15th Ave bike bridge!

For the last couple weeks, a small construction crew has been working on the Arizona Canal midway between 19th Ave and 7th Ave. What kind of project involves symmetrically erecting two concrete platforms on opposite sides of the Canal? A bike & pedestrian bridge!

The sign says: Intermittant [sic] Pathway Closures Mid May – August 2013.

I could have used this bridge for my previous work commute, as it would have given me a non-pain-in-the-butt way of using 15th Ave, which has bike lanes starting just south of the canal and running continuously all the way to downtown. It's one of a very few bike friendly ways of going straight north and south in Phoenix.

Between this bridge, the new 7th Ave underpass half a mile away, and the bike lanes the city installed on Central Ave last year, the city remains committed to building new bike infrastructure. Good spelling, however, has been budgeted out.

Riddle #5

There's nothing saccharine about today's riddle, I promise.

Today's riddle has thirteen letters. The clue is: Installing software for a self-driving car?

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Don't utilize

Let's all agree not to use the word utilize. Not ever. Let's strike it from our language and get on with writing and talking like normal people.

Utilize is a waste of space and syllables. Is there ever a case where saying utilize makes more sense than use? To utilize: to make utility of. That sounds like a college-paper-padded way of saying use, a wonderful English word that captures everything it needs in a single syllable.

Ethics assumptions, rev 1

Reading about moral paradoxes got me thinking about my ethics assumptions. These are things that I believe to be true, not because they follow from other truths, but instead because they are reasoned statements stemming from my observations of the universe.

After some thought, I came up with three assumptions, which I list here with little confidence that they're exhaustive. That lack of confidence is why I've appended to this post's title rev 1: I expect future revisions and additional assumptions.

1. Moral values are epiphenomenal. That is, what makes an action good or bad derives from the circumstances surrounding it, not from static or objective criteria against which humans are measured. As such, ethics is the theoretical side of social engineering, where the goal is to bring about the best ends for the mass of people. What those best ends are and how they should be brought about has a lot to do with circumstances beyond our control.

   For example, much of traditional morality of the last couple thousand years in the Western world has to do with reining in the inborn appetites that are good for the preservation of a hunting-and-gathering species. The ability to gorge on territory, food, and sex were once the virtues of our forebears, later necessarily turned into vices when homo sapiens settled down into agrarian lives. Consequently, it's because our genetics haven't changed much in the last ten thousand years that our moral ideals have had to change. That modern moralities are dependent upon a lifestyle choice, such as agrarianism versus hunting-and-gathering, exemplifies how morality is derivative.

2. The moral value of an action in the present partly depends upon how that action affects moral decisions in the future. Human decisions happen in a vast web of feedback loops, where what one person does now affects the likelihood of other people behaving better or worse in the future. These future decisions can't be ignored, morally. If a person does good in the present at the cost of making it likely that other people will bring about badness in the future, that badness is part of the moral value of the present action. If the future badness is significant enough, and the present good insignificant enough, then the action may be morally neutral, if not bad, despite its immediate good consequences.

   One example of a moral feedback is my choice to bike instead of to drive most places. Originally I saw my decision as a morally good act that makes the world a little better. Since then, it has occurred to me that every major city in the United States reaches a transportation equilibrium that involves jammed freeways during rush hour. That is, people collectively drive more and more until any excess road capacity is consumed. Thus, my solitary decision to drive less and bike more probably hasn't reduced motoring in the Phoenix area; rather, it has given every other motorist a tiny extra bit of incentive to drive more. Therefore, the moral benefits effected by me biking rather than driving are selfish benefits to myself, such as improved health, and not benefits to the group as would be the case if there were in fact less motoring going on overall.

3. In identical scenarios when facing the same decision, there will sometimes be multiple best moral actions. This follows from the necessity of having diversity within any ecosystem, including those occupied by humans, in order for that ecosystem to be productive and resilient. Because humans are best off over the long term in a productive and stable ecosystem, there must be a diversity of moral values to prevent the ecosystem from collapsing into fragile monocultures due to a uniformity of individuals' choices. With the human global population as large as it is, there doesn't exist a self-preserving morality that won't eventually lead to unsustainable destruction to our natural environments. People must choose sufficiently differently from one another.

Crash course

Last Friday morning I crashed my bike on my way to work. I took a route that passes by an apartment complex that Laura and I may move to, thus allowing me to test the new, potential commute. Shortly after having passed by the complex, I easy-pedaled along a winding bike path that runs along the edge of a golf course that had been heavily irrigated that morning. Several puddles had accumulated on the smooth concrete of the path, and after riding through a puddle and getting my tires wet, I leaned into a tight turn in the damp morning shade of a tree and both tires slid out from under my bike. My vision went horizontal and my mouth shouted out an expletive. A fraction of a second later I smacked into the concrete and slid to a stop a few feet away.

The unusual thing about this crash that makes it worth blogging about is that it hurt a lot. After coming to a stop on the pavement, I untangled my legs from the bike and quickly went through my mental post-crash checklist. Is anything in me broken? Are my clothes torn? Is anything on my bike broken? It turned out the only thing that broke was one of the water cages, which snapped after I tried to bend it back into its correct shape. And of course I had the usual scrapes, on my hip and knee, as well as a few unusual scrapes, on my ankle and foot. But nothing in me was broken.

However, my hip ached a lot, and after getting back on the bike and continuing my way to work, I struggled to muster much speed. Partly this was because of the pain and rapid swelling in my hip, but partly it was because I was suddenly spooked by the act of balancing on two wheels, and I involuntarily handled my bike gingerly, even on the dry, debris-free turns. Finally I made it to work and began sticking lots of band-aids on myself. It would take more than forty-eight hours before I would walk without a limp.

Lots of people are afraid of bicycling. What causes that fear? My wife fears the two-wheel balancing act—though to her credit she bikes to her running club most weeks nevertheless—and yet she rarely has any mishaps. Whereas I can think back on a long, hazy history of countless bike crashes, going back to my first year of riding. And always I ended up soon again on the bike, as though I'm unable to connect the painful consequences with the deed. It's a stupidity that I call resiliency, and it's something I'm very proud of, probably much in the same way many lifelong criminals are proud of their resistance to social conditioning.

For the next few weeks I'll have to take care not to fall on my left side. There's still a lot of soreness, and my hip remains swollen enough to have a bit of a feminine look to it. But I've already emotionally forgotten about the crash, and I'm back to leaning into turns and generally biking too aggressively. Seconds, sometimes whole minutes, are at stake.

Riddle #4

I'm on a roll with the riddles, for today's post is another one.

The answer has seventeen letters. The clue is: A transportation disease?

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Back to work

Once again it's time for me to be a respectable, productive citizen of the world: last Tuesday I began a new job. And though five days is too soon to tell for sure, I think I've signed on with a great company. I'll be writing software—of course!—and the one-sentence summary of what I'm working on is that the company makes autopilots for farm tractors.

I don't divulge much information here at Just Enough Craig about career work, instead focusing on stuff such as bicycling, so the bigger news about the new job is the commute. The one-sentence summary is that it's super tough—that's not to be confused with merely tough, as was my previous commute. For the new job, the shortest legal route from Laura's and my apartment to the office is about nineteen miles. But at least they're good miles; I've got three different, viable routes to take, and many of the paths and roads are the same quiet, low-traffic roads I bike on for fun in my spare time. Through those nineteen miles I pass through only eleven traffic signals, compared to about thirty-five signals for the twelve miles of my previous commute. This is to say that the new commute is physically challenging but mentally relaxing, which is exactly what bike-commuting is supposed to be about.

However, only a crazier person than me would try to keep this up indefinitely. The commute takes me 60-80 minutes each way, and an ideal commute is no more than 30 minutes. Fortunately, for my entire adult life I've thrown my money away by renting, and one of the perks of doing so is that I can easily pack up and move to adapt to new circumstances. Consequently, Laura and I will be moving eastward soon. We're now trying to find the best place that evenly splits our commutes and at the same time is walkable, like our current place. These are exciting times!

Project: super cat alcohol stove

Last week I bought, for the second time in my life, a bottle of Everclear and subsequently ended up doing a little bit of experimentation. I'm referring, of course, to testing a home-built alcohol camping stove.

Camp cooking is something new that I tried on Laura's and my recent trip to the Grand Canyon, and it went very well. Hot food breaks up the monotony of a diet otherwise consisting of trail mix and sandwiches, and besides, playing with fire is fun. However, one needn't buy a special stove at a store to do this: a homemade one can function well. Here are some instructions for making an alcohol-powered stove out of an empty 3oz can of cat food.

Prudently enough, I tested the stove before our trip by repeatedly boiling water near the safety of the swimming pool in our apartment complex.

The stove works simply: first it's primed, which means pouring the alcohol into the stove and then waiting fifteen seconds or so for enough of the alcohol to vaporize. Then one uses a lighter to set the whole stove on fire (as shown above).

Once the stove is aflame, one then places the pot directly on the stove (as shown above, in the second photo). This causes the flame to jet out from the holes drilled in the sides of the can. There's no flame control; the stove burns on high until it runs out of fuel, which can take up to eight minutes.

I bought two types of alcohol: methyl alcohol, from the hardware store, and ethanol, in the form of 190-proof Everclear, from the grocery store. I discovered both fuels work well, but the ethanol appeared to burn cooler than the methyl alcohol, as evident by an ethanol flame that was less blue and more orange than the methyl flame. (The ethanol flame is shown in the third photo; the first two photos are of the methyl flame.) However, the wind had picked up during the ethanol burn, so it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison. More testing would be necessary to know for sure. I stopped my testing with the satisfaction of knowing that in both cases, despite some wind and no screen for protection, I was able to bring 1.5L of water to a boil in under five minutes.

As for the adage that a watched pot never boils: that's false.