Month: August 2021

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds …” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It seems pointless by now to cry about this new flavor of tyranny that we have so eagerly embraced. It is here and it seems nearly impossible to divert the juggernaut; people are going to do what they do. If it means ruining families, friendships, freedoms, social justice, liberty, then that is what will be done to obtain this foolish consistency that we desire. Whatever it takes to obtain our consistency now seems well worth the sacrifice, because it seems the only thing we can do to allay our fears. And with no real collective ability to discern the lies of poorly wrought statistics, the fears will undoubtedly be with us for a while.

But is this new method do effective because of fear, or is it something more?

I have long been amazed, and I have even noticed it in myself, how “little” my mind can be with these foolish consistencies. I remember running through hundreds of pages of legally-binding documents, with no intention other than to the make sure all the spaces between paragraphs were the same size, or that only one space came after the period at the end of a sentence, rather than two. Certainly there was little need for me to do this, but it seemed to give me some comfort at the time, at least I was “doing something.” I could avoid thinking about the pointlessness of my tasks, if I simply scoured the world for inconsistencies. I could avoid thinking about how miserable I was in those jobs if I could successfully divert myself to the necessity of ensuring that the capitalization of certain words remained consistent across documents. The emotional disorder in this activity was not mine alone. In fact, my entire corporate department shared my dysfunction. It seemed normal because none of us wanted to contemplate our general misery, our children raised by strangers, our debt unrelieved by our long hours on the job. The foolish consistency seemed no longer foolish, but rather prudent.

Now the world is again on the precipice, we happily ignore the coming catastrophe to the natural world as we bulldoze pristine African wilderness to make way for the rare earth element mines, so we can drive electric vehicles to save the planet. We ignore our children who can no longer see each other’s faces, behind their COVID masks, an entire generation with a form of contact Asperger’s Syndrome from lack of facial connection. We ignore the debt, we ignore the lack of manufacturing, we ignore the looming humanitarian crisis of dissidents who stand up to their totalitarian lords. As long as we can create this foolish consistency in our little minds, we can ignore all of it. Throw the conscientious objectors to the new Transgenic Warfare under the bus, let the wheels crush their skulls, at least we won’t have to worry about catching their nonexistent disease.

We crave this compliance because we can’t fathom how to solve our real-world problems, how to extract the rare earth elements in a clean and sustainable way, how to respect others who don’t share our decisions, how to clean the air, clean the water, keep food on the table, keep a three year old Haitian child from death by diarrhea, or a 90-year-old woman who has had her home taken by the State to pay for the fees of the group death home into which she has just been rolled. Our training primarily consists of an ability to find a new television show on the computer, or purchase something on Amazon. We have no clue how to save that child from the diarrhea, so we don’t try and we instead kick in the head of anyone who dares to challenge the status quo.

These mandates, this demonization of people who have chosen a different path, even a more prudent path which we do not have the expertise to understand, these are necessary actions to help us avoid the realities of the world we have inherited.

We crave consistency in our neighbors and family not because it actually matters, but because it is easier than the alternative, and we have lost the ability to parse the information that is beamed into our heads through our eyeballs and our earholes. We can’t possibly know what to believe, so we let politics define the science, we let politics define the statistics, we let politics define the law, and we let politics define our ideals of social justice.

We will come out of this mess at some point … hundreds of thousands of Europeans have taken to the streets to protest. But we will lose a lot more before we can hold back the juggernaut. But as long as we allow the lens of politics to define statistics, science, rational decisions, and safety from the hints of disaster, we will not come out of this mess any day soon.

A small handful of the people who read this post will decide that they hate me, for I advocate a renovation of the sport of rowing that has become a tradition in their families. When the working class kids show that good rowing technique and world record times have nothing to do with good breeding and wealth, then the sport will have to change. I’m not going to be some heartless rowing socialist who screams at these rich kids that “life sucks sometimes, and this is what you get when spend more time partying than in the gym and on the erg, and in the water and studying for your classes.”

But that is the reality for a good number of students from what I call the “Rowing Class” which tends to mostly include people who may have had their water and gas shut off because they didn’t have the emotional fortitude to pay the bill, but they have not had their water shut off because they could not only not find enough money to pay the bill, but they couldn’t find enough time from their obligations to apply for public assistance. (The gas was shut off a long time ago.) The reality of rowing is that the best erg monkey in the world needs to get in the water at least a bit of the time. Yeah, slides are great under the erg, but they don’t change the power-transfer, as much as just make your Concept II look friggen awesome as smoked ceviche. Heck, I don’t even have a slide and I’m the future champion of the Monte Carlo U-250 Invitational in the men’s senior heavyweight division. If you can’t get your shit bird ass inside a shell, on the water, then you will never have an idea of how to properly couple into the water. An erg has a largely linear relationship to viscosity and speed, and on-the-water boat has a HIGHLY nonlinear relationship to viscosity and speed. So a good rower will adjust her or his attack angle from their paddle position constantly through his or her run, because when the boat first starts to move, the turbulence is largely from the blade tips rather than the hull. But as the boat comes up to speed, the turbulence transitions to a system that interacts between the blades and the hull. A single-place rower will then have to adjust his or her attack slightly as he or she transitions to a boat with more rowers, because the turbulence becomes a large-body problem, and a good rower can take advantage of a lot of nonlinearities in her or his power transition strategy.

And that’s the reason why so many people who read this are going to get pissed at me. They can’t ignore the basic physics of moving a displacement hull through a linear wave system. This is established in the rowing community. But when they try to ignore the less-basic physics of moving a transitional hull through a non-linear wave system, their heads explode a year later when they see that the teams who respected the strategic advantages of coupling into the non-linear wave system won a lot of events. They look at their fabled family legacy come to slow and sad end, as even the $160,000 high performance shells they donated to XYZ University can no longer reliably deliver the cups, or the pickle dishes.

And the reality of this is that a cup-winning crew is a cup-winning crew because they have just enough coaching not to fuck up their rows, and they have some good minds on the boat. This is not some kind of “coxswain rocket surgery.” This is stuff that every rower in the crew and in the team need to learn.

And yet, none of this really matters all that much when you’re cutting air on the Pain Sled.

When you’re on the erg, your power-transition is much more simple, and not just because you’re yanking on a symmetric solid bar rather than an asymmetric oar or two. It’s much more simple because air has something that water does not … it’s easily compressible. And because it’s easily compressible, the vaguaries of your power-transition tend to manifest themselves as noise, or maybe a little harmonic buzz from the erg, perhaps a little heat in both the erg mechanisms themselves and the air around the fan. But what those nonlinearities do not do, is turn themselves in tiny pneumatic hammers that work against the forward movement of a displacement hull in water.

What does this mean for competitive rowing? There are potentially world-class rowers who have never been in a boat, and because they have neither been in a boat nor have any immediate plans to be in a boat, they will remain on the cataclysmic fringes of rowing. It’s hard to find flatwater, it’s expensive to buy rowing shells, it’s tough to build the pace boat and support boat programs, and it’s damned near impossible to build a crew house that doesn’t become the center of a gaping hole straight to Gary, Claude and Satan himself. Rowers are … erm, an unusual kind of athlete. Global Rowing has found rowing prodigies in poverty and brought them up through the universities and club programs. But Global Rowing has failed to do what Optimists International did for sailing. Unlike the Optimists, they have failed to create a simple, open-source build plan for simple One Design rowing shells. If you throw a bag of weed into a crowded party at the Yacht Club, half of the demented souls in that place would admit to growing up sailing Optis on some hell-forsaken polluted lake in some industrial wasteland somewhere. The Optimists turned a bunch of dirty kids into millionaires by giving them a class conduit to the Societal Pleasures of Sailing. Yeah, sailing Optis was fun, but how many people now see them as anything other than a kid’s boat, rapidly replaced by the Bic O’Pen. Who? A handful of hardcore sailors who don’t gave a rat’s ass about a conduit to a bunch of wealthy people who need to hire them to beat up their bowman for langauge unbecoming of a stevedore. They sail the shit out of those Optis, in shit weather, in bailing conditions. But they do it not because the Optis are good sailboats, but because the Optis are the smallest possible boat on which a sailor can experiment with tactics and get a near immediate feedback from the wind and the water to guage to the soundness of the strategy.

And that’s the legacy of the Optimists in this one. They saved the sport of sailing from Death by Luxury. Global Rowing has not done that, it has created a two-pronged monster, with the gifted athletes on ergs, the gifted and lucky athletes in shells, and the neither gifted nor lucky but rather wealthy athletes, in single skiffs.

I have found a small company that manufactures folding rowing shells. I have obtained a sample and with some key modifications, I believe that they can present an inexpensive way for erg rowers to acquire a very inexpensive entry to in-water rowing. With this product, I believe that Global Rowing can acquire gifted athletes from other more lucrative sports, and expand our reach into every economic class and subclass in the world, including West Africa and Haiti. I have decided to follow the lead of Optimists International, and purchase all of this technology, in order to Open Source is Opti-style, to allow the lowest possible cost, time and expertise barrier of entry for new rowers.

This will need some calibration, but it’s a starting point.

Roz rowed say 3000 miles in 103 days. She rowed at an average speed, where 4,828,032 meters divided by 8,899,200 seconds, gives 0.54 m/s. Next, a micronized length of her row is thus 4.82 meters.

Degree in physics not necessary, only that you apes just pay attention in your classes so that you can row what you need to row. Improve the accuracy of that standard as necessary, but the MicroRoz is now 4.82 increment meters at an average speed of 0.54 meters per second.

So lessee, taken down to the practice and training of a student of rowing, if you are training for the 1,000 meter, for instance, then you would divide 1,000 by 4.82, you should get 207 and some change. Tell them to keep the change. So now multiply 207 times 4.82, and you get 997.74. That’s the distance you give your pace boat driver, or program into the ergometer. Now, you need to tell your pace boat driver how fast to go, tell your driver to do what they need to do keep it at 1.94 kilometers per hour. For you erg rowers, you aren’t from wealthy families like the in-water rowers, so you’ll need to actually crack a textbook open. You are rowing a distance of 997.74 and you need to set your erg computer to X number of seconds so that the paceboat has an average velocity of 0.54 meters per second. Bust out your pencils and Tupac it. Figure it out, if it’s easy for you, help someone for whom it’s hard. Type that number into the pace boat’s time.

And then you row.

If you obliterate the pace boat, then start to nudge your MicroRez down, take off a second or two from the pace boat’s total time and row again. Don’t take off too much too fast. If the pace boat is faster than you, then you need to train more to reach your Minimum Integral MicroRoz. And remember, you probably have something resembling nice, flat water. Roz had to pull that average speed in really rough conditions, that speed averaged about 1 mile per hour, which is about the speed you walk when you’re ambling through a store looking for stuff to buy. But on the open ocean, the rower has to fight a lot of conditions that the flatwater competitive rower and erg rower can mostly ignore. Roz’s boat had to be built for survivability, something which that rowing shell that your grandfather donated to the program, has not. Your grandpa bought the program a good boat, And it will help you beat some people whom your grandpa hates, because they screwed me in a land deal once. But this sport is opening, it’s changing. The erg, and the U-250 and the Folding Rower have brought people into this sport who have a drive with which you may not have been born. If you want to row as fast as your old grandpa Rick, then you will need to get into Optimists International, and get them to restart their old Opti sailing program, but this time for rowing.

At some point, I will calculate my world-record Unsanctioned-250 run of 45.0 seconds, and I will show all of you how my row stands in MicroRoz.

Again, if you obliterated the pace boat, don’t whack too huge of a chunk off your time at once. Progress in rowing needs to tend forward, and when you pick a too-optimistic time as a young-person, you lose a lot of the fun and beauty of the sport. This is not about becoming a Grand National champion like Grandpa Rick, this is about becoming a better rower and a better person. If you ever feel that rowing isn’t fun, you get into that boat and you row the most beautiful run you’ve ever had. Every stroke a masterpiece. If you can row a beautiful run, that’s more beautiful than fast run. But don’t you ever pull that shit in a race. Your opponent is on that pain sled because he or she thinks that you might be a better racer. If you find yourself loosing, you push hard to the flags, you may not feel that you’re worthy of the Pain Sled, but your opponent is worthy of your best possible time, and your opponent deserves a level of respect that you might not have for yourself. If you’re sure there is no way you can catch up in that race, you give your opponent every bit of effort you can drive. And that, you apes, is called “Sportmanship” you shit-birds.

One of the curiosities of this current battle against the conscientious deniers of the COVID vaccine is the placement of public policy as a new kind of science. In horse sense, it seems reasonable enough, if economists can claim their guidance as science, then why not public policy experts, who often work alongside the economists? Science acquires its own gravity, it often has the ability to silence dissent if pulled from the ass with sufficient gravitas.

In his recent opinion piece, Jonathon Meer suggests that these conscientious deniers of the most recent bit of Genetically-Engineered miracle to be bestowed upon our unworthy butts should hold responsibility for their medical costs, should they contract the lab-leak du-jour after having refused the vaccine. He ends his new public policy suggestion with “Real adults take responsibility for their decisions.”

Apparently, in Meer’s newly scientific worldview, buoyed by measurements of a vaccinated populations with few if any control groups, that these fully insured Americans just finished licking their wounds having broken into the Capitol, and now hordes of these ungrateful dimwits now either recover in hospitals or die on the public largesse that allows them to soak in vast societal benefits in their natural, unvaccinated state.

It surely would take a tenured professor of public policy, pulling in a sweet hundred grand per year, with a pension and solid health insurance to suggest that a portion of his fellow Americans are anything less than “real adults.” Meer seems ignorant of the reality that unlike his fellow full-time employees in higher education, tens of millions of Americans actually have not a dot of health insurance. Too broke to afford the market insurance, but slightly too wealthy to qualify for public aid, these “real adults” have to navigate a life where their daily decisions tie directly to their health. Some of them choose not to risk the fallout from the genetically-engineered solution, because if the free vaccine they receive from their corner pharmacy happens to make them ill eventually, they will have little recourse. Many of these people trust the whims of Mother Nature more than they trust the historically-established follies of the pharmaceutical industry, and they lose their jobs and even family connections because of their idealism.

When your science is public health, one need not worry about things like functionalized carbon and protein structures below the Kelvin barrier, they need not worry about torsional stresses on the RNA backbone, they need not worry about the kind of things that kept Frances Oldham Kelsey in a state of constant attack against an initially belligerent pharmaceutical industry that dismissed concerns of “hesitancy” which is exactly the word that Meer used in his opinion. Those who decided to ignore their feelings of “hesitancy” with Thalidomide had a markedly increased chance of giving birth to children that were unvaible, or pharmaceutically-mangled for the rest of their lives.

Like many children who want to keep their birthday cake beautiful, but also devour it, Professor Meer wants to shift the burden of the unvaccinated away from those who are vaccinated, while simultaneously using this population as the de facto control group for this new class of genetically-engineered vaccines and then thrust them further into poverty and public dependency by taking away their jobs. Professor Meer has obtained his ability to look at the unwashed masses of conscientious objectors of the new Genetically Modified Organisms due to his wealth. Should mRNA technology prove unreliable or even dangerous the as-yet untested long-term, he will still luxuriate in public-enabled health. But what of the uninsured, and people in Developing Nations who don’t have access to the level of healthcare that Professor Meer takes for granted? They’ll drop like beheaded sea bass, same as they usually do, same as they did when a laboratory leak of GMOs pinpointed their broke-asses with surgical precision and killed some four million people.

Professor Meer adopts a fairy tale cost metric where these unvaccinated have actually pulled dollar bills out of his pocket, and Professor Meer has clearly stated that he doesn’t want to share, he writes “But why should the vaccinated bear those financial costs?” Again, his position of luxury ignores the reality that is in in fact those without any health insurance at all who have subsidized his lifestyle, while his employer is able to deduct their significant contribution to the costs of his public health from their taxable revenue. Even a regular for-profit company is able to do this, let-alone a non-profit institution. This cost of insuring people like Professor Meer then falls to everyone who pays taxes, including the uninsured and those who choose not to receive injection of genetic engineering.

Meer fails because he doesn’t have the tools of science to apply to his argument. Without the benefit of long-term data, he has very little actual guidance to the economic outcomes of this global rollout of genetic engineering. Like 1950s policy designed to bridge society to the post-nuclear apocalypse world, his theories to what comes after the GMO are unmeasured.

Jonathon English at Bloomberg wrote an excellent analysis on the difficulties and opportunities of mass transit. Here is the link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-american-mass-transit-so-bad-it-s-a-long-story.

One of the luxuries of science is that it allows us to bypass debates that may not matter anyway. It’s a good article, if you look around, you can find it without necessarily having to navigate Bloomberg’s pay wall. And there are good analyses of Jonathon’s work, for instance on Wit’s End.

But before I shove my two cents down this hole, I did notice that Jonathon could be the name of a person, and also an event, like an Americathon, or Marathon, or Telethon, where the participants celebrate either someone named Jona, or possibly the ingestion of human beings by large fish in biblical times.

Now, as to mass transit … Jonathon mostly nails it; mass transit generally sucks unless you happen to live in a dense area, where you might not want to deal with traffic, parking, or even have to own a car. But regardless what he writes about the relatively low cost of light rail, it just isn’t a reality. The current costs of light rail in anything other than a rural area with lots of open land tends to start at about $20 million per mile, and rise from there. It’s expensive to nudge existing roads, build crossings, build foundations, set up infrastructure and modify stuff that is already in and on top of the ground.

Buses work because they create a double use of existing infrastructure; public roads. But who rides a bus? People who either don’t have a car, or people with lives so well organized that they can set up a repeating transit schedule with mass transit while they listen to their podcast and read some book that Amazon just mailed to them in a cardboard box that will realistically rot in some landfill somewhere.

Cars work because they present a level of flexibility that public transit rarely has. And since I don’t need to discuss the solutions and problems of mass transit, I can just open my eyes to the reality that the car makers are winning this war. They’re putting vehicles on the road that run on electricity, that can navigate themselves with their driver listens to their podcst and reads some book that Amazon just mailed to them in a cardboard box that will realistically rot in some landfill somewhere.

Mass Transit is sometimes excellent, but it sucks more often, so people drive instead. Jonathon noted this.

Therefore, I believe that mass transit can now be effectively framed as an “ill posed problem.” We no longer have to solve this problem, because it can’t be solved. We instead need to redefine mass transit: The immediate future of our lazy asses is inside of our cars. Those cars are our mass transit, and even with telework, those cars will destroy our souls.

So instead of changing mass transit, we should change cars.

Inthefuture.com, cars will be a fraction of their current size and mass. They will take advantage of segregated roadways, where full size vehicles and trucks are in those lanes, and “speedies” (my name for these new vehicles) will be in these lanes. Speedies will essentially be built like giant motorized motorcycle helmets, with the main body made of high-density, impact-absorbing foam, and with a thin plastic shell to protect the foam. Can we build these things without adding to our disposable economic culture? Yes. We can use foaming agents with low global warming potential gasses like CO2, we can potentially melt and refoam the cars’ bodies.

Speedies will be electric vehicles but with capacitors instead of batteries, to keep them very lightweight. The design envelope of these vehicles will be determined by the public policy that decides on the parameters of the segregated roadways. The limitation will be the specialized low-mass on-off ramps. This will place an upper limit on the speedy mass of approximately 160 kilograms. This will require only one small battery, arrayed capacitors, and a small 30 cubic centimeter ultra-high-efficiency two-stroke gasoline engine that is rev-tuned to act only as a generator for the speedie’s electric motor, with regen braking piped to the capacitors. They will likely include some human-powered drive, likely a recumbent-style cycle connection to add charge and increase range while decreasing mass. Driver, passenger, room for some stuff, a fan to help stay cool, perhaps some electrically-heated seats for the winter, a good sound system, and that’s about it. That’s the new mass-transit, and the previous ill-posed problem has been corrected for the conditions.

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