Timothy King – Page 24 – Mechanical Sympathy

Bike Delivery System: escaping frozemagheddon!

It’s supposed to drop into the -40°Cs in the next couple of days. We’re in the bowels of winter here and I’m getting cabin fever. I’ve already day dreamed of the kit I’d need to go to track days, but that kit would serve another purpose, to get me clear of the never ending winter with my own bike.

Having a second vehicle that is utilitarian is never a bad idea, but I’m not much of a truck guy. I am a Guy Martin fan though, and he happens to have a Transit Van! You can pick up a well maintained, low miles Transit Van on autotrader.ca for about twenty grand, or about the price of a new hatchback. It’ll get over 32mpg, and will happily carry a couple of bikes and kit (or other stuff) as needed. With a carrying capcity of over 1600lbs, it would be more than up to the job of moving two bikes and riders out of the snow belt.

When it’s about to hit -40°C, the Transit could get loaded up for a long weekend and aimed south. A power drive could get me to The Tail of the Dragon, where the two bikes in back could be unloaded, ridden hard, put away wet and driven back into the inhuman wintry darkness after a couple of days of two wheeled therapy.

Tail of the Dragon, eating its own tail!

The Tail of the Dragon is only 11 hours away, but while it’s minus forty here, it’s in the low teens in Tennessee. A banzai ride in the van into ride-able territory would make the vehicle much more than just a track day tool.

Based out of Marysville, Tennesee, I’d do a 210 mile loop one way and then do it backwards the next day… Friday: leave noon, arrive in Marysville about 11pm. Saturday: all day clock wise. Sunday: all day counter clockwise. Monday: leave after breakfast, be home by 8pm.

Stage one would be getting the van. At that point I’m in for about $20k. It’ll also come in handy for track days and picking up bikes. I’d be able to throw my Ninja and a buddy’s bike in there for the drive down and get to it.

The Triumph Daytona took out bikes twice its
displacement in Performance Bike‘s Track test.

Stage two would be getting a bike that doesn’t have to compromise to get me there. A sport focused machine that will arrive ready to take on the twisties would do the trick. My first choice would be the Triumph Daytona 675R. At only 189kgs (416lbs) ready to ride, it’s a light weight machine that punches well above its displacement.

You can pick up a new, last year’s Daytona for about twelve thousand bucks. For the ten grand under the price of the cheapest Volvo SUV, I’d have a a bike delivery system of epic proportions, with an epic bike in the back of it. When it isn’t taking me out of the snow belt it could be picking up used bikes or taking me to track days.

I’ve almost talked myself into this!

The College Experience

The Media/Design Schools at Conestoga College had a forum on Wednesday, April 6, 2011.

Some notes:

College isn’t what it used to be. Since grade 13 was removed from Ontario schools, colleges have stepped in to assist students in working out pathways, especially if they lacked direction and/or maturity in high school. Maturity came up continuously throughout the day. Many students do not do poorly in high school because of anything the high school process did or didn’t do, they do poorly because they are not yet mentally mature enough yet to recognize the importance of the (poor) choices they were making.

Tim note: You can try and base this on brain development, but history would prove you wrong; we are capable of maturing more quickly than we do, we choose not to. We teach and parent to discourage maturity (taking responsibility for our decisions) because:

1) it’s cheaper to create a factory school environment if you limit personal choice. Personal choice doesn’t fit well in a small room with 32 students crammed into it.

2) the school system does as much to fight unemployment as anything in society – keeping students in school until they’re 18 isn’t necessarily for their own good, but it’s a great way to keep a disenfranchised age group out of the work force and away from voting citizen’s jobs.

3) we spend a lot of money trying to prevent people from making mistakes they choose to make, it looks like we’re saving money if we’re keeping a high risk population in semi-lockup

Legal note: I reserve the right to play with ideas in writing that I may not entirely agree with just to see what they look like on paper.

Notes Continue:

A number of students were on hand for an open, panel discussion, many of them seemed to support this belief (needing maturity and time to get on track – the fundamentals programs offer them this space in a guidance/portfolio building course of study).

Bachelor of Arts students, in the vast majority of cases, never recoup the costs of their degree program in terms of costs and earnings lost. Colleges focus on job preparedness and marketable skills. To that end, they aim to serve a much wider range of students than universities do.

Conestoga was careful not to vilify universities, they merely serve a different sort of post secondary student.

Tim note: I didn’t go to university to gain marketable skills, I went to university to gain a deep understanding of my disciplines. I quit a lucrative job to go to university, a job that provided me with an apprenticeship, marketable skills and on-the-job training. Do businesses not do this any more? When did employee training get downloaded onto the employee through government sponsored college programs? Do businesses do *ANYTHING* other than serve their own profitability any more? Yet another example of how business keeps removing itself from anything remotely socially redeeming, but I digress…

Another theme that came up again and again was: Realistic Goals & Expectations.

In all Conestoga courses there is a zero tolerance for lateness and absence. Most degree/diploma programs have very low (under 10%) drop out rates. The fundamentals courses, courses they put students into who did not meet the requirements for specific diploma courses they had applied to, have higher dropout rates (about 1/3 don’t finish).

A diploma specific course (graphic design, advertising, etc) typically receives 2-300 applications for 35 positions. If students meet academic requirements (65/55 in Eng4C/4U for fundamentals courses, 70/60 in Eng4C/4U English for diploma courses) they are invited for a 10 minute interview in which they show 15 diverse pieces from their portfolio. Top students gain admission.

Tim note: Interesting student story (I paraphrase): “I didn’t pass the academic requirements, so I had to take an admissions test, I failed it by a couple of percent each time (I’m curious at what level the test is pitched). I could have done better in English, I just kept skipping and couldn’t be bothered.”

Hey sparky, the test scores suggest that you couldn’t have done better in English, I’m assuming you actually showed up and tried on the college entry tests. You failed a standardized admissions test… twice, know why? Because you don’t get better at English by suddenly deciding to try. It’s a set of skills built up over many years. Student who tell me in 3U/3C that – Oh, I’ll just turn it on next year – don’t have anything to turn on, they don’t know what they’re doing… which reminds me of this.

Something to keep in mind: if you give a student a 60% in Eng4C, you’ve just denied them direct access to even fundamentals programs at the college level. They would have to take make up courses to gain admission. I suspect most students have no idea what the expectations for access are.

Setting a real world standard of competency allows Conestoga to focus resources on committed students. What a wonderful world they live in. And students (even the dropouts) pay cash for this process.

Students all said that they wished: “high school teachers had taught them better time management… had pushed for strict time limits and deadlines…”

Tim note: this initially made me angry with the lala land that we deliver to high school students. We are not allowed/are heavily restricted in how we can grade according to time management competency. I often see teachers being required to mark projects months late, sometimes after the course has actually ended. They usually stink, which makes the whole process even worse. After some reflection, I realized that college can pitch like this because their mandate allows them to shake out the weak/uncommitted students.

From a high school point of view, we don’t get the luxury of getting to shake out the bottom third of students and then focus our resources on the top two thirds. Like college, we’d have a much higher technology to student ratio and a fantastic pass rate if we could do this, but we need to serve the entire population.

IT Management and technology access at the college was very impressive, what you wished you had in public school really. Teachers have detailed and specific control over internet access. They can block sites, time access (only full access for the first 20 minutes, then the system focuses on the software and web access you need to do class specific work. Mac labs were at least as common as PC labs in the media wing, no Window-centric/simplified public school IT going on here.

Tim note: by the time it was over I was trying to get a grasp on what education looks like in Ontario in 2011. That may not be entirely accurate, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s certainly the direction we appear to be going.

One of the comments made was, “we try to do these events so that teachers, many of whom have never been on a college campus, know what it is that the next steps are for the majority of students they work with.” A nice way to say that having a school system run almost entirely by people invested in the least popular form of post secondary education might not be the best idea. I really hope teacher’s colleges and the profession in general starts to look a ways to find good, flexible candidates from many life experiences that can provide more than just a primary focus on academics.

All Else Is Washed Away

A rough week at work discovering just how untrustworthy people can be had gotten me down. On top of that (or perhaps because of it), I was fighting an imminent cold. If you’re reading this then you probably already know it’s better in the wind, so I went looking for some.

I was originally thinking of pushing up to Beaver Valley, but it’s a long slog across tedious Southwestern Ontario to get to any good bits, I wanted to get to twisty roads sooner. The most direct route to the Niagara escarpment, one of the few places not tediously flat around here, is through Orangeville.

I fired the Tiger up and aimed it north east. The air was cool, in the high teens Celsius, and the traffic light. I dispatched appliance coloured (and shaped) minivans as I came upon them and quickly made my way over to The Escarpment.

Bypassing Orangeville, I rode past what must have been a forty pound beaver lying in the middle of the road. This thing was big enough to knock someone off a bike or damage the underside of a car, but the Orangeville police officer fifty yards up the road running a a radar trap was more interested in revenue streams than road safety. Stay classy Orangeville popo.

The only way to make a sign like that better is to
make the number on it bigger!

Hockley Road seldom has you up on the crown of your tire. I was alone going east but was passed by several groups of bikes coming the other way from the GTA. After the never ending flatness it was nice to drop down into the valley and lean. Leaning on a motorbike is as close as you’ll ever come to flying. It feels more like flying than flying does.

When I’m riding all of the negative things my mind impulsively chews away on are washed away in the wind. It’s partly to do with the complexity of piloting a motorcycle. You’re deeply involved in the progress of the machine; hands, feet and whole body balance, so your mind is focused away from those nagging thoughts. It’s also partly to do with the sensory flow you experience. The wind, the smell, the temperature, the sound and sights are powerful as they accelerate around you. You are busy, involved, and the world demands to be experienced when you ride a motorbike.

Home made turkey pot pie warmed me up.

After sixty plus kilometres of twisty roads I was ready for a break. My hands were actually getting cold since I’d been spending my time weaving through shady, leafy green valleys. Coming back down River Road, I stopped at the Terra Nova Public House for lunch. It isn’t cheap, but the food is locally sourced and well prepared. Sitting in the sun on the patio watching the bikes go by is a nice way to spend an hour on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

With some hot food inside me, I was ready to leave these lovely roads and begin the long ride back into the agricultural desert in which I live. I took my time heading toward Horning’s Mills (where I once thought of buying a house), getting the corners right that I hadn’t on the way in. There is one particularly twisty section that has a decreasing radius corner that catches you out if you come in too hot. On the way in I’d overcooked it and had to brake, on the way out it was a smooth, throttle only proposition.

There are a couple of more big sweepers passing north over Shelbourne on 17 through the wind mill fields, but after that things get pretty straight. By this point I was loose and feelin’ good. On the straights I found curves in the form of mobile chicanes, and passed them. It felt like I was in a time machine, I was home almost before I left. Motorcycles can make even straight roads exciting if you approach them with gusto.

Once back the cold closed in and the nagging doubts returned. If I could ride a bike forever, I’d always get to sit in that meditative saddle. When I watch around the world trips on the TV I think the best part would be getting to be out in the wind every day, always seeing something different, having the world wash over you. No wonder Ted Simon and others come back from their trips hearing the sound of one hand clapping.

Some spontaneous art from the ride…

mid-life crisis

I turn 45 today. I don’t feel old, but that isn’t stopping the math from bullying me. As I told a friend, the only way to battle this age thing is by acting as immaturely as possible. With that in mind, here are my top six motorcycle choices for a mid-life crisis:

#6 Off Road Opportunity

The chance to experience off-road riding with a focus on bike control would be awesome. It so happens that Yamaha offers just such a course a pretty hour and a half ride north of me. That would be a fantastic day in the dirt.

#5 Kawasaki Z1000

The anime dream machine. Twitchy, not as good as other naked bikes according to Bike, but it’s one I got excited about throwing a leg over and I’d never get tired of looking at it, though it makes little sense and would be a handful. What’s a mid-life crisis without making silly, emotional choices?

#4 Triumph Thruxton

The start of an ongoing cafe racer makeover. The basic bike is sufficiently hooliganish so it speaks loudly to that vanishing sense of immaturity. This bike begs for leathers and old school style. I’d ride it like a rocker to pub brawls. This Thruxton would turn into the bike I’d ride to Fight Club. It wouldn’t be shiny for long, more like a rolling black eye.

#3 Royal Enfield Bullet Classic

For those moments when I want to feel like Indiana Jones outrunning Nazis. The classic Bullet is an old school thumper that would take me back. It’s the next best thing to being there because it’ll start every time. Seeing if I could ton-up on it would be a long term goal. Old people like me like things that remind them of their pre-war childhoods.

#2 Leather pants… or worse!

I went all modern textile with my first round of motorcycle gear, but nothing says mid-life crisis like leather pants!

In my year of riding I’ve come to appreciate leather riding gear for the level of protection it gives. I’ve also come to realize how much more effective leather is at keeping you warm in less than comfortable Canadian riding conditions.

All that aside, leather looks cool! If not the pants, then a full race suit and some track days to wear it in on.

#1 Suzuki Hayabusa or Kawasaki ZX-14R

I got all glassy eyed when I sat on a ‘Busa at a show, it feels really special. It’s a big, beautiful bike that will go faster than light speed. I’ve always had a soft spot for Suzuki and the Hayabusa is about the most beautiful thing they’ve ever made. The other super bike that took me by surprise was the super Ninja ZX-14R. Either one would scratch that mid-life crisis itch (really quickly).

Oddly enough, the whole adventure bike thing doesn’t seem to tickle the mid-life crisis itch, though perhaps it’s because adventure riding is so far away from normal life while a road bike is a daily opportunity. To make the list the adventure bike deal would have to get all Ted Simons (I’m reading Jupiter’s Travels at the moment) and involve a long term opportunity to travel too. I get the sense that another post is forming around this.

Riding in the Desert

Flying in to Phoenix, the roads wrap around the
mountains like ribbons. Riding them you’d
seldom be upright.

Originally published on Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries in April, 2014

I’m still having culture shock over going to Arizona. They have “buckle up it’s the law” signs everywhere but most motorcyclists ride around without a helmet on. They do things different in Arizona.

I was gutted to learn that Eaglerider was closed on the one day I wasn’t at the conference I was going for. I ended up in the desert in a cage. I still had a great time hiking in the heat, but Arizona really is built for bikes, especially in the spring when it’s hot but not too hot.

I took the route I was going to take anyway if I had the bike. The only part I didn’t enjoy was 87 back down to Phoenix where everyone was thumping along at twenty over the limit in massive pickups towing boats.

The ride out of Phoenix was smooth and the road quickly went down to one lane and got interesting. Soon enough I was working my way up into the Mystic Mountains. If you’re riding from Phoenix a nice place to stop is the Boyce Thompson Arboretum on the right of US-60E about an hour out of Phoenix. It’s a lovely place to stretch your legs and smell the desert blooming.

On towards Globe it gets switchbacky and a dream ride for a bike. The roads are smooth and never dull. Turning toward Lake Roosevelt in Globe, the road takes on a less frantic vibe and has you taking long curves at speed. I stopped at the Tonto National Monument. It’s a sweaty hike up the hill, but another interesting stop for a leg stretch.

Take 88 back to Phoenix, 87 is fast
and crowded.

I then pushed on up to the intersection at 188/87 at the top of the lake which I’d classify as a mistake on a bike ride. There is a much more interesting road, the Apache Trail/US88 that follows the Salt River out of the Mystic Mountains and down to Apache Junction on the outskirts of Phoenix. Had I been on two wheels I would have taken that one without a second thought.

Arizona begs to be ridden on a bike. When I was out in the desert hiking I got a real sense of how wide open it feels. Being able to feel that all the time on two wheels would be wonderful.

There will be a next time now that I’ve seen how easy it is to get down there. From Southern Ontario I flew out of the tiny and quick Kitchener Airport into Chicago and on to Phoenix. I was travelling for about five hours, but with the time change I left at 6:30am and I was on the ground and ready to go by 10:30am Phoenix time. With that in mind, I’m now thinking about what a week in the desert on two wheels would look like.

Voila, the Desert Ride. ~1765kms/1100 miles. I think I could comfortably do it in a week.

The route: Phoenix up the road I missed, on to Sedona and some vortexes (!). Then the Grand Canyon and ‘Vegas before orbiting back to Phoenix through Yuma. If I left on a Sunday morning and came back on a Sunday night it would be seven days of riding with the pickup and return of the bike on consecutive Sunday mornings. 252kms of riding per day minimum, more if I get lost, should be pretty manageable.

It was about $800 to fly down return, $1118 to rent a Harley Fat Bob for a week (7 day discount!) from EagleRider. A couple of hundred a day for food & lodging… $3320 for a week riding in the desert. That’s not crazy for a chance to ride when I can’t at home and shake off the winter blues, and an adventure bike would probably cost even less.

Now that I know how close and easy Phoenix is to get to, I think I’ll be back.

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Bleeding Edges

Originally posted on Dusty World in 2014…

One of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed computers is because I tackle them like an engineering problem to be solved. I’m less interested in using them as an appliance than I am as an experimental tool. My interest in machines generally leans this way: what is the machine capable of rather than its typical operational parameters.

One of the frustrations in teaching with technology is that I have to retreat from that edge and use computers in typical way. I once asked our food school chef why he didn’t want to take over the cafeteria and produce lunches for the whole school. He said it would turn an exploration of food preparation into a production line; I know exactly what he means.

I’m proud of the lab we build from scratch each semester. Using old, discarded parts and Betas of Windows and Linux, we cobble together a full, working lab of 26 desktops, most with multiple monitors and operating systems that allow students to experiment with computers instead of just using them. But just when it’s about to get interesting we have to back off because we need to use these computers to access our Google online services and use them like chromebooks. It’s not possible to use our computers as experimental sandboxes and an appliance at the same time, any more than it’s possible to use your top-fuel dragster as your daily commuter.

I don’t get budget to build my lab, it’s all done from handouts and leftovers. With bits and pieces always rare, and inexperienced students not following direction and grounding themselves properly, we have a lot of static-fried components each semester. Those errors are important learning experiences, but they aren’t free in the same way that a spelling error is. The machines we cobble together end up being quite valuable because we’re so light on parts. What I could do if we didn’t have IT forced on us through board budgets and could select our own bits and pieces.

When we shift from building and experimenting to using we lose the advantage I thought we were creating. We start being able to build just about anything but end up aiming for the beige mini-van because students have no background in supporting their own technology, and constantly swapping out parts isn’t possible due to the lack of availability. We end up running the machines as plain old desktops because I can feed them into your typical edtech: Google Classrooms, shared documents and web access; that’s what edtech has become, a pathway to online services. Anything else is considered to be expensive and irrelevant.

In this land of online=edtech I find myself looking for opportunities to exercise my talents (as do many of my strongest students). This week a colleague lost the file system and partitions on her USB memory stick (including all her marks). I spent an enjoyable hour looking up the latest in data recovery tools and restoring her data (I started with Recuva and ended up having to use testdisk and Photorec to rebuild the master boot record and partition tables before being able to access the lost files). It felt good to dig deeply into my field and experience my own trial and error process rather than the surface skimming I seemed doomed to repeat in the classroom.

That surface skimming is, to a great extent, dictated by the expectations of education. The system and especially the students trained by it expect computers to be appliances, maintained by other people, with software installed and networking taken care of. Many people drive cars like that now, though you couldn’t have fifty years ago. We find ourselves in an age of consumers, trained to expect technology that serves them with no expectation of how it works.

Like our school chef, I hesitate to put students in a position where they are responsible for looking after our education technology. In addition to reducing an experimental learning opportunity into a simplistic production line, students have also been trained out of the approach needed to perform this role. They aren’t just missing the experience and skills needed, they are also missing the mindset. Being trained to consume technology puts you in a passive, minimal relationship with it. Rather than understanding what you’re using, you’re barely understanding what you’re told to do with it.

I’m going to try and break out of the build a lab and then use it mindset I’ve got going on right now and push for continual development. Part of the problem is having to share that lab with grade 9s who are just getting into technology and seniors who could do so much more with it. Maybe next semester I can seek to separate the two.

As Different As Different Can Be

The wall-o-carbs that blast
the Concours to warp speeds.

I’m looking to expand my riding experience so a second bike had to be as different from the Concours ZG1000 that I have as possible. The Connie is a 999cc, sport touring heavy weight with shaft drive, full fairings and an inline four cylinder with a row of carburetors that create astonishing power. It’s a blast to ride on the road.

The KLX I rode home today is a rev-happy 250cc single cylinder bike that weighs an astonishing 370lbs less than the Concours. Everything the Concours does well the KLX doesn’t and vice-versa, which was kinda the point.

Having never ridden a fairingless bike before I was surprised at the wind blast from the very naked KLX. It could get to 100km/hr with some judicious gearing and a willing throttle hand. If I squeezed the Concours that hard I’d be travelling well over 100mph while vaulting over the horizon.

A very different riding experience, and I haven’t even taken
it off road yet!

What else is different about the KLX? Knobby tires offer some weird feed back. The KLX comes with some fairly serious off-road tires which make a kind of slapping sensation on pavement. They almost feel like whiskers, picking up seams and other details in the pavement with surprising detail. It makes me wonder how nuanced the feel is on dirt. Once I got used to the change in feel it wasn’t a problem to make full use of the 250ccs. The KLX pulls away from traffic lights in town with aplomb.

The tallness of the KLX makes cornering nothing like the Concours. Where the Concours (and the Ninja before it), tuck in and conquer corners in a buttoned down way the KLX feels like you’re on a ladder. Tall rims and seat, long suspension and a clear view ahead conspire to give you an unobstructed view of the road. Again, once I developed some confidence in the bike’s strange geometry managing corners, I had no trouble rolling on throttle through turns and getting things more settled on the floaty suspension.

A two Kawi garage

The skinniness of the KLX is also a shock after straddling the wide and heavy Concours. You feel like there is nothing around you and virtually nothing under you.

Looking down, the wasp waisted KLX is barely there. Strangely, it has a less cramped riding position in spite of it being a skinny, 370lb (!) lighter bike. With more relaxed knees and taller bars it feels like a good fit; it’s funny how such a small bike can feel so big.

I’m hoping to have the paperwork in order by the weekend then it’ll be time to see how the KLX handles what it was build for. Taking it out on some trails is imminent!

Digital Amplification of the Mega Self

I’ve finished Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and I’ve been ruminating on it for a couple of weeks. Crawford makes a number of educational criticisms in this philosophical treatise that attempts to free us from Enlightenment thinking gone mad. This post is on how digital economics amplify and feed off our sense of self.

Crawford’s historical argument is that the Enlightenment rejection of authority has been amplified by neo-liberal values and digitization, turning what was once an early scientific rejection of church authority (rationality vs. superstition) into a sort of hyper-individualism that rejects obvious facts about reality in favour of opinion. In our modern world opinions have the weight of truth, the irony being that the Enlightenment push to free people from authority has enabled individualism to such a degree that it is now ushering in a new era of superstition.

This person-on-a-pedestal is happily embraced by modern marketing which will go to ridiculous lengths to emphasize just how individual you can be if you all buy the same thing. The modern, insulated self is also coddled by digital media designed to cater to your every whim. Whole worlds are made where people feel they are accomplished because they followed the script of a game. Ask any student, they self-identify with their social standing in game play, yet their greatest achievements don’t actually exist. The scripted interactions in gaming lead many people to believe that they’ve done something other follow a process they were supposed to complete. You can never win a video game, you can only finish it, like a book.

Crawford uses the example of Disney’s original cartoons in comparison to the modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to emphasize this change in how we (teach our children to) approach reality. The original cartoons emphasized the tension between what we want and what reality demands with characters battling the elements, often with machines that don’t work as they’re supposed to.

The modern Disney playhouse teaches children an almost deified version of technology. The machines are psychic, performing their functions perfectly before you even are aware that you need them. Any problems are resolved by the machines, there is never a question of them not working. Classic Mickey can often be seen repairing broken machines, modern Mickey is permanently happy as the machines resolve every problem that might arise, it almost plays like an Apple ad. Digital environments designed to cater to your every whim… sounds like the perfect twenty-first century learning environment.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2014) – Mickeys Space… by Zy-Video

Gamification in education tends to play much like Mickey’s Clubhouse, offering an experience so safe that it’s virtually (pun intended) meaningless. When you can’t fail, you can’t succeed. When you’re following a script instead of self-directing your learning, you’re not really learning. I’m a massive fan of simulation, even digital simulation, but gamification isn’t that. In my simulations students often fail. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a worthwhile simulation. What I hope the simulation does is give them the space away from worldly cost concerns to experiment and try more radical approaches.

When I was a younger man I played paintball a fair bit. When I played, I often tried to live out silly movie fantasies. I wouldn’t have done this with real bullets, but in paintball it isn’t for real, right? One time I left my gun behind and ran straight to the other team’s flag, grabbing it and legging it while they were all standing around getting their defence set up. I didn’t even get hit because no one was ready. Another time I tried to do the Arnold-Terminator thing, walking down a road, slowly taking aim and shooting people and ignoring the fact that they might get me back. I shot six people before someone calmed down enough to get me. When they play paintball, most people run and hide like it’s real. They do the same thing in video games, camping or hiding even though the entire thing is bogus. If simulation becomes real in the mind of the user, it ceases to have the same effectiveness as a learning tool; just ask Kirk.

Pedagogically, educational technology suffers from much of the same marketing creep as Mickey’s Clubhouse. It often tries to do too much, but it’s also infected with attention grabbing nature of the digital economy it’s derived from. The software we use in education is derived from platforms designed to ensnare attention for as long as possible in order to make money from it. In an economy where nobody makes anything, the only value people have is as consumers.

Crawford goes into detail about how we don’t have a digital technology attention issue, we have a digital economics issue. Machines are designed to keep user attention because the economy that profits from it made them that way. We build machines to ensnare user attention (familiarity helps this, it’s why education is ‘given’ tech ‘for free’).

We children of the Enlightenment, having freed our minds from superstition and social authority by amplifying individuality, ushered in scientific and industrial revolutions. The Enlightenment championed democracy rather than the mystical divine right of kings, but something insidious latched on to that democratic push. Democracy became democratic-capitalism and now we’re saddled with an economic system that is happy to make use of the individualism championed in the Enlightenment.

Digital technologies latch on to our already amplified sense of self, multiplying it and allowing us to exist beyond the constraints of the real world (at least until there is an internet or power failure). As long as that comforting digital blanket is wrapped around our minds we are free to believe whatever we want (the internet will provide proof).

If you feel like there is something wrong with how we’re doing things, Crawford’s challenging book will give you the philosophical latitude to do an end-run around this mental trap that’s been centuries in the making.

Tiger Tales in a Never Ending Winter

It’s been an icy, crappy spring, but it looks like the end is nigh!

Tiger tales on a wintery April Weekend. Last year at this time Max and I were out doing a 300km+ run to Blue Mountain in some fresh Ontario spring air. It was cold, and even flurried in places, but it was doable on dry roads with winter well behind us.

After another round of freezing rain last night we were up to ten degrees today. Over the next few days it looks like riding season will start officially. The Tiger is at my local mechanic getting saftied. I should be on the road and ready to go by Wednesday, the day everything starts to get better. In the meantime, while waiting for the ice age to end, I’ve been playing with some digital imaging:

Tigertester by timking17 on Sketchfab – a 3d model of the Tiger

Soon enough I’ll be able to stop looking at it and starting to ride it!

Variations on a garage photo:

3d printed Triumph logo

I backed the Tiger out while trying to get the carbs sorted on the Concours – 2 hours later is was a white out out here.

3d printed Triumph logo

Triumph logo 3d printed

Dremel 3d printer doing the business

I scanned the Tiger with a Structure Sensor and then printed the 3d model on the Dremel 3d printer – not just a model of a bike, but an exact scale model of my bike!

Superior Ride

Just over three thousand kilometres around Huron and Superior…

I saw the Tiger in the
parking lot at work today
& was sorely tempted to
jump aboard and disappear

I did Georgian Bay last year and I’m already thinking about Great Lake circumnavigation again. With the Tiger cleaned up and ready to go, it’s time to lob one over the horizon. Huron & Superior would be the single longest trip in the Great Lakes series.

Day 1: Elora to Tawas City, Michigan (~604kms) North Star Motel
Day 2: Tawas City, MI to Marquette, MI (~545kms) Marquette Day’s Inn
Day 3: Marquette to Duluth Minesota (510kms) Radisson Duluth Harbourview
Day 4: Duluth to Thunderbay Ontario (305kms) Days Inn Thunderbay
Day 5: Thunderbay to Wawa (487kms) Wawa Motor Inn
Day 6: Wawa to Little Current (513kms) Anchor Inn Hotel
Day 7: Little Current to Elora (334kms) 1:30pm-3:15pm Ferry to Tobermory
~3200kms

I could be done in a week with no extreme days and enough time in there to wander off the route if the mood struck us. Max and I are already trying to work out a week we could do it on.