On Melancholy

I had an English professor in my undergrad days. His PhD thesis was on the book The Anatomy of Melancholy, Professor McCormack is pretty sure he is the only living person to have read the book in it's original Latin.

Now I am no expert in Melancholy but re-reading my previous post it occurs to me I did not properly summarize my emotional state yesterday. Then again it is rather difficult to put into words what is going on.

On the one hand it has been exceedingly hot lately so my loss of appetite could theoretically be explained by the heat, but I doubt that. Since I've submitted the papers and completed the divorce from Lesley I find myself recalling days of old. That is to say back when she loved me.

I cannot put a precise finger on the day that Lesley stopped caring about me, but one event I recall was when I was undergoing some professional hardship and I remember she went out of town with her girlfriends. I told her to, I did not want my own difficulties to make her life at all worse. But really, shouldn't a spouse always be around in the bad times as well as the good? Not that Lesley was around much in the good times either for the last year or so that we were 'married'.

When I was still married there was a television advert, it was for a soup cracker, the image of a tomato soup with the song 'Lonley, I am so Lonely, I have nobody... etc.' playing on the audio track. I remember cleaning my ride, probably Jordan at the time, and hearing that song and it hit me, I am all alone.

I am in a much better place, yet still I recall ten years of my life, that is almost a third of my time on this planet, poof the thing that mattered more than anything else gone. In a blink of an eye. Well no, it was more drawn out than that. She just stopped loving me, and I didn't see it coming, I suddenly had a lot more time to ride. (Little wonder 2010 will probably go down as my strongest year ever, yes I'm a year older, but I've met someone else who wants me to be around the house more and on the bike less.)

I guess the moral I can draw from this... is nothing. There is, near as I can tell, no moral tale whatsoever in the post. I suppose I should stop wallowing in the past, it is good to remember but one must still live. I must endevour not to lament Lesley and the expense of those who love me.

On Yet More Change

Well it's official kids, Lesley is no longer my estranged wife, 42 years to the day from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's little walk on the moon, Lesley is now my ex-wife.

I am happier now that it is done. But there is still a knot in my stomach, I think it's the heat but the stress from going to court for the past couple days and everything at work. Well I lost my appetite, I have to force myself to eat breakfast, and then resist the urge to puke it all up on the short ride to the office. Dinner is almost as difficult to eat and while I toss and turn at night, at the office I have trouble keeping my eyes open.

Divorce sucks, if you find someone and marry them, well make damn sure they are right for you before you marry them. And if you are curious what else is out there, after tying the knot, well be honest with that other person, because being lied to sucks too.

On Change

Why do people change things? Change career paths or jobs is rather obvious. But what about activities? When I started this blog I was an inline skater. Go check out those posts from I think November, 2007. Then around May 2008 I discovered the bike. Here's the thing, from a usefulness standpoint the bike makes sense. I can ride from Toronto to Rochester, I can get to work 10 or 30km from home every day, on the other hand, I'll be completely honest, and maybe this is rose coloured glasses, but in general skaters are a friendlier bunch than riders. (Perhaps having the underdog sport makes them nicer? Or maybe it's just been so long that I don't remember the ugly, just the beautiful? - Who knows!)

I still much prefer to ride my bike to just about any recreation, but that said I think I've come to an important realisation. I don't like to ride in large groups. There are rules, accepted behavioral norms, attitudes, all sorts of reasons to stay home and sleep in. I'm told Mountain Bikers are a lot more flexible this way, which is a shame, for me, because I have so little interest in riding off road. (Nothing against the Mountain Biking set, I just prefer speed, distance and stable solid ground.) It's too bad there isn't some form of road biking where the rules are more or less tossed to the wind, except lets be honest here, a lot of the rules actually, annoyingly, are required and make sense. As long as I have to share the road with cars I'm bound by the Ontario Highway Traffic Act and if I ever find myself in a draft I'm bound by the rules of etiquette for the pelaton.

I guess I'm just tired of all the structure, lord knows I'm not having fun in the group any longer and if I'm not having fun doing what is a recreation, (well riding to work is not a recreation, but I'm talking here about group rides) maybe I should re-evaluate what I do for fun?

On Youtube video's, one funny, one very not funny.

Here are a couple video's I've been referred to on Youtube.

The first is funny, it makes fun of frankly a very rigid road riding "culture". I should point out the main character has a white saddle and black bar tape.

Now for something a lot more serious, more on peak oil.

On Long Rides

I know, I promised to explain why I think the Space Shuttle is the worst sort of engineering there is, but that will have to wait for another day. I've been riding.

Just over a week ago Ian Wilcox and I rode out to Klienburg, it was a nice short ride. Thanks to an exceedingly strong wind from the North West by the time we got out to the hills I was pretty tired and had some trouble with the hill climbing. Of course the trip home was blazing fast, but when I got home I was in quite a bit of pain.

Then instead of riding to Rochester this year I tried to ride to my Aunt and Uncle’s cottage. Dawn made me throw in the towel at Orillia (170km) she said I was looking really tired and I’d likely hurt myself if I pushed hard for too much longer. Probably this was a wise call, there was a lot of construction as I went further north.

Then Sunday I rode up to Lake Simcoe and back, I went with a few guys from the BCC who were prepping for the Louisville Ironman. I was the only guy on a road bike, everyone else was on a tri-bike. Frankly, drafting off a tri-bike is a good excuse to ride alone, there is no draft at all. As well, all those fancy Cervelo’s just kept breaking, flats, loose bottle cages, you name it. Unless a person really spends the time with their ride while she’s on the stand, she’s going to fail in all sorts of different ways on the road.

Then again, and this might be very un-Canadian of me, but I hate Cervelo, I think they are a very over-rated brand. People talk about how great the warrantee replacement at Cervelo is. Sure it’s great, everyone with a Cervelo has had to use it, sometimes two or three times. Now I’ll admit I have lots of Specialized bikes, but the only one that has every actually failed on me, was in a horrible crash and Specialized replaced that bike, which was a lot more, to be honest than I was expecting – and one, of several, reasons why a reader will never hear me bad mouth them, they make really nice machines.

I have to admit this year I’m really peeved, I cannot watch the Tour in real time, unless I get a TV cable at my desk at work or pay $30 I’m stuck using the PVR. Anyway its funny to hear the journalists talk about these early stages of the tour as if they matter. Everyone knows, winners, either Schleck or Contador will be found in the mountains in the south, not the wind swept north. Anyway my money is still on Contador, although I really want to know, where is the Manx Missile? I was expecting great things from Cav.

On Bad Engineering (Part II)

Previously I wrote that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was an example of, well frankly bad luck more than anything else. Lets face it, if Barney Elliott had not been around at the time, there would have been no footage of the failure of the bridge and then the failure of the bridge would not have won the notoriety it gained.

Today I would like to look at legitimately bad design in the form of the Bugatti Veyron. Here is a thing that is utterly, completely devoid of practical use for the improvement of human life. On the contrary, because it is such a fuel guzzling, traffic inducing hog, there is nothing about this machine that justifies its existence.

Consider the achievements of this machine, it has a 1001hp or (depending on the model) 1200hp engine. Is this engine some marvel of new and novel design? No, heavens of course not, it's simply a 8L W-16 (two side-by-side V8s) with four turbo charges. In other words it's four 2L 250hp turbo charged engines that have been glued together. A marvel of cam timing, except even there, only two overhead cams, so a total of four cam shafts are required. But when you think about it, a 250hp 2L four cyclinder turbo charged engine, nothing fancy there.

Well it is true the Vayron is fast, 240km/h, except consider this, the TGV has a top speed of 320km/h and unlike the Vayron can actually sustain such a speed for prolonged periods (without a traffic citation or a blown tyre - to say nothing of the fact that there is only one oval, I know of, big enough for the Vayron to reach full speed on.)

Ah yes, but a Vayron is more direct, you have to wait for the train if you take the TGV. Well yes, but then at least the TGV only stops for scheduled passenger loading and unloading. The Vayron, well pedal to the metal will exhaust the 100L tank in 12 minutes. So really highways of the world get fleeting glances of this ludicrous machine, the Vayron's natural home is a gas station. Heck even at "normal" highway driving, it managed to suck away 18L per 100km, or 13mpg (US gallons). That means that while the 100L tank might make it a full 556km on the highway the fact is this is a function of the swollen size of the tank. A normal small car typically has a 40 or 60L tank. If we go with those numbers the 60L tank would last just 330km, and heaven knows what city driving would get.

Yes but the point of the car is speed!

Okay, conceded as a recreation for small boys and rich men with a mid-life crisis, the Veyron fills a market niche nicely. But for an engineer wishing to push the envelope, the only significant achievement in the Vayron are the $10,000 tyres. As far as I can tell the rest of the vehicle is a complete waste and in a peak oil environment, the Veyron is a criminal waste.

Thus the Veyron, for being hailed as an achievement in engineering, that it is not, for being as wasteful, more so actually, than a Ford GT (a car that won infamy on the hit BBC car review TV show Top Gear for being a gas guzzler), gets the status of second worst engineering design that I can think of!

My next post, why I believe the Space Shuttle is an example of the various worst possible design.

On Bad Engineering

Recently on the bike club website someone got all excited about an auto review of the Bugatti Veyron and that got me thinking, movements in engineering that we, well us engineers, should hang our head in shame for. Where to begin? Well clearly Tacoma Narrows has to go down in any list of bad engineering moments, for failure to account for the then unheard phenomena of aeroelastic flutter, we cannot really go gang busters on the engineering of that bridge. Lets see, there is the Bugatti Veyron, at a staggering €1.9m and gobbling up it's entire 100L of gasoline in 12minutes at full power the Vayron's natural home, the gas station, has to go down as one of the silliest ideas in engineering. But truly the worst design ever has to be the Space Shuttle.

But lets rewind for a second and review the entrants.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built in the 1930s in Washington State, it opened on July 1 (Dominion Day!) 1940 and was destroyed by 42 mph (67km/h) winds on November 7 1940. The bridge lasted an entire 129 days before it failed the result of aeroelastic flutter. An area business owner shot a film of the bridge's collapse, in the book Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke called that film the most expensive 11 minutes of movie making ever. (The book, Fountains of Paradise was written before the making of the James Cameron movie Titanic.)

Becuase there were no deaths in the failure of the bridge, and becuase the bridge failed for entirely new and novel reasons (in 1940 no one had heard of the concept of aeroelastic flutter, this bridge, Galloping Gertie as the locals called it, opened up a brand new field of study) the Tacoma Narrows Bridge does not actually represent bad engineering, just bad luck that someone happened to be around who owned a camera.

Next post, why the Bugatti Veyron is bad engineering, but not the worst.