The bike parking at the Ideal Market in North Boulder is itself pretty close to ideal: copious, right next to the front door, under video surveillance, and they even provide air and basic tools! The only major improvement I can imagine is a roof to keep your steed dry all winter long:
Tim Johnson, apparently a prominent cyclocross racer, recently got into bike advocacy. Says he:
Bike advocacy is about as far away from ‘cool’ as one can get. It’s a world full of recumbents, Day-Glo yellow, helmet mirrors, wool and tweed; the stereotypes that make self-important racers and hardcore enthusiasts cringe.
I’ve often been confused by the question “Are you a serious cyclist?”. I don’t own a car, and bike virtually everywhere I go. I’ve spent a year or so cumulatively living on my bike touring. In eastern Europe, in Mexico. To my mind, this makes me serious. But not so in some other minds. To many it seems that only competition can make one “serious”, and I just don’t understand. But then, I’ve never watched a SuperBowl either.
Continue reading Can competitive cyclists help the face of bike advocacy?
An hour long interview based documentary by some Dutch filmmakers about the changing social and economic realities of southern California, in the wake of the financial crisis, and America’s general malaise.
It’s dangerous to cling to an identity which is no longer compatible with reality. Remember the Norse and their Greenlandic colonies. In the long run I think adaptability is the greatest kind of power you can wield. Evolutionary power.
We need, in so many ways, to move beyond thinking of ourselves as consumers, instead of citizens. Consumers, instead of producers and creators. Society and culture are almost infinitely flexible, if you’ve got the right mindset and a reason to change.
Whatever the outcome, I don’t think anyone should be surprised by the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Like virtually all nuclear plants, they’ve been safe and quiet for decades. But they’re not the kind of thing you can walk away from. And sometimes, you need to walk away. Volcanoes erupt. The Earth trembles beneath your feet. There are floods, and famines, epidemics and wars. We do a good job of ignoring these things when they aren’t pressing concerns. It makes life simpler and more enjoyable, especially since historically, we’ve had little power to do anything about infrequent, terrifying events.
I’m not categorically against nuclear power. If we can do it in a responsible, scalable way, then great.  Making 10,000-100,000 year commitments is not responsible. We can’t keep those promises. Extracting only a couple of percent of the fuel’s energy isn’t scalable to tens of terawatts for centuries or millennia. So any scalable, responsible nuclear power will involve breeding fissile fuel, and re-processing spent fuel to remove fission products that inhibit the chain reaction. Additionally, to be responsible in my mind, a nuclear power station should be something you can walk away from at a moment’s notice, with no fear of catastrophe. It should be something that an invading (or perhaps more likely, retreating) army cannot use as part of a scorched earth campaign without a major engineering effort that would take months of work.
But obviously, that’s not where we are today.
Whenever Tax Day approaches, I end up thinking about where that money goes, and what it buys, and whether I really wanted any of it. Increasingly, it seems to me that the larger the governing jurisdiction, the less democratic it is, and the more despairing I am of having any influence over it. More than any other realm of policy, the way we build our cities — and thus our buildings and our transportation systems — influences our energy use and other impacts on the world around us. Land use is nominally controlled by local government (city planning boards, zoning commissions, etc). However, in many important ways the actions that local governments can take are limited by the state and federal policymakers. In particular, they’re limited by what they can get funded. The large jurisdictions take your tax dollars, and then set up hoops for small jurisdictions to jump through in order to get it back. This leads to an unfortunate homogeneity of policy, and discourages experimentation, or even imitation of things known to work in other places. At best you end up playing accounting games, doing things like building bike paths with federal flood mitigation money.
How exactly does this mitigate flooding again?
I spent the afternoon wandering around downtown, reading, sipping coffee, and taking pictures. I was surprised to see that Boulder had apparently been invaded (in the best possible way) by stylish olive skinned women wearing high heels, until I got to the Tea House, and remembered it was Persian New Year (also known as the Vernal Equinox). The music and dancing was just winding down, but the outdoor space was still filled with people, and social buzz.
The Boulder Bike Commuter Meetup group got together at Dan’s (now former) house, to play with his tools and hang out. It was nice to have a during-the-day event that lasted a little longer.
Kathy fixed a slow leak in her rear tire. First patch ever? Hopefully it held!
Kerry wasn’t feeling mechanically inspired (she’s been playing with her own tools), and just wandered around snacking and heckling. And napping. And cooking kielbasas.  Ann did a practice run of DIY fender (and pannier) making for the workshop she’s teaching at Community Cycles next weekend.
I don’t even remember how I got the idea in my head that one could go bike touring. I must have heard of other people doing it, but growing up in Sanger, California I certainly didn’t know any of them. By the time I left home for college, I’d decided I wanted to go on a bike tour the following summer. I saved money I earned by working as an usher during my freshman year. I hadn’t been prepared academically for Caltech by my rural high school. I’d never had to study before. By the spring I was frazzled and depressed. I’d had mononucleosis, and had almost failed out entirely. But I had a bike.
At the time I was afraid of riding alone in the US and ended up buying a cheap ticket to the UK at the last minute, intending to spend the summer riding around the British Isles. I ended up meeting other bicycle tourists, and riding all the way to Turkey, via a newly open eastern Europe. I didn’t make it home until December, after five months of riding gravel roads through the Champagne vineyards of France, drinking cheap wine and eating baguettes and cheese before napping in the shade in the mid-afternoon.
Getting a flat tire is never fun, but all flats are not created equal. My black bike has had a slow leak for months. I have to pump it up every few days. Surely I’ve spent more time and effort inflating the tire by now than would have been required to patch the hole or replace the tube. This is my least favorite kind of flat. It’s a long term drain that’s never quite inconvenient enough to demand fixing. Sometimes they linger until a second puncture forces you to remove the tire anyway.
In contrast, when you run over a big piece of glass as you’re rushing home with drinks for people who are supposed to be showing up any minute, there’s no ambiguity — you just sit down and patch it, right there, right then. If it’s obvious where the hole is, you don’t even have to take the wheel off the bike, and it turns out not to be such a pain in the butt after all.
(Especially if you remember to unseat the bead of the tire all the way around before trying to lever it off the rim… D’oh!)
One of the Rosetta discs was recently bequeathed to the University of Colorado libraries, and the Long Now put out a request for pictures of it in its new home. I eagerly responded by heading to the special collections in Norlin yesterday. It didn’t seem to be on display anywhere, so when the librarian made eye contact, I said I was here to see the Rosetta disc, and she sent someone off to get it. And they took it out of its Pelican case, and set it on the table in front of me (after I’d filled out a reader card and agreed only to take notes in pencil… or by digital means — no pens are allowed near the old books) At first I was hesitant to touch it, and asked if it was okay, and she said “Oh it doesn’t look like the kind of thing that requires any special handling.” So I picked it up.
