Where's Craig?

I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile. I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, E6.

—Steven Wright

I'm in Houston, TX, at my parents' house. I got here via train, which I got on at Maricopa, AZ and rode for twenty-nine hours till Houston. There, at the Amtrak station in downtown Houston, I unpacked my bike, loaded my panniers, and rode westward for fifty miles to where my parents live, which these days is no longer in the boonies due to the ever expanding sprawl of the Houston Metro Area.

Here I am at my apartment ready to leave for south Chandler. This is the first trip I've taken that uses all four panniers simultaneously, even though I've owned the bags for three years. Even with two weeks of stuff, I had a lot of spare capacity.

This is the second bike-and-train trip I've taken from Arizona to Texas, the first one having taken place four years ago during Christmastime after I learned about the thrift and ease with which bicycle transportation integrates with train travel. That trip began with me leaving my studio apartment on a cool December afternoon, shortly before sunset. I rode my heavily loaded LeMond bicycle south out of Phoenix, and by the time I arrived at the train station in the city of Maricopa, nearly forty miles away, the cool afternoon had become a cold night. Nevertheless, even after all that biking I was still two hours early. The train was scheduled to arrive at about midnight, and the station didn't open until two hours prior. At first I waited out in front of the station in the frigid desert air, occasionally donning more shirts—cotton over polypro over wool over polypro—until I ran out of extra shirts and traded freezing outside for loitering inside the convenience store across the highway.

Amtrak has since changed their schedule. Nowadays the eastbound train leaves Maricopa at 6:40 in the morning. The new time eliminates the problem of waiting around in the cold like last time, but it presents the new problem of getting to the station early enough. I knew I would need an hour to check-in and fit my bike into its box. Also, I live an extra half-hour farther away from Maricopa and thus need more time to get there. I briefly considered the scenario of leaving my apartment at 1:00 in the morning for the longest and latest night-ride of my life. Next I considered leaving the day before and spending the night cocooned in a sleeping bag along the side of the highway somewhere between Phoenix and Maricopa. But I settled on the best possible option: staying at a friend's house in south Chandler and waking up in cozy comfort at 3:30. I even got fed quinoa and beef and Jack Daniels the night before, which is much better than being food for coyotes or other Sonoran carnivores.

The train ride was uneventful. I remember four years ago being sociable, talking to the other passengers and, well, having a lot of fun. This time I kept to myself: I read, I worked on Project Euler problems on my laptop, I sat in the lounge car and watched the scenery pass by, and I slept. When the train came to a stop in Houston, I was happy to get off and eager to begin my third and final bike ride of my trip to my parents' house.

Cheap wine

I'm a fan of cheap wine. I've had some tonight, in fact—a glass of the cheapest chianti sold at my neighborhood grocery store. At $6 for a 1.5 liter bottle, it's as cheap in unit cost as Three Buck Chuck. At double the size, the bottle will last Laura and me several weeks. It won't go bad during the time the bottle is open because the wine starts out that way. Every glass delivers on the thrifty promise of cheap table wine.

There's an XKCD comic on the subject of cheap wine. To me, that comic isn't funny so much as it's factual commentary about American life. A lot for what passes for culture and refined taste in these United States is little more than collective failure to resist corporate mass-marketing. This isn't blame; it's tough to tell the difference between what's a commercial and what isn't. Take something like the Food Network. Is there a single minute on that channel that isn't an ad for something? Consume enough of that kind of television, and you're sure to start believing that there's something deficient with your food and drink, that you're missing out on something better. Even if it were true, why would you want to believe it?

The best-tasting food I ever eat is whatever I happen to eat after a long bike ride. I'm talking about the length of ride that goes on for most of a morning, where I burn thousands of calories, and bonk, and that for the last hour or so I can barely navigate home through the thick haze of an incapacity to think of anything other than eating. Hunger is the best flavor-additive, and I'm sure a peanut butter sandwich that ends a huge calorie deficit is a finer food than anything anyone eats at a gourmet restaurant that same day. What a deal.

I drink cheap wine but ride expensive bicycles. That's a quirk of how I allocate my resources. Everyone's different and has unique preferences. But for those of us of limited means, a good universal strategy is to figure out what's important to us and to not waste our life trying to obtain more than that. And to not let others convince us of what's important.

The ultimatum game

Here's more following from Priceless, the book I'm reading by William Poundstone.

*

An oft-repeated experiment showing that rational self-interest can be a poor predictor of human behavior is the ultimatum game. In this game, there are two players. The first player is given some money and must split it between himself and the other player. The second player then decides either to accept the first player's offer, in which case both players keep their allotted portion, or else the second player rejects the deal and both players get nothing.

For example, suppose the purse to be split is $10. The first player decides to keep $7 for himself and offer $3 to the second player. If the second player accepts the deal then the first player gets $7 and the second player gets $3. Else, if the second player rejects the deal, then both players get $0.

If both players are rationally self-interested—that is, if each player wants to obtain as much money as possible—then the first player will keep most of the purse for himself, and the second player will accept any nonzero offer. So an example of a rational split of a $10 purse might be, say, $9 for the first player and $1 for the second player. And both players would feel happy with the result, for each player got something out of the deal. But this isn't what usually happens when real people play the game. What often happens is the first player makes an even or near-even split—e.g., $5 to each player—or else the first player makes a heavily uneven split—e.g., $9 to the first player and $1 to the second—and the second player rejects the deal, turning away free money.

These results have held up across a multitude of variations of the game, including one variant where the two players never meet each other and remain anonymous and another variant where the players' roles as either first or second player are deservingly decided through a skillful challenge, such as answering a trivia question. Even so, players tend to turn down free money. What's going on?

One theory is that the ultimatum game as played in the laboratory is skewed by small purses, where small monetary amounts collide with players' sense of fairness. As a first player, even if you could get away with a $7/$3 split, you might feel guilty for doing so and would instead offer an even split. Or as a second player, you might find that $3 isn't worth the feeling that you were taken advantage of, so you might reject it. But what if you played with a $100 million purse? Would you, as the second player, reject a measly 1% offer of $1 million for pride? Unfortunately, no grants for playing with such large sums have been made available to psychologists to study the problem.

However, according to the Wikipedia article for the ultimatum game, the game has been played in Indonesia with a purse size equivalent to two months' average income for the country—that would be analogous to $7,000 in the USA—and the results were similar to what goes on with small sums. Many of the offers were even splits or near-even splits, and of the heavily uneven offers, many were rejected by the second player, despite that player having turned down several weeks' worth of income to do so. If the ultimatum game is skewed by a sense of fairness then fairness is worth more than just a few dollars.

Special announcement

I asked Laura if she will marry me, and she said:

Yes.

Like a new bike

The summer before I left for my first year in college, my parents bought me a new bike. It was the first bike I ever got from a bike shop, and it may have been the cheapest one in the store: a $300 GT hybrid made of the softest steel money can buy. I know the steel was soft because sometime during my sophomore year I broke the fork. Strange thing. I don't remember how or when I broke it; one day I got on my bike and it rode funny, so I stopped, got off, and looked at it closely and saw that the gentle curve of the fork was no longer gentle.

I loved that bike. I rode all over San Antonio my first year in school—downtown, midtown, uptown, the missions, and lots of trips to stores all over. I still think of that year of casual city riding—sans helmet, sans bike pump, sans stiff-soled bike shoes, cotton everything—to gain perspective on what a namby-pamby cyclist I am these days, with all my special gear and special clothing. And the helmet thing. I got my first bike helmet when I bought my first road bike—a LeMond Tourmalet—presumably because you need to wear a helmet to ride a real bike. A few years prior, during freshman year, I came within inches of leaving my brains spilled all over a sidewalk along W Sunset Rd when, cruising high speed down a small hill, I jumped the curb to avoid a car that had pulled out from a driveway, directly in front of me—this was before I broke the fork—narrowly missing a telephone pole that was smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk. That collision with either the car or telephone pole would have been a big mess, but no near-miss was going to make me wear a helmet back then.

Anyway, I still remember what my dad told me soon after we came home from the bike shop with that GT hybrid bicycle: A bicycle never rides as well as when it's new. I nodded in agreement at the time, for my shiny new bike rode a lot better than any of the old, rusty bikes in our garage. And for years afterward I continued to nod agreement, first as the condition of my GT steadily worsened, then later as my LeMond road bike suffered too from my negligent ownership. When I bought that road bike, I also bought my first pair of bike shoes, my first pair of bike shorts, my first on-the-road bike pump (a Zefal frame pump), and my first helmet, so I was equipped to deal with some on-the-road kinds of problems—namely sore feet, chafing, flat tires, and injurious impacts to the head. But I lived for two years in San Antonio and four years in Houston before I once oiled the chain or lubed anything else on that bike, and I never replaced the tires or did any other maintenance. Actually, that last sentence is a lie: I once oiled the chain in 2005 or 2006 with WD-40, which is worse than never oiling the chain.

But I have a point here. And that's that I no longer nod in agreement to my dad's wisdom about new bikes riding best. An old bike will ride as well as a new bike so long as you maintain it correctly. Carefully maintained (and crashes avoided), a bike will give you that new-out-the-store feel for many years. I would write more about this, but today I finished some maintenance on my bike and I'm eager to get to bed early to be able to wake up in time for the Friday Morning Ride tomorrow.