Tag: caltech

Basic Wrenching at Caltech

We had our first Basic Wrenching class yesterday at the Caltech Bike Shop. I think it went pretty well. Maybe a little bit chaotic, and a few too many people – but that’s okay. Someone brought chocolate chip cookies, and someone else brought chocolate banana bread! A great start!

I helped 9 people take their front wheels off, remove their tires and tubes, and then walked them through patching one of the many tubes that we had laying around at home with holes in them. Steve from Open Road graciously gave us some patch kits and chain lube and tire levers for the effort. John McKeen walked people through adjusting their brake and shifter cable tensions, and Katherine gave people bicycle anatomy walkthroughs. I think Ian kind of floated from one place to another. There were at least 20 people total. Hopefully most of them got something out of it.

The shop itself is almost completely barren – everything but the tools was jettisoned for the South Hovse remodel unfortunately, and the Moore-Hufsteadler funding hasn’t come through. They (I think rightly) pointed out that we really need to have some procedure in place to keep the tools from diffusing away. I don’t really want to call it “theft”… but when people can borrow things, they do tend to end up making a kind of random walk away. That’s just (social) entropy. But we really do need workbenches, and a couple more stands, and a big toolbox, and pegboards that haven’t had all of the tool outlines turned into phalli. So I hope we can agree on a structure that we’re willing to implement, and they this is acceptable.

There’s lots of room in the “rafters” of the shop to hang bikes, if we can get some hooks and cables set up somehow, safely. I think it would be great if we could operate like the Bike Oven, letting people work on abandoned bikes we get from Security, and then buy them for cheap. And it would be nice if we could have a selection of patch kits, tubes, and tire levers, that people could buy at cost (or at least cheaply).

Maybe what we really need is a separate bike shop “membership”, with a minor fee to cover consumables like oil and patches and grease and gloves, etc., and to serve as an official designation for the people who have access to the shop. Then, at least once a week, I think we should commit to having a mechanically inclined person down there willing to help anybody else out who wants to work on their bike, so that it’s a Caltech Community resource, instead of just a closed club.

I think I’ll see if I can show up (extra) early next Monday, and do a little tool organization, and make sure to bring the work stands from home, and maybe my own personal tools, since it seemed like we really were lacking some basic stuff – or it just wasn’t findable.

We need more Dionysian Science

Michelle and I just finished reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. It was good. He can get a little rambling at times, but overall it was entertaining and enjoyable. The book follows the relationships between people and four plants, through history. The four plants are: apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes. It pairs with them four desires, respectively: sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. The connections are more than a little tenuous, but the histories are certainly worth examining. The apple chapter in particular has inspired me to learn more about hard cider (since it turns out that’s largely what Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman’s apples were used for, all across 19th century America). And who can resist an examination of cannabis’s relationship with humans, written at least partially while stoned?

One theme Pollan has touched on repeatedly, in this book and his others, is the competition between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in nature and society. Apollo representing order and control, Dionysus wildness and chaos, both being utterly necessary for civilization to be dynamic and persistent, for knowledge to increase and broaden through time. E.g. our Apollonian monocultures of Russet Burbank potatoes are vulnerable because of their uniformity, but are also productive and economically efficient. The Andean potato farmers of antiquity grew dozens of different varieties in different micro climates, all the while allowing the plants to hybridize with the local wild potatoes, maintaining a possibly less productive, but certainly more diverse and robust system of potato cultivation, in which new biological innovation was constantly taking place, and in which the farmers were well protected against catastrophic collapse in any one year… unlike the potato farmers of Ireland in the 1840s. The potato chapter in particular focuses largely on a very recent interaction with the potato: the introduction of a genetically engineered variety called the “New Leaf” by Monsanto, that produces Bt toxin to guard the plant against the Colorado potato beetle and other insect pests. Continue reading We need more Dionysian Science

Meta-reinventing the sacred, yet again

Michelle and Jeremy and I went to a talk entitled Sacred Science at Caltech last night put on by the The Skeptics Society, it was part of Suart Kauffman’s book tour for Reinventing the Sacred. It was okay, but it could have been great. If you’re interested, he gave essentially the same talk at Beyond Belief in December (41 minutes long).

His purpose seemed to be to outline a semi-formal proof that atheistic humans are justified in reinventing the sacred for themselves as something which is wholly naturalistic, and that doing so has great value. I agree, but I’ve agreed for years. I guess some atheists haven’t yet come to this conclusion. This is the same conversation that we ended up in at Amy’s Salon a couple of months ago, and I’m always like “Yes, YES already, so let’s just get on with reinventing it, instead of continuing to try and convince ourselves that we should do it. It’s a meta conversation. We’re talking about talking about what we think should be revered. Are we afraid that we won’t be able to come to any kind of common ground, and that just having the conversation will somehow splinter us into even smaller non-theistic sects?
Continue reading Meta-reinventing the sacred, yet again

Science Framed at Caltech

Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet came to Caltech and gave SASS talk on Monday night, and ran a science media messaging workshop entitled Speaking Science Bootcamp all day Tuesday. It was great. Anybody who’s getting a PhD in science should go through at least that much communication training, and if they’re in an area that has policy implications, or they have any interest whatsoever in doing outreach or communication of science, they should have a week long course on the same material.
Continue reading Science Framed at Caltech