Little thing about bicycle tire sizes

Not a major deal here, but when I'm reading tech bicycle email lists (such as these excellent ones) and Americans refer to tires using ISO rim sizes such as 559, 571 and 584, it makes me edgy. (Europeans and antipodians are excused at this point.)

Now, the systems for measuring bicycle tire sizes are a huge mess for a variety of historical reasons, as Sheldon Brown does a good job of explaining. But he neglects to mention something, and no one else ever seems to want to bring it up either. I keep wondering whether that's because it's so obvious, or because no one even realizes it.

I sure get the impression that most American bike riders don't know that a 559mm rim (standard mountain bike) is exactly 22" in diameter, a 571mm rim ("650c") is exactly 22.5", a 584mm rim ("650c") is exactly 23", and a 622mm rim ("700c") is exactly 24.5" in diameter.

Where did you think those funny metric numbers came from anyway?

Sure, it's important to know the metric dimension since that's how they're sold and what the rest of the world uses. But for us Imperial girls still living in an Imperial world, the size in inches tells us how big it really is, in an intuitively useful way.

Same deal with 35mm photo film, if you didn't know. Measure a piece some time. It isn't quite 35mm wide, but it's exactly 1 3/8" because Thomas Edison designed the film format (for motion pictures) and he never used metric units.

Should there be some kind of a clever name this kind of non-metric metrification?

If you haven't discovered Wikipedia yet

I guess Google started giving me hits on Wikipedia a year or so ago, and by fall of this year I was going to Wikipedia first for a lot of my queries. The Guardian ran a story about it in October, which I read for the first time yesterday.

Not everyone loves it, but I'm suspicious of a lot of their reasons for not liking it. "Librarian and internet consultant Philip Bradley," whomever and whatever that is, complains about "the lack of authority." Maybe that's a problem for him, but woe be unto any normal person who takes information from any single source as the absolute last word. You can find mistakes and misinformation anywhere, but when so many sources are available on the Internet, why would you ever not double check?

More annoyingly, Encyclopedia Brittanica Editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg opines:

People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.

And a big "so what?" to that. It's only a problem to people who think their customers are still making a choice between dropping multiple Madisons on a bound edition of EB versus some other hard-copy encyclopedia. Or deciding whether to pay for their ridiculous online subscription plan versus some competing service. (Are there any?)

No such either/or choices are called for. Wikipedia does what it does, a lot better than you'd think it could, and I can follow links or use Google to check facts and get other perspectives. And already other wikis and pedias are popping up to handle topics that Wikipedia doesn't cover as well.

Double Babelfish trick

I had wondered if it was possible, and indeed it seems to be, to create a single URL telling Babelfish to translate a webpage to another language and then back again all in one step.

Clicking here just might do it.

Preceding posts
* Snarky, as was to him a good thing
* Lakoff, philosophy in flesh
* Miniature engines of Ken
* Gods of the guitar of slide
* More Bushwhacking
* The history will teach us nothing
* Just if you wonder...

Snarky, like it was a good thing

I'm not familiar with the etymology of the word snarky but it was immediately clear from context what was meant. And very quickly the word became as annoying as the tone of writing that it describes.

And then there's James Wolcott.

If everyone did snarky like he does snarky, I'd be all for it.

From Gop Goes Fellini:

The wolves, it has been explained to us (since the media assume we're idiots), symbolize the terrorist threat lurking in the shadowy darkness. Bush will contain and kill the wolves. Kerry will presumably ignore them until America is a feast of bloody feathers. Or maybe pet them, thinking they're Huskies, only to lose an arm. Liberals are so gullible.

I am probably not the target audience for this spot, since my sympathies are with the wolves, which were slaughtered and tortured by Western settlers and hunted to near extinction. Is there an Elmer Fudd hunter in this commercial symbolizing Bush? I sincerely hope not, because in a fateful standoff between a hunter and a pack of wolves, I will find myself cheering for the wolfpack to rip the hunter to pieces, and this could be construed as a desire to see harm befall our president. I saw what happened to poor Nicholson Baker and I don't need that kind of grief.

Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh

I've seen some mentions lately of George Lakoff in political news,
of the Rockridge Institute and his book Don't Think of an Elephant.

But this John Brockman interview really got my attention.

Excerpts:

What we discovered was fascinating: Each major philosopher seems to take a small number of metaphors as eternal and self-evident truths and then, with rigorous logic and total systematicity, follows out the entailments of those metaphors to their conclusions wherever they lead. They lead to some pretty strange places.

Plato's metaphors entail that philosophers should govern the state. Aristotle's metaphors entail that there are four causes and that there cannot be a vacuum. Descartes' metaphors entail that the mind is completely disembodied and that all thought is conscious. Kant's metaphors lead to the conclusions that there is a universal reason and that it dictates universal moral laws.

These and other positions taken by those philosophers are not random opinions. They are consequences of taking commonplace metaphors as truths and systematically working out the consequences.

and

We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.

Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. This is what we have to theorize with. Is it adequate to understand the world scientifically?

Ken's miniature engines

They're a little bigger than your hand and you can actually watch 'em run. A V-twin, an inline four, a V-8, and even a blown V-8. What red-blooded American boy wouldn't love it?

Main site frame here.

Gods of the slide guitar

Dave Alvin on Ry Cooder:

I think Ry Cooder is so great that the American Gov. should give him $ just for getting out of bed. I would be too imitated to ever work with him. He's a genius!

David Lindley on Jerry Douglas:

Jerry Douglas was another matter and I didn’t know what to expect. I’d heard him on recordings but that was another matter entirely. No one really knows how good he really is until you hear him play all by himself...and watch him play. It scared me to death! I had to remind myself to breathe several times. He never repeated himself! And it was all good and musically rewarding! He never made any mistakes! And one would think that someone who plays faster than you yourself can think would sound mechanical? Hell no! It was like Django and Charlie Parker meet Speedy West! He tore everyone a new pooper with what he played! (Later in the tour Jerry came to the gig in Salt Lake City and sat in on two tunes. He’s the best Dobro player there is, hands down. Nobody else can play like that.)

One more Bushwhacking

Says Linda Allison, whose husband Jimmy employed George W. Bush in an Alabama Senate campaign when he should have been serving in the Texas Air National Guard:

The dynamic allowed the Bushes -- Barbara especially, Allison said -- to manipulate the friends and supporters they needed to further their ambitions, a lesson she says could not have been lost on the young George. "They had a way of anointing you, then pushing you out," she said. "It was like a mind game. It was very subtle, very hard to describe. But when you were out, you wanted desperately to be let back in." It was how she and Jimmy felt when, in 1973, they experienced a strange and, to Allison, never fully explained rupture with the Bushes, which took place against the backdrop of boorish behaviour by their son that persisted during the time he was nominally under the Allisons' care.

Don't feel too bad about it, Linda. Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein know just how you feel. One day you're best pals, tits and champagne all around. Next day they're calling you an evil madman, and then the bombs start falling.

History will teach us nothing

"It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

-- Hermann Goering, April 18 1946

Quoted in this excellent essay. And yes it's authentic.