every day is a massive struggle.
Andrea's sense of outrage is that her son's misfortune is not an isolated incident. It happens every day.
Over forty thousand Americans die in auto-related collisions every year. Over a million are injured. As Andrea's story shows, many of those injuries are far from trivial. It's obvious isn't it? If an external threat killed 40,000 Americans and maimed 1,000,000 every year, we would spend billions to combat that threat. Maybe form a new branch of the Federal Government. But these accidents and injuries happen one at a time. We blame bad drivers, bad weather, or just bad luck. Driving can never be entirely safe, but "accident" isn't the right word for this level of carnage. As I walk, ride, and drive in America's cities, it's clear to me the basic problem is that many drivers don't take driving seriously.
Not that I'm exactly a model driver. I'm impatient, more than anything else. But I try hard to have good driving skills, which to me includes signaling properly and yielding to pedestrians. For the last six or seven years, I've been more often a pedestrian than a driver, and that has definitely made me more respectful of pedestrians, and more aware that too many drivers just don't understand pedestrian's rights, or don't care. That has to change.