January 2020 – Page 3 – Mechanical Sympathy

A Long Ride Home

Last week I was in Edmonton at the Skills Canada National Competition. We were there for IT & Networking, but they have everything from metal work and carpentry to 3d modelling and fashion on hand. One of the competitions I was drawn back to again and again was motive power where competitors were working on everything from outboard motors to a variety of motorbikes.

They had Kawasaki KX450s up on a block as well as some lovely Yamaha MT09s. Both Yamaha and Kawasaki were sponsors at Skills Canada – which kinda makes you wonder where that Canadian manufacturer CanAm went, but then judging by the long faces of Team Quebec throughout the competition, perhaps they too find the idea of participating in a Canadian event to be bothersome. How every other province and territory, many of them strongly represented by Canadians from all over the world as well as a strong contingent of aboriginal tradespeople, could be so positive about Skills Canada while Team Quebec looked like they were at the dentist the whole time was both baffling and frustrating.

Competitors in the motive power competition were diagnosing faults and doing maintenance under the watchful eyes of multiple judges. This (of course) got me daydreaming of alternate ways of getting back to Ontario after the competition that didn’t involve air travel. Though I can’t complain as I got bumped up to bulkhead behind first class and spent the entire flight back with Sherry Holmes.

We wrapped up Skills Canada on Wednesday, June 6th just after lunch in Edmonton. From there it’s just over thirty-three hundred kilometres home.

The MT09 isn’t exactly designed for long distance trips, but if I could manage doing three tanks of gas (the MT does about 190kms/to a tank) a day I’d be averaging close to 600kms daily. That means a six day blitz across most of North America and around the Great Lakes to get home on eighteen tanks of fuel.

The only thing I’d need for the bike is a tail bag for essentials and then I’d be off. It’s Canada in June, so the clothing options would have to be pretty dynamic as I’d be likely to see everything from 40°C heat to possible snow. As it happens, Aerostich is just over half way back in Deluth, Minnesota, and they have a Roadcrafter suit that happens to match the MT09’s funky paint scheme pretty well. It would only take a slight modification to the trip to pass through there. If I’m looking for something that’ll get me through the madness that is Canadian weather, the Roadcrafter’s the thing. The trick would be to get across The Prairies without freezing or overheating before enjoying the final fifteen hundred kilometres in and around The Great Lakes in a made to fit super-suit. It’d make for a formidable before and after comparison.

Edmonton was packed with motorcycle shops. We saw everything from Indian/KTM to Ducati and the usual Hawg shops. There is a lot of disposable income in Edmonton. The MT09’s grey with high-vis paintwork is right on trend with a lot of Japanese helmets at the moment. I’d have a fine choice of matching Shoei or Arai lids to choose from.

Funny how just seeing a bike after days spent on planes and buses gets me dreaming about riding again, even if it’s a six day slog over a quick three hour flight. I suspect that most motorcyclists have this perverse nature about them.

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Dirt or Adventure?

I was out in the woods this past Canadian Thanksgiving and couldn’t help but look at the mad logging roads we’d travelled down and wonder what they’d be like on two wheels. I’m also considering a starter off-road bike for my son, so having something I could ride along with him would be awesome.

I’ve actually ridden into the cottage on the Ninja. It was surprisingly surefooted on the winding gravel lanes, but with a capable dual purpose bike I could head off the roads and onto the trails and not be terrified about dropping it.

I’d initially focused on the KLR650 as a dual sport, off road capable two wheeler, but if off-roading is going to be a major part of what this bike is purchased for then weight is a key factor. The Suzuki DRZ-400S is over 100lbs lighter while offering a better power to weight ratio. It’s a smaller machine and $500 more expensive, though I don’t find smaller necessarily worse since I’m an Austin Vince fan. With no fairing whatsoever it’ll be all wind while riding whereas the larger KLR would cover road speeds better, though no fairings means less broken plastic when it’s dropped. Both machines have off-road sized tall seats and feel well sized for me. After seeing a DRZ last summer I was surprised at how much presence it had, it’s a mighty fine looking machine.

Both are single cylinder, simple machines, but you get the sense that the Suzuki has been updated more often whereas the KLR proudly wears its 20 year old tech on its sleeve. The DRZ also dresses as a supermoto street bike and has a plethora of go-faster kit. KLR extras seem to revolve around repairing basic engineering issues with this old design.

I guess a choice between the two would come down to what the bike would be used for. If covering distances in more of an adventure bike way is the goal, the KLR is a first step into that world. If I’m looking for an off-road machine that’ll carry you to those places, then the DRZ seems a better choice.

Two very different approaches to riding off the pavement.

Do bikers ignore reality?

I recently saw this on the Science Channel’s Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. I really enjoy the show, but I’ve gotta call you on this one Morgan.

Let’s look at some of the statistics given:

For the UK: motorcycles make up less than 1% of motor vehicles on the road but they are 14% of total deaths/serious injuries.

Considering that bikers have no cage around them to mitigate their own poor driving habits I’m surprised that they are only 14% of serious accidents. There is no doubt that if in an accident bikers are more likely to be injured; bikes don’t have fender benders.

Riding well demands a level of defensive awareness foreign to most drivers. A good rider is attentive to the threats around them and deeply engaged in the operation of their vehicle beyond what most people are capable of. The only time I came close to that level of intensity driving was in a shifter cart in Japan and during track training at Shannonville. Day to day driving is a simple, safer operation by comparison, but does that mean it’s better?

A motorbike rider doesn’t get on a bike to test fate or ignore statistics, bikers know how dangerous what they are doing is. There is a difference between doing something that is bad for you (smoking, etc) and developing a complex skill in a challenging environment. Like other athletes or sportsmen, the motorcyclist is developing their craft in an unforgiving environment. To say that they are ignoring the reality of statistics is reduction to the point of absurdity. Not to mention that statistics themselves aren’t reality, but a vague mathematical representation of it. If there is a reality it isn’t to be found in a human abstraction.

Is biking more dangerous? No doubt, but this reality episode is choosing to selectively chose their realities. Chasing all motorcyclists onto four wheels because it’s safer isn’t really safer. Why don’t they take into account how dangerous it is to drive a massive SUV that is actively destroying the ecosystem we live in with its atrocious waste of resources? Or mention the political and financial instability caused by big oil and OPEC? If there were less people driving around in three ton tanks there would be fewer severe accidents. You can do a lot more damage in a 5000 lb vehicle doing eighty miles per hour than you could ever do on a bike. The reductive reality given in the show seems designed to cater to mediocrity.

If we want to be really Malthusian about it, making sure everyone survives every accident no matter how many they cause might appeal to SUV drivers, but for the rest of us keeping them alive to do it again (and again) is a disaster.

Biking demands competence and punishes you harshly for not having it. If you want mediocrity go drive a car, if you want incompetence go drive as big a vehicle as you can find. You can hit as many things as you want and if you have enough money, you can burn a hole in the world while doing it in a massive SUV that pretty much guarantees your safety.

US stats: motorcyclists are 37x more likely to die in a crash

This is an exceptionally worthless statistic, of course you’re more likely to die in an accident if you’re on a bike. If you were in a motor vehicle collision would you rather be on a motorcycle or in a Smartcar, a Hummer or a Sherman tank? That tank would offer you the greatest level of protection if you were in an accident, but would be cripplingly wasteful.

Once again, there are other degrees of damage being done in the complex activity of human beings burning fossil fuels to transport themselves. This past summer I did about four thousand kilometers on the bike. I didn’t die, I didn’t come close to having an accident and I did it all at about 60mpg. That’s a reality I’m not ignoring.

Why do people continue to take this risk?

If reality is what we think it is I want mine to reward competence and punish incompetence.

I don’t believe that longevity is the point of human existence, I believe that we should all seek to improve ourselves by any means available, even and especially if that means putting ourselves at risk in order to do so.

I think we should strive to improve ourselves through the activities that we pursue and that should involve putting some aspect of yourself on the line in order to make the feedback meaningful. Learning that matters can only be gained through sacrifice and risk.

I’m not ignoring reality when I get on a bike, I’m facing it in a way that most cage drivers never will.

Is Always On Exhausting or Exhilarating?

In a recent conversation with a techno-phobic (or at least reticent) colleague she was bemoaning the constant state of connectedness that modern technology forces upon people. I’ve heard this complaint from a lot of people who struggle to remain unplugged.

The conversation:

she: I choose to remain present and not in a state of constant inattention!

me: It’s more of a oneness with the datasphere, you’re never alone, a living cell in a massive organism… a heightened state of awareness, the world is all around you, information conducted by you…

she: Wow…sounds almost like Zen Buddhism. Ohm.

One of the reasons this onlineness isn’t work for me is because it’s cathartic. I never feel like I’m doing work, it feels more like self expression. I’m the one who directs it, it’s empowering.

What I find exhausting is sitting in traffic, fascism , traffic lights, current Canadian politics, indoctrination and standing in lines. If I had to do that 24/7, I’d go mental, yet millions of people accommodate these things as the necessities of daily life. When I’m online I’m orchestrating my interests, communicating with people I enjoy and feeding my mind. How would I ever get tired of that?

And as for information overload…. well…

Zazzle Madness

Beware the Zazzle, it’s addictive! After I started monkeying around with t-shirt designs I couldn’t stop.

I wanted to make a ‘cars suck’ shirt similar to the one I saw at the IndyGP. After a few attempts I had a nice design that said what the shirt at Indy said, but in a different way:

http://www.zazzle.ca/cars_suck_tshirt-235628708391573422

After doing one I had another go, this time using one of the photos I took at the Moto3 practice at Indy:

http://www.zazzle.ca/bend_curves_tees-235297707930540831

Then, of course, the Mechanical Sympathy tshirt was inevitable:

Now I’ve got a Zazzle store!

I may not be able to stop.
http://www.zazzle.ca/mechanicalsympathy*

Weights and Measures

I’m always mindful of how heavy a motorcycle is, but there is a lot of static in the way. Between the splits Canadians do between the metric and imperial systems and the games played by motorcycle manufacturers, I’m often left second guessing what I think I know.

I’ve owned everything from feather weight KLX250s (278lbs/126kgs) to light weight Ninja 650s (393lbs/178kgs), heavy weights like the Concours (‎671lbs/305kgs) and middle weights like my current Tiger (474lbs/215kgs), but even those statistics are suspect because manufacturer’s will share a dry weight (no fluids) if it’s a bike that is bragging on its lightness and a wet weight (ready to ride with fuel) if it doesn’t matter so much or the bike has a tiny tank and lousy range. There is no consistency at all in this other than the marketing angles being played. I have no idea if those numbers published on the bikes I’ve owned above are even equivalent. Are they wet weight? Dry weight? Something else?

To try and get my head on straight I’ve gone looking for some stats, and found montesa_vr‘s work on ADVrider.com (great site! Check out their epic ride reports if you like to get lost in a long distance adventure).

I took that exhaustive list of street legal dual sports and dumped them into a spreadsheet, sorting them by comma separated values. Then I added in some handy metric/imperial connections and stats on weight of a tank of fuel, so you can see them all in one place.one gallon of gasoline weighs 6.2 lbs.
One litre is equal to 0.264172 gallons (US liquid).
So, 1 litre = 1.6378664 lbs.
1lb = 0.453592 kgs
1 litre of gasoline = 0.7429237021194 kgs

Here’s the spreadsheet:

It ain’t heavy, it’s my Tiger. It’s obviously lighter than
the Concours I rode before it, but much heavier than
the Ninja before that. I just wish the stats were
consistent and comparable.

The Tiger 955i is listed as a 215kg dry weight. With a full tank of gasoline it’s loaded up with almost 18kgs of fuel, putting it at about 233kg, yet it’s listed as a 257kg wet weight. So, that must be 18kgs of fuel and 24kgs of oil and coolant? That seems like an awful lot of oil and coolant (and brake fluid? and what, fork oil? How asinine does dry weight get?). At 566lbs, my old Tiger would be 7th in the current crop of heavy weight adventure bikes. I don’t think it’s exceptionally heavy for what it is, but it’s hard to tell with the smoke and mirrors.

Dry weight is virtually meaningless, I’m astonished that it’s even given as a statistic. When would you ever need to know what a bike weighs without any fluids in it? I couldn’t run, so it’s an academic statistic verging on pointless. I also get montesa_vr’s point that bikes shouldn’t be punished on weight comparisons for being able to carry a reasonable amount of fuel. Putting a peanut sized tank on a bike so you can brag about the weight seems disingenuous.

At least a wet weight comparison offers up a bike that is actually operational. A wet weight with an empty tank seems like the obvious standard if you don’t want to punish long distance capable machines, but no one seems to do it.

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Digital Serfs

This topic has come up before, but I’ve been rehashing it in my mind over the past day or two after having a twitter-talk with @innovativeedu.

She posted a blog on using Facebook in class. Before last semester, I would probably have read it, nodded, and moved on.

Last semester I found myself teaching career studies (a grade 10 compulsory credit to prepare students for the work place). It isn’t a challenging course, so our board decided to use it as a pilot to introduce students to elearning. I thought this was a great idea. Our completion rates in elearning aren’t good and introducing students to the technology before they have to go live with it alone and online is a solid step towards fixing things. (I initially wrote about that pilot here).

Even at high academic levels (pre university English is what I’ve taught on elearning), we typically have a 50% dropout rate. Last time through I had a 60% completion rate and I was over the moon about it. Part of the problem is how guidances place students into elearning – it seems to be a ‘you’ve exhausted all other options so we’ll dump you there’ situation for many students – not an ideal way to cull candidates for a technically challenging, lonely learning experience. After doing these recent in-class/hybrid elearning classes I now think the failure rate has to do with digital literacy; very few people have it.

Part of the problem is an educational assumption (usually based on ignorance, age based ludditism and/or fear of technology), that young people have some kind of magical connection to technology that allows them to immediately understand and make effective use of it. We dress them up in terms like ‘digital native‘ and sit there complacently, happily waiting for them to wow us with their, um, digital nativity.

When you’re teaching elearning remotely, you’re not seeing what they’re doing first hand, you just get a (digital) window into what’s going on (which is often nothing). When work does come in, it’s often a jumbled mess. Students ignore things like file format (.rtf please, nothing else, then you get everything else). Students ignore file naming conventions (everything handed in is called document.doc, and is usually not what they thought it was because by mid-way through the course they have a documents folder filled with document(1) document(2) .doc files).

When you do finally get something as (technologically) simple as an essay, they often show little or no understanding of how the word processor they used actually works. They don’t know how to format simple things like line spacing and margins, let alone more complex layout issues like APA citations. There isn’t a lot of room in the grade 12 university bound English curriculum for teaching grade 7 computer skills.

This all leads me to the realization I had in that open grade 10 careers class. In a class of 25 (I taught 4 such classes, they all played out similarly), ten students took to the elearning environment like fish to water. They had the technical chops to manage uploads, file management and the various IT issues that arose. Ten or so had enough computer experience to push their way through the course and be successful. Five or so students in each class had very limited computer knowledge. They were comfortable doing only very specific things with a computer. They had no idea what file types were, how to upload things to the internet or stay focused on what they were supposed to be doing. These students were constantly, and I mean constantly, staring at Facebook.

What’s interesting about that distribution is that it’s pretty much the same across the general population. Teens don’t have a magical insight into technology any more than boomers do. The willingness to learn and understand computers is not age specific.

I should add that all students were on Facebook at various points (including the student who finished with a 100% in the course). The difference between the technically literate ones and the digital serfs were telling though. The serfs weren’t doing this because they were bored, they were doing it because they literally don’t know how to do anything else with a computer.

In working with them I noticed big differences in their Facebook profiles as well. Strong students had media rich walls with many links, comments and discussions with a wide variety of contacts (many of whom were family members); they were media generators and social networkers. Weak students tended to have empty walls, minimal written contact with people (virtually all peers, most of which was appallingly low brow and often related to pictures that would turn their parents’ hair white). They didn’t know how to use the internet to add interesting content, they were users, not makers, and they were not in peer groups that encouraged more effective use of technology.

The more confusing part was that the vacant Facebookers would sit there for hours, looking at pictures, there was very little reading involved. This reminds me of a video I saw the other day. Put simply, many people will not self-direct their learning, even in a media rich, technologically plentiful environment where the entire history of human development is laid open before them. If the gap between what a student knows and what they are being asked to do is so great, the preferred solution is to ignore the situation entirely by pretending it doesn’t exist; Facebook is the ideal go-to in these situations.

These students don’t know what they don’t know, and think they know a lot that is, in fact, wrong (just like those in that video). This is a Zone of Proximal Development issue. Their ignorance is so great that they can’t even begin to realize how little they actually know. Their knowledge is akin to belief.

The internet, for many, is a vacuous, narcissistic waste of time. Their habitual use of very few (often two: youtube and facebook) websites has made them new media illiterate. They know virtually nothing about computers, navigation or using the net to provide resources, to the point of begging even common sense.

“It doesn’t work”

“it’s unplugged”

“I can’t edit this file”

“You’re looking at it in WORD viewer”

“The internet doesn’t work”

“You haven’t connected to the wireless” (this after 3 weeks of doing this)

I’ve had colleagues working with grade 12s who have no idea, not one of them in a class of thirty, about how to create a hypertext. They were supposed to be developing google docs about a piece of literature, but she’s teaching them simple hypertext because none of them have any idea how the internet works.

Until we start taking digital literacy seriously and begin to develop the necessary skills in a coherent manner throughout school, we’re throwing students into the digital sea with very unfair limitations, often based on family circumstance and technology access.

Thanks for Nothing Toronto Spring Motorcycle Show

On March Break this week my family is hanging out with my buddy’s family. He has been riding for years but didn’t actually take his bike out at all last year. He’s thinking about getting a new bike so I pull up the Toronto Spring Motorcycle Show online. I tell him how much fun my son and I have had attending the mid-winter supershow and the manufacturer’s show this year. I suggest we all go down, four professionals who earn over $300,000 a year between them and their three kids.

Special Guests? Anything about motorcycles?

My wife has doubts, the ‘feel’ of motorcycle shows online isn’t always very friendly toward educated, professional women and she’s also had concerns about our son going – it doesn’t seem a very family friendly affair. She pulls up the website to see what’s going on there and this is what comes up.

Guess what? We’re not going to the Spring Motorcycle show. My buddy with all that earning potential and a want for a new bike and his wife who is keen to adopt his old one but has no kit of her own aren’t going. My wife, who I think I can convince to get on two wheels if I can Vespa her up, isn’t going and has had her suspicions confirmed yet again. My son, who is on the verge of getting his first 50cc isn’t going, and my buddy’s kids, who are also two wheeled curious aren’t going.

The irony is everything else on the site is actually motorcycle related and would have had us there, but you had to lead with the playboy model and list all the motorcycle related people below as an afterthought. Not cool.

If motorcycling in North America would just grow up it would have a chance of becoming more mainstream and less an excuse for creepy old men to act like adolescents. I live in hope.

Dakar 2020

Dakar 2020 has just gotten underway in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Red Bull TV has a good (and free to view) daily recap of the event here:
https://www.redbull.com/ca-en/events/dakar-rally-saudi-arabia-2020

You can keep up with events on the Dakar website too: https://www.dakar.com/en

In case you have no idea what the Dakar Rally is about, there is a good primer and historical explanation of the event as it heads into its 42 year:

Some photos from dakar.com from the first day of the rally:

What a thing!

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Micromorts & Motorcycling

I’m watching Morgan Freeman’s Through The Wormhole again. This particular show is all about whether or not luck exists. In the episode they introduce the concept of micromorts – a unit of measurement based on chance, in this case a one in a million chance of instant death. Using statistics, the micromort allows you to assess the risk involved in various activities based on your chances of a fatality.

Micromorts: assessing risk by statistical comparison
You’ve got to wonder what ‘driving is safer’ means from an
environmental perspective.

Needless to say, motorcycling is up there. Compared to other forms of transport shown, you earn more micromorts motorcycling than just about anything else. Of course, you have to remember that being alive costs you micromorts each day (and more each day you get older). Sedentary activity? Smoking? Drinking? They all get you.

A twenty a day smoker generates the same micromorts as a motorcyclist who rides 100 miles. Every 28 months you live with a smoker earns you the same micromorts as that 100 miles on a motorbike. Next time a smoker is telling you how dangerous motorcycling is, you can hit ’em with some micromortization (and maybe point out that your motorcycling doesn’t kill everyone around you quicker either).

When you get into extreme sports the micromort count skyrockets. Ever felt the urge to climb Everest? That’ll cost you about 40,000 micromorts, or 266,666 miles on a motorbike. Of course you’d spend a couple of weeks climbing a mountain or years on two wheels racking up a quarter of a million miles. Funny how one thing is considered brave and noble and the other reckless. Of course, riding a bike also uses less fossil fuel to move people around, while climbing Everest creates an environmental disaster.

One of the hardest things to wrap your head around with micromorts is how they change over time. As a baby you’re small and weak and much closer to death. Through your middle years you’re stable and as far from death as you’ll ever statistically get, but as an older person you face death more and more each year. Considering that, you have to wonder why more older people don’t get into biking. Just waking up the in morning in your sixties nets you more micromorts than a hundred miles on a bike. If you’re facing that long good night anyway, do not keep trying to turn away from the inevitable hoping to go gently.

The point of us being here isn’t to be here for as long as possible. Motorcycling, more than anything else, will remind you of that every moment you’re in the saddle. There are some things than cannot be reached without risk, and they are usually the best things. If I’m going to rack up micromorts anyway, I’d rather be doing it on a motorbike.

Some micromort links:
understanding micromorts
A lesson in risk taking
Extreme sports, risk and micromorts
Understanding Uncertainty: Survival

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.