Timothy King – Page 37 – Mechanical Sympathy

Peaks & Aerodynamics

This might be a n00b question, but I’ll ask it anyway:

Why do dualsport/off road helmets have those giant peaks on them when road helmets don’t?

Do they serve some sort of purpose? I’d think having a peak that could catch on things when you come off would be a bad idea, and you’d come off much more often when you’re riding off pavement, wouldn’t you?

Wouldn’t having a big peak on a helmet catch wind and tire you out on the road as well?

I just watched Ewan and Charlie do their Long Way Round and noticed the big peaks on their helmets and wondered why they wore those when they could have had something more aerodynamic and safe.

FOLLOWUP: The baffling dual sport helmet part 2

Mobilizing Technology Access in Schools

I’ve long been a fan of mobile technology. My first 486 (and colour screen) was an Acer laptop, and I’ve owned a steady stream of laptops and even one of those LCD word processor only writing machines. The idea of mobile computing has always felt like the future of technology; if computing is ultimately an extension of ourselves and our abilities, then it should obviously not be chained to a desk. A human/machine future of cyborg coolness isn’t going to happen if we have to orient ourselves to a desk.

In education, we are still very much in a 20th Century mindset about technology access. Expensive, breakable desktops in shared labs with little over sight and high breakage rates. In a way, we’re training students to be office workers by sitting them in these areas modeled on cubical land. In addition, these labs use a lot of electricity (more when most teachers walk out of them without requiring students to turn them off – often over a weekend, or a March break) and generate a significant amount of heat that we deal with by turning up the air conditioning.

Mobile tech offers us a low energy consumption, agile access that can be grafted to specific teachers and departments (giving us that needed oversight of the equipment). Mobile tech tends to be tougher by nature, having been designed for movement and use in multiple environments; it’s not nearly as fragile as its desktop alternative.

My future school would leave full desktop labs only where actually needed (CAD design lab, media arts lab, that’s pretty much it). The other labs get re-made into general purpose learning spaces and the massive budget that went into creating them goes towards creating department responsible mobile labs and improving poor school network bandwidth. These charge carts are under the eye of specific people and can be lent out within departments as needed. The end result is tougher tech with better oversight.

This isn’t all about tablets either. In some instances (research, light text work on the web, media viewing and generation) something like the ipad excels. But as a long form text entry device it does not. These mobile labs would consist of ipad class sets, netbook class sets. At 6 to 1 (ipad) or 7 to 1 (netbook) cost ratios to full desktop systems, this means roughly a three to one ratio (counting in charge carts and wireless printers etc – it’s a new infrastructure needed to get away from the holes in the wall and the world of desks).

Coming to think of it, I’d love desks on rollers, completely mobile spaces, that encourage changes in formation and function. If the technology can do it, why not the furniture?

A quick fact sheet to end it:

• ipads cost about $250 a piece, 60 ipads (almost 3 class sets?) cost about $34,000 (including charge carts etc).

• desktop PCs cost about $1800 a seat. A typical lab of 24 pcs costs about $45,000. We average about $300 a week in repairs to these shared labs.

• each one of those desktops uses 15x more electricity than an ipad, and the ipads can charge at off peak times, further lowering electrical overhead and stress on the grid.

• because of the lower voltages, heat generation is much less of a problem, so you don’t need to air condition over it

• at end of life, an ipad results in 600 grams of waste, and Apple goes to great lengths to reduce toxic materials in their products. A typical PC results in 1-3 kilograms of electronic waste (6-10 times as much).

It’s so not everyone else…

I went to Roof Helmets to see if I could find a Canadian distributor. They put me on to Fullbore Marketing, a company that delivers motorcycle gear to retailers. They told me that they aren’t distributing Roof Helmets any more, but they have a couple of models left over. They put me on to Blackfoot Motorsport, and after a number of emails we got it a deal sorted out: a Roof Desmo for $400 Canadian (they usually run 469€ or about $673CAD, but you can’t get ’em here).

If you dig it, they had a pearl/white one still kicking around in XL too. Good luck chasing the distribution flow. If you succeed, you can get your Jo Sinnott on (Wild Camping is where I first saw the Roof and thought, wow, what a cool lid). I’m going to!

In the meantime, I might be the only person in Canada this year with a new Roof Desmo, and it looks fantastic! (and also a crime). All of those Arais and Shoeis on the road are going to look so… common.

The helmet fits my temples better than anything else previously. It’s snug front to back, but it’s wearing in nicely. When on it has a fantastic anime feel to it!

On the way home today it started to rain. With a single motion I went from open face to closed face, but this isn’t just a modular helmet, it safeties as a full face helmet. I can’t understand why these aren’t for sale in Canada any more.

A Year of Living Dangerously

It’s been one heck of a year. Personal tragedies aside (and they were quite epic in scale), my year in teaching has been difficult to say the least.

I began the year suddenly being asked to fill the shoes of our head of computers and IT. He is a dynamic, patient, kind man who is adored by all who know him; I am not. The chances of me filling his shoes satisfactorily were not likely, but I was the only other person in the school with any IT experience, so it fell to me.

I was asked to field a robotics team (never before done) and maintain a computer club whose sole purpose appeared to be allowing socially derelict grade 10 boys the opportunity to swear at each other using an astonishing array of racially insensitive epithets, while playing FPSs on school PCs.

With no training or planning, I suddenly found myself teaching a course I almost failed in high school and a pilot course on new equipment that didn’t work. Oddly enough, this wasn’t really a concern for me, I love in-class challenges, and I beat up the tech to make it functional. A couple of years ago I did an inter-disciplinary media arts program for (very) at-risk students. It almost killed me, but I actually enjoyed the edginess of it (it was immediately cancelled in spite of being labelled a great success), but I digress.

At first I was excited to get back into coding, something I genuinely enjoyed as a child (I used to type whole programs out of COMPUTE! magazine, then mod them, just for fun!), but that was before my computer science teacher implied that I wasn’t competent and shouldn’t be there. Still, the thought of getting back into coding really appealed, I was excited to teach the course I almost failed.

That was before I started averaging 40-50 emails a day, mostly from people who couldn’t be bothered to check if the damn thing was plugged in before contacting me. My days were spent running around the school, plugging things in and restarting them, and constantly (and repeatedly) resetting students (who seemed incapable for remembering what they’d just typed) passwords.

Between pointless support based on shear laziness, the occasional genuine problem, students vandalizing equipment and some truly odd IT purchases (a wireless TV system purchased by student council a few years before that simply would not work), I typically missed lunch, had no prep and was buried in IT support and ordering; all while trying to teach three new classes in two departments I’d never taught in before, while being a department head for the first time. I never got that chance to model teaching my own re-introduction to programming, and struggled to be able to appreciate what my students were doing from a distance… very frustrating.

I kept coaching soccer, maybe not the wisest move considering, but I genuinely enjoy doing that. I don’t really remember much from the beginning of the year. Between multiple deaths in the family and the crushing weight of work, and knowing that I couldn’t spent the time I needed to on courses I had no experience with, I felt like I was doing too much, and none of it well.

The beginning of the year madness settled down, and soccer season ended. I staggered out of semester one feeling like I hadn’t done anyone justice, but I was still on my feet.

Semester two consisted of three more new courses I’d never taught before in two departments I’d never been in before. Once again, I tried to balance the teacher in charge of computers thing with actually teaching (I imagine this is much easier when you’re teaching things you’re familiar with). Again and again I tried to go out on a limb and push technology growth in the school, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, usually to scowls and complaints.

March Break rolled around and my first ever international field trip started with me on a buzzy high. We drove down to Pearson at 2am in the morning, met up with our kids and prepared for a life-altering nine days sharing our love of Japanese culture. Out of a 3 hour line in US customs we saw some footage, but left when we were told everything was reopened. In San Francisco we got turned back. I got back into my own bed 23 hours and 9000 kms after I woke up, having had students crying on me, a strange kind of survivor’s guilt and an exhausting and pointless trip across the continent (twice). And so ended my first international field trip experience.

In the weeks that followed we were accused of incompetence for not knowing what was happening while in customs lockup (or guessing what was going to happen next at Fukoshima), we had to fight for our students to get their money back, and were treated as a bothersome inconvenience by the travel company and our board. At no point did anyone ask us if *we* were alright, even after one of us had to cut their teaching time to get a grip on things. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I think we felt that we were being blamed for even trying to stage the trip.

At the end of the year I spent my extra exam day not getting marks and comments in order, but helping prepare the school for a 70 computer update, all while hearing constant complaints from people, some of them department heads, about how we better not mess anything up, and they better not lose anything on ‘their’ computer.

Difficult administrators, puerile teachers, arrogant students, and a crushing work/life combination made this a year to remember. At our end of the year meeting teachers were being rewarded for falling out of canoes and having to teach difficult classes, I just wanted to find the door and get out. Ending the meeting with a (attempted in humor) “teachers can go on summer break and wonder what working people do” felt like the right finish to this year; I would have laughed, but I’ve lost my sense of humor.

I now know what an anxiety attack feels like, and it seems like once you’ve had one, they are much easier to get again. Jittery and exhausted is how I feel; I don’t want to go back.

My foray into department headship and my willingness to leap into the breach when needed has put me in a bad place. I said to a colleague at the end of the year, “I don’t feel tired, I feel broken.”

Is Ontario Anti-Motorcycle?

Motorcycle insurance in Ontario has always thrown me for a loop. To emphasize that strangeness the Toronto Star recently printed a searing indictment of Ontario’s motorcycle insurance policies. In it a rider who has been out west (California and B.C.) comes back to Ontario to experience the disastrous way Ontario does things. He suddenly finds his $2-300 a year insurance rates multiply by ten to well over two thousand dollars a year, for the same bike!

In breaking down Ontario insurance he discovers some discrepencies that appear to be practically criminal:

“My motorcycle was assessed as if it was new — $20,000. But if I have a crash and the 12-year-old bike is destroyed, will I receive $20,000? Of course not. The payout would be more like $4,000 or $5,000. For the insurance companies in Ontario, this must the gift that keeps on giving.”

So, you’re insured on a new bike no matter what, but you’re only paid as little as possible on the back end. That’s the kind of quality fairness that exemplifies Ontario’s approach to insuring motorcycles.

When I called in to see what a second bike would cost to insure I was told that another bike would essentially double my insurance. I pointed out that I could only ride one at a time and having two would mean both would have fewer kilometres than a single bike. They just smiled and said that’s the way it is. If you read that Toronto Star article you have to be asking yourself, “why is this the way it is?”

Last year we went out to B.C. and discovered that my wife could easily rent a scooter with a G license and go for a ride around Victoria. We had a fantastic time and she came closer to considering two wheels as a mode of transport, but not in Ontario.

To ride a scooter in Ontario you need to take courses and work your way through the graduated motorcycle license. Ontario is determined to keep people off two wheels even if it is a much more efficient way of getting around.

The block is systemic, from insurance practices that are out of sync with the rest of North America (and the planet) to governmental regulations that are more focused on milking citizens for license money than they are on offering access to an environmentally friendly, efficient and exciting way to get around. Ontario couldn’t help but become more efficient with more people hoping on scooters and motorbikes to get where they’re going, but that isn’t the vision. Ontario isn’t about environmental consideration, efficiency or excitement.

Free parking, but Ontario makes riding so difficult to access that it’s empty.

How un-bike focused is Toronto? On my recent trip down there I could use HOV lanes and park for free downtown, but the bike parking area was virtually empty.

After reading that Star article I’m thinking that Ontario is anti-motorcycle. The government supports an insurance industry out of whack with the rest of the world and throws as many blocks as it can at riding. Ontario may be the most over licensed and expensive place to insure a bike in the world.

Below I looked up costs randomly in the US and the UK and Ontario is way out of whack with the the results. If I lived five hundred kilometres south of here in urban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (instead of in rural Ontario), I’d be paying about $295 Canadian for my insurance this year (that’s with equivalent policy). I currently pay almost $900 a year on a twenty year old bike that I bought for eight hundred bucks. A second bike in PA would cost me an additional hundred bucks, so I’d be paying about $400 a year for both. In Ontario I’m paying three times that.

When I first started riding I considered a new bike for safety reasons. When I requested a quote on a new Suzuki Gladius (a 650cc, mid sized, standard motorbike), I was quoted at about $3000, but most insurers just refused to offer coverage – this on a guy in his forties, married with auto and home insurance and a family. Had I been in England I could have quickly been insured with equivalent coverage AND road support and bike transport in a breakdown for about $950 Canadian in my first year of riding.

Considering the blocks to access on basic scooters and the insurance madness, Ontario isn’t maybe anti-motorcycle, it’s systemically anti-motorcycle.

Inside Motorcycles had a good article on the benefits of integrating motorcycles and scooters into a coherent traffic plan. It would be nice if Ontario followed the research and encouraged more people onto two wheels.

My buddy in Japan got back to me – he pays $161 a year in motorcycle insurance… in Japan, one of the most expensive places to live in the world!

LINKS

Just to torture myself I got a quote from Progressive as if I lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – my stats, my bike. The cost for basic insurance was $75 a year. To get Ontario equivalent insurance it went up to $226 a year.

Are you feeling the love yet?

Think it’s expensive to live in the U.K.? Not if you’re insuring a motorbike. MCN’s site has a listing of new motorbike insurance costs (on the right). A new Gladius in Ontario will cost you well north of three grand to insure new if you’re a new rider and assuming you can find someone to insure you at all. The quote on the right is full insurance with more bells and whistles than the Ontario minimum including road side assistance and bike return in case of a breakdown.

What is the average cost of motorcycle insurance?

“Drivers above the age of 25 with a good driving record usually qualify for good prices. Combine those factors with liability only coverage and a touring bike and you are looking at $200 to $500 a year” – Ha! Not in Ontario
“You can reduce your rate further by purchasing motorcycle insurance through your auto insurance carrier, owning a home, having good credit, and taking a motorcycle safety course.” – I have all those things (auto, house, good record, good credit, a safety course) and my auto insurer wouldn’t touch me. They said to come back after I’d been riding for a few years.

EdCamp Waterloo

My second EdCamp in the past six months, I guess I’m hooked. EdCamp Waterloo Region was, like EdCamp Toronto, a chance to break the mold on how PD is done to us.

I volunteered before hand to do a first round session mainly because, after seeing the nerves and reticence at EdCampTO, I thought I could bring some experience to it and help it start a bit smoother. I started off with an excerpt from a TEDtalk looking at how future technology could become more interactive and intuitive in the class room, and how we could access and present data more seamlessly while teaching. Everyone seemed content enough to be lectured at, so I made it difficult for them.

Being an edcamper means being a good listener too, something else we’ve learned not to do in PD. I made a point of listening closely to comments from the audience, and tried to reply with a question that refocused the discussion on them rather than trying to get them back to what I want them to know (standard PD protocol). It took about 20 minutes, but they started to realize that EdCamp was all about the US, not the ‘expert’. A few of the bolder people spoke up, but by the end I think everyone in the room had said something at some point, and we went 15 minutes over. That doesn’t happen too often in PD, but then PD doesn’t happen on Saturday mornings too often either (unless you’ve got a PLN).

About half an hour in I said, “there are no rules in EdCamp, but I’m going to make one anyway, no more hands.” It became a running joke, but the conversation began to flow after we got that nineteenth century convention of teacher control put behind us.

***

As a survival mechanism, many of us have developed the habit of, at best, being passive in PD in order to make it end sooner, or worse, have found ways to wander off in our minds while it’s happening so the condescension, repetitiveness and/or latest poorly performing American EduFad which we have no interest in, doesn’t make us angry.

Edcamp throws all that on its ear. It’s all about you being there. It assumes your experiences in your profession, which are current and unique, are as valuable as an entrepreneurial guest speaker’s (who hasn’t been in a classroom in decades and when they were tried to get out of it as soon as they could to become a paid speaker and sell their latest book on a fad they’ve invented). It assumes that teachers talking to teachers and valuing each others experiences are what professionalism and developing it are all about.

***

For me this EdCamp started with teachers showing and telling what they are doing to make the future in technology available to their students. I then wandered into a group talk on the nature of professional development that evolved into a deeply nuanced philosophical discussion about the subtle, individually powered profession of teaching. After lunch I watched a bit on Edmodo then finished listening to a talk on technology use across k-12 curriculum. The last one was on how to continue EdCamp ideas beyond EdCamp. By that point I was intellectually fried; something that doesn’t happen too often in PD. I found the focus on how to cater to the disinterested tedious, but if you don’t get where it’s going, you can leave!

EdCamp is, by its nature, an experimental process. After doing a couple, I still wonder at the blocking of time, like classes. Some of the discussions still had a lot of steam, others were ready to end (or should have earlier). A more flexible schedule might be interesting to try. Perhaps having spill-off areas where groups that want to finish a discussion can go would offer an out there, or having enough rooms that they aren’t booked one after the other might work; built in extra time if you need it.

The other trick is to ensure that it’s easy for people to slip in and out of classes. Regular classrooms are designed around the opposite idea (keep them contained and accountable). There were a couple of times where rooms were full enough that getting out would have been overly disruptive. The classroom seating arrangements of rows facing a central board also cater to the sage on the stage, something EdCamps ideals don’t seem thrilled with.

If you’ve never done an EdCamp, I highly recommend the experience. You’ll find it personal, meaningful, intense and empowering. You’ll have to break through many of those learned PD habits, but it’ll be nice to let your chained inner-professional out to see the sun for the first time in years.

The only PD experience I’ve ever had that came close was (is) ECOO conference, which is very teacher driven as well, and Barrie Bennett’s Beyond Monet workshop, which was career changing. The vast majority of the rest feel like an infomercial admin demands that you sit through.

The next time I’m grinding my teeth as another professional presenter with a new book to hawk is telling me how I have to revolutionize my practice by doing exactly what they suggest (and nothing else, until the next book comes out), and who has been flown up to us (business class), and paid thousands of dollars that could have gone into classrooms instead, I’ll think back on EdCamp and wonder why administration is so afraid to trust us with our own PD.

EdCamp Waterloo Region Twitter Doc

Quiet Mind at Ten Tenths

Written March, 2013, courtesy of Straw Dogs:

I’ve wanted to get a bike since I was old enough to drive, but my parents did backflips to put me in a car instead (probably wise at the time). Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m looking for something other than just thrills from riding a motorcycle.

What feels like a lifetime ago, I was living in Japan. A colleague and I came across a student who was into racing carts. He invited us out and it became a regular event. I’d always had an interest in motorsports and fancied myself a decent driver, it was nice to have the lap times prove it.

One of the most enjoyable side effects of ten tenths driving in a tiny shifter cart doing 100km/hr into a left hander was how focused your mind is. You are taking in all sorts of sensory inputs, your adrenaline is ticking, you can feel the tires on the edge of grip, the wind is thundering past your helmet, the engine is screaming behind you, and you are no where else but in that seat. You feel burned clean of any worries, plans, random thoughts or distractions. You feel like you’re dancing with the machine under you, it becomes an extension of yourself. It’s a wonderful feeling and I have never felt so exhausted and relaxed as I did after a day at Kiowa, deep in the mountains, tearing around that track.

I’m hoping that I can find that same quietness of mind on a motorbike. The personal space and focus needed will be therapeutic. The chance to disappear into my senses, to be entirely with the moment… the best kind of meditation.

Tao of Teaching

Chapter 17 of the Tao Te Ching

The best education is the one no one notices, the people are free to go about the business of realizing their potential.

The next best is the education that is loved, though this distracts people from realizing their potential in favour of a shared idea.

Next is the education driven by fear where testing and failure dictate your future.

The worst is the one that is despised, this education creates such hatred that none can succeed.

Student happiness in their school system

Ah, that Tao te Ching (that’s my favourite translation by Wing-Tsit Chan), it pretty much works for everything from governing to ethics to metaphysics to naming a blog…

Chapter 4… blunting sharpness, untying tangles, softening light and becoming one with the dusty world

I first came across the Tao in a fourth year philosophy class. Our prof had the six of us go through this little (5000 character!) classic in detail. It’s the closest I’ve come to finding a holy book. At the end of the course he asked us if we could find fault with the ideas presented in it, no one could. It’s a profound, deeply sensitive and honest guide to life. He then asked, will any of you give up your delusions and follow it? No one could or would. Opting out of modern society isn’t easy to do. Even finding the path out is difficult.

From bad days in class to moments of clarity, the Tao te Ching offers a voice to the teaching experience:

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.

A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is.

Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone.

He is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything.

This is called embodying the light.

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

Chapter 27

The basics that Lao Tsu stresses are honesty, flexibility and an immediacy with creation. You’d think these simple things to keep in mind but we seem wired to cater to the distractions and abstractions of our intelligence.

There is a grace to Lao Tsu’s Way that emphasizes just how fractured we are from the world today. As a teacher I see it more than most because I see generations pass before my eyes. Rapid changes in technology affect both how they see themselves while also further limiting their relationship with the reality in which they exist.

It’s a pyramid, it must be true! Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

Motorcycle Media: a documentary to look forward to

I came across a description of The Greasy Hands Preachers in BIKE Magazine this month. The two guys responsible for this upcoming documentary about motorcycle culture previously did a short film called Long Live The Kings:

LONG LIVE THE KINGS – Short film documentary – from SAGS on Vimeo.

It packs a surprising amount into a short film. It’s nicely shot and carefully crafted, though it does seem to fall into a genre trap that I saw pointed out the other week; the dreaded bullshit hipster bike video. There is something genuine about Long Live The Kings that (I hope) excludes it from being a BS hipster bike video.

Looking at BHBV’s bingo card (left), they seem hit a lot of the hipster bullshit, yet I still want to believe that they are genuine.

With luck The Greasy Hands Preachers will offer some real insight into motorcycling. I’m hoping against hope that they have interviewed Matt Crawford and are able to present a film that doesn’t just paint motorbiking and working on your own machine crudely in a fad that will quickly look out of date.

Long Live The Kings has moments of philosophical insight that might develop into a deeply reflective documentary in Greasy Hands Preachers. Crawford’s brilliant Shopclass as Soulcraft would be a perfect fit for that approach but I’m afraid the film is going to devolve into another ‘ain’t bikin fun?’ video, this time with a veneer of hipster bullshit on top.

Sneak preview straight from the edit – The Greasy Hands Preachers from SAGS on Vimeo.

THE GREASY HANDS PREACHERS DOCUMENTARY Pre-trailer Kickstarter from SAGS on Vimeo.

Deluge

Toronto is sinking man and I don’t want to swim. While the GTA slowly sank into Lake Ontario under record breaking rains, I was discovering the visceral thrill of storm surfing on two wheels…

Riding home tonight into a wall of black. Yesterday I dodged the storms, today I’m not so lucky.

If it starts to spit I’ll pull over and put my rain jacket on and cover the tail bag.

It starts to spit. I pull over.

I get the rain jacket out and throw it on the ground and cover the tail bag with the rain cover. As I’m getting the jacket on I look up and a wall of water is moving toward me. I get the jacket on quick and get back on the bike. I’m back up to speed when I hit the wall. The rain is so heavy the guy in front of me in a pickup is hydroplaning everywhere.

It’s so black I can only see cars by headlights.

The bike is a bit skittish but surprisingly sure footed, then the gusts begin. I get to highway 24 and there is a lightning strike so bright it’s blinding, followed by an almost immediate thunder roll. The gusts are so hard I’m leaning into them to stay on the bike, visibility is almost zero. If there is a tornado I’ve decided to hang on to the bike – together we weigh almost 650 pounds, that’s got to be better than going solo. Being out in a violent thunder storm is an entirely different thing from watching one hit your windscreen.

I hang on for a couple of kilometers and everyone starts to pick up speed as the sky starts to clear. The road begins to show patches of tarmac through the water. I ride the last 15 kms home soaked to the skin but elated! That scared the shit out of me! It was great!