Timothy King – Page 2 – Mechanical Sympathy

Emissions & Where We Hide Them

Ah, the wisdom of the internet…

This article on how motorcycles might be less green than you think was shared by Zero motorcycles online. A number of people underneath the article posted responses that had little to do with the article and more to do with a general hatred of motorcycles. The loud pipe crowd seems to raised the ire of the general public quiet effectively. Thanks for that.

I’d heard about the Mythbuster motorcycle pollution test mentioned in the article previously, and had seen annoyed responses pointing out how unfair it was. I felt obliged to put something up that wasn’t just angry motorcycle ranting.

“The Mythbusters they refer to compared a 1990s family sedan to a 1990s Honda super bike. A fairer comparison would have been an 90’s Corvette vs. the Honda super bike (vehicles with similar performance and intent), but then it wouldn’t have been close. The other comparisons were equally unfair. It seemed to be the result of what they had handy, and one of the mythbusters was a sports bike guy, so that’s what they used.

If you think hybrids are the magic bullet you should look into how current battery technology is created and retired, it isn’t pretty. An accurate accounting of the e-waste from hybrid production and operation overshadows their minimal pollution output – you’re basically showing a green face to what is a very polluting industrial process. That hybrid vehicles are utterly tedious and heavy because they carry redundant power trains is yet another problem; heavy things are never efficient.

The idea that some bike owners remove pollution gear for performance is no less true for four wheelers – except when the idiot on my street straight pipes his massive Dodge pickup you can actually see the hole he’s making in the sky. Meanwhile I’ll keep getting 50+mpg out of my Triumph Tiger.”

After that I started poking around to try and get a feel for just how magically ecological electric vehicles are. It turns out lithium based batteries are nasty, both to create and to recycle:

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2012/03/30/why-hybrids-and-evs-dont-help-solve-the-energy-conundrum/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/hold-smugness-tesla-might-just-worse-environment-know/
http://transweb.sjsu.edu/project/1137.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lithium-ion-batteries-hybrid-electric-vehicle-recycling/
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/10/what-happens-to-electric-car-batteries-when-the-car-is-retired/index.htm
https://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/graphics/2015-04-28-carbon-emissions-from-electricity-generation-for-the-top-ten-producer.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214993714000037
http://www.mai.org.my/ver1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1934:recycling-the-hybrid-battery-packs&catid=42:global-auto-news&Itemid=165

“A Prius battery begins life in a dirty nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. This mine has caused enough damage to the surrounding area to be called a “dead zone.” There is no natural life of any sort for miles around. NASA used that area to test its Moon rovers because the area resembles its craggy surface. Acid rain from the toxins of the mine killed all the plant life in the area and washed away the hillsides. All of this sounds positively wonderful, but don’t worry, it gets better. These battery components are then shipped to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. After that, they make their way to China to be turned into nickel foam of sorts. Finally, the batteries make their way to Japan to be put into the cars, which are then shipped all around the world to happy Prius buyers who are anxious to drive their new hybrid.”

“EVs that depend on coal for their electricity are actually 17 percent to 27 percent worse than diesel or gas engines. That is especially bad for the United States, because we derive close to 45 percent of our electricity from coal. In states like Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, that number is much closer to 100 percent.”

“The initial production of the vehicle and the batteries together make up something like 40 percent of the total carbon footprint of an EV – nearly double that of an equivalent gasoline-powered vehicle.”

We live in a time of compromise, but thinking that you’ve somehow solved the entire vehicular pollution thing by leaping into a hybrid or EV sourced from parts delivered by oil driven transport from all over the world and powered by whichever lowest hydro bidder your miserly government is supporting this week is a bit much. The harder choice in the short term is to live with less, which no one is willing to do (that’s probably what’s driving hybrid/battery e-vehicle evangelism – a chance to bypass that choice).

I suspect that hydrogen fuel cells driving electrical motors are where we’ll go next in personal transportation (though why that’s only happening as a college project in motorcycling is a bit vexing). Fortunately, Honda is doing something on the four wheeled front. A super light weight hydrogen celled electrical vehicle bypasses the battery production nightmare, but then we aren’t moving toward light weight, minimalist vehicles. Would you want to drive a thousand pound hydrogen vehicle next to a massive SUV? That would be as dangerous as riding a motorcycle!

While that’s happening, advancements in nuclear engineering will hopefully drive us out into the solar system. The outer planets are a virtually unlimited store of non carbon based fusion energy, we just have to get there and collect the fuel (which is rare on Earth). If we took half of what we spend on military budgets world wide each year, we’d have an unlimited source of clean energy on tap within my lifetime. Instead we just keep doing what we’ve always done, stumbling forward in ignorance driven by greed instead of driving for real global advances in sustainable energy production.

Of course, none of that matters to personal transportation if we can’t find a better way to store electricity locally. Chemical batteries are an eighteenth Century solution to a twenty-first century problem. We really need to start advancing hydrogen fuel cells, kinetic storage and other non-chemical battery technologies. A near perfect scenario would be using d-He3 fusion to produce hydrogen with no carbon footprint. The hydrogen then works as an electrical generator in a fuel cell as it fuses with oxygen producing pure water.

A truly zero emissions vehicle with an abundant and
powerful fuel supply? I’m dreaming of that future.

I have no doubt that the internal combustion engine’s days are numbered and that the future is electrical. Companies like Zero Motorcycles and even EVs like the Nissan Leaf are doing their part to improve electrical engine efficiency, but depending on globally sourced, polluting chemical battery technologies isn’t the future. One day I’ll hop on my hydrogen fuel celled Zero Tsunami (because it produces only water, get it?) and zip off down the road knowing that I’m riding a vehicle that is truly sustainable.

Arguing between gasoline power and hybrid/EVs that depend on extremely polluting chemical battery technologies and fossil fuel driven electricity generation is like arguing whether your coal fed steam powered train is less polluting than my wood burning steam powered train – neither solve the problem, and one seems more about hiding it than fixing it.

***
Originally shared by Zero Motorcycles
Are motorcycles greener than cars? They are if you ride a Zero! Interesting discussion. Your thoughts?

Arguing on the internet, I should know better…
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1105626_why-motorcycles-may-not-be-greener-than-cars-missing-emission-gear#comment-2845856393

I’m beginning to think that a few years ago a very smart MBA type walked into auto manufacturers and said the whole environmental thing can be resolved by moving the burning of fossil fuels out of sight of the general public.

The issue with climate change is that it’s obvious to consumers that they are responsible! Every time they put gas in the car they’re burning it. Simply move the carbon production out of sight and everything is good again, and you get a brave new legion of e-vehicle evangelists who will fight tooth and nail to ignore any evidence of this shift.

That your intermediate step is itself very environmentally damaging is easy to ignore. State that the batteries used in electric vehicles are very recyclable and everyone (especially your believers) will happily state that this is what is happening. Don’t demand laws that require recycling, don’t have any oversight over what happens to batteries when they’re done.

With carbon emissions and the pollution from the new systems that hide it happily out of sight, the general public can get their pride on riding around in hybrid and electric vehicles and never once see the damage they are doing first hand. Problem solved!

Dairy of a Disenfranchised Coder

The first blog entry I ever wrote (about 18 months ago), spoke of risk aversion in students, but began with a brief ‘why I never pursued computers’. This one opens that up a a bit and looks at how childhood interests never seem to fade away.

In the 1980s, I became interested in computers because my father wouldn’t buy me an Intellivision game console. The Vic 20 we got instead became our gaming system, but it was much more. I’ve carried a sense of intellectual superiority over game consoles ever since. The Vic could plug in cartridges and play games, but where it really took off was with the datasette. When we got our hands on that, we suddenly had the ability to save our work. Before I knew it, I was begging my parents to drive to the only computer store in the area whenever a new COMPUTE! magazine came out so I could type out the basic programs in there.

None of this had anything to do with school. Our junior high school had 3 Pets in the library, but it was typically a 2 week wait to get half an hour on one. You had no chance of gaining any kind of familiarity with them.

It started all about video games, but quickly turned to coding. Instead of buying the latest game (Cosmic Cruncher?), I was saving the paper route money for a 3k memory expander (I kept filling up the 3.5k of working RAM with code). With more room to move, I began modifying those COMPUTE! programs, turning a road racing game into a Star Wars trench battle or the 8 key sound synthesizer into full keyboard synthesizer.

I’d shown friends what I was doing and soon Ataris and Apples began to appear in the neighborhood. We’d dictate code while the fastest typer would hammer away at it, then we’d proof and run it. Hours of speculation and experimentation about how changes might affect things followed.

There was no grade 9 computer course in high school, but I quickly leapt at the grade 10 one in 1985. By then I had a Commodore 64 at home and we’d all discovered that if you had a good recording deck, you could sound record the cassettes that software came on. There was a thriving pirating hub in high school with what looked like homemade mixed tapes. A teacher once took one that was being passed in class and tried to listen to it, it wasn’t pretty.

That grade 10 class used a card reader. We laboriously spent hours penciling in our lines of code, and would receive a printout off a dot matrix printer (which sounded like a machine gun tearing through silk). I lasted about a month at this before I became determined to get a printer of my own. No one else in the school had one, and the only place to find one was half way across the city. Four bus transfers and a long night of travel got me back home with the printer, only to discover it was defective. Another six hours on the bus and I was home again with the only dot matrix printer anyone had.

I coded at home, printed out my results and got to bypass the agony of the card reader. Others begged me for access. It became a nice sideline and paid for itself in short order.

Our grade 10 computer teacher was a young guy who got the job because he was the only one who could maintain the card reader without it jamming up all the time, he didn’t actually know much about coding (and why would he, he only had a card reader to figure it out on). I did well in grade 10 intro to computers but was really excited to get into senior computer science. The astronomer dream had been dashed in grade 10 physics when I discovered, to my horror, that physics was really just lots and lots of math, which I found tedious and unimaginative. Anything that had only one way to a single solution seemed mind numbingly dull. I was still hoping to find my niche in computer science though.

Finally able to get onto the senior computer science lab (first gen IBM x86s!), I was stunned to learn that our computer science teacher wanted us to program… math. I found the assignments linear and the teacher, who already knew the mathletes in the class, didn’t have time for anyone else or anything other than mathematical certainty in coding; the opposite of my experimental, hacking approach to programming. Five years of passionate self-driven learning dissipated in a cloud of frustration and disinterest over that semester.

My parents went to the teacher conference confused at how a kid who spent hours and hours of his free time coding could be such an epic failure in this class. My weakness in maths was sighted as the problem. I’d signed up for the grade 12 class in semester two, but withdrew immediately when it started. The teacher seemed surprised that I’d signed up for consecutive semesters of comp-sci. I was surprised that he remembered my name. And so ended my love affair with coding computers.

Of course I maintained an interest in computers, mainly around gaming and hardware, and eventually went on to get some I.T. certifications and even worked in software implementation in a few places, but getting knocked out of the holy grail of computing, the place where you author how a machine thinks, put the idea of working fully in the field beyond reach, and created a sense of self doubt that a teen is only too willing to embrace.

I’m getting computer certified this summer as a teacher. When I walk into that class in the fall I’m hoping that I can support as many different approaches to coding as there are students in the room. The last thing I want to do is knock a keen, self directed learner out of a woefully underdeveloped field of study in secondary schools.

Thunder bolts & Lightning

I was up early, getting ready for my 3rd day of commuting to Milton on the Ninja. The sky was heavy, the roads patchy but still mostly dry. In the 20 minutes it took me to get ready the weather moved in, rain bucketing down, the sky so dark the street lights came back on.

I’m standing there on my porch looking at the bike which I’ve got started, sitting in the driveway with rain tearing off it. I’ve gotten into the safety gear, then the rain gear. I’m hot and dry, but I won’t be for long. The car is sitting there, an easy, comfortable option.

I’m looking for experiences. I could have stripped down and taken the easy way down, but I wouldn’t have felt the rain, or smelled the world as it opened up under it. I wouldn’t have been out in the world as mist rose from the ground and trees emerged from the fog.

I was worried about the 401 but I need’t have. With the rain it was barely moving. By the time I got to Milton I was crawling along at walking speed behind a transport truck. I arrived at the school after an hour in the wet. The worst was in Elora, then I drove out of it and it was only drizzle, but by then I was hosed.

I only lost the back end once while downshifting and a quick hand on the clutch got that back in line. I stopped downshifting after that while in the deep water.

It’s 2pm now. Most of my gear is dry after some time under hand dryers and sitting on a warm lamp stand. In retrospect, today would have been a good day to wear my big cool weather boots – I think they’re waterproof too, unlike the AlpineStar summer boots I had on. I now know my gloves aren’t remotely waterproof. The rain gear did a good job of keeping me warm and mostly dry. The only wet spot on my body was on my stomach. It probably got in under the jacket. I’ll tighten that up next time.

It would have been easier to jump in the car, it would have been more comfortable, but it wouldn’t have left me with an idea of what riding in driving rain feels like; lessons learned.

It’s 6pm now, and trying to dry out wet gear in an air conditioned lab is all but impossible… there is nothing better than some good old sunlight on a hot deck:

A Honda Wander

Ah, to pretend to be Marquez…

I finally found KW Honda today! It’s hidden around back of the big Honda car dealer peddling bland people movers. If you head around back you find Repsol themed race bikes and jewel like VFRs.

On a much needed lunch break from Skills Ontario provincial championships with thousands of boisterous teenagers watching a few hundred wonderfully talented ones, I got some head space wandering through the Hondas.

The bike I longed for as a teenager was the VFR750, so I was hoping to find its spiritual successor at the Honda dealer, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The white VFR800 they had on the floor was breathtaking. The paint has a subtle pearl iridescence that gives it fantastic depth. Every detail of the machine has a finished quality to it that I’ve found lacking in a lot of other bikes; it’s a bike worthy of desire.

Stealth fighter cool front end on the VFR800…

They had a number of older Hondas as well, including this astonishing 1970s CBX with a massive air cooled six in it!

If I had thirteen grand to throw around a VFR would be in the garage right quick. Sitting on it, my legs are about as folded as the Concours, I’m leaned forward more but it’s a substantial bike, I don’t feel like a circus bear on it.

The Determined Luddite

They showed this at the Google Summit a couple of weeks ago:

A metaphor for users of technology?

It’s a special kind of learned helplessness, and I see it every day when trying to get people moving on their computers again. There is nothing magical about computers, though many people like to think there is (it gives them an excuse not to engage in learning about them). If we’re going to make digital skills a foundational skill set in the twenty first century (and we certainly seem to be moving in that direction), then we need to integrate digiracy into curriculum in the same way we integrate literacy and numeracy, and we need teachers to be able to demonstrate competence in digital skill in the same way that we expect them to display proficiency in traditional literacies; acting helpless does nothing to move this forward.

Our board is about to take steps toward a BYOD/multi-platform approach to #edtech. This can’t happen until people get off the escalator and figure out how to open a book.

Helplessness, learned or otherwise, isn’t going to lead to the effective integration of technology in the classroom. How we train teachers to become digitally competent is a vital piece to this puzzle. The mini-lab approach with digital coaches assigned to their own tech-cloud is a way to encourage the tech-curious to develop better skills. It also (through collegial interaction with peers) lets the tech-curious spread their enthusiasm and know-how to the less keen.

Build digeracy through scaffolded, objective learning with diverse technology. Opting out is no longer an option. It was an embarrassing approach ten years ago, it’s quickly becoming untenable now.

That people seem to rewind well past where you think reasonable caution may lie in trouble shooting computers is frustrating from a tech’s point of view. If a user has a genuine issue with their computer, or something has actually broken, then we’re generally happy to be of assistance, but when a teacher says a printer is broken when it is simply unplugged, this points to a willful kind of ignorance. When that teacher is also one of the schools computer teachers I want to move to the arctic and give up.

A minimum expectation of digital fluency should be a willingness to address basic, operational issues before evoking support. If schools want to develop digital fluency, an expectation of honest engagement has to be where that starts. If the internet is really becoming that important, then it becomes incumbent upon the user to make that connection as stable and effective as possible. I’d say that 80% of the tech calls I deal with are people unplugging things they shouldn’t be touching in the first place, and then everyone else being too helpless to plug it back in again.

One of my grade 9s shared this as a video to help them out with an introduction to computers (the editing is hilarious): Komputer Kindergarten. MSDOS and the beige 1990s are the reason this sounds so antiquated (and funny). That so many people twenty years down the road still don’t “do that stuff'” is getting to be equally ridiculous. I’m not saying everyone has to be a technician, but everyone should be able to change their own tire, otherwise they shouldn’t be driving. You can’t be expected to operate the equipment effectively if you’re determined to know nothing about it and want nothing to do with it.

Effective teaching with digital tools begins with teachers, and I find so many of them not just reluctant but downright contrary to the idea of learning even the basics of how a computer or network functions. Some of that lies at the feet of teacher unions and school boards who have taught teachers to be helpless through locked, fear driven educational I.T. regimes. Educators who have bypassed these restrictions and developed digital fluency in spite of their union and board’s best efforts are the ones we need to bring back in from the cold now that the school technology cold war is over. Their fluency as digital coaches could create momentum to inflect enough colleagues to adopt a more open approach to learning technology.

The idiotic idea that technology is the realm of the young and if you want to know anything about it, just ask your students, needs to die. Students are the rocket scientists who unplug an ethernet cable to plug into their infected laptop so they can have faster internet. They then leave it unplugged and the next student comes along and instead of plugging the end back into the computer, plugs it into the wall, creating havoc as the network loops itself. Then everyone complains at how slow and unreliable the internet is; it’s not the internet that is slow and unreliable.

As school systems stumble along years behind business and society, they have finally gotten the idea that being online is just a new medium of communication (not bad, only a decade after the rest of us did). As education evolves into a more diverse, open technological environment, perhaps the hardest people to convince will be teachers who have bought into the fear and panic of their unions and employers and have been forced out of step with social expectation as a result.

Riding Scottsdale

I just got invited to the Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale at the end of the Easter weekend. I get in early the day before so I’m thinking about getting myself on something appropriate for a lovely Sunday afternoon and evening around Scottsdale. Eagle Rider has a place in Scottsdale and seems big on Harleys. I’m not really a Harley guy, but when in Rome…

They have a little thing called a Harley Davidson Sportster 883, which seems ridiculously large for what it does, but then I guess that’s kind of the point. Riding around the hills near Phoenix would be a blast on a big blatting Harley.

Scottsdale area seems like a biker’s paradise, with winding mountain roads and desert all around the city. The Mesa, Globe, Punkin Center ride through Four Peaks Wilderness, Tonto National Forest and past Theodore Roosevelt Lake looks like a nice afternoon/evening ride on the big American bike.

Another great opportunity to expand my riding experience in an unexpected location, can’t wait! I only hope they have a sparkle purple Harley there waiting for me.

Dream Project Motorbikes

Some dream project bike builds…

Stock (before)

1970s Honda CB750 Cafe Racer Mod

I’d take the standard CB750, strip it down, refinish it and modify it into a cafe racer along the lines of this Dime City Cycle build.

I’d modernize the pieces that need modernizing. This isn’t a period remake, it’s about creating something new with old bones.

A cafe racer build (after)

The CB750 that Dime City put together gives you an idea of what could be done in customizing an old CB750, but I’d do something different.

I’d hope to be able to pick up the bike for less than a couple of grand and then put at least that much into it again as I stripped it and put together a personally customized cafe racer. The CB is a big bike, which would turn into a bike cafe racer for a big guy.

Being Austin – build my own Mondo Enduro Machine

Austin on his mighty Suzuki DR350

Find a Suzuki DR-350 or DR-400, hopefully one that’s been sleeping in a barn somewhere, clean off the straw and strip it down to nuts and bolts.

In rebuilding it I’ll not only end up with a dependable long distance off roader, but I’ll also have laid hands on the entire thing before it inevitably breaks somewhere far from anywhere, meaning I’ll know how to get it going again.

Long distance and modernizing modifications would include a long range tank, updated suspension and an engine rebuild with performance carbs and a re-bored engine.

Find a 1990s DR350 Suzuki dual sport
bike and prep it for long distance off
road work, Mondo Enduro-ize it!

The goal would be a minimalist go-anywhere machine that isn’t all about branding. So many adventure bikes are all about the BMW-ness or whatever. This bike would be a capable, light-weight all rounder that isn’t about advertising but all about going anywhere.

Anime Dreams: taking the bike I loved as a kid and building an anime custom

The bike that was on my wall when I was younger was the Honda Interceptor. With a complex, powerful v-4 engine and the sharp edged eighties styling, this bike was the bomb.

I’d want to do a rebuilt / customization that keeps the feel of the bike but also feeds into the Japanese animation fixation I’ve had forever.

Influencing the build would be Akira and Robotech. BBB-Bike has already done a Cyclone customization, which is a bit more comicon than I’d be aiming for.

My Interceptor would still be an Interceptor, but with little tech-touches that bring out the anime in it. LED lights, a customized, anime inspired seat/rear cowling and mirrors, that sort of thing.

Real Restoration: a Triumph Bonneville the same age I am

an new old Triumph Bonneville

Henry Cole did a restoration on a ’70 Triumph Bonneville in the last season of The Motorbike Show on ITV (not sure why ITV isn’t offering a webpage for that show, they should be).

What they started with

Henry and Peter Thorne (the restorer), of Aspire Restorations, take what can only be described as a complete wreck (a frame and fairly useless lump of engine) and completely rebuilt it. It ends up pretty much being a new 1970 Triumph Bonneville.

I’d like to find a British bike built on the same day I was born (in the UK) and do a restoration on it, then we could both age gracefully together.

Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

Wired at 20 years old

My favorite magazine is WIRED, and I’m a magazine guy. No other magazine dares me to think as widely and as daringly about the times we live in (if you’ve never picked up a copy, give it a go!). Wired will go after interests of mine (internet culture, technology, etc) but it will also introduce me to the leading edge of fields I have only a passing experience in, and make me care about them.

This month they turn 20 years old. They’ve been daringly guessing what will happen next for two decades now, and while they don’t always get it right, they always make you realize what changes are upon us.

As I read a new edition I usually want to link and share the ideas they stir up. This edition is full of them as Wired goes over an alphabet of ideas considered in the last two decades.

Neurodiversity is a topic that hits close to home. With a son diagnosed, I’ve come to recognize how I’ve dealt with ASD myself. One of the reasons I love reading Douglas Coupland or William Gibson is because many of their characters are neuro-atypical, and it’s nice to read about people like yourself; I find much of mainstream media quite alienating.

I’ve struggled with my inability to care about social distinction forever, and I feel for my son while he does. I also think that difference is wonderful. When we heard the diagnosis I said, “excellent! Who would want to be normal!?” I guess the normal people do.

WIRED’s take on all this? Neurodiversity is like biological diversity; it develops resiliency. The neurodiverse might not all be geniuses, but the ones that are (and geniuses by definition are neurodiverse) may very well save the human race. Diversity allows a species to survive in extreme conditions, conditions that we’re making for ourselves. As long as we’re hammering round pegs into square holes, we’re not allowing human beings to be as neurally diverse as we naturally are… and we’re hurting ourselves in the process. Normal people really need to get off their high horses.

I wish I could convince the school system of this as it focuses exclusively on short comings in hopes of making the exceptional ceptional.. If they could improve my son’s image pattern recognition (which is astonishing), his special skills would be enhanced, instead they rush to make him fit a mould. The system presses him to be as widely and flatly skilled as ‘normal’ people in hopes of making him what, normal? Upcoming standardized tests won’t examine his superhuman abilities, they will focus on what ‘normal’ people are expected to do (they have charts). When he fails a literacy test because he’s unable to verbalize what he knows in a manner that suits the testers, we’re left with the pieces.

Some might suggest that alternative school systems might offer a response to this, but I doubt it. Adding money to remove expectations isn’t what is needed here.

Like eating factory produced meat, driving SUVs or buying sweatshop made products, how we treat the neurodiverse is going to be one of the things that points to our backward (hypocritical) thinking in the early twenty first century. Like the eighteenth century person who thought slavery was perfectly acceptable, this social ignorance makes us look like fools to history.

Fortunately, I don’t really care what most people think about it.

Metacognition Missteps

What Mr. Cleese is so eloquently describing above is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, something that didn’t receive a moment of notice in the metacognitive PD we recently received. Metacognition is often seen as a way to encourage student directed learning, and I’m generally a fan of the idea, but this bias deserves some consideration, especially if we’re trying to improve student learning.

In trying to break this down I came up with the Venn diagram to the right in hopes of understanding what should be a process toward enlightenment rather than a barrier to it.

There is a degree of stupidity so intense that it is self-consuming. People trapped in that tend to reinforce their own ignorance and simply can’t hear alternative points of view, even if they are self evident. These people tend to wallow in limited, habitual action. If you want to see it happening watch most digital natives on a computer. In that kind of stupidity you’re going to be hard pressed to learn anything, let alone expect any kind of accurate self assessment.

Ignorance is bliss, you’re going to be happy if you think you know everything. Anyone who lives in an Earth centred universe and thinks their species the darling of creation is that kind of certain-happy. People like this make a point of surrounding themselves with like minded people.

If you can begin to take in evidence from around you, certain self-evident truths will begin to make you question your beliefs. That would get you out of the stupid vortex and into ignorance. The more you realize you don’t know, the more rapidly you’re able to move toward knowledge. Humility is a vital component in this process, and where metacognition could begin to help.

In the realm of knowledge you may know many things but your experience with them is limited, so while you know theory you are unable to successfully interact with it in reality – this is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching tech so much (reality doesn’t coddle you in your learning). You’ve read about riding a bicycle but you’ve never done the deed. The final step is to do as well as know, only then do you graduate from talking head to doer.

Metacognition is a valuable tool in creating the kind of self-aware humility that can move you from ignorance to knowledge, but applying it too early will push you in the wrong direction. At the early stages of learning you are incapable of knowing what you don’t know, so you’ll think you’re better at something than you are. This appears especially true in mind based, academic work because your math equation doesn’t burst into flames when you do it wrong.

At no point did our metacognitive training suggest that there was a threshold where you should (carefully) begin to implement self-analysis of learning, rather, it was suggested that we do this continually and throughout, which appears to be just what you shouldn’t do if you want to get somewhere with it.

I like the DIY motive here, but getting to “learning to self correct” is a tricky step
that can push you the wrong way if you do it too soon.

Riding to a MotoGP Race, Next Level

Riding to Indy was a blast, one of the highlights of my summer. I was all keen to sign up for the whole weekend next year, but then this happened. With no Indy on the calendar any more, the chance of me riding south to see Valentino and Marc do their thing has just gotten quite a bit more extreme. If Indy was level one, here is what more commitment would look like.

Level 2: THE RIDE TO TEXAS

Riding to Texas, ironically, takes us right past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This one’s a bit tricky. The Texas race next year is in April. We can still get snow in April so it would have to be a weather permitting exit and then get south as quickly as possible to get clear of impassable roads.

Indy was a ~780km ride, Texas is over three times further at 2564kms; it’s basically a diagonal trip across the majority of North America. The IBA has a Bunburner 1500, and the ride to Texas just happens to be 1593 miles. Could it be done in 24 hours? If it could, it would need some recovery time afterwards, and some serious physical and bike prep beforehand.

If the race is on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of April 8-10, 2016, I’d leave on Wednesday, April 7 (very) early morning, aiming to cross the border and be out of Detroit before anyone wakes up. Baring any major traffic problems I’d land in a hotel in Austin Thursday morning early, and pass out.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday would be practice, qualifying and race day, and then I’d begin the trek back at a more sedate pace. Five hundred mile days would mean a stop in Arkansas and Indiana on the way back, leaving Sunday afternoon and getting home late on Wednesday, April 13th.

Could a ride to The Circuit of the Americas be completed within a week from Southern Ontario? That would be over 3000 miles or a touch over 5000kms in seven days. Boo ya!

Level 3: THERE IS ANOTHER!

There is another MotoGP even I could ride to, but if you thought Texas was a stretch, this one is something else entirely.

The Argentinian MotoGP event takes place the week before Texas at the other end of the world. If you thought the exit for Texas might be tricky, this one is downright diabolical.

This is a 13,655km (8485 mile) odyssey that would mean riding across two continents and crossing one of the highest mountain ranges in the world (not to mention the rain forests and dozen or so international borders). Nick Sanders managed three trips up and down the Americas in 45 days, but he’s crazy, and legendary. John Ryan, introduced to me through Melissa Holbrook Pierson‘s fantastic book, The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing, did Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to the tip of Florida in an astonishing 86.5 hours, but he too was crazy, and legendary.

The ride to Argentina would have intention. This wouldn’t be a wishy-washy wandering around the world ride, it would have Terra Circa like intent. I’ve thought about riding the Americas before. Riding to Rio is about 16,500kms and I thought it would take 60 days (275kms/day – higher in North America, lower elsewhere). Riding to Termas de Rio Hondo would be marginally shorter. Pushing the average to 340 kms a day, it might be doable in 40 days.

That would mean a departure date of February 18th. If you thought leaving in the first week of April might be weather problematic, leaving in the third week of February is positively terrifying. I’d aim for a leaving ‘window’ between February 15-20 looking for clear roads to make a quick break south to get clear of the hard water.

This happens to fit nicely into a semester at school so it would be an easy absence to manage logistically. With that in mind, I’d find myself in Argentina in the first weekend of April. The end of the world is in the same country south of me, so hitting Ushuaia before coming back north and seeing Machu Picchu would be a nice idea. Going down that way is a few hundred extra kilometres out of the way.

At this point do I have to return the bike? If so, the ride back could take place over 18 weeks. If not, the flight back happens in just under one day (though coming back via Texas would mean I’m on a plane with a whack of MotoGP types!

What to take? Honda, Yamaha, Ducati and Suzuki all have factory presences at MotoGP and they each offer a viable choices:

Yamaha’s Super Ténéré is what Nick Sanders does his double ride up and down the Americas on. When they took it apart after the trip the engine still looked brand new. This is one tough bike. That story impressed the motorcycle Jedi I work with so much he bought one. It’ll handle less than perfect roads and swallow miles with ease… and it’s bullet proof. I’d get mine in Rossi colours. Whatcha think Yamaha Canada?

Honda’s African Twin is being resurrected next year. Rumours have this bike being off-road capable and more than able to manage anything Central and South America might throw at it. Canada to Argentina would be a solid way of proving the new Africa Twin’s metal, whatcha think Honda Canada? I’d get mine in Marquez colours.

Ducati’s Multistrada is a long distance beauty with lots of tech thrown at it. It doesn’t have the dependability rep of the two Japanese bikes above, but it appears a very capable all-rounder that would have no trouble managing the variety of roads to Argentina. It’s so pretty and I haven’t heard of any epic treks made by one, so it’s a bit of a risk, but what’s a trip like this without some risk? This ride would give the Multistrada that world beating rep.

I’d get mine in Ducati red, whatcha think Ducati North America?

Suzuki’s V-Strom is a road focused adventure tourer, but it has some off road cred after BIKE Magazine took one from the UK back to the factory in Japan where it was made. Anything that can ride across Asia can manage Canada to Argentina. Suzuki has only recently returned to MotoGP, it’d be nice to remind everyone that they’re there by riding a Suzi through all those countries. Whatcha think Suzuki Canada?

My opportunity to ride to a MotoGP race hasn’t ended with the death of Indy, it’s just taken on a higher level of commitment.