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Unmasking The Truth

I’ve been teaching the engineering design process for the past two weeks to grade 9s in very difficult circumstances.  The engineering process underlies all the work we do in our stochastic, tactile technology/engineering program.  We aren’t rote learning to the same standardized answer, so blind obedience to processes won’t get us working results. We need to be organized, agile and able to step back and gain perspective in our non-linear problem solving circumstances like any good technician or engineer would when solving a complex, arbitrary problem.

I’m struggling with the half-baked safety plan we seem determined to follow at all costs.  Rather than get more frustrated with the optics, politics and bureaucracy that drive it, I thought, “why not apply the engineering process to my intolerable situation?”  

 

ENGINEERING DESIGN: COVID MASKS

  •  ASK:how do we resolve physically untenable policies around masks?
  • IMAGINE: a Heath Unit/Canada COVID19 compliant masking system that is effective and comfortable (if it isn’t comfortable it isn’t effective)
  • PLAN: collect data, research how COVID actually works, find existing solutions to best mitigate its spread
  • CREATE: build a testing system, create a solution based process
  • EXPERIMENT:  try different mask types and materials
  • IMPROVE: deliver an improved masking policy that is constantly in review

 

PLANNING:  DATA COLLECTION

It got up to 30°C/70% humidity in our it-has-never-worked-properly incorrectly ventilated classroom on Friday, which equates to a humidex temperature feeling like 41°C (that’s 106°F if you’re old school). I was rotating grade 9s outside to demask and breathe. It’s hard to learn when you’re seeing spots and can’t think straight… during a pandemic.

We were building circuits with Arduinos so I built a temperature/humidity sensor, which is how we captured data. Just for giggles I put the sensor on longer wires and put it up inside my mask while I was instructing. Curious about the results?

Inside the too small and tight, restrictive masks we’re required to wear all day every day at school the temperature is 4-5 degrees warmer than the outside air. I was getting readings of 33-35°C inside the mask depending on whether I was breathing in or out. But what gets you is the humidity. Inside the mask it was ranging between 92-97% humidity. Run that through the Canadian Humidex calculator and I’m stewing in what feels like 54°C all day, every day.

If I were in a climate controlled environment like the medical people who wear masks are this would probably be much more manageable, but I’m not.

CONCLUSION:  the small, restrictive medical grade ASTM Level 1 masks we’re required to wear might work in a well ventilated hospital, but they don’t work in schools where climate control is a distant dream.  When temperatures rise medical grade masks quickly become a liability more than a protection.
 
 
PLANNING:  ASTM Level 1 Mask RESEARCH:
 

WHERE & WHY ASTM1 MASKS WORK:  If you’re a medical professional working in a dentist, doctor’s office or hospital you’re working in a climate controlled environment that must follow strict guidelines.  In that context ASTM1 masks work effectively because the environment is supporting mask use rather than fighting it.
 
In an uncontrolled environment medical masks are restrictive and can cause discomfort which makes them a liability because people start fidgeting with them.
 
Staff struggling in uncontrolled climates (ie: most classrooms) resolve their breathing difficulties by breaking many of the rules for safe mask use:
 
I regularly see staff having to move restrictive medical grade masks around or wearing them with gaps or incorrectly just to get a breath.  Wearing a medical grade mask incorrectly is less safe than wearing a properly fitted non-medical grade mask correctly.  Discomfort from an improperly mandated masking policy drives this misuse.

PLANNING/RESEARCH: WHEN TO USE ASTM1 MEDICAL MASKS

ASTM1 surgical masks, such as are being provided to teachers, are medical usage masks that work in concert with a variety of other PPE options that teachers haven’t been provided with.  This video gives you an example of how medically focused these masks are:

What do ASTM1 medical masks do that a more comfortable, properly fitted non-medical option doesn’t?  Not much in the context of a classroom.  In a medical environment where a professional is working with COVID19 positive patients, a medical mask would be used in conjunction with a face shield to keep the medical worker safe in a known high risk situation.

 
“Medical masks are designed to protect against large droplets, splashes or sprays
of bodily fluid or other type of fluid.” (Health News Hub.org).  In a medical context these masks provide a valuable level of protection, but an ASTM1 mask by itself isn’t a better barrier to COVID transmission, especially when worn incorrectly.
 
“It’s unlikely you’ll be infected in public by airborne viral particles.
The real threat is touching an infected surface and then putting your
hand to your face: Frequent hand-washing is a sure way to avoid
COVID-19”  (Health News Hub.org)  A focus on cleaning surfaces and regular hand-washing would be far more effective than the false protection of a single layer of PPE/incorrectly applied medical mask.
 
Smaller class sizes, reduced bus loads and more frequent spot cleaning is a far more effective barrier to COVID19 transmission than stipulating a medical grade mask with no other PPE, but it does provide the appearance of greater diligence without the effectiveness and makes uneducated jumpy people think things are being handled diligently.
 

ASTM1 mask compliance in non-medical settings also puts Ontario’s public education systems at odds with the public health unit and Health Canada masking stipulations: “Due
to critical shortages during the COVID-19 response, we are implementing
and/or proposing a range of strategies to respond to the increased
demand for medical masks”  Bins full of them outside every public school in Ontario every day isn’t helping to solve this world-wide shortage, especially when it’s done for optics rather than efficacy.
 

There are numerous well researched sources of information on mask usage this far into the COVID19 pandemic.  Its modes of transmission are known and technology is on hand to mitigate them, yet myths persist, like the idea that a medical mask is somehow a cure-all and significantly ‘safer’ than a correctly fitted cloth mask.  Every health agency in the world wouldn’t be advocating non-medical masks if they didn’t work.

 
 
PLANNING: RESEARCH: THE LIMITATIONS OF MASK ONLY PPE

“The coronavirus can spread through eyes, just as it can through nose and mouth” (American Academy of Ophthalmology) so demanding medical grade nose and throat protection while requiring no eye protection is wildly inconsistent and dangerously disingenuous.  The droplets that a properly sized and fitted cloth mask would stop and that an ATSM1 medical mask is designed to specifically stop 95% of would happen in a situation when a COVID19 positive person coughed or sneezed in your face without wearing a mask themselves, but with no eye protection you’re going to contract it anyway.  Rather than pretending to act from a sense of greater protection, more logical and consistent masking policies from the provincial government would not only make educational staff more comfortable but also less likely to contract the virus.
 

The appearance of medical safety, without the efficacy..

That educational staff are being required to wear poorly fitted and environmentally damaging ATSM1 medical masks at a time when they are vitally needed by people who would be wearing them with a complete set of PPE in an appropriately controlled environment is problematic.  The education system seems incapable of understanding or providing a masking solution that aligns with masking requirements everywhere else.  We need to stop acting like this is a marketing gimmick and start acting like it’s a medical emergency.



PLANNING: RESEARCH:  LACK OF CLARITY AROUND EFFECTIVE MASK USE
 
All medical mask directions stress a smooth seal with your face to ensure effectiveness, but another wildly inconsistent piece of Ontario education’s approach to mask adoption is demanding ATSM1 medically compliant masks with no direction around facial hair.  A beard or moustache that prevents a seal around the nose and mouth makes the mask all but useless, but there has been zero direction on the mandatory removal of facial hair.  The CDC as well as other health groups have made suggestions on facial hair that allows for a proper mask fit, which is a challenge.  CBC’s piece on it suggests a larger cloth mask would actually be more effective than smaller medical grade mask that won’t cover the beard. Another piece suggests COVID19 droplets spat onto your beard from a virus carrier can live for hours, but wear an ATSM1 mask incorrectly and the powers that be are happy.  The only conclusion that can be drawn is that ATSM1 mask usage by Ontario educators is a marketing move and not a medically viable choice.  That so many teachers seem to be buying into it is astonishing.
 

You’ll find a lot of panicky accusations saying this
is a conspiracy theory from early in COVID19, but it should be fairly
obvious that a beard would prevent a ‘tight seal’ as required in any
surgical mask directions.CDC has always recommended shaving for medical professionals wearing medical grade gear.

 
CONCLUSION:
 
It appears Ontario public education is using ASTM1 level masks to produce a sense of false protection in the education system.  By ignoring the more difficult and expensive medically proven ways of preventing COVID19 spread, such as resolving decades long HVAC issues in schools and not providing the full range of PPE required to provide medical levels of protection, Ontario’s pick-and-choose safety approach with an emphasis on medical mask use without any other criteria is both ineffective and misleading.

CREATE/EXPERIMENT/IMPROVE: FINDING A MORE EFFECTIVE MASKING SOLUTION

For staff with breathing and size issues the Chinese manufactured disposable ATSM1 masks are all but ineffective.  A policy that allows for public health/Health Canada compliant masks would not only produce staff in less physical distress, but also provide greater safety for everyone at this difficult time.
 
SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS FOR MASKS:
  1.  Must fit the wearer’s face (current one size fits all masks do not fit all user faces)
  2. Masks must be comfortable enough for 150 minute continuous usage scenarios
  3. Masks must be breathable enough that users aren’t constantly pulling them away to breathe
EXPERIMENT:

Purchase a variety of mask types and sizes and experiment with them to find effective fit and duration results.  In a  medical situation professionals choose a mask from a selection of sizes and types.  They aren’t all handed the same sized and shaped mask as educators have been.  By experimenting with appropriate fit and breath-ability options a more effective masking solution would reveal itself.  None of this happened in preparing for the new school year.  This doesn’t appear to be happening now either.


IMPROVE:  COVID19 IS STILL BEING UNDERSTOOD SO RESPONSIVE CHANGE SHOULD BE BUILT INTO ANY PLAN
 
With COVID19’s transmission still under review by major players like the CDC, the safest route would have been to provide remote learning for the majority of families so that social isolation bubbles could persist.  Schools should have only been opened up to students in need or for specific classes that require face to face instruction.

A more cautious and medically researched approach to this school year would have prevented the current increases in cases, but the provincial government picked what it liked in terms of medical advice and ignored the rest, while using medical mask usage to whitewash any questions of efficacy.
 

The latest data suggests that droplet transmission happens when people are in close proximity to one another.  In this scenario it is much more important that staff and students have properly fitted, comfortable masks than it is to have a splash ready ATSM1 medical grade mask.


Beyond a metre the droplets tend to fall out of the air, though this is in question too.  If airborne transmission can happen from infected droplets that hang in the air for hours, the only logical choice would be to shut down face to face schooling again as a single infected person in any school would be spreading COVID19 indiscriminately anywhere they travel whenever they remove or incorrectly wear their mask.  Even a properly fitted mask is up to 95% efficient so COVID19 transmission would occur anyway with enough exposure.

Following WHO’s current understanding that COVID19 is most easily spread in close quarters, it’s vitally important that staff and students have comfortable, properly fitted masks that they aren’t constantly touching and making ineffective.

IMPROVE: A FLEXIBLE, MEDICALLY DRIVEN MASK POLICY FOR ONTARIO SCHOOLS

By experimenting with a variety of sizes and types of masks Ontario education could create a more effective masking policy that better protects its staff and students.
 
By closely following medical research on transmission and management, Ontario education could provide timely updates to its masking and PPE policies that keep people safe.

Larger, systemic issues like poor classroom ventilation and class sizes will have far more efficacy than a simplistic and misleading one-size-doesn’t-fit-all masking policy.  Some boards (mine included) have taken steps to reduce class sizes but in some cases the Ministry intervened and prevented boards from creating smaller class sizes.  In our case the cohorted solution to class sizes has downloaded all of the effort in making it work on classroom teachers which is creating marathon sessions of face to face classes while teachers are simultaneously expected to manage the other half of the class online.  This is twice the preparation and work along with the impossible expectations of being in two places at once – all day, every day.  Doing this while wearing an ill-fitting mask with breath-ability issues in a poorly ventilated classroom is a combination that will hurt many employees.  Rather than enforcing a misleading, half-finished medical masking policy, a focus on these other urgent matters would produce better outcomes for all involved.

NOTES & LINKS:

Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19:  https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/advice-on-the-use-of-masks-in-the-community-during-home-care-and-in-healthcare-settings-in-the-context-of-the-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov)-outbreak

https://news.lvhn.org/fact-or-myth-facial-hair-and-covid-19/

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/face-masks-for-beards.html 

“Dr. Sten Vermund, infectious-disease epidemiologist and dean of the Yale
School of Public Health, he told us he trimmed his own facial hair down
“so that the mask could completely cover my beard.” The key, he added,
is to make sure there are no gaps and that the mask is hugging your
skin, not your facial hair.” 
https://virologydownunder.com/flight-of-the-aerosol/

A well written article by a pile of doctors that explains how viral transmission happens.  An airborne virus is a terrible thing.  Whether or not COVID19 is airborne is still in contention, but the latest from CDC suggests it is. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-coronavirus-spreads-through-the-air-what-we-know-so-far1/

“Currently, WHO guidance
considers surgical masks to be adequately protective for healthcare
staffers working with potential COVID-19 patients, and advises using N95
masks in limited situations, such as when intubating patients, which is
known to generate small particles from deep in the lungs. Healthcare
workers who follow these recommendations have been generally protected
against the virus, WHO notes.”

Medical masks for medical work…

 

https://healthnewshub.org/cloth-mask-vs-surgical-mask-vs-n95-how-effective-is-each/

“A dual-layered cloth mask is sufficient to protect people in public settings. It’s unlikely you’ll be infected in public by airborne viral particles. The real threat is touching an infected surface and then putting your hand to your face: Frequent hand-washing is a sure way to avoid COVID-19”

“medical masks protect people from the wearer’s respiratory emissions. But it’s designed to protect against large droplets, splashes or sprays of bodily fluid or other type of fluid.”

 
“The challenge before many healthcare workers in combatting the disease
would be a daunting task unless proper administrative, clinical, and
physical measures are taken within the healthcare settings”
– wouldn’t hurt if educational administration followed proper measures too…

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Cultivate Your Intuition

It had been one hell of a morning.  I got to work only to get a frantic phone call telling me to turn around and come back home because a snow plow had backed up into my wife’s car.  An hour later we’d dropped off the car at the repair centre (while finding out it might get written off and/or take weeks to fix) and were on our way to work.  As we approached the last traffic light before work I must have seen something out of the corner of my eye and my foot was hard on the brakes.


I don’t consciously remember hitting the brakes.  In retrospect I must have seen something out of the corner of my eye and instead of ignoring that peripheral warning I instinctively acted on it.  At 50km/hr we were moving at over 3 metres a second.  Had I hesitated or waited for clarity, we would have driven right into a t-bone with the big, V6 American sedan that was running the light at twice the posted limit.

We were just outside of two school zones in a residential area with low speed limits, but that big sedan was easily doing 80km/hr when it blew threw a very red light.  I sat there stunned for a moment, as you do when something happens and you don’t know why.  There were a lot of questions popping into my head:  had I just run a red light because I wasn’t paying attention?  Why were the people in the other car were trying to kill us?  Did we really just come that close to getting clobbered after the morning we’d just had?


As we proceeded through the intersection I double checked the light just to make sure I hadn’t made a mess of this whole thing, but I was still facing a green light.  The guy next to us who was turning left had also stamped on the brakes to avoid the flying Dutchman.  He looked over and rolled his eyes at the situation.  I grinned back uncertainly.  I asked Alanna, “did that just happen?”  After the morning we’d already had this seemed beyond the pale.  As I pulled in to work the implications of what happened were starting to sink in.  In an alternate reality where I didn’t listen to that feeling my son was an orphan and the mouth breathers in that car, if they weren’t scattered down the road, were probably trying to explain to the police how it wasn’t their fault.  No one is responsible for anything any more.


This all got me thinking about what saved us.  Peak performance requires your rational mind to apply itself to practice in order to develop basic skills, but there comes a point where you have the basics in hand and spontaneous, complex action can arise seemingly without intent.  If you’ve ever become competent at a sport you know what this feels like; you don’t think about it when you backhand the puck into the net or make that diving catch.  I don’t think about vehicular control, I inhabit the vehicle.


Driving is one of those things I’ve worked on for years, taking advanced classes, racing carts in Japan and expanding my vehicular operation into new areas like riding a motorcycle, which is itself also an intensive exercise in situational awareness.  I have to wonder if the Tim who never took up bikes had the same developed peripheral attention and reacted on it as quickly; riding a bike makes you open your third eye or you tend to keep finding yourself in situations that make you want to quit doing it.


It’s important to cultivate an awareness of your intuition and trust in it.  Your subconscious mind is a much less cluttered and restricted part of your thinking process and can see things with a clarity that your reasoning mind is oblivious to because it keeps getting in the way.  If you have a bad feeling about something, listen to it.


Here is some philosophy to connect the link between intuition and performance:

https://www.scholarsage.com/author/jason-gregory/
“Intelligent spontaneity, then, is a fully embodied state of mind where one is perfectly calibrated to the environment. The environment essentially becomes an extension of your skill.”




This comes out in the summer, I’ll be looking it up:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48229202-emotional-intuition-for-peak-performance



































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Management Expertise

WIRED: http://ift.tt/2rOSGKP


This is a WIRED story about tech software startups in the Denver area.  In it a man who has an idea about buying insurance online has become a ‘TECH CEO’ even though he has no idea of what it is he is actually building.  With no background in technology hardware or software development, this guy is trying to launch a tech-startup with an idea and little else.


The quotes below are from the article.  The bolding is mine…

ROSS DIEDRICH HAD gone pale and raw-boned. The CEO of a year-old startup in Denver, he’d stay at his office until the middle of the night, go home and sleep for about five hours, then chug a spinach smoothie and start again. He was just 27 years old, but he felt wrung out.

He still didn’t have even a basic version of the software that he could demo—an “MVP” in coder parlance, for minimum viable product. Chris was still holding down his full-time job; he didn’t want to quit until Covered had some funding in hand. The lead development engineer that Ross had brought on, a big, quiet nerd named Jonathan Baughn, was juggling a bunch of projects and wasn’t as available as Ross had expected. But Ross didn’t want to put too much pressure on Baughn. As a contractor, he was within his rights to work for others. A junior software engineer Baughn had brought to the project, Reyna DeLogé, tried to manage on her own, but they kept blowing past their self-imposed deadlines.

He navigated to the demo site, typed in his password, and tapped on the mousepad. Then he tapped again. Nothing happened. The demo was broken. “What the heck is going on here?” he murmured.

I’d feel wrung out too if I was building something that I had no idea of how it works and kept blowing through deadlines.  Demoing it and having it fail to launch and then having no idea why would be exhausting.
 
I would posit that you need at least a passing acquaintance with the technology you’re pedalling before you try to claim ownership over it.  An automotive executive who has no idea what is under the hood would be a poor manager.  A head chef who doesn’t know how to cook would be a poor manager.  A general who has never stepped foot on a battlefield would be a poor general.  A principal who was a disaster in the classroom would be a poor principal.
 
The film Steve Jobs does a good job of examining the contradiction of a manager who has no engineering skill:



Where Jobs diverges from the disaster described in the WIRED article above is that he surrounds himself with the most knowledgeable engineers – an orchestra of expertise, and then focuses on having them produce their best possible work.  An argument could be made for a manager like this, but not at the expense of engineering, never at the expense of engineering.


Your ideal manager must have some technical background if they are to work with skilled labour.  In the clip above Woz tells Jobs that he can’t do anything, which isn’t really true; they met and bonded over their shared knowledge of electronics.  Jobs may not have been able to engineer the devices he helped create, but he was very aware of the technology and how it worked.  With that knowledge he was able to gather experts because he could appreciate their expertise.

A manager who is only an expert in management is best when not managing people who perform skilled work, whether that be engineering or teaching or any other complex, skills based process.  Matt Crawford does a great job of examining this in The World Beyond Your Head.  In the book Crawford distinguishes between the skilled labourer who modifies or ‘jigs’ their environment to better perform their profession and the unskilled script follower who does what they’re told in a prefabricated production line.  Being free to manipulate the physical environment in order to perform your expertise is a foundation stone of professionalism in Crawford’s mind.  A lot of the downward pressure you see on worker valuation in education and employment in general is because of the Taylorism of workplaces into script following routines.  Making the end goal of education a result in a standardized test plays to this thinking perfectly.  In those prefabricated and abstracted workplaces skill isn’t a requirement, obedience is.


An effective manager of skilled labour acknowledges and cultivates expertise in their people.  You can’t do that without having some kind of handle on that skillset.  Being oblivious to how reality works and managing complex, skilled labourers who work in that demanding environment like they are a production line is the single greatest point of failure in management, unless your goal is to chase out skilled labour and turn your organization into a mechanical process where the people in it are little more that scripted robots.  There are financial arguments for that, but they aren’t very humane.  We might not perform as many repetitive job tasks in the future, but if we remove human expertise from the workplace it will damage us as a species, and any financial gain from it would be short lived.


Related Readings:

Shopclass as Soulcraft: IT Idiocy, Management Speak & Skills Abstraction
Taylorism in Edtech
Implications of a Situated Intelligence in Education
A Thin and Fragile Pretense
How We’ve Situated Ourselves





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Chasing Eclipses on a Tight Schedule

Things have tightened up around the total solar eclipse that crosses The States in August.  If I can make it back for the 23rd I’ve got a conference I can attend to demonstrate virtual reality, and who wouldn’t want to do that?  The conference would also pay for the trip, so that’s nice.  Timing and weather are the key factors in making this work.  This eclipse is also a two for one deal because it happens right over the Tail of the Dragon at about 2:30pm on August 21st.

 There are a lot of very detailed maps out there showing you where the path of totality is thundering across the Earth’s surface at over six hundred miles per hour.  From 1:05pm local time to about 4pm is the time it takes for the moon to go tip to tip over the sun.  Totality only lasts from 2:33:54pm to 2:36:25pm – a scant two and a half-ish minutes, then daylight returns.

Taken from the interactive Google eclipse map

I’ve seen partial eclipses before but I’ve never seen totality, so that’s the goal (that and riding the Dragon).  Fortunately Deal’s Gap and the road to the Fontana Dam are right in the path of this once in a life time (in North America) event.

 I’ve got to boogie home after seeing totality.  If I’m on the road by 3pm local time, how much time can I make before stopping for the night?  Now for the iron-butt portion of the trip.

 The conference kicks off late morning on Wednesday, August 23rd in Toronto.  As long as I’ve gotten my ass home by Tuesday night, all is good in the world.

 It’s a 360 mile interstate blast to Dayton, Ohio (home of Les Nessman!).  Google Maps says just over six hours.  With a couple of stops call it seven.  If I’m on the way by 3pm, I should be stopping for the night between 9 and 10pm – just after a late summer sunset.

 Day two is a long distance run up to the Canadian border and back home – just over four hundred miles.  If I were under way by 9am, with a few stops and some lunch, I’d be home by 6pm-ish; totally doable.

With the back end compressed, the front end of the trip becomes my only chance to ride the Appalachians on the way down…


South through Buffalo and into the mountains, then it’s three days of winding Appalachian roads and Blue Ridge Parkways south to Cherokee in the heart of the Smokey Mountains.  


If I left on the Thursday before, I could do Thursday and Friday nights on the road south, Saturday and Sunday nights in Cherokee near the Tail of the Dragon, Monday night near Cincinnati on the way back and then home again.  It’s a lot more interstate than I’d normally go looking for, but it’s still a once in this lifetime opportunity.

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Bun Burning MotoGP

A few years ago we rode down to the last Indianapolis MotoGP.  It was a great few days in Indiana and it was pretty close to us.  At a push the ride there could be done in a day (we took two because I had my ten year old son with me).


This year’s only North American MotoGP is in Texas and happens the weekend before Easter.  How few days could I do it in?  It just happens that Austin is a Bun Burner Gold away, just over 1500 miles south west of here.  I watched a couple of fellow motorcyclists from the Lobo Loco long distance rallies pull a Bun Burner Gold off in the fall.  If I could get to COTA in 24 hours I’d be a rockstar!


If I left on Thursday evening I’d be down there Friday evening or a bit later if I missed it (BBGs depend a lot on construction and delays to pull off).  Either way I’d be up Saturday morning with some kind of Iron Butt ride (if I missed the BBG there are half a dozen other, easier ones that I could still aim for) under my belt to catch qualifying.  Early to bed Saturday night and then another day at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday for the races.  After a good dinner I’d be back on the road again making tracks north to home.


If I missed the Bun Burner Gold on the way down, I could attempt it again on the way back!  Either doing a Sunday night to Monday night blitz to get the gold, or breaking it into two long days and going for a plain old Bun Burner 1500 (1500 miles over 36 hours).


In a perfect world I’d do the BBG on the way down, enjoy the weekend and rest up again before getting a Bun Burner 1500 on the way back, riding Sunday night after the race as far as I can, having a sleep and then getting up and finishing the ride within 36 hours.  If I’m back Monday night I would have only missed two days of work while getting to watch a MotoGP live and picking up multiple iron butts!  That’d shake the rust off after a long, cold, Canadian winter.


Does two Iron Butt rides around a weekend of MotoGP sound extreme?  From the dark depths of February after weeks and weeks out of the saddle, it sounds like a brilliant idea!  When you’re trapped under a polar vortex and some truly grim, neverending Canadian winter, the thought of trying to cross much of North America twice in five days on two wheels scratches an itch.

Slow motion through the esses at Indianapolis…

COTA has all sorts of pretty views for video and photography…


The long way down… and back.

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Moto Anime

Best. Wheelie. Ever! The Robotech Cyclone rocks!

At the end of the 1970s as a nine year old I came across Star Blazers, the English version of Space Battleship Yamato.  This was my first look at Japanese animation, which was quickly followed up by Battle of the Planets and Robotech.  It’s safe to say anime was a major influence on my developing sense of aesthetics.  Being Japanese, there were an awful lot of motorbikes in the various stories, probably because many of the people making the animation were riders.


I’ve written about motorcycles and anime before, in fact you could probably call it a recurring theme.  The history of motorcycles in Japanese animation is a long and storied one.  Motorcycles themselves are deeply embedded in the Japanese psyche, in much the same way they are in Western history.  As a symbol of freedom and power, there is little that comes close.


If you haven’t dug into Japanese anime and you’re into two wheeling, you’re missing out.  Anime offers a distinct angle on motorcycling that is often at odds with how it’s presented in film and TV.  It’s also quite culturally distinct.  Japan has a rebel biker culture similar to but distinct from Britain’s cafe racers or North America’s one percenters.  Anime films like Akira make that culture a big part of their story-lines.


Sometimes I forget how many times my formative, young mind saw motorcycles in anime in the 1980s and filed the idea away.  I’d actually forgotten that Princess rode a bike (albeit with rockets, missiles and it transformed into part of a spaceship – but who wouldn’t want that?).


My life-long mecha メカ fixation (one I share with Guillermo del Toro) often merges with motorcycles.  The Japanese Shinto religion believes in a pan-theistic world where there are many gods or kami that can inhabit anything, including machines.  Many motorcyclists are prone to this Shinto-ist belief – if you don’t believe me ask one what kind of personality their bike has.

Princess from Battle of the Planets rides like she stole it.

Have you tried tickling the carbs?
If you like the romance of riding, you’ll find it in anime:


Akira is a seminal anime from the 1990s set in a dystopian future Tokyo where Bosozoku biker gangs have run amok!

Like Kaneda’s bike?  It’s two wheel drive pushed by a cold superconducting electrically driven power-train on a carbon/ceramic frame.  The whole thing comes in at just over 150 kilos.  You’re seeing it folded down in the lower profile high speed mode, but it bends in the middle into a more standard shaped machine when needed.  It’s rumoured to be a Honda, but any manufacturer’s markings are gone from the stolen bike used by Kaneda in the film. Someone spent a mint making a working model of the thing.


There are a lot of anime that focus on motorcycles, usually with a dash of mecha thrown in for good measure.  Rideback is a near future anime with modern digital animation that focuses on robotic motorcycles, but the main relationship is between an injured ballerina and a modified bike that has all the rider aids turned off (she is the only one who can ride it because of her athleticism).  Once again you get a strong sense of Shinto as the bike itself is presented as a character in the series.  The relationship between it and Rin Ogata allows her to heal after her career ending injury, it’s good stuff!

Baribari Densetsu is another moto-specific anime that’s worth watching if you love riding. Have a watch below, you’ll see what I mean.  This was obviously made by people who ride:

Racing on public, mountain roads by bosozoku on modified bikes was a social issue in 1980s Japan.  This anime follows the story of young men learning how to ride fast before going professional on track.  It parallels the lives of young racers at the time.

If you’ve never given Japanese animation a go, don’t think it’s all one thing.  You can get everything from violent, adult only feature length films to school girl soap operas, and you can bet there are bikes in pretty much all of them.


20 best anime with motorcycles:
https://www.ranker.com/list/best-anime-about-motorcycles/ranker-animeKino’s Journey is a good one I forgot to mention – there are a pile on there I haven’t seen before that are now on the hunt list.

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It’s Inbetween Them

I just spent a hot Saturday on two very different bikes, though they claim much of the same riding intent.  The Yamaha TT-R230 trail bike is a 250lb lightweight that gets you through the gnarliest trails with nary a mark on the trail.  There is barely anything to it and it isn’t road legal, but that simplicity is also its strongest suit when you’re deep in the woods.  With almost nothing to break and being so light, the TT-R230 is also not a worry if you drop it.  It won’t bend under its own weight and there is virtually nothing there to snap off.


The BMW F800GS I rode later in the day tips the scales at just over twice the weight of the Yamaha.  At just over 500lbs, it is a road ready adventure bike that you don’t need to trailer to a trail, but it’s a heavy thing, so you’re never going to even think about taking it where the Yamaha went.  For fire roads and simple trails, the BMW is fine, but all that weight also means lots of pieces to break off.


After riding both bikes, I really enjoyed the athletic nature and singular intent of the Yamaha, but I also enjoyed the road ready nature of the BMW.  What I’d really like is something in between them.  Fortunately, Yamaha has something in mind.


A few years ago they came out with the T7 concept bike – a lightweight, off road ready, dual sport machine that can make use of the roads and still handle off road in more than a gravel track way that you see all the adventure bikes doing in photoshoots.  The T7 has since morphed into the Ténéré 700 World Raid Prototype.  It’s taken years to get to this point, but I hope that’s because Yamaha aren’t just rolling out another porky, ‘lightweight’ (but not really) adventure bike.  What I’m looking for is something in between the trail bike and an adventure bike.  Something that I don’t need to trailer to trails and can keep up with traffic on the road, but also something that can let me exercise some of my new off road skills without worrying about pieces falling off or getting stuck in the woods.


For the Ténéré 700 to hit the mark, I need it to roll in fully fueled and ready to go at less than 400lbs/180kgs.  A Dakar Rally bike (which the Ténéré 700 is obviously designed from) with the big navigation tower and over engineered for strength and endurance comes in at 320lbs/145kgs – so a 180 kilo weight goal isn’t out to lunch.


I also need it to be robust, with lights that won’t snap off the first time it’s laid down and plastic bits built to flex, not snap.  An exhaust that up high and not likely to take a hit when it’s laid down is also an obvious ask.  That sticky outy Akrapovic in the photo is making me think they’ve lost the plot.  I want it tucked up close to the seat and protected.


I’m willing to give up some of the BMW’s road bike plushness for a lightweight, modern, dual sport bike that is truly capable of off roading.  I hope that T7/Ténéré 700 is that bike.

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Data Starvation

Last summer we went to England and picked up a SIM card and an astonishing 30gigs of data for about $38.  We currently pay about $35 a month for 0.5gigs/month in Canada – prior to that we were paying over $80 a month for a gig each as part of a package deal.  For that month in the UK we felt like we were drinking from the fire hose.  We turned our phone off drip data and discovered what modern smartphones are really capable of.  Canadians are so used to breathing their data through a straw that anything else seems like a trick.  You have to wonder what that’s doing to our global competitiveness in a connected world.


I’m currently out in the Maritimes and managed to run out of data in a single day when the ferry wifi I was on crapped out and Facebook decided to pump a high def video through 4G instead of waiting.  Facebook takes no responsibility for this (I found an option 3 menus deep to prevent it happening again), neither does my phone manufacturer or Canadian telecom, the people actually responsible for this mess.  Canadians live in a constant state of data starvation as they enjoy one of the poorest cost to performance telecoms in the world.


Canadian Telecom Protectionism
Canada Sky-high Data Prices
Canadian prices dropping but still among the highest
CRTC Confirms Canadians pay more


What’s interesting about data starvation is what it does to the quality and focus of your thinking.  Rather than spontaneously share what you’re doing, you’re spending time and energy wondering if and when you should.  Instead of collaborating and connecting you’re intentionally isolating your thinking.  Instead of creating and expressing you’re silent.  As someone who uses digital connectedness for professional and creative communications, I wonder how many good ideas are forgotten and lost in Canada’s data desert.


I was talking about this with Alanna and suggested a way out:  don’t believe that what you’re doing needs to be shared in the moment you’re doing it.  That lets you send data when you’re able, but she made a good point: don’t regret your impulse to share and speak your experience as it happens… doing otherwise diminishes the quality of that shared experience, but diminished quality is our default setting in the Canadian data desert.


I got into an argument with someone recently about reducing carbon emissions.  His angle was that Canada has unique circumstances (large country, difficult climate, low population), and so shouldn’t have to participate in carbon reduction, even if it is a world-wide emergency.  My response was that every country has unique circumstances and challenges and if we use that as an excuse to not do anything we’re all doomed.  The same arguement has been applied to Canada’s telecom sector – large distances, challenging geography, low population, but rather than develop emerging technologies to try and resolve these challenges, Canada has adopted a protectionist system that looks after big business profit lines and creates one of the widest digital divides in the world.


The digital divide is deep and wide in Canada
“income disparity plays a role in determining whether or not Canadians are connected online. Findings show that 97.7% of households that reside within the highest income quartile have high speed internet access, while only 58% of households that reside within the lowest income quartile possess access to the internet at home”
Even relatively wealthy students in my school have trouble finding reliable high speed internet because Canada doesn’t put much focus on last mile connectivity.  We have fibre backbones, but when it comes to connecting people to them, especially in rural circumstances, we don’t bother.  This isn’t even a particularly rural example, the students I’m talking about live less than half an hour from Google headquarters in Waterloo, but that’s how limited Canada’s final mile ICT infrastructure is.


My argument on the climate emergency is similar to my argument for Canadian telecom:  this is an engineering challenge that Canada as a whole can benefit from if we resolve it ourselves.  The technology we develop to help solve our unique challenges will be so efficient that the rest of the world will eagerly buy into it.  What we’re doing instead is the worst kind of hypocrisy as we wait to see what others develop and then buy into it as cheaply and unequitably as we can.


There is a lot of buzz about 5g wireless standards and how these can revolutionize our lives.  This high speed connection prototcol will allow us to communicate with each other in a richness (think virtual reality and other high bandwidth media) that is simply impossible at the moment, but not in Canada.  Most of the country won’t see it at all, and if you’re unlucky enough to live in a city that has it, your 1gig a month Canadian data plan would use up all its data in less than a second – yep, it’s that quick.  Perhaps Canadians can go on holiday to countries that are actually well connected in order to enjoy this emerging technology:  a data holiday.


As we’ve moved across the Maritime provinces this summer, the effectiveness of Canada’s ICT infrastructure has been cast in a rather harsh light.  Less than half the restaurants that offer connectivity actually have it working.  When they do the throughput is often slow to non-existent.  In a country that doesn’t offer usable celllular networks (which themselves came in and out of effectiveness) due to  some of the harshest data caps in the world, the wifi pool can become a cost effective way to draw customers into your business, but most small businesses can’t seem to manage even this simple piece of ICT infrastructure.


This really came to a point on Cape Breton Island in northern Nova Scotia where we had no cell service and no wifi at the hotel (though it advertised it as a service).  There is a part of me that enjoyed that disconnection.  Suddenly I couldn’t work on my Cisco Netacademy Cyber Operations course and I certainly couldn’t teleconference in to our weekly meeting with our teacher.  There’s something to be said for giving up on digital data entirely and disappearing into the world, at least for a few days…



What was strange was returning to the half world of lousy Canadian ICT infrastructure.  In this broken landscape I somehow managed to blow through my entire data plan in a single morning, probably as a result of trying to use the hotel’s not-working wifi the night before.  We got to the ferry to PEI and got on that wifi only to have it flake out on us.  My phone, still trying to catch up on all the things I’d been trying to do in Cape Breton before I gave up and turned it off managed to burn through my entire data plan in a single morning when the wifi dropped.  In talking to my wireless provider I got the typical Canadian telecom response, “yep, that’s too bad, you’ll see a big data charge on your next bill.”


Being completely off ICT infrastructure is rewarding in its own right – it’s one of the reasons I ride a motorcycle, to be off line, but trying to be on it while travelling in Canada is exhausting, and frustrating, and points to a future where the world will be collaborating and helping one another while too many Canadians don’t bother because of the cost and difficulty involved.  We really need to start doing better, especially in that final mile infrastructure and in helping businesses provide usable and cost effective connectivity for their clients.  So much marketing is word of mouth now on social media that you’d be crazy not to apply marketing budget to stable connectivity in order to encourage people to spread the word about what you’re doing.  The federal and provincial governments should be supporting municipalities in helping their businesses get connected effectively. It’s 2019 for goodness sakes!


LINKS:
The digital divide in Canada (StatsCan)
Northern Connections: Broadband & Canada’s digital divide
CATA Alliance: advancing Canada’s competitive innovation ranking
CWTA: the network is fast where it exists, but poor final mile and data capping prevent it working for too many Canadians.
Canadian Government and Industry push for 5G (but only for city dwellers)

Harry Potter Wizards Unite:  my wife is playing this at the moment (think PokemonGo but with Harry Potter), and loves it.  It got her walking again after cancer surgery and keeps her connected with people as she recovers.  On our lousy Canadian telecom she managed to blow through a month of data in a week on it.  We’ve since finessed it to not cost us $50 a month in data, but software developed around the world isn’t defaulted to run on Canada’s ‘unique’ and heavily capped wireless infrastructure.  I imagine Canadians are paying tens of thousands of dollars in overages playing this game, so that’ll be yet another emerging medium we can’t participate in properly.




It makes me wonder if Canadians are going to end up paying data overages constantly once the internet of things gets going and our fridges and washing machines are constantly using data.  IoT, something else most Canadians are going to end up turning off.

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SMART Adventures: What Trials Bikes Can Teach You About Motorcycle Control

I’m still thinking over our day this past July, 2020 at SMART Adventures Off-Road Training.  This was our third year taking off-road training with this fantastic program that runs out of Horseshoe Resort just north of Barrie in Ontario, Canada.  If you’re interested in expanding your bike-craft, this program will do just that, and they’re open during the summer of COVID with all appropriate safety in place (masks, social distancing, temperature testing of all people prior to starting, etc).

 Last year Clinton Smout, the owner and head instructor at SMART, had us all try balancing on a stationary trials bike, and that got me thinking about doing a session with them this time.  I’d watched Ross Noble take a run at the Scottish Six Days Trial on TV which was gruelling and battering to his ego and always wondered just how different trials bike are from dirt bikes, so here was my chance!

What is 90 minutes of trials riding like?  Very difficult.  Just to get going you have to give it a bit of gas and let out the clutch and then lift your foot up as you start moving.  Screw it up and you’re hoping along on one foot trying to keep the bike upright as it tries to jump out from under you.  Starting to move on these bikes is harder than any other bike you’re ridden, and that’s just the beginning.

I was on a GasGas 250cc two stroke trials bike, and it was like trying to hang on to a wild horse (I presume, I’ve never tried to ride a wild horse because I’m not crazy).  It weighs about half what I do, has way too many horsepower and tries to squirt out from under you at every opportunity.  I got Clinton as an instructor this time and he made a point of highlighting just how mad these things are.  The brakes have thrown people over the handlebars and the acceleration has had people wheelie the machine on top of themselves, so if you’re going to touch the gas or brakes expect it to respond way more suddenly than any other bike you’ve ridden.

How do you handle this madness?  The clutch!  A finger on the clutch and a finger on the front brake will reduce the arm pump you’re going to experience (Clinton was right, I’ve gotten good at dirt bikes and can stay loose, but on this crazy thing my forearms were throbbing after an hour).  Without supreme clutch control you’re going to launch yourself into the sky on a trials bike.  If you crack the throttle to make it go it’ll try and throw you, if you hit the brakes too slow down it’ll try and throw you.  You need to modulate the clutch to manage these inputs with any kind of finesse.

 I like to think I picked this up pretty quickly.  The GasGas never threw me and I handed it back in the same condition I got it.  Like everything else I’ve ridden my long body meant my back was what was taking the brunt as I had to bend over the machine.  If I were ever to get my own trials bike it’d have risers or modified handlebars so I can stand straight up on it.  Were I to go after trials riding (and a part of me is very trials-curious), I’d enjoy the violent focus it puts on your control inputs the most.  Once you catch up to what the bike expects, it raises your clutch control to god-like levels.

 In the afternoon I took out a Yamaha 250cc dirt bike and couldn’t believe what that intensive morning on the GasGas had done to my clutch hand.  Instead of too much gear changing or braking I was modulating the clutch constantly to ride smoother than I ever had before.

It takes a trials bike to make dirt biking seem easy.


 Suddenly situations that might have made me stop and adjust my gearing didn’t matter.  Between clutch and throttle I could manage deep sand, mud, 30° inclines (in deep sand) and axle deep puddles without hesitation.  I couldn’t believe the difference.  When we stopped my son’s ATV instructor said, “ok, you know what you’re doing”, which was a fantastic thing to hear.

 If you have access to SMART Adventures (you can get yourself to Ontario, Canada in the summer of COVID), go.  It’ll improve your bike-craft even if you’re a pavement focused rider.  After you’ve got the off-road basics down take a swing at trials riding.  It’ll give you an appreciation of clutch control and drill you so aggressively in it that your left hand will come out of it with the twice the IQ it came in with.

 I even notice it while riding on the road.  I was out on the Honda Fireblade the other day and noticed that my clutch hand was modulating the bike in new and interesting ways.  In mid-corner as I’m winding out power my left hand is helping the bike deliver drive smoothly without me realizing it.


I’m a strong advocate of life long learning and applying it to your bike-craft should be every motorcyclist’s main purpose.  If you want to keep enjoying the thrills of riding you should be looking for ways to better understand the complexities of operating these machines.  A couple of hours working with trials bikes did that for me.  I wish I had the means to chase down an ongoing relationship with these visceral, demanding and ultimately enlightening machines.

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