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Pan American Motorcycle Diaries

As I got into motorcycling, I came across Ewan McGregor & Charlie Boorman’s Long Way Round.  I HIGHLY recommend it if you enjoy travel documentary.  The Long Way Down is a second trip they took that felt a bit more rushed, but still very enjoyable.

The idea of being on a bike, out in the world, and seeing the world, has real pull for me.  And so… the Pan American Motorcycle Diaries: From Toronto to Rio for the 2016 Olympics.  Courtesy of Straw Dogs (originally published February, 2013):



The North and Central American ride

  • gearing for 500kms a day in the States, 2-300 a day in Central America
  • minimizing interstate/get there fast without seeing anything roads
  • the idea is to get away from the local touring scene as soon as possible and get into the once in a lifetime bit (Central & South America)
The direct route: minimal highway travel in The States

The South American Ride

A much shorter and cheaper ocean voyage, then south through Columbia
 PAMD2.0: from north to west to east in South America

Using the new ferry service from Colon, Panama (on the Carribean side) to Cartegena on the north coast of Columbia.

  • much cheaper than trying to charter a boat down the Pacific side
  • regular, dependable service
  • more than enough space for everyone to go at once
Chilean Atacama Desert & Volcanoes

The South American portion now includes Columbia and an angle through the Atacama desert in Chile. The end result is a more economical, shorter trip (though with more time on the ground in South America) and we still get to add another two countries to the roster.

  • 7000kms in North & Central America (6 days in The States at 500kms a day, 22 days in Central America at 2-300kms a day)
  • A 500km/7 hour ferry trip from Panama to Columbia
  • 8000kms in South America (27 days at 300kms/day)
Even if we reduce the South American mileage to 200kms/day, we’re still only looking at 40 days.
With the reduction in time and cost, we could easily leave mid-May and arrive without rushing (including days off and/or diversions) at the beginning of August.

May 17th, 2016 departure from Southern Ontario.

North & Central America: 7000kms

CANADA: 325kms to U.S. border ~ first day – stop in Toledo?
USA: 2700kms to the Mexican border ~ 6 days, 6 nights
MEXICO: 1800kms to Guatamala ~ 7 days, 7 nights
GUATAMALA: 300kms to El Salvador ~ 2 days, 2 nights
EL SALVADOR: 328kms to Honduras ~ 2 days, 2 nights
HONDURAS: 150kms to Nicaragua ~ 2 days, 2 nights
NICARAGUA: 360kms to Costa Rica ~ 2 days, 2 nights
COSTA RICA: 560kms to Panama ~ 3 days, 3 nights
PANAMA: 581kms to Colon (ferry) ~ 4 days, 4 nights

North America:   6 nights
Central America:  22 nights

South America: 9500kms

COLUMBIA: to Ecuadoran border 1550kms ~ 6 days, 6 nights
ECUADOR: to Peruvian border 931kms ~ 3 days, 3 nights
PERU: to Chilean border 300kms ~ 2 days, 2 nights
CHILE: to Bolivian border 288kms ~ 2 days, 2 nights
BOLIVIA: to Brazilian border 1566kms ~ 6 days, 6 nights
BRAZIL: 1866kms ~ 7 days, 7 nights

South America: 26 nights

Basic budget 

  • Gas per day ~ $30 avg (higher in expensive countries, lower in cheaper countries)
  • lodging per day ~ $60 avg each (shared accommodation)
  • food per day ~ $40 avg (lower/higher)
  • ~ $130/day/person
  • 54 day trip = ~$7000 each
Had I the means, I’d offer ten places and budget $10,000 per person and do the trip from May 17, 2016 to August 1st, 2016. The seats would be filled by people willing to document the experience using various forms of media from their own distinct perspective.  I’d want people of various backgrounds who would all bring their own insights into the experience of riding through such a diverse range of cultures and climates.  I’d then take the results and build a travel documentary in multiple media about the experience.

The Pan American Motorcycle Diaries


A two month odyssey along the spine of the Americas.  Out of the Great Lakes basin, across the Mississippi and the Mid-West, through South Western U.S. desert, along the Mexican coast before crossing the back of Mayan Mexico and tracing the Pacific coast of Central America all the way to the Panama Canal. Recrossing to the Caribbean side of Panama, we take a ferry service to Cartegena and trek south through Columbia into Ecuador. Following through the Andes and bouncing off the South Pacific shoreline, we enter Peru and after heading inland to Machu Picchu we skirt Lake Titicaca (I just wanted to say skirt Titicaca) and head south into the Chilean Atacama desert.  Crossing volcanic Chilean Andes we enter Bolivia and finally cross the back of the Andes into the Amazon basin.  The rest of the trip skirts Brazilian jungle on the way to Rio on the South Atlantic coast.

60 days, 15 countries, two continents, 16,500kms!

Links:
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A Year of Living Dangerously

Work’s been heavy as of late, and I’ve got the middle-aged itch to do something profound before I’m too old to do anything interesting.  As usual, money and responsibility tie me to the earth, but in my more imaginative moments I wonder what I’d do with a year off and the money to do things that one day I’ll be too old and creaky to manage.

If I finished work at the end of June this year and had a year off I’d be back at work the following September.  That would give me the better part of fifteen months to explore three of my favorite aspects of motorcycling:  road racing, endurance riding and long distance adventure riding.  In chronological order, here’s my year of living dangerously:

It’s seat forward, middle & back,
in ergocycle but it looks like I *really*
like that Daytona.


1… Road Racing:  This spring get my race license, get a bike sorted and complete in the SOAR schedule over the summer.

A 12+ year old Triumph Daytona 600 would be a nice machine that fits into specific age (lost era) and displacement categories and wouldn’t be what everyone else is sitting on.  I also fit on it quite well (see the suggestive gif on the right).

Road racing would sharpen my riding skills and let me wrap my head around some of the more extreme dynamics of motorcycle riding in a controlled environment.  

Familiarity with high speed on a bike wouldn’t hurt for what I’m planning to do next, and racing over the summer would also focus my fitness training which would be helpful in building up to #2.

Costing a road racing season:  ~$20,000 (including race prepping a bike and racing in a local series)

Less than 50% usually finish, it’s
difficult, astonishing and viciously
exhausting, but finishing puts you in
a very small and exceptional group.

2… Race the Dakar:  Happening over New Years and into early 2017, finishing the Dakar would be the kind of thing that not many people manage.  Dreamracer puts into perspective just how difficult this can be.

Leaving work at the end of June I’d be full-on training and preparing for the race.  There are a number of Baja and other sand/desert focused races that would get me ready for the big one.  There are also a lot of off road training courses available well into the fall.  My goal would be to get licensed, certified and experienced in as many aspects of motorcycle racing as possible in the six months leading up to the Dakar.

Doing a Dakar would also be a fantastic fitness focus.  With a clear goal in mind, it would be a lot easier to schedule and organize my fitness.  A personal trainer and a clear targets would have me ready to take my best run at a Dakar, one of the toughest tests of mind and body ever devised.  It would do a fantastic job of scratching that middle-aged urge to do something exceptional.

Costing of a Dakar:  ~$98,000 Cdn

3… Ride Home:  The Dakar raps up mid-January, the perfect time to begin a ride back to Canada!  After resting up from the race I’d head south to Ushuaia at the beginning of February (summer time there) before riding back up the west coast through Chile.

A stop in Peru at Machu Picchu and then up the coast through Ecuador and into Columbia before loading on the Ferry in Cartegena to Panama around the one roadless bit in the Americas.



Once landed in Panama I make my way through Central America before pushing all the way up North America’s West Coast to the Arctic ocean in mid-summer (lots of sunlight!).  The last leg has me finally heading south again and east across Canada and back home.

 
 
The new Tiger would do a sterling
job of taking me the thirty three
thousand kilometres home.

All told it would be just over thirty three thousand kilometres.  Leaving Buenos Aires at the beginning of Februrary, and averaging 500kms a day (less on bad roads, more on good roads), I’d be looking at 68 days on the road straight.  Fortunately, if I wrap up the trip at the end of July I’d have more like 180 days to do it, leaving lots of time to enjoy the magic I’d find along the way.

Cost of a trip like this?  A week on the road is cheaper in South and Central America than North America.  If this is a 160 day trip (with 20 days for potential slowdowns to stay within the 180 day/6 month goal), then the money can be roughly estimated using these approximations:

  • $150/day (gas, food, lodging, expenses)  in South & Central America
  • $250 a day in North America

The raw numbers break down like this:

  • 14,500kms in South America (43% of the trip)  –  69 days = $10,350
  • 5600kms in Central America (17% of the trip)  –  27 days = $4050
  • 13560kms in North America (40% of the trip)   –  64 days = $16,000
For a total of $30,400 for the trip + $15,000+shipping to Argentina for a new Tiger
 
For the low, low price of about $150,000, I’d have a year of unique challenges, once in a lifetime experiences and get a chance to do three things that will only become more and more impossible as I get older.  Some people like the idea of a holiday where they can do nothing, but that isn’t for me.  I’ll take the challenge any day, if only I had the money and the time money gives.
 
The goal once I was home and back to daily life would be to collate the notes and media from this year of living dangerously into written and visual mediums.  Being able to produce a video and book(s) out of this experience would be the cherry on top.

Besides a fantastic set of memories, some new skills and the material needed to write an epic tale, I’d also have a race bike ready to compete on again the next summer.  That year of living dangerously might persist.
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Are you ready for your fitting? Tailored Motorbikes & Micro-manufacturing…

I just read a good article in Motorcycle Mojo called, “Building The Perfect Bike.”  In the article the author supposed that since no ‘off the rack’ bike fits properly, he would give himself a new bike budget, buy a lightly used machine and create a custom-fit.  His exercise made for an interesting process, and he got closer to a custom fit, but it’s still far from a tailored motorbike.

I’ve used Cycle Ergo to great effect when considering off-the-rack bikes for fit,but you have to wonder how long it will be before we migrate from mass-produced, generic machines to personalized/tailored ones.  In that future Cycle Ergo two point oh will 3d scan you and get your performance needs and produce a custom machine specifically for you.

My day job is as head of technology at our local high school.  My focus there is in information technology and electronics.  I work closely with our technology design teacher who has a background in robotics.  We’ve both watched the rise of specialized manufacturing with great interest.  Our labs have taken on 3d printers, digital routers and five axis digital CnC machines in response to this evolution in manufacturing.  The prices on these devices have dropped dramatically over the past few years.  It won’t be far off when you’ll be able to custom build parts from scratch for a fraction of what it used to cost.

Computer controlled, small scale manufacturing will radically change our understanding of what have always been industrial scale production processes.  I suspect that in the future most of the manufacturing process will decentralize from factories and into regional shops that can produce customization on a scale unimaginable to 20th Century industrialists.

Some of the very high end motorcycle manufacturers are already embracing the idea of tailoring a machine to the rider.  Even a tiny volume manufacturer like Brough Superior can now consider machining all its own pieces in response to individual customer demand.  As the costs of personalized machining come down, the idea of a tailored motorbike will become the standard rather than the exception.

When you can cut your own pieces,
you can build your imagination.

One of the unseen hands that is encouraging the latest surge in the customized motorcycle scene is access to machining and manufacturing processes that used to only make sense in thousand plus unit runs.  You can build an astonishingly well built customized machine nowadays because you can build the bits you need for it to your own specifications.  Custom builders are a step toward truly individualized production.

Rather than plugging my dimensions into a database of bikes, one day soon I’ll be plugging my dimensions and performance needs into a blank template and watching the perfect bike form around me.  The seat would be designed for my backside, the handlebar grips built to fit my hands.  The system would then CAD/CAM out all the parts and custom produce everything from the frame to engine components, all to my specific needs.  The distinction between OEM and aftermarket will disappear, there will only be builders.

Now *that* would be a perfectly tailored bike!

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Ongoing 360° On-Bike Photography

With some second generation parts I’ve got the on-bike portrait down to a fine art.  The Lammcou durable flexible tripod is a solid, dependable thing compared to the cheap and terrible flexible tripod I used before that I had to keep gluing back together.  The light, inexpensive and easy to use Ricoh Theta is still my favourite go to camera.  I’d like to try the higher resolution ThetaV but they aren’t cheap.

 Here are the latest round of photos and video from the ThetaSC.  On the afternoon of the longest day of the year my wife and I went for a romantic ride over to where we got married almost twenty years ago.  On a rainy Saturday I put the waterproof cover on the camera and tried to get rained on.  I didn’t get wet, but I did see a ghost on the covered bridge in West Montrose.  That was a weird, atmospheric ride.

 Solstice Romantic Ride:



Creepy, Atmospheric, Rainy Saturday Ride:

OK, so it’s not a ghost.  A young old-school mennonite woman was walking across the bridge complete with bonnet and black dress.  This is the covered bridge they used in the Stephen King movie, IT.  Creepy, right?

Staying ahead of the end of the world.

Dark and sinister…





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Cybersecurity and the AI Arms Race

We had a very productive field trip to the University of Waterloo for their Cybersecurity and Privacy Conference last week. From a teacher point of view, I had to do a mad dance trying to work out how to be absent from the classroom since our school needs days got cut and suddenly any enrichment I’m looking for seemingly isn’t possible.  I managed to find some board support from our Specialist High Skills Major program and pathways and was able not only arrange getting thirty students and two teachers out to this event, but also to do it without touching the school’s diminished cache of teacher out of the classroom days.

We arrived at the conference after the opening keynote had started.  The only tables were the ones up front (adults are the same as students when it comes to where you sit in a room).  Sarah Tatsis, the VP, Advanced Technology Development Labs at BlackBerry, kindly stopped things and got the students seated.  The students were nervous about being there, but the academic and industry professionals were nothing but approachable and interested in their presence.


What followed was an insightful keynote into Blackberry’s work in developing secure systems in an industry famous for fail fast and early.  Companies that take a more measured approach to digital technology can sometimes seem out of step with the rock-star Silicon Valley crowd, but after a day of listening to software engineers from various companies lamenting ‘some companies’ (no one said the G-word), who tend to throw unfinished software out and then iterate (and consider that a virtue), the hard work of securing a sustainable digital ecosystem seems further and further out of reach.  The frustration in the air was palpable and many expressed a wish for more stringent engineering in online applications.

From Sarah Tatsis I learned about Cylance, Blackberry’s AI driven cybersecurity system.  This reminded me of an article I read in WIRED recently about Mike Beck, a (very) experienced cybersec analyst who has been working on a system called Darktrace, that uses artificial intelligence to mimic his skills and experience as a cybersecurity analyst in tracking down incursions.

 I spent a good chunk of this past summer becoming the first high school teacher in Canada qualified to teach Cisco’s CCNA Cyber Operations course which, as you can gather from the name, is focused on the operational nature of cybersecurity.  After spending that time learning about the cyber-threatscape, I was more and more conscious of how attackers have automated the attack process.  Did you know criminals with little or no skill or experience can buy an exploit kit that gives them a software dashboard?  From that easy to use dashboard, complex attacks on networks are a button push away.

So, bad actors can perform automated attacks on networks with little or no visibility, or experience.  On the other side of the fence you’ve got people in a SOC (so much of this is the acronyms – that’s a Security Operations Centre), picking through anomalies in the system and then analyzing them as potential threats. That threat analysis is based on intuition, itself developed from years of experience.  Automating the response to automated attacks only makes sense.

In the WIRED article they make a lot of hay about how AI driven systems like Darktrace or Cylance could reduce the massive shortage of cybersecurity professionals (because education seems singularly disinterested in helping), but I don’t think that will happen.  In an inflationary technology race like this, when everyone ups their technology it amplifies the complexity and importance of jobs, but doesn’t make them go away.  I think a better way to look at this might be with an analogy to one of my other favourite things.

Automating our tech doesn’t reduce our effort.  If
anything it amplifies it.  The genius of Marc Marquez
can only be really understood in slow motion as he
drifts a 280hp bike at over 100mph.  That’s what an
AI arms race in cybersec will look like too – you’ll only
be able to watch it played back in slow motion to
understand what is happening.
What’s been happening to date is that bad actors have automated much of their work, sort of like how a bicycle automated the pedaling by turning into a motorcycle.  If you’re trying to race a bicycle (human based cyber-defence) against a motorcycle (bad actors using automated systems) you’re going to quickly find yourself dropping behind – much like cybersecurity has.  As the defensive side of things automates, it will amplify the importance of an experienced cybersec operator, not make it irrelevant.  The engines will take on the engines, but the humans at the controls become even more important and have to be even more skilled since the crashes are worse.  Ironically, charging cyber defence with artificial intelligence will mean fewer clueless script kiddies running automated attack software and more crafty cybercriminals who can ride around the AI.  I’ve also been spending a bit of time working with AI in my classroom and can appreciate the value of machine learning, but it’s a data driven thing, and when it’s working with something it has never seen before you quickly come to see its limitations.  AI is going to struggle, especially with things like zero day threats.  There’s another vocab piece for you – zero day threats are attacks that have never been seen before, so there is no established defence!

Once a vulnerability is found in software it’s often held back and sold to the highest bidder.  If you discovered a backdoor into banking software, imagine what that might sell for.  Did you know that there is a huge market for zero day threats online?  Between zero day attacks, nation-state cyberwar on a level never seen before and increasingly complex cybercriminals (some of whom were trained in those nation state cyber war operations), the digital space we spend so much of our time in and more and more of our critical infrastructure relies on is only going to get more fraught.  If you feel like our networked world and all this cybersecurity stuff is coming out of nowhere, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  AI may very well help shore up the weakest parts of our cyber-defence, but the need for people going into this underserved field isn’t going away any time soon.


***


Where did the Cybersecurity & Privacy Conference turn next?  To privacy!  Which is (like most things) more complicated than you think.  The experts on stage ranged from legal experts to sociologists and tackled the concept from many sides, with an eye on trying to expose how our digitally networked world is eroding expectations of private information.


I found the discussion fascinating, as did my business colleague, but many of the students were finding this lecture style information delivery to be exhausting.  When I asked who wanted to stick around in the afternoon for the industry panel on ‘can we fix the internet’, only a handful had the will and interest.  We had an interesting discussion after about whether or not university is a good fit for most students.  Based on our time at the conference, I’d say it isn’t – or they just haven’t grown into the brain they need to manage it yet.  What’s worrying is that in our increasingly student centred, digital classrooms we’re not graduating students who can handle this kind of information delivery.  That kind of metacognitive awareness is gold if you can find it in high school, and field trips like this one are a great way to highlight it.


The conference (for us anyway) wrapped up with an industry panel asking the question, “Can the Internet be saved?”  In the course of the discussion big ideas, like public, secure internet for all (ie: treating our critical ICT infrastructure with the same level of intent as we do our water, electrical and gas systems) were bandied about.  One of my students pointed out that people don’t pirate software or media for fun, they do it because they can’t afford it, which leads to potential hazards.  There was no immediate answer for this, but many of the people up there were frustrated at the digital divide.  As William Gibson so eloquently said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”  That lack of equity in entering our shared digital space and the system insecurity this desperation causes was a recurring theme.  One speaker pointed out that a company only fixated on number of users has a dangerously single minded obsession that is undermining the digital infrastructure that increasingly manages our critical systems.  If society is going to embrace digital, then that future better reach everyone, or there are always going to be people upsetting the boat if they aren’t afforded a seat on it.  That’s also assuming the people building the boats are more interested in including everyone rather than chasing next quarter earnings.


This conversation wandered in many directions, yet it always came back to something that should be self-evident to everyone.  If we had better users, most of our problems would disappear.  I’ve been trying to drive this ‘education is the answer‘ approach for a while now, but interest in picking up this responsibility seems to slip off everyone from students and teachers to administration at all levels.  We’re all happy to use digital tools to save money and increase efficiencies, but want to take no individual responsibility for them.


I’ve been banging this drum to half empty rooms for over a year now.  You say the c-word (cybersecurity) and people run away, and then get on their networked devices and keep doing the same silly things they’ve always done.  Our ubiquitous use of digital technology is like everyone getting a new car that’s half finished and full of safety hazards and then driving it on roads where no one can be bothered to learn the rules.  We could do so much better.  How digital skills isn’t a mandatory course in Ontario high schools is a mystery, especially when every class uses the technology.



I was surprised to bump into Diana Barbosa, ICTC’s Director of Education and Standards at the conference.  She was thrilled to see a troop of CyberTitans walk in and interrupt the opening keynote.  The students themselves, including a number of Terabytches from last year’s national finalist team who met Diana in Ottawa, were excited to have a chat and catch up.  This kind of networking is yet another advantage of getting out of the classroom on field trips like this.  If our pathways lead at the board hadn’t helped us out, all of that would have been lost.


We left the conference early to get everyone back in time for the end of the school day.  When I told them we’d been invited back on the bus ride home they all gave out a cheer.  Being told you belong in a foreign environment like an industry and academic conference full of expert adults is going to change even more student trajectories.  If our goal is to open up new possibilities to students, this opportunity hit the mark.


From a professional point of view, I’m frustrated with the lack of cohesion and will in government and industry to repair the fractured digital infrastructure they’ve made.  Lots of people have made a lot of money driving our society onto the internet.  The least they could do is ensure that the technology we’re using is as safe as it can be, but there seems to be no short term gain in it.


The US hacked a drone out of the sky this summer.

Some governments have militarized their cyber-capabilities and are building weapons grade hacks that will trickle down into civilian and criminal organizations.  In this inflationary threat-scape, cybersecurity is gearing up with AI and operational improvements to better face these threats, but it’s still a very asymmetrical situation.  The bad actors have a lot more going for them than the too few who stand trying to protect our critical digital infrastructure.  


Western governments have stood by and let this happen with little oversight, and the result has been a wild west of fake news, election tampering, destabilizing hacks and hackneyed software.  There are organizations in this that are playing a long game.  If this digital revolution is to become a permanent part of our social structure, a part that runs our critical infrastructure, then we all need to start taking networked infrastructure as something more than an entertaining diversion.


One of the most poignant moments for me was when one of the speakers asked the audience full of cybersecurity experts who they should call, police wise, if their company has been hacked.  There was silence.  In a room full of experts no one could answer because there is no answer.  That tells you something about just how asymetrical the threat-scape is these days.  Criminals and foreign powers can hack at will and know there are no repercussions, because there are none.


Feel safer now?  Reading this?  Online?  I didn’t even tell you about how many exploit kits drop hidden iframe links into web pages without their owners even knowing and then infect any machine that looks at the page anonymously.  Or the explosion of tracking cookies designed to sell your browsing habits to any interested party.

***

I’m beating this drum again at ECOO’s #BIT19 #edtech Conference in Niagara Falls on November 6, 7 and 8…

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Riding A Motorcycle

I’m up into third gear coming up on the cones fast. The wind is pressing into my chest and starting to roar around my helmet. On this introduction to motorcycling course this is as fast as we get going, I’m probably doing about 45km/hr.  As my right hand rolls off the throttle and reaches for the front brake my left hand reaches out to the clutch lever and begins squeezing. As the engine disengages my left foot begins tapping down the gear shifter and my right foot is already on the rear brake and squeezing in time with the front brake, hauling the bike down from speed in surprising time.  As the bike slows, the centrifugal force of the wheels spinning aren’t enough to keep the bike balanced any more, my backside and legs are also subtly beginning to balance the bike.  I’m now only doing about 5 km/hr as I enter the turn but this is a tight box of cones leading to ninety degree left exit.  I turn the handle bars into the corner, trying to keep my eyes up instead of looking in front of the wheel.  At that moment I realize I don’t have enough momentum to get through the corner, I’ve scrubbed off too much speed.  I let go of the clutch in the middle of a sharp, slow speed left hand turn, dumping the bike into first gear, it’s a jerky exit I make as I dump the clutch clumsily and begin to regain some lost momentum.

At the motorcycle course I just took many of us went from never having sat in the saddle to realizing just how complicated riding a bike is.  Unlike a typical car with one hand on the wheel and one foot operating pedals, you’re using all four limbs and your body mass as a whole when riding a bike; it’s a surprisingly aerobic exercise.  At the end of the first day, 2-3 hours in the class room, 7+ hours in the saddle, I was exhausted.  The physicality of it is one thing, then there are the mental demands, especially when you’re new.

An instructor told us of a new rider who had just finished the course and decided to drive his new bike out to Alberta for a job.  It was all very romantic.  He never made it out of Ontario.  The truck driver saw him coming from miles away, he even managed to slow down and stop completely when the kid on the bike, in the oncoming lane, plowed into the front of the truck at high speed… asleep on the bike.  Riding a bike is a good bit of exercise when you’re experienced.  It verges on a mind and body marathon when you’re new and having to think about everything you’re doing.

In addition to the technique of operating a vehicle that asks you to steer with your whole body, change gears manually using both hand and foot, and operate two sets of brakes independently, again, using both hand and foot, the bike rider is also developing a constant 360° awareness of what is happening around them.  Your head is a on a swivel, you’re constantly assessing threats and dangers.  It matters much less who is at fault if you’re in an accident on a bike, it isn’t likely to be a fender bender you drive away from.  Defensive driving on a bike takes on dimensions that car drivers would find extreme locked away in their metal boxes.

After a weekend of getting familiar with the basic operation of a motorbike, my back is sore, my arms ache and I’m still getting over the wind/sun burn, but it was a purging exercise.  If you ever wanted a challenge that puts you into a very intimate relationship with a machine, motorbiking is that.  It isn’t easy.  It’s demanding mentally and physically and requires your undivided attention.  You can’t walk into it after drinking, drugs or even emotionality and hope to do it well enough to not be at risk, and the risk is about as high as it can get.  In a world of safety at all costs, insurance company run nanny states, I’m kind of surprised that motorcycling is still allowed, but I’m glad it is.

Riding is a Zen thing that demands you surrender distractions and live in that moment, your whole body and mind deeply involved in the task before it.  It’s a task that rewards you with a sense of freedom and the thrill of open speed that I’ve never experienced in any automobile; it’s the most honest form of motorized transportation, which is exactly why I answered the call.  Taking the course made me realize that motorbiking was everything I’d hoped it would be.

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360° Video on a Motorcycle

I borrowed a 360° video camera from work to see what it could do.  This one is Ricoh’s Theta, and it produces some astonishing results (you can move the point of view around with your mouse as you watch it):

On occasion I teach media arts and one of the key aspects of that course is considering point of view in the media you create.  These 360° cameras ask some challenging questions around how camera operators will present point of view in the future.  At some point we’ll be telling our grand kids that we once all watched the same movie at the same time and they’ll look at us like we’re old and backwards.

Immersive video like this means the viewer tells the story by controlling their own point of view.  You can watch the bike going down the road, watch me on it, watch what the other traffic is doing – it’s a different video for each person who views it.

When you upload this to youtube it’s a big file.  Youtube throws up a low resolution version very quickly, but if you give it some processing time you’ll eventually get access to a full 1080p version, which offers impressive detail in all directions.

For three hundred bucks Canadian the Theta does things the more expensive GoPro can’t.  It isn’t as tough as the GoPro, but forty bucks will get you a waterproof case that resolves that.  If you’ve never tried 360° video, the Ricoh Theta makes for an easy introduction.  I wish I had it for more than a short term loan!

It also does a good job of 360° photography:

trying the photo app on the phone with the 360° Ricog Theta.. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

For the video above I clipped the camera to the windshield with a rubber clamp.  It’s so low profile that the wind had no effect on it.


Below are some screen grabs from the video that show the native resolution of the video in the Ricoh app.  In that Ricoh software you can zoom in and out of the 360° image as well as pan around it.  This is as close as I’ve seen to the Bladerunner photography tool Harrison Ford uses – you can use the video or photo to actually explore the scene you’re looking at.

If you zoom right out you can see the native/fisheye view of the camera.  It does an impressive job of managing the
geometry of filming in all directions simultaneously.

Stills from the garage showing off the resolution of still images on the Ricoh


You can get some pretty interesting perspectives and abstract images out of this kind of camera:

Taken at pretty much the same time as the one above.  This gives you some idea of what the 360° can catch at once.

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Revised Seat Geometry=Happiness

After installing a new seat cover (with some modifications), I took the Connie out for a ride.  The change in geometry is a compromise, but I think it’s one I prefer.  In raising the seat height I’m causing more forward lean, but I’m also easing knee flex.


The gel cushion and extra padding on the new seat cover raises the seat a couple of inches.  I notice the forward lean a bit more, but the bike already has bar risers, so I’m not laying on the tank or anything.  The 6° knee angle relaxing is dynamite though.  I’d gladly take a bit more lean to ease the knee cramping.

The extra height above the windshield is negligible as I’m already looking over it by quite a bit.  With the extra height the bike feels like it fits me better.  A shorter rider would find a taller, wider seat difficult to manage, but I still have no trouble getting feet flat on the ground and riding is a much more comfortable proposition.

The seat itself is also much firmer.  Instead of squishy foam I’m sitting on thicker vinyl backed by higher density form over the gel pad.  The Corbin seat I was thinking about looks very low profile, so it would probably have bent my knees even more.  I think I’ve made a cheaper option actually work better for me.

A ride to the Forks of the Credit on a sunny, cool Sunday tested the new setup.

Your typical weekend in the parking lot at Higher Ground in Belfountain – everything from a
1947 sidecar outfit to Ducati Monsters to the latest Yamaha R1, and everything in between
Panniers make handy coffee holders
(I used them for a bakery pick-up in Erin)
Back home, the new seat’s looking the business

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Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail: an ultimate ride?

 I’m currently crossing the Canadian Maritime provinces with my wife.  She’s recovering from cancer so a bike trip wasn’t in the cards, but I’m using the trip as reconnaisance for future rides.


On our way back to our hotel after a day on the Cabot Trail in northern Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island, a guy on a Honda Repsol race replica blitzed through a row of traffic five cars at a time and disappeared down the road.  The Cabot Trail attracts that kind of rider with its hundreds of kilometres of twists and turns over the Cape Breton Highlands in the north west corner of the province.


Coincidently, while I was out here, Canada Moto Guide did a primer on how to ride the Cabot Trail.  That and the steady stream of bikes making their way up to the remote, north-west corner of Nova Scotia cemented the trail as a Canadian riding icon in my mind.


We were up in Neil’s Harbour when a bunch of guys in full leathers wandered in to the Chowder House up by the lighthouse (you can write sentences like that when you’re on the Cabot Trail).  The bravest of them was on a Ducati.  I say brave because the road itself is indeed a roller coaster, but it’s also pretty rough in places.  I asked them if they could put a knee down or would they knock their teeth out first.  They laughed and said they pick their moments.

The Cabot Trail traces most of the coast of the north-west side of Cape Breton Island.  This 300km loop takes you up and over the Cape Breton Highlands and through a national park; it’s stunnlingly beautiful and it’d be a shame to rush it.  Actually, what would be a shame would be only doing it once while focusing on the road.  The ideal way to tackle the Trail would be to get yourself into one of the many lodging opportunties on the south end of it and then do a day focusing on the road followed by a day focusing on the many stops available.  If you came all the way to the end of the world in Cape Breton and didn’t bother taking side roads to things like Meat Cove and Neil’s Harbour, you’d be missing some wonderful opportunities.

There are many sections with good pavement and astonishing curves, but there are others where the road hasn’t had any attention in some time and Canadian weather has had its way with it.  I was told there were some switchbacks where riders had a hand down on the ground as they came around, but trying to do that in other places would have had you bouncing out of your seat and kissing a guard rail.  Rough or not, if you’re used to living on a tiny island with sixty million people on it, you’ll find the Cabot Trail frighteningly empty, even in mid-summer.

Having done a lot of miles on Canadian roads now I’d approach it as I do them all: enjoy them while you can but expect them to go to shit at any second.  Something with supension travel and some athletic intention would be a good place to start, it made me miss my Tiger sitting in the garage over two thousand kilometres away in Ontario.  A psychotic mix of power and suspension flexibility like the BMW S 1000 XR adventure sport would be good.  Another angle would be to take one of the newest intelligently suspended bikes and see what they make of it.


This ain’t no butter smooth Spanish road, but it’s a fearsome thing.  A couple of years ago Performance Bikes put their man John McAvoy on a sportsbike and pointed him at Spain, in the winter.  It was a riot to read him navigating snow storms through France before finding the sweet never-ending summer of Spanish roads at a time when everyone else is huddled in their houses waiting for the snow to end.  Reading Johnny in questionable riding circumstances is never dull.  PB (now a part of Practical Sportsbikes) should send him out to Cape Breton for a tour of the Cabot Trial in the fall.  It’d deliver demanding and stunning riding and photo opportunities that no one in mainstream motorcycle media seems to be aware of.  It’d also give Johnny a chance to practice his Gaelic.

Instead of riding the same old Spanish roads over and over, motorcycle manufacturers should be bringing journalists out to Cape Breton.  A 300km loop on varying road surfaces through stunning, Jurrasic Park quality scenery and some incredibly acrobatic roads would let them assess a bike’s real-world prowess without cheating on roads that have never felt the terrifying touch of a Canadian winter!

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What Is Learning?

What is Learning?

Thrown out casually during a teacher conference and then immediately forgotten, but it lingered with me.

I heard the initial “transmission of information” definitions around me and shook my head. Saying that learning is simply information transmission is like saying killing is a physical effort that ends a life; a very simplistic definition designed to make a complex idea manageable.

I caught a National Geographic special a few years ago in which a team studying the differences between great apes and humans made the sweeping statement that teaching and learning are the key difference between humans and apes. There is little else to distinguish us from our close cousins.

If it is so pivotal to the definition of our species, it deserves a better definition than “the transmission of knowledge.”

Learning (def’n): the enrichment of our mental facilities that ultimately gives us power over the physical world. We are able to know truth in a broader and deeper way because we can experience the world indirectly and abstract the world in order to understand it beyond our own senses. Learning allows us to preserve and enhance this discipline independent of our individual existences. We are the only species that does not have to relearn how to master our physical environment in every generation; more than that, we are able to amplify previous learning and build on it at an astonishingly proliferate rate. We are dangerous animals indeed.

This definition has a couple of challenges:

Firstly, the idea that knowledge and learning it is very powerful makes people uncomfortable. If you’re teaching and you just want to transmit information, you can simplify your practice to that simple goal. Accepting that learning and knowledge are powerful and potentially dangerous (giving the learner power over the physical world), a teacher would have to also accept some moral responsibility for imparting information, and many teachers don’t want to take that on.

Secondly, since our brains (hardware) became sophisticated enough to develop this viral learning (software), we have developed well beyond the constraints of our immediate physical environment. We have mostly deferred the costs of overcoming our immediate physical space to a macro/planetary level that we haven’t had to deal with directly yet. When I look at all the teachers who drive into my school alone in large SUVs in the morning, I get the sense that most teachers aren’t any more aware of these challenges than the general public; they are either unwilling or unable to consider a larger picture. The viral nature of our learning means the people teaching and the people learning are not learning hard truths with any real discipline. Learning how to overcome nature taught the first learners some hard truths, truths we forget when we are the billionth person to learn a hard won truth as a fact in a text book.

Calling learning the dissemination of information is a very dangerous thing indeed. This is the viral core of learning; when learning becomes knowledge transmission with no real context. The dangers appear thick and fast. Teaching becomes indoctrination and learning devolves into belief generation rather than a coherent, candid body of knowledge. Standardized learning does this in spades. Standardized tests force it, curriculum defines it, cutting knowledge into independent disciplines clouds it and grading validates it. Instead of developing a student’s body of knowledge in a coherent, interconnected, meaningful manner, the industrialized education system creates information overloaded human beings with limited (or no) understanding of what their knowledge is capable of.

This is disastrous for us as a society and a species, especially if you want human beings to live in democratic circumstances with relative economic and civic freedom. The fact that we don’t want to appreciate complexity will result in simple solutions, like simplified education, dictatorial government and poor economic choices. In those circumstances the urge to control the herds of the ignorant would become overwhelming for those in power.

Making learning easy is a disaster, it should be challenging, not pointlessly so, but contextually it has to be, ignorance is preferable to a passing on knowledge that empowers a human being beyond the confines of their natural world.

If learning devolves into knowledge transmission, we populate the world with dangerous fools.