Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

Sorry for the clichéd title, I couldn’t help it. Here in Baltimore, there’s a “bike project” called Velocipede. There are two main aspects to this project.

  1. The Co-op
  2. The “Bike Shop”

The co-op part is that they have a full complement of bicycle maintenance tools, which you can use to repair your bike. There are also a lot of spare parts. By paying a monthly fee, or working 3 volunteer hours for the “bike shop” side, you get access to the tools. If you work additional volunteer hours, you can “buy” spare parts with those hours.

The bike shop part is that donated bicycles are fixed up and sold for cheap or given away. The fixing up is done by the co-op members.

This is a really great thing for me. Since getting rid of my car, my primary mode of transportation is my bike. In warmer months, I also have the racing bike to ride for training/recreation. Bike maintenance is great, because it’s something that you can really do for yourself, if you take the time to learn. I can learn by volunteering at Velocipede, working on cheap / crappy / donated bicycles with plenty of spare parts available. I also get access to the bike tools for my own use.

And finally, the reason for the title.

Bike maintenance, like a lot of manual labor, is really helpful to me for “centering” — getting myself mentally to a calm place, where I’m focused on the task at hand, and all of the busy chatter of my mind goes away. In fact, the “self” kind of goes away, and there’s only the task. Athletes call this “flow” or “the zone”.

I went to Velocipede the Sunday before last to sign up, and worked my minimum 3 hours for January. I took a donated wal-martish bike with a broken shift lever and sticky bottom bracket (the thing in which the pedals rotate), and got it ready to be given away. This involved:

  • Removal of the shifter cables and shifters because the shifters were broken and we wanted to make it a single-speed.
  • Fixation of the dérailleurs since we were making it single-speed. I found the right positions in the front and back, and screwed the set-screws all of the way down.
  • Rebuilding the bottom bracket because the pedal cranking felt really “gummy”. For this I took off the pedals, disassembled the bottom bracket, took out the crank, wiped down and degreased everything, and then put it all back together. Then, I realized I put the bearing races in backward, so the pedals wouldn’t turn. I took it all back apart again, flipped them, and put it back together. Nice, smooth pedal motion.
  • Replacement of the brake pads because they were in pretty bad shape. Worn almost all of the way down. I also had to adjust the brake cables. I found that if I loosened the cable at the brake, squeezed the brakes with my hand until they were in contact with the rim, and then screwed the cable back down, when I let go the brakes had just the right clearance.

I only really need to learn a few more key things, such as wheel trueing, headset maintenance, and proper dérailleur adjustment. The rest is just tightening and loosening screws, basically.

I’m currently planning to go again this Sunday, provided that the superbowl doesn’t start too early.

Zombies vs. Humans – A Predator-Prey Model

Molly just pointed me to a predator-prey type analysis of zombie populations and efficiency at killing and consuming humans.

I think this should become the standard for differential equations and epidemiology courses, rather than foxes and rabbits or something totally lame like that.

After students grasp that, I think you could have them move on to a more complex, pirates/ninjas/zombies/pedestrians ecosystem.

Post-Katrina Paranoia

There’s a change in my ways of thinking that occurred because of my experiences with Katrina. I know that it has happened to others as well.

It’s not quite post-traumatic stress disorder, maybe a step below. I notice it in little things. For instance…

I had a safe deposit box in the Chase at the corner of Carrollton and Claiborne (in New Orleans). It was just below shoulder level for me, probably some 5 feet or so above the ground. The water got up to about 3 feet in that area. Contrary to my expectations, the vault was not watertight, or was not closed before the flood (I think it was the former). I never went back into that bank — Chase pulled the boxes from all of their flooded safes and put them in a warehouse, where people could go get their boxes. As soon as I walked in, my eyes went wide.

All of the box units (probably 10 boxes across by 20 or 30 high) had distinct lines on them. Above the lines, the units looked normal. Below, they looked awful. They were dirty and terribly rusted. I had to sign something before accessing my box, acknowledging that I might find… undesirable stuff in my box. Luckily, as I noted above, mine was out of the reach of the flood waters.

When I got a new safe deposit box here in Baltimore, I made sure it was as high as possible. It’s almost entirely irrational. This part of town is high up on a hill, and it’s not ever likely to flood.

But it can’t hurt.

I was already paranoid about offsite and portable backups of computer data before the hurricane. That partly saved my ass, but I’ve noticed that others are now becoming more careful about backups as well.

I don’t want to buy stuff. I moved an average of once every two months from April 2005 to August 2006. I want all of my stuff to fit in a U-Haul van (not a truck, the plumber/carpenter/etc type utility van). Every time I think about buying something, I can’t help but think about the fact that it might disappear due to some disaster or another. Even though my stuff is insured, why go through the bother of acquiring things if I’m just going to have to replace them later?

This is also irrational — massive natural disasters, and even catastrophic house fires do not happen very often to a single person. If this were really a hindrance, I’d work to overcome my irrationality. Since it lines up with my budget and desire for minimalism, I’m not fighting it much. If something gets really inconvenient not to have, I’ll buy it.

There are other things, here and there. As I mentioned in an old post, Katrina gave me a good solid reminder about impermanence. Other Katrina survivors (and I use the term loosely), have you noticed similar tendencies in your own thinking?

Closed-Access Journals on the PR Offensive

I’ve talked in the past about the problem of access to journals. It varies drastically between institutions. Here at JHU, our access is pretty good. However, I’d say it was better, and certainly more convenient, at Washington University in St.Louis. But really, it shouldn’t matter what institution you’re affiliated with. Peer-reviewed research, and especially government funded peer-reviewed research, should be widely and freely available, from the internet, preferably in PDF format.

I’m not saying that anyone has to really give it away. Costs can be shifted around. However, for the sake of scientific review, collaboration, and progress, anyone should be able to access the papers. There’s already an extensive movement toward this standard. The Public Library of Science publishes several open-access journals, and carries out some advocacy of open-access publishing.

This, like the ability of bands to sell and promote their own music without the RIAA, is a threat to the traditional publishing industry. Nature recently published a brief article on the efforts of Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society to counteract open-access promotion with their own PR. They’ve hired an expert on the PR-offensive to advise them in this effort. His advice allegedly includes tidbits like this:

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship”. He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles”.

Do you see what’s going on here? Simple, but bald-faced lies, repeated often. Peer review is not at all limited to “traditional publishing models.” PLoS is a great counterexample. Also, public access is not government censorship, especially if taxpayer dollars paid for the research. I’d call that getting what you pay for. The argument is that,

“When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity’s interests.”

I mean, read that. Should a funding agency pay to disseminate everyone else’s work? Clearly these guys have hired an expert on crafting statements that seem reasonable but are actually quite deceptive and misleading. Based on the quotes from the involved publishers, they’re already drinking the kool-aid, or doing a good job of pretending to do so.

This issue has been covered and extensively discussed on Slashdot.

Using your RSS aggregator as an Inbox

It occurred to me this past weekend that I use my RSS aggregator like an inbox. I have long since quit categorizing my feeds. Rather, I just view them as a “river of news”, reading them in the order in which they arrive. This isn’t really interesting.

What is is how I process them. As I mentioned in my post on using the Firefox bookmark bar, when I see something I want to read, I drag it into my Action folder. More specifically, I read as if I were processing an inbox:

  • I first decide whether I want to read something or not, based on the headline and glancing over the body text.
  • If I don’t want to read the item I just skip it. It gets marked read when I’m done with the batch of 10.
  • If I am interested in the item then I decide if it’ll be a quick read (i.e. < 2 minutes). If so, I read it.
  • If I want to read it but it’s too long, then it gets dragged to the Action folder to be read at a later date.

I suspect my 2+ years of GTD practice led to the unconscious development of this processing strategy. It seems to work pretty well — it allows me to catch up on a lot of items without actually having to read and dwell on all of them.