February 2022 – Page 2 – Mechanical Sympathy

Music, millenials and the lost art of curation

The other day I asked my senior class how millennials listen to music when they get their first car. They seemed confused by the question. I’ve noticed that young people don’t like to manage files any more (many grade 9s don’t know how to find files on a desktop), and since music turned into file management around the turn of the millennium, it’s all about file management these days, isn’t it? It turns out it isn’t.

When I started driving near the end of the 80s the couple of cassettes in my pocket turned into a briefcase of tapes. That briefcase contained whole albums by artists, both what they released and B side stuff. When you went to a concert you’d hear the released stuff, but you’d also hear the unreleased songs, and the majority of people in the audience were very familiar with it; they were fans of the artist who had spent a lot of time in a long form medium (the album).

That process continued into the 90s as my tape collection evolved into compact disks. The smaller form factor resulted in flip books of disks. The plastic box with the album art on it got left behind, but I was still listening to whole albums and collecting the works of specific artists in a detailed, long form, album based manner. I was introduced to mixed tapes in the mid-90s by my hot, new girlfriend, so the idea of designing your own playlists have been around for a long time, but albums were the main point. We spent a lot of time curating our collections. You’d discover new artists in friends’ collections, you’d hear unreleased music while in their car. At a concert you knew the words to every song, even the unreleased stuff. What happens at concerts nowadays? They play their released songs only and then do popular covers so everyone can sing along?

I went digital early. From Napster to modern mp3 distribution, I kept cultivating a locally based, artist focused collection of music, but that isn’t the way that the industry has gone. Nor is it the way that teens today relate to music. The gigs of music I’ve curated aren’t the future, it’s me using modern tools to imitate my past relationship with less fluid, physical mediums, but is that a bad thing? I’d argue that my relationship with an artist’s music was deeper and more intimate because of the limitations of our mediums. When you have the collected works of Dire Straits (six original albums plus four live ones) on hand, you are diving deep into what they did. Surely deeper familiarity breeds a more loyal fan.

Kids are still into music, but the digitization of the medium has resulted in a much more fluid relationship with it. I frequently watch students randomize YouTube videos as background music and then click through a song in the first ten seconds if it isn’t grabbing them. Their’s is a high input low attention threshold relationship with the artist. You can hardly blame modern artists for producing shallow, catching songs – the cloud based medium that has descended upon us pre-selects that kind of music for success in a fluid, digital landscape.

Laying on a bunk at air cadet camp in Trenton on a hot, un-air conditioned summer night in 1985 and getting lost in Brothers in Arms on a walkman isn’t something millennials consider doing with music, is it? We started doing the skip a song thing on CDs in the 1990s, but it was such a pain on tape that you’d just listen to the song. In doing so you sometimes came around to liking something that didn’t grab your attention in the first ten seconds. At the very least you’re experiencing an artist’s thoughts and music in a more detailed fashion.

When I asked my students what they do when they get a car for the first time they were confused. Spotify was the answer (it turns out Spotify is the millennial answer to any music related question). I get it if you’re swimming in wifi at home or at school all the time. Sure, it’s bandwidth and data ain’t free, but it is if you’re a kid in 2017 for the most part. But what do you do when you’re going for a ride in your first car and have no locally curated music to take with you? I figured they’d all have MP3s on their phones, but they don’t. Spotify premium was the answer. That’s ten bucks a month to listen to whatever you want, and you can evidently save it locally if you’re on the road, but do they? If you’ve never had to manage a local music collection before I suspect it wouldn’t even occur to you to do it this late in the game, it’d feel too much like work.

So the young driver’s solution to the problem of never having cultivated a personal collection of music is to pay for a monthly cloud based service and then now begin cultivating a local music collection? You could just hope your phone is willing and able to bring down all that data in a continuous way, but that’s an expensive prospect in Canada. With some of the highest mobility costs in the world and lots of long car trips in store, Canada isn’t a comfortable place to be cloud dependant for your tunes. If you end up not being able to pay the ten bucks a month for the pro version of Spotify, you lose all your local music. Just when you thought the digital native’s relationship with their tunes couldn’t get any more ephemeral, it gets more so. When you live in the cloud you don’t really own your data, do you?

Another problem with cloud-based digital music natives is the interactivity. When you’re used to constantly inputting changes to infinite cloud based music it’s second nature to go looking for whatever strikes your fancy, or skip through the play list looking for whatever drifted into your mind as a must-listen-to song in the moment. How long are your eyes off the road while you’re doing that? If that’s your relationship with music then you’ve trained yourself over many years to surf through your fluid, digital music with frequent inputs. I wonder how this is reflected in statistics…

Digital distraction for the win.

MADD stats on young drivers.
Young Driver stats on distracted driving
Transport Canada on distracted driving: “the highest proportion of distracted drivers involved in fatal crashes was in the under-20 age group (16%) followed by those aged 20 to 29 (13%)”
NHTSA on distracted driving
It’s a world wide issue, here is Australia

The texting culture is generally blamed for the problem of distracted driving, but I suspect this learned, constant input approach to music has a part to play in it as well, especially with younger drivers.

The long and the short of all this is that the music culture of young people is completely foreign to anyone over thirty. For people who got into music before it got very cloudy in the twenty-teens, curating your own local music means you can jump into a car or go on a trip and never once wonder about access; you own your music. Because of that effort you’ve probably also got a closer relationship with the artists you call your own. For the cloud dependent millennial that move to vehicular mobility produces a number of expensive problems. Of course, since you never really got into any one musician when you were younger because listening to more than one third of a song is boring, maybe you don’t care.

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Dream Project Motorbikes

Some dream project bike builds…

Stock (before)

1970s Honda CB750 Cafe Racer Mod

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

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

A cafe racer build (after)

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

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

Being Austin – build my own Mondo Enduro Machine

Austin on his mighty Suzuki DR350

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Restoration: a Triumph Bonneville the same age I am

an new old Triumph Bonneville

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

What they started with

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

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

Wired Thinking on Neurodiversity

Wired at 20 years old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metacognition Missteps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Triumph Tiger 955i Fuel INjector Cleaning

We’re seeing temperatures in the low -20s these days and waves of snow passing through creating banks that are hard to see over. To quote the Penguins of Madagascar…

The roads themselves are sanded and snow covered too. We’ve got a major storm rolling in tonight that looks like it’ll pitch another 48 hours of the white stuff at us.

At this time of year I tend to be in a mood as it’s been far too long since I’ve leaned into any corners. Compounding the lack of riding is the tricky nature of trying to find parts for the old Triumph Bonneville in order to keep that project purring along. What parts there are pretty damned expensive too. I’ll get back into it soon enough, but in the meantime I thought I’d give the new (er) Triumph’s fuel injectors a cleaning.

I’ve been in and out of the Tiger so many times that it’s second nature. The tank removal process (which is pretty complicated involving removing 4 panels and many awkward fasteners) can be done (blindfolded!) in about 10 minutes.

Last year I installed a new regulator/rectifier, but didn’t install it properly because I didn’t want to dismantle the whole lot. The first job was to properly fasten it down.

The second job was to remove the fuel rail. This is easy on the 955i Tiger (two bolts), but one was threaded (having a 19 year old bike as my regular runner does produce some headaches). A cunningly installed second nut on the back of the threaded one had it all back together tight though.

For the fuel injectors I heated up the ultrasonic cleaner to 65°C and ran the vibrations for 20
minutes before cleaning them up with fuel cleaner. The injector nozzles are very fine, so even a small piece of gunk getting past the fuel filter could cause headaches.

Once cleaned and sorted I press fitted the injectors back into the rail and reinstalled it back onto the bike. The injectors press fit (there are thick rubber gaskets on each end) into the metal injector body on the bike too. The only tricky bit was sorting out that threaded mounting bolt, but there is space behind the rail for a second nut and it did the trick. While I was in there I cleaned all the electrical connections and put dielectric grease on the connectors to keep everything neat and dry.

It all went back together well and I had the tank back on and the Tiger back in hibernation before it knew what had happened to it. I’m hoping the cleaning sorts a slow starting issue that developed after I solved the stalling issue last summer.

The old Tiger’s fuel injection is one of the crankiest things about it. Early mechanical fuel injection is famously, um, personality ridden. The latest (delightful?) bit of character is having to lean on the starter motor for several seconds before it fires. It used to fire at the touch of the starter, so I’m hoping to get that back again.

We’re in the middle of semester turnover and I haven’t had time to chase the old Triumph parts guys (who like to do things old school on a telephone), but that’s next on the list of things to do before the weather breaks and I can lean into a corner again.

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