Should I Stay or Should I Go? - Update Style

In regard to the question of whether to start a new blog, thereby leaving this one to a die a quick death, my abnormally beautiful and supremely intelligent wife offered to co-author a blog related to bicycles with me.  Having a co-author would allow me to worry less about posting regularly on the new blog.  This means that I might indeed have enough time to continue updating this blog, while also occasionally posting on another.  So as for now, I am going to keep this blog alive with semi-regular updates.  If it begins to look like I can't keep up with both blogs, I'll make an executive decision at that time.

So it looks like I'll be starting a new blog with my wife.  My wife will author posts focused on cycling fashion - particularly with respect to office-appropriate clothing that is feasible for a bicycling commute.  This is more or less the content of her current blog, which is very good.  She'll also include tidbits about her daily commute.  This is also a feature of her current blog, and most of the notable moments during her commute consist of encounters with asshole motorists.  My posts will likely also include information about my daily commute - dipshit motorists and all - but I plan to focus more on bicycle repair and restoration.

With the holidays imminent, I'm not sure when we'll get the new blog up and running, but I'll post a link to it here when the time comes.  In the meantime, I'll try to keep the science-related updates coming as best I can.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

I've become a regular reader of a motorcycle blog called Chin on the Tank.  Although the theme is cafe racers and similarly-styled vintage motorcycles, the content varies quite a lot.  The author has a workshop and is a skilled photographer, so he takes a lot of pictures of his shop and the bike projects that he works on.  He also includes information on the local cafe racer scene, promotes motorcycle events, and documents group rides.  It's a fun blog and it's made me yearn for a vintage motorcycle.

Why am I bringing this up, you ask?  Well, as I've mentioned before, I am a bicycle enthusiast of sorts.  In particular, I enjoy restoring older bikes and putting them back on the road.  In my garage I essentially have a fully functioning bicycle workshop and I spend a fair amount of time working on my personal restorations, as well as a pretty steady stream of projects for my friends.  And so I'm considering starting a bicycle blog.  On this blog I would document and detail the projects that I work on.  Posts would include a lot of photographs - particularly before-and-after images of full-on rebuilds.  And I would try to include a lot of information on the restoration process, costs involved, problems and challenges that I came across, etc.  I would probably also talk about group rides that I participate in, and discuss any notable events from my daily bicycle commute.

The reason I'm mentioning this here is because if I start a new blog, it is unlikely that I would be able to continue updating this one.  There are only so many hours in the day, and I'm unable to spend much of them writing blog entries.  I should note that there are a number of other good science blogs out there, whereas I have been unable to find a good bicycle restoration blog.  On the other hand, I sometimes go fairly long periods without having any bike-related projects, and the cold Missouri winter can really cripple my motivation to work out in the garage.  So updates might sometimes be sparse (though it's not like I'm doing a great job of updating this one consistently).  A few things I should note about this:  1) it's likely that a bicycle blog will motivate me to spend more time tinkering in the shop, 2) I can always ditch the new blog and pick this one back up if things aren't working out the way I had envisioned, and 3) I have a fairly substantial back-log of projects, so I could fill the gaps in current projects with old projects that I've worked on in the past.

Thoughts on which direction I should go?  Let me know...stay the course or try something new?

You Say Scientific Reference, I Say Reprobate

As an avid bicyclist, bicycle aficionado, and all-around bike-lover, I have a great respect for the bicycle helmet. Beyond general self-awareness and following the rules of the road, the bicycle helmet is one of the few ways a cyclist can help ensure his or her own safety. That's why I was taken aback when I came across a supposed bicycle advocacy website that purposefully denounced the use of helmets, citing their "scientific reference on helmets." Their reference is for the so-called 'Bicycle Helmet Research Foundation.' I should warn you that, should you decide to visit this reference website, your head might explode due to the sheer volume of stupid that will be racing over the internet directly into your brain.

Here's what the 'research institute' is all about. They've compiled a bunch of research studies that show that bicycle helmets make cyclists safer. They take these studies and tear them apart, looking for any gaps or holes that can be used to decry the findings and conclusions of the study. Then they look at a bunch research studies that show that helmet-wearing cyclists are not statistically significantly safer than non-helmeted cyclists, which they take as gospel. This is, of course, because these studies back the conclusion that they had obviously settled upon beforehand: helmets may or may not make bicyclists safer, so no one should use them.

Basically the authors have decided that they don't like helmets, so they dig up a bunch of literature to justify themselves, often failing to understand or purposefully misconstruing the conclusions of the papers that they've cited. I should probably be a little more fair and honest about this; the authors are actually against mandatory bicycle helmet legislation. No matter their underlying goals, though, it really is quite despicable.

How about this instead: Helmet use has been estimated to reduce head injury risk by 85 percent, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Oh and by the way, I'd say the biggest difference between the IIHS and these turds who run the anti-helmet website is that the IIHS isn't made up of a bunch of quacks trying to come to a preconceived conclusion.

Overall, the website reminded me a lot of the websites of climate change skeptics. Obviously subjective and including only the evidence required to illuminate their own narrow viewpoint. And I think it's rather pathetic that this is what these people have devoted their time to. Not wearing bicycle helmets seems to have caused them to take a few too many blows to the head, if you know what I mean. But I guess we're all entitled to our point of view, no matter how idiotic it may be.

Bikes Are So Freakin' Cool!

I love bicycles. I enjoy riding them. I enjoy working on them. In particular, I like rehabbing and restoring old bicycles. There's something about bringing a machine back to life that may have otherwise ended up in the landfill that fills me with pride. Plus there's a certain level of cool that vintage bicycles, especially 60s and 70s road bikes and roadsters, possess that is rarely seen in modern bikes. Something about the clean lines and simplicity of the thing I guess.

The machine that we now recognize as the bicycle has been around for a little over a century. And the physics of how the bike works and how it stays upright are fairly well understood. First of all, the bicycle has a particular geometry with respect to the position of steering that helps to keep it upright. Enhancing this effect are the rotation of the relatively large wheels of the bicycle. This rotational motion provides an inertial force or gyroscopic effect, much like the tail rotor of a helicopter, and allows the bicycle to stay upright even when it is not actually going anywhere. These phenomena are well studied and are fairly easy to understand.

But not so fast. A research group has eliminated the gyroscopic effects of the bicycle's wheels by adding a counter-rotating wheel and altered the traditional geometry of the bicycle by playing around with its form and shape. And what they get is a bicycle-like vehicle that is able to stay upright on its own, as long as it moves greater than a particular speed. Pretty mind-blowing stuff. You can see a video of it in action here, and also read more about the study and the conclusions. The research group believes that the ability of their machine to stay upright can be attributed to the fact that, like a traditional bicycle, the machine has a tendency to steer into its fall, keeping it from completely falling over when it begins to tip. But this is just a hypothesis. So the study has added a bit of mystery and intrigue to what was considered the ordinary, plain-old bicycle.