Like a lot of you my activities have moved indoors, and while road cycling is still possible in California (you just have to do it in the middle of nowhere), I decided to scratch a longtime itch and get a Zwifting setup.
A what?
Zwift is an online community of cyclists who ride "smart trainers". It's a sort of dynamo for your bike. You mount your bike on a stand which includes a flywheel that connects to the back wheel which measures your speed. And the flywheel is connected to Zwift via your computer.
You ride various courses - either on Zwift's own virtual island of Watopia, or "real" courses like Alpe d'Huez - and Zwift shows "you" riding on the screen. The faster you pedal, the faster you go. Heading uphill, Zwift tells the trainer's flywheel to increase the resistance, downhill, yippee, you can fly.
The experience is not exactly like riding - the biggest difference I've noticed so far is there is no cooling wind in my office (!) - but it's a lot of fun and a great workout. And you get to ride "against" a bunch of other people, so it's competitive. In fact a lot of pros are on Zwift, working out until pro racing gets going again. (You cannot believe how fast you get dropped by those guys with dollar signs on their jersey :)
After a bit of research I ended up getting a Wahoo Kickr smart trainer, which seemed to be one of the most popular. So far it's working perfectly. It connects to my laptop via Ant+, so I needed a little Ant+ USB dongle.
You can also get on the Kickr and "just ride" ... for example, while watching old pro races from last year :) I actually out-sprinted Matthew Van der Poel to win the 2019 Amstel Gold ... in my mind :)
The Ole filter makes a pass ... curiously, it's not all happening, very little seems to be going on for some reason...
I have been self-analyzing myself, watching me not preorder an Apple Watch. I just don't want one. Maybe I don't think the learning curve on how to use another device is worth it, or maybe ... I just don't want one. Huh.
NASA captures first color image of Pluto. "The New Horizons probe, which is bearing down on Pluto, has captured its first color image of the distant dwarf planet." Excellent. It's truly amazing that we can launch satellites so far away and retrieve images from them. It takes 4.6 hours for a photon to travel from the spacecraft back to Earth!
A new trailer for the new Star Wars movie is up, and it looks ... great. Cannot wait to see it, although I guess we all will; it is schedules to be released on December 18. I love the way the Internet is trying to reverse engineer the plot from the trailer teases.
Oh, and remember the little round droid BB-8 introduced in the first teaser trailer? Apparently it really exists! Wow, what cool technology. Sort of Segway-ish. I would have thought actually building it would have been harder slash more expensive than just generating it on a computer screen, but surely it's more fun this way.
I'm at this ACLA conference which is 0% science, 1% business, and 99% politics, and one of the themes of the sessions has been the difficulty our congress faces in getting bipartisan support for anything. And it occured to me, that when we learn about candidates it is often in debates. In a very real way we are selecting for politicians who are contentious, because they are good debaters. But what we need to get things done is politicians who are diplomatic and pragmatic, and who can work well with others. Maybe instead of debates, we should have collaborations.
How would this work? Well, suppose there were four candidates, and instead of each debating each other for an hour, they each worked with one of the other candidates for 20 minutes. They would be given a task or project or idea to develop, and would have to work together to come up with a solution or approach and they they'd present it together. Each of the candidates would be paired with each of the others, so we'd have a chance to see how well they each worked with the others. Out of that we'd get a pretty good idea of who could actually get things done.
I think there *is* such a thing as luck, and there are ways to be luckier. The key is that things happen in patterns. If you can cause a "positive" pattern of events, then individual positive events will feel random - lucky - but they'll actually be a statistical outcome from the pattern. Similarly if you cause a "negative" pattern of events, then unlucky things may happen.
You can influence this through awareness of the pattern. Be one with your surroundings, go with the flow, have good kharma. And maybe you will be "luckier".
(Precelebration is the root of all failure; blogging about being lucky is unlucky, and blogging about ways to be luckier is most unlucky. Fortunately admitting that blogging about being lucky is unlucky, is in fact lucky. Unless you say so :)
Back to normal! Well, what passes for normal around here, anyways... I am caught up, all my old half-composed blog posts have been finished and synced out, and hopefully I can now keep up. Several of my unsettled business issues have calmed themselves also, yay. Just need to get some personal stuff back in the box. But that's under my control...
meanwhile...
From Elon Musk: At Long Last, an Inspiring Future for Space Exploration. "The President has articulated an ambitious and exciting new plan that will alter our destiny as a species. I believe this address could be as important as President Kennedy's 1962 speech at Rice University. For the first time since Apollo, our country will have a plan for space exploration that inspires and excites all who look to the stars. Even more important, it will work." Cool.
Ken Auletta in New Yorker: the iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books. A good read which defies synopsis. The most interesting aspect is the degree to which newspapers, magazines, and book publishers look to the iPad to be their savior. If the content wasn't compelling on paper, why would putting it online make it more so?
BTW my verdict: the Kindle is better for reading. Better screen and lighter and smaller. The fact that the iPad is backlit is great for reading in bed however...
Ars Technica reviews iWork for the iPad. "In the end, using iWork for the iPad is a lot like going to the moon. It might be a nice place to visit ... but in the end, it’s not a place I’d like to live, or even stay for any extended amount of time. iWork is decent, but there is only so much you can do for an office suite without a full keyboard and a mouse." So much for the new computing paradigm.
What we have here is pretty amazing, the entire text of Douglas Hofstader's Gödel Escher Bach.
This happens to be my favorite book of all time, and here it is for you to read.
Actually I wanted to share just the Birthday Cantatatata dialog.
The rest came along for the ride, courtesy of Scribd.
Please enjoy!
(No, it isn't my birthday... I'm just feeling a little omega-incomplete :)
Oh and if you'd like to hear Bach's Birthday Cantata, here you go.
Greetings... I spent the entire weekend on Project Q, and that makes me happy. It is going slow but going; after two weeks of doing nothing (well, I was working, but not on Project Q :) I was finally able to make some progress. It happened to be a gorgeous spring weekend outside and I did escape for a little ride yesterday before we had friends over for dinner, but today I contented myself with looking out an open window while coding. So be it.
Did you enjoy my Scribd excerpt from Gödel Escher Bach's Birthday Cantatatata? The technology is kind of cool, isn't it? I had read about Scribd as a text analog to YouTube but I couldn't imagine why it would be useful, and yet for this purpose it was perfect. (Of course we have to wonder, is there a business model?)
GEB was published in 1979, and I've read it literally hundreds of times, but it still feels "fresh" to me; I learn more from it every time I pick it up, which is often (my copy is an old paperback, a rather large paperback, and it is pretty tattered). This is one of the few books I can open to any random spot and start reading, and enjoy a page or two or ten, and then put down. So today I picked it up, and opened it to the Birthday Cantatatata dialog, and I thought wow I should share this, and so I did. In case you don't know, each chapter of GEB is preceded by a dialog which introduces the concepts of the chapter. A great mnemonic device; interesting that it hasn't been copied elsewhere.
I have shared GEB with many friends and there are two reactions, first, some try valiantly but are completely mystified by the book, and second, others can't put it down and are enthralled by it. Which are you?
Onward, a filter pass if you please, robo-Ole...
Philip Greenspun: show me the money. Links several interesting graphs about how the federal reserve is spending money to improve our economy. As you can see, the stimulus bill and company bailouts are small feed compared to asset purchases and new lending. Wow.
And meanwhile, Venture Capital is under attack. Not that it needs to be bailed out, but the startup ecosystem needs help. "Lastly, and critically, if the data I began with is as compelling to you as it is to me, we need to make sure every legislator and policy maker knows: Venture capital is how America wins."
Is telepresence our best bet for exploring space? Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute seems to think so, and he might be right. With sufficient improvement in man/machine interfaces, who could tell the difference? And it sure would be cheaper and safer to send robots "out there"... not to mention, we don't have to bring them back...
The annual Coachella rock festival took place yesterday, and apparently Paul McCartney stole the show with a fantastic performance. Good for him.
So the pre-Pre media blitz is on, including publicity for Sprint's "Now Network". I would like to see a countdown timer for when the device will be available. The demand has been created - now please fill it!
Dustin Nolte, chief blogger at American Empire, directed me to this post, in which he explains the blog's name. "The American Empire I think of as being the focus of this weblog is an empire of ideas that starts at one shore and ends at another". So be it.
Dustin is also a contributor to the Command Post, and suggests that the redesign is not a repositioning. Time will tell, but I think I was hasty in declaring a shark jump; I owe it to them and the great work they've done to give them time before passing judgement. They also have a PDA version of their Iraq blog which looks great on my Treo. So - sorry!
And speaking of SARS (we were, really; that's what drew my attention to American Empire); here's an interesting article in the NYTimes about how China's response to SARS has undermined their efforts to appear progressive.
Matt Webb (Interconnected) and Tom Coates (Plastic Bag) are visiting San Francisco (they're both English), and blogging about it. They seem to regard the U.S. much as we might regard Mars. Visit both their sites for some interesting perspectives...
Want to know what Playboy's Playmate of the Month looked like the month you were born? Aha, I thought so. Here you go...
Okay, this is funny. Yeah, it is a Japanese page, but let the pictures load...
Like a lot of you my activities have moved indoors, and while road cycling is still possible in California (you just have to do it in the middle of nowhere), I decided to scratch a longtime itch and get a Zwifting setup.
You ride various courses - either on Zwift's own virtual island of Watopia, or "real" courses like Alpe d'Huez - and Zwift shows "you" riding on the screen. The faster you pedal, the faster you go. Heading uphill, Zwift tells the trainer's flywheel to increase the resistance, downhill, yippee, you can fly.
The Ole filter makes a pass ... curiously, it's not all happening, very little seems to be going on for some reason...
And here we have 
I'm at this ACLA conference which is 0% science, 1% business, and 99% politics, and one of the themes of the sessions has been the difficulty our congress faces in getting bipartisan support for anything. And it occured to me, that when we learn about candidates it is often in debates. In a very real way we are selecting for politicians who are contentious, because they are good debaters. But what we need to get things done is politicians who are diplomatic and pragmatic, and who can work well with others. Maybe instead of debates, we should have collaborations.
So, what do you think, 
GEB
