XC is Suddenly Cool Again

After a decade of 6"-8" travel rolling sofa trail bikes, suddenly cross-country seems to be getting re-discovered.  Behold, article at Singletracks mag: 

It's an Olympic Year, Which Means XC Mountain Bikes are Getting Sexy Again

I really, really dig that tire in the first picture.  That on the back and some medium knobs up front just look like an extra 10% speed.

But of course we already knew all about how sexy XC mountain bikes really are.

BTW, Singletracks online mag is a pretty good mountain bike resource.  It doesn't quite have the down-home funk of 90's Dirt Rag, but hell, what does?  Seems to be one of the better thing going these days.

It's Been a While...

... since I've had a good Mustang post.  Here we go!

The Value of Education vs. Training

Illustrated well over at yesterday's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal web comic.

Survey Markers, Magnetic Declination Drift, and Border Disputes

Yesterday's xkcd comic dragged up memories of a small fence line discussion last year:

The latest team of surveyors in my neighborhood had used the 1988 local declination value and neglected to adjust for the changes over the intervening 35 years.  This amounted to about 3.5 degrees, which put the buildings, sidewalks, and even city streets at considerable odds with their new maps.  Double check figures?  Nah.  Why bother, the magic computer box on the instrument sed whut it sed.  All of those century-old buildings and two-century old streets were clearly in error.  So the new property lines ran through buildings, carving off a few feet here and there to new owners.

Glad that I had a 65 year old survey map of my place, back when people did math and double-checked it.  Strange how that map was in agreement with, well, reality.

The Ultimate Captcha

These things are getting more and more involved.  I got this lulu this morning:

OK, not terrible, but the previous screen (which I unfortunately did not capture) had more of vague tigers-in-a-foggy-jungle images, in much the same way as the lower-left tractor image.  I actually hade to squint at it for a moment.

But let's stop messing around with these simple image captchas and move on to Things That Only Humans Can Truly Do.  For example,

Make the following indeterminate quantum state collapse into a determinate reality.

The cat is:

[ ] Alive

[ ] Dead

Well, that's certainly a 100% lock on the whole  captcha thing.  Unfortunately the actual hardware/software implementation could be a little tricky.  Not to mention that we'd need an unreasonably large supply of surplus cats.

Teaching the Ham General License Class

Teaching's keeping me busy these next couple of weeks, so blogging may be sporadic.  In the meantime, here's a link to a 2017 post on The Quick & Dirty way to Tech & General License for people with a STEM background.  Really, if I could pull this off while recovering from sinus surgery, you can too.  Also, here's a link to a local club's testing sign-up & what-to-bring page.  Even if you're not on the Forgotten Coast or somewhere in Area X, odds are that the overall procedure will be similar in your locale so it's worth a look.

The band chart.  No, this won't all be on the test, but you will have to show some ability to navigate it.  Click here for the full-res version in pdf.

And That Was the Eclipse That Was

I was driving through Port St. Joe at the peak of coverage here in NW FL and was down to a half-tank, so I used that as an excuse to pull over and observe.  Lacing fingers together to make a crude pinhole gave a decent image on a smooth patch of the gas station's pavement.  At least, it was enough to see a chunk taken out of the image of the Sun, maybe 70%.  Though nowhere near the totality path, I'd still have felt bad if I hadn't at least made that little effort.

Coming out of the gas station (bathroom & caffeine stop), there was a dood hanging out in the gloom outside.  We spoke, he said he'd looked straight at it anyway.  I showed him the improvised pinhole trick and projected a pretty clear image on the sidewalk, still showing a hefty chunk out of the image.  He looked at me uncomprehendingly.  All I could think to say was "Hey, science.  Don't worry too much about it."  Then I popped open my can o' caffeine, got in my car, and headed for home.