How Italian sports cars and bicycles are alike: You always have something to do in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.
How they are not alike: If you accelerate through the corners on a bike, you get pedals that look like this:
My right pedal. The outer metal part used to be rectangular.
I got on the scale yesterday morning, and all I could say was, “ugh.” Feasting on Chinese food the night before had its consequences. “What is it about Wednesdays?” I asked myself. It seemed like I’d seen a few Wednesdays like this.
But had I? This is how urban legends are born. You start to get a feeling that something is true: “I tend to gain weight on Wednesdays” or “More babies are born when the moon is full.” Then every time you see something that corroborates the impression, the more sure you get. Meanwhile, you don’t notice the unremarkable Wednesdays when weight follows its usual pattern.
However, having measured and recorded my weight consistently since last June (well, mostly consistently – more on that in a bit), I had the data to actually measure whether Wednesdays were Big Wednesdays or not. It took a little fiddling (I am not the spreadsheet-jockey that many of my coworkers are, and Apple’s spreadsheet, Numbers, lacks an obvious function that would have made this much easier), but I ended up with this graph:
My weight change by day of week. (For me, negative is good.) The horizontal blue line is the average for all days.
It turns out Wednesdays are net-gain days, but not as bad as Mondays or Tuesdays. It’s odd that despite my having lost 13 pounds over that time, the first half of the work week still shows a net increase in plumpness. Notice also the shorter error bars Wednesday and Thursday; for whatever reason (or for no reason at all) the numbers are in a closer range on those days.
As you look at the graph, keep in mind that I weigh myself first thing in the morning, so the weight change is a reflection of the choices I made the day before. So while I show the most weight gain on Mondays, it’s actually what I do on Sunday that leads to it.
There’s also a subtle measurement bias that makes the weekend look better at the expense of Monday. I sleep in on the weekends, so my body processes a measurable amount of extra water before I climb on the scale. So, Saturdays may not be as good as they seem in this graph, and Mondays may not be as bad. Even so, it’s hard to ignore the trend that shows up here, and it makes me wonder a couple of things.
First, I’m not aware of anything I do substantially differently on Thursday than I do on Monday, yet the outcome seems quite different. This suggests to me that the lag time between decision and consequence is often more than twenty-four hours. That bulge early in the week may be the previous weekend catching up to me. Or it may not; there’s no way to tell from this data. I may try to research this further out there on the Internet.
Second, is this information actionable? Can I look at this little graph and make better life choices on Mondays? Probably I can, but honestly, I probably won’t. This graph will likely remain for me a mildly-interesting little factoid, and as long as my week-on-week numbers stay in the green, I’ll not worry so much.
When I started riding to work, I was one of the slower ones out there. When stopped at a light, there was little doubt who would be pulling out first when it was time to crank. After a while, though, there were a few other riders where things were not so clear-cut. I started to look for clues while stopped, to know if I should be getting out of the way, or working to get in front while it was safe.
A couple of lessons I learned: 1) some of those fat-bottomed girls pack a lot of muscle down there; 2) don’t even think about trying to pass someone on skinny little racing tires.
But there is one category I feel pretty comfortable pushing ahead of: guys wearing sweatshirts who are riding bikes with fat tires. Most of them are commuting, like me, but they’re just not in as big a hurry — if they wanted to go fast, they’d have equipment designed for that. I assume they are not going as far.
On yesterday’s ride, however, as I pushed up Willow at (for me) a pretty good pace, a dude in a sweatshirt riding a bike with fairly wide tires passed me in style. I looked at his receding form, his near-effortless cadence as he pushed his pedals, and was impressed. He would have shamed a lot of the spandex crowd.
The Gods of Traffic favored me, and I caught up to him at the next light. No ambiguity about who should be at the front of the pack here. I waited behind him, and when the light changed he moved out effortlessly.
I mean, literally effortlessly. He didn’t pedal at all. His bike had an electric motor. He could go faster than cars do on that stretch, and he had the go-to-the-head-of-the-line benefit of the bike lane at traffic lights. Not a bad way to travel.
The other day I was using a car to get home from work, and in front of me at a traffic signal was a Cadillac with what might have been the Single Ugliest Rear End of All Time. This honor was once held firmly by the Pontiac Aztec, but in recent years our friends in Asia have produced some marvelously hideous-looking cars. Mind-boggling, to tell the truth.
So I guess the boys at General Motors decided to give the guy who made the Aztec another shot at glory. (This Caddy’s rear definitely had some of those Aztecan sensibilities.) They managed to find the storage room where they’d been keeping him, brushed most of the dust off him, and turned him loose on the newest Caddy. I thought I’d go to the Cadillac Web site and poach a picture so we could all appreciate the grotesquery.
Only, when I go to the Cadillac Web site, I see that while their CTS-V coupe rear (the closest match to what I saw) is by no means pretty (vast plains of plastic, almost no glass), it lacks those finishing details of the one I saw that put it into the running for all-time ugliest. Which means that they’ve already thought better of the horrid design. Maybe GM put it out for one year to reclaim the ugly crown, then backed off to merely “rather ugly” so people would buy the car. If someone were to say to me, “You know, I kind of like that look”, I would merely shrug and wonder quietly to myself what the hell is wrong with that person. But I know those people are out there.
On the subject of ugly cars, every once in a while I put “Electric Roadster” into my search engine to see if there’s any news on a viable electric replacement for my aging Miata coming down the pike. The answer is, alas, “not yet.” Tesla has announced a retrofit to its lotus-based roadster to put in better battery technology, so that’s progress.
The search engine results provide a wide range of things claiming to be electric roadsters. Most of them are not. Golf carts are not roadsters, even when they look like this:
If it can’t go more then 25 mph, it’s not a roadster. http://californiaroadster.com/rlimo.php
And then come the ugly ones. Boy howdy. The overall trend in automotive design these days is to add fiddly bits and creases to the car until there’s no surface area left to add bits to. Take this monstrosity:
Pride forbids me from considering this vehicle. http://torqev.com
Along those same lines, only much more expensive, we find Detroit Electric’s entry in the field.
Maybe in person it wouldn’t seem so ugly. http://detroit-electric-group.com/sp01.html
The Europeans, meanwhile, are heading off in a distinctly different direction. While this vehicle doesn’t fit my definition of ‘roadster’, that hasn’t stopped other people from calling it that:
Just a concept car, but wow. Mashable
Finally we have this car, a one-off unconstrained by having to conform to any laws, that shows that out there are still some automotive designers who haven’t fallen into the more-is-better trap. We can thank the Italians for this one, and we can thank the Germans for paying them to build it:
Awesome inside and out – unconstrained by practicality. Design Boom
Music to my ears:
‘In this car all unnecessary equipment or decoration is sacrificed, as performance is gained through lightness and efficiency of the bodywork and interior.
Who knows? That might be my next car, right there, if they can keep the original aesthetic intact and get it to market.
TV playing silently in front of me, showing an ad with a kid, maybe twelve years old, on the baseball diamond throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a big-league ballgame. The kid did a pretty good job, a little low and outside, but with some zip. The catcher scooped it out of the dirt and held it up the way catchers do to show the umpire they have it. Then the catcher took off his mask and the kid lost his shit. It was his dad, back from military service overseas. Joy ensued.
I have no idea what that ad was selling. I wish I did, because if it isn’t shitty beer, I’d buy some.
Email is frightfully insecure. Anything you write can and will be read by any number of robots or worse as it bounces across the Internet. Gmail? forget about any shred of privacy. While the Goog champions securing the data as it comes to and from their servers, once it’s there, your private life is fair game.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can encrypt the contents of our emails so that only the intended recipients can read them. I’m not sure how many more embarrassing corporate, government, and university email hacks will have to happen before people start to take this seriously, but remember, those were only the illegal hacks. Other people are reading your emails all the time already. This bothers me.
Sorting out a solution to this problem has been like having a big jumble of puzzle pieces on my coffee table, and while I’ve pushed the pieces around to get them to fit together, it’s become apparent that there’s a piece missing — until (perhaps) now. To understand the puzzle piece, it’s easiest to start with the hole it needs to fill. Some of this you may have read in posts from days of yore.
Here’s a simplified illustration of how email encryption works. Picture a box with two locks, that take two different keys. When you lock the box with one key, only the other key can open the box again. If you want to send me a message, I give you one of the keys, and you put the message in the box and lock it. Since I’m the only one with the matching key, only I can unlock it. Sorry, Google! You just get gibberish.
Of course, there’s a catch. How do I get your half of the key pair to you? If I put it in an email, any bad guy could switch the key before it got to you, and then your secret message would only be readable by the bad guy. He’d probably pack the message back up and lock it with my key and send it on, so I might not notice right away that that the message had been intercepted.
What’s needed is either a foolproof way to send my public key to you, or a way to confirm that the key you got really came from me.
If there were a foolproof way to send the key, we’d dispense with the whole lockbox thing and just send the original message that way. So until that foolproof way arrives, we are left with the need to authenticate the key I send you, through some trusted, hard-to-fake source. There are competing ways to accomplish this, and they all have flaws. This is the hole in our jigsaw puzzle.
The most common way key-verifying is done is through a series of Certificate Authorities, companies entrusted with issuing and verifying these keys. This works pretty well, as long as every single Certificate Authority can be trusted. The moment one is hacked, the entire system has been compromised. Guess what? CA’s have been hacked. There are also several governments that are CA’s, meaning those governments can listen in on any transaction on the Web today that uses https:// – which is just about all of them. Any of those entities could send a fake key to you and your software would trust it. I don’t know which makes me more nervous, that China is on the list or the United States.
So if you can’t collectively trust a few hundred companies and governments, who can you trust? There are several competing systems now where you and all your friends only have to trust one company. As long as you and I both set up with that company, they will quite effectively safeguard our communications. Your privacy is as good as the security and integrity of a single corporation — unless a jealous government shuts them down, anyway, or they get bought by a less-scrupulous company, or a pissed-off engineer in their IT department decides to drop their corporate pants. Having a single entity hold all the keys is called the “key escrow problem”.
At the far end of the spectrum is crowd-sourcing trust. There exists a large and (alas) floundering network of people who vouch for each other, so if you trust Bob and Bob says my key’s OK, you can choose to trust my key. I’ve tried to participate in the “Web of Trust”, and, well, here I am, still sending emails in the clear.
But now there’s a new kid in town! I just got an invitation to join the alpha-testing stage for a new key-verification service, keybase.io. Let’s say you want to send me a message. You need the public key to my lockbox. You ask keybase for it, and they send you a key. But do you trust that key? No, not at all. Along with the key, the server sends a bunch of links, to things like this blog and my twitter account. The software on your computer automatically checks those links to see if a special code is there, and if it is, invites you to go and look at those links to make sure they point to things I control. You see the special code on Muddled Ramblings or Twitter or whatever that only I could have put there, and you can feel pretty good about the key. You put your own stamp on the key so you don’t have to go through the manual verification again, and away you go!
There are more features to prevent bad guys from other shenanigans like hacking my blog and twitter before giving you a fake key, but you can read about them at http://keybase.io.
The service is still in the pre-pubescent stage; I’m fiddling now to see if I can use keybase-verified keys from my mail software. Failing that, there are other methods to encrypt and decrypt messages you cut and paste from your email. Kinda clunky.
Having set up my keybase identity, I have been given the privilege of inviting four more people aboard. Good thing, too, since otherwise I’d have no one to exchange messages with, to see how it works. I’d be grateful if one (or four!) of y’all out there would like to be a guinea pig with me. Drop me a line if you’re interested. Let’s win one for the little guy!
Let’s pause for a moment to talk about Quack Science.
We’re all about facts here at Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas, so this afternoon I went in search of a factoid I’d heard tossed out in an advertisement, upon which I hope to one day base an episode. That little bit of analysis will have to wait, however, because I stumbled across another, shinier trivium, and while “researching” that (also known as drifting through Duck-Duck-Go results), I stumbled across a Grand Conspiracy.
The interesting nugget: 99% of the molecules in your body are water. Most of the time we hear about the composition of the body in terms of mass, where water can account for somewhere in a very broad neighborhood of 60% (how much fat is in your body being the major variable). But water molecules are relatively small, compared to all the proteins and whatnot, so if you just want to count the sheer number of molecules, well, they’re mostly water.
While digging into my research I discovered that just by telling you that little fact, I am a rebel. It seems Modern Science doesn’t want you to think about the water in your body that way. I found a site that leads with
Settled Science has some very strange fixations about water and mass.
Uh, oh, I thought. I believe I hear ducks in the distance. Apparently comparing body composition using the masses of the constituent chemicals is a fixation. Using Wikipedia as the reference for what Settled Science wants you to believe, the blogger goes on about how widely the number varies from person to person, and so forth. He doesn’t say why this is bad, just that it’s “quantitatively meaningless”.
Step one to selling people quack science: pick a straw man and throw insults at it. “Science says this! But that’s not true! So trust me instead!
I kept reading, because I was curious what the guy was selling.
Apparently, it’s much more quantitatively meaningful to count the number of molecules rather than their mass. The reason for this is unclear. Never mind that his number is based on exactly the same measurements, with exactly the same variation, just doing a little math on the results. His own tables even show this.
Step two in selling Quack Science: baffle them with bullshit. The numbers look different. He’s got more decimal places (a sign of bad analysis). He must be on to something!
Presumably, this curious charade of mainstream misdirection is undertaken so that the casual reader doesn’t realise that 99% of molecules in the human body are water.
First, I love the phrase “curious charade of mainstream misdirection”. I’m gong to use it, I promise. Second, what a bizarre presumption. Why in the name of all that’s holy would anyone bother to prevent casual readers from pondering this mildly-interesting trivium? Curious indeed. Perhaps even nonsensical.
Step three in selling Quack Science: Set up the Establishment to be toppled by the white-night rogue scientist.
Thankfully, Dr Gerald Pollack [University of Washington Bioengineering] is far more direct.
OK, then! Now we’re about to get the sales pitch.
Only what we get is a video by Dr. Pollack showing how he can make water do crazy stuff, and thoughts on ways his discoveries might be useful, increasingly speculative as the presentation continues. Desalination definitely got my attention. (If I were a billionaire, I’d spend my lucre building bulletproof, low-maintenance solar desalination facilities in communities around the world that need them most.)
And our colorful blogger who spent all this time tilting at windmills? He just fades away, leaving me without a final conclusion to mock. Rebellion was his only product, and in the end, doing an extra step of math on the mainstream numbers and calling it rebellion was his only trick.
But then for bonus points I found a whole bunch of products that are loudly quoting (or misquoting) Dr. Pollack to sell fancy water bottles and crap. Often they will have a sentence that starts out with his quote, then adds to it, putting words in his mouth.
Because if you’re 99% water, that makes what you drink that much more important. Some of the products are blink-blink ridiculous, some are just portable water softeners. One kickstarter offered “Living” water. Yikes.
Get this: “Far-infrared emitted by the <product’s magic beads> enliven your water to improve your bodies natural healing capabilities” Never mind that every object at room temperature emits infrared; what does that even mean? What’s the difference between enlivened and non-enlivened water? How does that affect you, physiologically? IS IT SAFE? Are people going to start having aliens explode from their guts because of ‘enlivened’ water? And dudes! LEARN SOME FUCKING GRAMMAR!
That company also thought oranges were alkaline, and conveniently glossed over the part where the water is immediately dumped into a pool of acid when you swallow it. The more alkaline the input, the more acid your stomach creates.
I’ll let you research those products on your own; I don’t want to boost their search engine ranks with a link.
