I flew through El Dorado International Airport four times last month. On the final trip security was none too pleased when they spotted the Bogota Pi toolset in my pack. The normal Bogota Titans in my wallet were either missed or deemed not problematic. I found the experience ironic.
The Sparrows Mini Jim met with suspicion, but I just did my smile-nod-no-hablo-español routine and they put it back. One could make a convincing argument that Super Mica Shims are more appropriate for travel.
I first began to use the Schwalbe Marathon Supremes six years ago. Since then I have tried a few other tires, but within a couple months I invariably end up coming back to the Marathon Supremes. They ride well, only get maybe one or two flats per year, and I appreciate the visibility of the reflective sidewall. I tend to replace them after somewhere around a year of use – I think the set I removed today were in service for 15 months. I don’t track miles, so I don’t know what sort of distance the tires get me, but it’s up there. They aren’t cheap, but they’re worth it for the contribution they make to my everyday mobility.
A metaphor can help understand the role of sleep and why alarm clocks are bad. We can compare the brain and its NREM-REM sleep cycles to an ordinary PC. During the day, while learning and experiencing new things, you store your new data in RAM memory. During the night, while first in NREM, you write the data down to the hard disk. During REM, which follows NREM in the night, you do the disk defragmentation, i.e. you organize data, sort them, build new connections, etc. Overnight, you repeat the write-and-defragment cycle until all RAM data is neatly written to the disk (for long-term use), and your RAM is clear and ready for a new day of learning. Upon waking up, you reboot the computer. If you reboot early with the use of an alarm clock, you often leave your disk fragmented. Your data access is slow, and your thinking is confused. Even worse, some of the data may not even get written to the disk. It is as if you have never stored it in RAM in the first place. In conclusion, if you use an alarm clock, you endanger your data.
With climate change, humans are beginning to appreciate that cities are not separate from the environment. They are environments. We should also recognize that the rural is, at least in part, man-made. Cities approaching the changes already in motion with a sense of the Earth as a biological network, rather than adopting psychological siege positions, will be essential for survival. Technology and engineering will need to be deployed in what is currently regarded as wilderness. In turn, what seems rural will have to be deployed in cities: rooftop and vertical gardens, wetland buffer zones, greenery as a sponge for rising waters, and towers that channel polluted air into greenhouses…
I mounted the saddle at 15,000 feet. Thin air for pushing pedals – everything feels like uphill, until it is, then it feels like something worse – but I like to think it might have prepared me somewhat for the oxygen deprivation of my recent respirator trials. Integrating some sort of hypoxic training into a PT regime may be worth considering.
We took a short hike up to Ground Equipment Facility J-33 on the West Peak of Mt. Tam. This was the first time I’d been back up there since Field Day 2017. I was able to get two contacts on 2 meters with my VX-8DR, and another two on 20 meters with one of the other operator’s KX3. The club has more photos.
