March Madness Updates

March 22nd, 2009

It’s been a while since I posted here.

  • A month ago Melissa’s parents came down to visit, and on one of the days we went to the USS Midway Museum. Usually I post photos right away, but I forgot this time. Here is a link to the full gallery, and below are some highlights.

    Giant MixerRadio Room DialsRon, Mary and Melissa in the Officer's MessThe Deck
  • Today on an errand I saw this egregious example of bad brodozer behavior. I saw the able-bodied owner and his able-bodied elementary school-aged son get out. I didn’t bother to check if there was a placard in the windshield because I didn’t have my climbing gear nor my binoculars.
  • I’ve watched more college basketball games in the last four days than I have since, well, last March. I miss watching the games in person at Haas, and I am disappointed by the mens flame-out in the first round of the tournament on Thursday. The women have already done better. C’est la vie of a Bear fan. For those of you who care, here is current my bracket which I put together in about 5 minutes, and it shows.

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Brodozers

February 22nd, 2009

I spent several hours today standing at the corner of El Norte Parkway and Elm Street in Escondido as a course marshal for the Amgen Tour of California. Today was the final stage of the eight stage (plus prologue) race that started in Sacramento.

While I waited hours for the brief seconds of each pack of cyclists to pass, I decided to amuse myself by taking pictures of all the ‘brodozers’ that drove by. A brodozer is a pick-up truck that has been jacked up on shocks with huge noisy tires. They are a particularly nasty form of transportation. They are a big middle finger to the environment and are driven by young males in a very aggressive manner. One of my scariest moments on a bicycle was due to a brodozer in East County San Diego. This county is infested with brodozers, and Escondido is particularly bad.

Below are 16 of the 17 brodozers I was able to capture. There were many that passed before I had inspiration, and others I missed. It’s interesting that white is the dominant color, and none appear to have been off-road recently. The seventeenth was the only vehicle I saw escorted off the course by the police. That brodozer needed to be told more than once by the police to get off the course. This tells you all you need to know about brodozer drivers.

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My Eddington Number is 48

January 30th, 2009

A couple days ago I was browsing the internet on astrophysical topics, when I came across Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s wikipedia page. He’s best known for the Eddington limit, which describes the luminosity limit of a star as a function of its mass. Near the bottom of his page linked above, there is a description of the “Eddington number,” which for any person is the greatest number of bike rides they done which have been that at least that number in miles long. From the wikipedia page:

The Eddington Number in this context is defined as E, the number of days a cyclist has cycled more than E miles. For example an Eddington Number of 70 would imply that a cyclist has cycled more than 70 miles in a day on 70 occasions.

This is very similar to the Erdös number and the h-index, which measure a scientists publishing impact. I don’t have an Erdös number, nor an h-index, but I do have an Eddington number. And since I have a nice GPS database of my rides, I figured I could easily calculate it.



Above shows two Eddington calculations, in miles and in kilometers. The curved blue line is x=y, and it’s curved because the y axis is using a logscale. Where the blue line intersects the Eddington lines is my Eddington number. The downward arrows show my actual integer Eddington numbers (48 for miles, 74 for kilometers), while the upward arrows show that 49 and 75 aren’t above the blue line, and thus aren’t my Eddington numbers. Since the definition is in miles, my true number is 48, but the kilometer calculation shows that the number is also a function of your unit.

Unfortunately, I don’t have records before I got my GPS, so my true Eddington number is surely larger.

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Failed Socks

January 20th, 2009

The hopes and dreams of these socks unfortunately never came to pass.

Let’s see how the the hopes and dreams of Obama turn out. I’m excited!

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No More Tunnels

January 3rd, 2009

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By far my favorite place to ride my mountain bike (that is reachable without driving) are the single track ‘tunnels’ that are typically reached through Peñasquitos Park (although they aren’t actually inside the park, they are on non-park city land). They are called ‘the tunnels’ because for most of their length they are covered by low bushes and trees just over head height. There are four of them that total a few miles in length and vary in technical difficulty. Until about a month ago, they were somewhat illicit and not patrolled, now they are very expressly illegal. During the rainy season I think it’s perfectly reasonable to close them. Muddy and wet ground is especially susceptible to erosion, and nature doesn’t need human help to erode the ground during the rainy season. The ditch my bike is pictured in above was fairly level ground the last time I was there, less than a month ago (*).

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