Turkey sandwiches with heirloom tomatoes and country bread, and homemade french fries. For two.

Last week I traveled to Utah with seven friends (above: Paul, Chris, Stephen L, Mike M, Mark, Mike H, Matt and me) to ride our mountain bikes. The main attraction was the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow race that was held 10 A.M. October 31 to 10 A.M. November 1. The twenty-fifth hour was provided by the end of daylight savings time that happened during the race.

The race was held just outside the sleepy Utah towns of Hurricane and La Verkin, near St. George. The location is amazing, which I'm told is not unusual for Utah. Above you can see Matt watching the sunset on the mountains and the (nearly full) moonrise as he gets ready for a lap.

The course itself is broken up into four sections. It starts out with a climb, mostly on fire roads. Next is a descent on the Gem Trail which is fast and smooth and extremely enjoyable. After the Gem trail, there is a section on flat fire road that connects to the Virgin River Rim trail (I think that's the name) which is a very brutal and demoralizing stretch of rocky single track. The trail is littered with sharp-edged flat-topped rocks spaced inches to feet apart. It was difficult to maintain momentum and the terrain made my back hurt.

I rode four laps of the course. My first at 11 am, then 3pm, 8pm and finally at 3am. The pace of laps naturally slowed at night, and we also got some sleep in the early part of the morning. The bright moon meant I didn't need my lights for most of the climb on the night laps. This kept my eyes sensitive, and I could see the sky filled with stars. On one of the night laps I stopped for a minute or two to just enjoy the calm and emptiness of the desert at night. The weather was very amenable to racing. It was clear the whole race with minimal winds. The daytime had temperatures in the mid-70s (F, of course), and nighttime in the low 40s. For the very curious, I have the GPS track of my ride online. I didn't clear the GPS between laps so there are some weird smoothing effects on the graphs during the time I turned off the GPS.

My team was made up of Matt, Chris and Stephen L, and we came in fifth of six finishing teams, out of seven that started the four-person category. The other team in our group, Paul, Mike M, Mark and Mike H, finished one lap up on us and in fourth place. Neither of our teams had any designs on actually competing for a high place in the event, so we are both satisfied with the results. All of us also had Halloween costumes. Mike H above shows his very warm Luigi costume that came in handy for one of his night laps.

I want to also mention the ride we did a few days before the race, on Gooseberry Mesa. This was riding like I have never done before. The mesa has huge rock-face sections that we crossed on which the trail is marked by painted white dots. It felt like sight-reading music for the first time, picking our way on carefully planned routes to cross technical rock sections. The trail network is built on a mesa that narrows to a point high above the surrounding land. The land below is the area on which the race was held, and a few of the fire road sections can be seen.

A couple of the trails we rode tracked the rims of the mesa very closely, especially the south rim trail. In this Google Earth image, you can see just how closely the red line tracks the edge of the mesa, and below you can see the sharpness of the mesa edge near the point. It was truly spectacular riding!For the very curious, here is the GPS track for that ride.

We didn't go to the Miramar Air Show this year. I've lived long enough in Mesa apartments to know the routine for the Navy's Blue Angels and that they they pass overhead several times. When I heard them pass the first time I went out with my camera to see what I could capture. This is the best picture I got. I see (and hear!) F-18s flying overhead daily, but never in such close formation so low to the ground, nor turning so sharply as when the Blue Angels are in town.

Yesterday I rode the Nobel Canyon trail in Cleveland National Forest with Mike Hannon, Mike Morton and Stephen Lynch. Yes, it was two Mikes and two Stephens. My GPS track can be seen here.

I'm at the SciPy 2009 conference at Caltech in Pasadena today and yesterday. It is an amazing collection of nerds and questionable facial hair styles. There have been some interesting talks.

I like this "snub cube" fountain:

The SciPy crowd:

A fountain in front of the building the conference is in:

The 2009 Tour de France pool is over, and Team Storky came in fifth. In terms of the time gap to the winner, this team did better than any I've been part of before. But it lacked several things: luck and winners.

The team lost Levi Leipheimer, a nearly-guaranteed top-five finisher, Jens Voigt who always finishes tours well-placed and is capable of winning a stage, and Robert Gesink, a promising young Dutch rider who has won a Tour of California stage ahead of Leipheimer and finished seventh in the 2008 Vuelta a España. No other team in the pool lost a single rider of the caliber of Leipheimer, nor three riders of such skill and ability.

The team also got exactly two time bonuses, for a total of 25 minutes of bonus time. This put Team Storky as the second-lowest team in terms of accumulated bonus time, ahead of only the astoundingly unlucky Team John Arnold. Team Wells got over eight times as much bonus time as Team Storky. On one stage, a group of eight escaped from the pack and reached the finish before everyone else. Of those eight, three were on Team Storky. Time bonuses go to first, second and third. The Team Storky riders got forth, fifth and seventh. That outcome is emblematic of the kind of luck the team had throughout the tour. It appears that to win the pool, a team needs at least a sprinter or two that can finish well-placed on a number of stages reliably, something my team didn't have.

Above: The fire department was training across the street from my apartment on Sunday, in no way related to the Tour de France. I just wanted to share that.

It's Tour time again, and I've posted the team rankings after today's prologue in Monaco. You may remember this from last year, when I didn't do very well. I hope to do better this year. For once I actually put some thought into my choices.

I'll update the rankings every day after the stage as quickly as I can!

For a few months I have subscribed to Shorpy, a site that posts high-quality scans of historic American photographs. I save the ones I like, and I've set my computer to rotate randomly through them as my computer desktop picture. This morning I saw something I couldn't ignore! Take a look at the photo below of the [French Market in New Orleans in 1910][2]:

What do you see just above and to the right of the wagon wheel? You can click on the image for the full view, or look at a zoom-in below:

It's Che Guevara, of course! You can clearly see an eye, his beard, two nostrils and hat. He even appears to be sticking his tongue out. I am forced to wonder how his image ended up on a horse-drawn cart in New Orleans eighteen years before he was born. But clearly it's a sign of something profound and mystical. Any ideas?

(Further reading.)

I found the faucet in my lab at school dripping this morning. I guess some air got in the pipes and a bubble formed. Each new drip was forming on the bottom of the bubble until it fell off. Fun accidental physics!

Seen this morning in front of the La Jolla Farmers Market, parked in a red zone:

Big news.

Universal Sports, which is part of NBC, is going to show the entire Giro d'Italia live! I'm guessing that because Lance is riding the Giro, Universal Sports figures Americans will be interested. Down here in San Diego, the local NBC affiliate broadcasts several digital channels over the airwaves. They have their main channel 39-1, that shows full-1080p high definition TV. They also have 39-2, a weather channel, and 39-3 shows Universal Sports. Neither is HDTV, but I'm not complaining. The Tour de France is always on cable, so I have to go to a friends apartment to watch it. I'll be glad to watch this on my very own couch.

My mornings suddenly got much earlier for the next month.

Update May 9: The Giro is being streamed live online, not over the air. It is just a commercial-free stream of the Italian coverage (with inconsistent English commentary) on the Universal Sports website. I guess I read what I wanted to read. I'll take it however I get it.

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. Here are some highlights.

• 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.

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 17 brodozers I was able to capture. There were many that passed before I had inspiration to photograph them, and others I missed. It's interesting that white is the dominant color, and none appear to have been off-road recently. Note that a brodozer 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.

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 Erdős number and the h-index, which measure a scientists publishing impact. I don't have an Erdős 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.

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 (*).

Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that the City of San Diego is planning on closing them permanently, or at least severely curtailing how many can be used. Since the tunnels are fairly far from any road, it's only cyclists that use them with regularity, but the city feels it needs to consider all the other potential users. Cyclists are the lowest on the public land user totem pole, so you can see how this can do nothing but hurt our interests. I suspect that if they're kept open, they'll have to be upgraded so hikers and equestrians can use them, which will remove much of what is attractive about them (which is the lack of those two groups for a large part). If they're closed for environmental reasons, only cyclists will miss them. It's kind of a lose-lose situation for us.

The City of San Diego isn't full of complete idiots, there is a series of legal drag race events that take place in the Qualcomm parking lot. This alleviates the pressure of what many people want to do and would resort to doing illegally without other options. There is a similar pressure from cyclists who want quality single track trails. If trails are available, legal and fun, cyclists won't have to resort to cutting trails and breaking laws. We'll see if the city has enough foresight to recognize this.

(*) For those my friends to are familiar with Peñasquitos, if you're heading east, this is just past the big deep sandy patch where you used to have to ride on the extreme right, and just before the really rocky climb. I think it's in the center of here. The second photo above is the top of the third tunnel, the farthest north of the three linked tunnels. The riding I did do today (I didn't go into the tunnels) showed that many of the lines we rode in the summer are now completely different.