posts – Page 117 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Fake News Epidemic

I’ve often been at odds with how new media makes its billions. People self-identify with new media like nothing else because it is such an intimate part of their lives. The hardware is always at hand and the software makes personal demands on our information and our time that would have felt foreign and invasive twenty years ago, but like a frog being slowly brought to a boil, we haven’t noticed how it’s killing us.

We suddenly feel time compressed like never before because we have become a commodity in an always on attention culture. The tech giants feeding from this frenzy that they have created present themselves as saviours of the people, democratizing media and making the world a better place:

If you ever want a brilliant parody of the bizarre nature

of our digital revolution, you really need to watch Silicon Valley

Yet there is a change in how we are relating to the strange new mediascape we find ourselves in. Facts are no longer facts and the tech companies enabling this, up until recently, were willfully unaware of how damaging that can be, though more than happy to make advertising revenue from it.

The hand wringing helplessness felt over this epidemic of fake news always struck me as odd, like an alcoholic wondering why everything is going to shit when the answer if obvious (it’s the alcohol). Yet the vendors of our hangover kept it paying off until the damage was done.

This was brought into sharp focus for me after reading this article by WIRED. It tells the story of disenfranchised teens in a former Soviet Bloc state who found a way to make silly money by aggregating fake news. Google, Facebook and others were only too happy to make a mint from this process in advertising revenue.

By leveraging the information collection platforms (aka ‘social’ media) they have created to produce targeted ads, these new media advertisers found an avenue for stale marketing budgets. Companies flooded in to Google, Facebook and the rest, desperate to tap a younger demographic unreachable through traditional media. But social media companies offered something more than just the vaunted Millennial crowd, they also offered targeted advertising.

You don’t get Gmail, or Facebook Messenger or any of these other complex, expensive services for free. You get them because they are constantly mining your data and using that information to target ads. Social media companies ARE advertising companies. How powerful is this technology? Last year Facebook made six billion dollars more than the largest advertising agency in the world. Google made tens of billions more.

Tech companies present themselves with noble ideas like organizing the world’s information or giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, but they aren’t non-profits, quite the opposite actually. While they might engineer their technology to organize and share, the way they pay for their private jets is to monetize those noble ideas while avoiding paying taxes as aggressively as they are legally able.

Google, Facebook and social media itself is now the largest advertising system on the planet.

That some shifty Macedonian teens made a bit on the side is really an afterthought. What should strike you as most illuminating is that the multi-nationals driving social media were more than happy to make millions from obviously false and plagiarized information that was dressed up as news. If you think this didn’t have any effect, look to the damage done to one of the oldest democracies on the planet.

Google stopped cashing in on fake news when people complained,
not before, and the people who lost money on it were the website
owners, not Google, they kept every penny.

By aggregating bonkers right wing fiction into easily consumable content (usually by stealing it outright and dressing it up as news), those kids made years of salary in a month, but what are pennies on the dollar compared to the profit social media advertisers pocketed? Google and others were not only making a fortune off the fake news epidemic, they themselves were the cause of it, using their customer data collection systems to feed lies back to the people who most wanted to read them.

It wasn’t until the flaming mess of the US election that anyone stopped to consider what the ramifications of this approach were. These tech companies love to claim the moral high ground, but their highest ideals take a back seat to greed. Perhaps Google needs to try a bit harder with it’s motto of ‘don’t be evil’.

Try harder.

I’ve struggled with how these companies have insinuated themselves into education, branding teachers and even information itself with their logo. Looking over nearly seven years of Dusty World I can see myself slipping from a technology evangelist into an increasingly uncomfortable relationship with these companies. As they’ve become richer and more influential, their ability to make decisions based on the public’s best interests seems to have steadily deteriorated. Nowhere is this more apparent than this latest social hack: design a system that feeds lies to the people who most want to believe them, and then make a profit from it. They’re making it mighty difficult to like them, let alone admire them.

Meanwhile Britain Brexits and the US government can best be described as a maelstrom. At least some poor kids in Macedonia made a bit of money in a world were it’s usually the super rich who make something from nothing. Maybe social media systems are blameless in all of this. After all, they only give us what we want. If we’re too stupid to educate ourselves, perhaps it’s what we deserve. Is it still propaganda if we’re doing it to ourselves?

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Facilitators

This provocative article was shared on Facebook recently. Teachers sharing and talking about education during March Break, I know, crazy, right?

There is an technologist slant to this article that, like everything else people do in the age of information, reduces complex human interaction into a simplistic informational exchange. We fall into this trap in every age we live in. When society was church based we defined ourselves as souls and saw ourselves as intangible spirits in a material world. When we industrialized people started to see themselves as machines. In the information age, unsurprisingly, we treat ourselves like computational nodes in a network. We always seem trapped in our sense of self by the reflection our society casts casts back at us. In every case we’re taking what we are and reducing it to the limitations of the flawed technology we are producing.

By forcing our definition of people to fit the technology at hand we make humans an integral and exploitable part of that technology. If you can reduce complex human social interaction into simplistic social media exchange and centralize the profits from those interactions you’ve made a fortune. The same companies doing this do everything possible to avoid paying taxes to support the societies providing that data. This is one of the best examples of business leaching off society (other than the stock market itself) that I can imagine.

The fortune to be made reducing students to data is often dressed up under the guise of happier more engaged children, but in my experience the self directed learning suggested by the author of this article is neither efficient nor particularly engaging. Self directed learning requires the kind of focus, self discipline and appreciation of future benefit that most children are incapable of because they haven’t developed that bit of their brains yet.

Many adults are equally stymied by self-direction. For most, getting into a directed course of action means happily surrendering free will in order to work out of habit. This a much less stressful way to live a life. Developing routines and sticking to them means you get to off-load responsibility for the outcomes of those routines onto the people or devices that manage them. Being able to complain about this while taking no responsibility for what is happening (you’re a helpless cog in the system) is one of the most cathartic things your typical human being does in modern society. Schools are a favorite target of the lazy or aimless; an easy institution to hate because they are trying to develop you into a more fully functioning human being against your every effort.

The brave new world of self directed child geniuses being monitored by cheap, non-professional facilitators that require no special training get a lot of neo-liberals excited about the cheap and engaging de-institutionalized future of education. In the coming age of machine intelligence computers will do all of the thinking and management. Human beings won’t have to do anything more than assimilate with those machines… and complain about them.

Perhaps this writer has a point. In 20 years when AIs are doing the jobs of most of the non-specialized workforce, why waste money educating them? Students can go to school and perform the same mind numbing habitual activities they do at home. Once we’ve achieved this nirvana we will have taken the final step toward becoming nothing more than the technology we create.

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Updated 3d Modelling Software on Motorcycles

I’ve had a Structure Sensor for a couple of years now. They keep updating the software and firmware and improving the detail capture of the device. After the last round of updates I spent some time in the garage while it’s -20°C and snowing outside in March to test out that new detail.

You get all the Structure software with the scanner, but you can also use third party apps to operate the device. Itseez3d is one of those apps, but I always found it quite buggy. That all seems to be behind it with the latest update.

naked concours: Scan of the Concours in the garage using Itseez3d and the Structure Sensor
by timking17 click on it to open, then you can scroll in to zoom and drag to move it around
on Sketchfab

The model above is on Sketchfab, but itseez3d is doing
something like it on its own website. The detail seems similar on both. I’d never been able to get a stable large scale model out of itseez3d before, I could this time. The level of detail and how well it paints the surface of the model using the ipad’s camera to catch colour and texture is impressive. The pictures on the left are the Tiger inside and out as a model on the itseez3d site.

Even with the Structure software I’m finding that the quality of detail in the 3d models the scanner produces are always improving. A boxed capture of the front section of the Tiger was a way of working close enough to take in a lot of compound curves and mechanical parts to see how well the Structure sensors lasers could feel out those details. It’s producing smoother, more accurate models than ever.

Triumph Tiger 955i Front End

by timking17

on Sketchfab

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Trust

I came across this excellent article by the Harvard Business Review about how trust relates to productivity in business. It turns out trust goes a long way towards creating a productive learning environment with students as well. Trust doesn’t end in the classroom though. Between teachers in a building, across entire school boards and in the education system in Ontario as a whole, trust is the cement that turns us from individuals into powerfully focusedl groups. After reading that article I couldn’t help but wonder at the damage done by the aggressive politics that drive out of date and combative management practices in education.

This week we were handed a remedy for a court case won by teacher’s unions in Ontario. In 2012 the Ontario provincial government decided to ignore the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and deny the right to strike and force a contract on teachers in the province because bankers had tanked the world economy a few years before and the government’s way to fix that was to vilify and then bleed public employees dry.

You couldn’t pick a finer example of broken trust within an organization. After a miserable late 1990s under a tea party style conservative government that was bound and determined to diminish the teaching profession in Ontario, the Liberal party was ushered in and a decade of rebuilding occurred. In that time Ontario shot up the ranks in terms of world education. Suddenly, in 2012, in a desperate attempt to garner conservative votes the Liberal party chose to ignore the Canadian Charter – the document at the foundation of our democratic rule of law – and force a contract on teachers, just to move some money around on ledgers so it appeared that they were more fiscally conservative. The strips to sick days actually cost Ontario more even before the government lost the court case and had to pay restitution. It was a case of desperate and illegal law making and profound mismanagement. The people responsible have never apologized. If your boss did that would you trust them?

Since then trust has been thin on the ground in Ontario’s education sector, yet this article on trust goes to great lengths to underscore how important it is to create a transparent, consistent and reasonable relationship between members within an organization:

“Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy, collaborate better, suffer less chronic stress & are happier – these factors fuel stronger performance”

Having worked in the private sector for fifteen years before coming a teacher, I’m often surprised at how unenlightened management practices in education are. Perhaps it’s simply a byproduct of being managed by politics rather than productivity. In any case, the mismanagement of Ontario’s education system over the past few years is neither cheap, nor productive.

I’ve worked for my current employer for over ten years. In that time I only ever asked for a single exception to being expected to come in to work every day. In 2012 my mother committed suicide. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a result but was expected to be in class teaching volatile teenagers. I went to my principal and asked for help. She called HR for me to navigate the process but we were told by a senior manager, “we have people at work who have had a heart attack and have cancer, what makes you so special?” I went back to work with images of mopping my mother’s remains off the floor still floating before my eyes. Can you imagine my level of trust since then?

This month I just got back from surgery. I went back to work 2 days before I should have because we are only allowed 3 days off before needing to contact HR – something I wasn’t going to do. I’d lost so much blood due to this surgery (sinuses, it isn’t a nice one) that I passed out at the end of the school day while stacking chairs in my classroom. I woke up on the floor in a puddle of blood, cleaned myself up and went home and called in sick again. Damaged trust isn’t easily forgotten and can put people in ridiculous situations that need not occur.

Trust looks wish-washy from a conservative mind-set, but it’s actually a fiscally powerful incentive.

Mismanagement has a trickle down effect. Board level administration is required to support and enable Ministry dictates, no matter how politically arbitrary, damaging to learning or asinine. School level administration ends up in a frictional relationship with their teachers as a result of this trickle down distrust. The end result is that people tend to duck and cover. It’s difficult to get people to raise their heads out of their classrooms and collaborate on anything because they doubt the veracity of the people who manage them.

“when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves. A Google study similarly found that managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work.”

Trust creates a bond between teacher and student and student and peer. Knowing you’re working with someone who has your best interests are at the centre of what they do makes learning more effective. A teacher who students can’t trust is a poor teacher. Students don’t know what to expect or what is expected from them. A teacher who surprises students with tests, sometimes on material not comprehensively covered in class, is a teacher students shy away from. For the rest of us who are trying to establish a trust relationship with our students in order to empower their learning, these teachers are a cancer on the profession.

When you think about your favorite teacher I doubt it’s because they gave you a high mark, or because they were hard to figure out. Teachers that enable us are honest, direct and help us to exceed our own expectations of ourselves. Trust isn’t a nice idea in those cases, it is the foundation of the entire process. After reading that article, I now realize that trust is actually a mechanical process hard wired into how humans think; it’s the mechanism that makes us so socially powerful.

Enabled, energized people in an organization, be it a board of education or a classroom, want to engage. Engagement is a big buzz word in education right now. It occurs in high trust organizations naturally. If it isn’t happening in your school or classroom look to how you are developing trust to see why it isn’t happening. Demanding engagement is a sure way not to generate any.

“Once employees have been trained, allow them, whenever possible, to manage people and execute projects in their own way. Being trusted to figure things out is a big motivator: A 2014 Citigroup and LinkedIn survey found that nearly half of employees would give up a 20% raise for greater control over how they work.”

I’m at my best in a classroom when I’m able to define goals, ensure students have fundamental skills in place and then give them the time, space, equipment and positive encouragement to figure it out for themselves. This light-handed approach means that when they get something to work they feel that they’ve figured it out themselves. This is very empowering. Another benefit of this light handed approach is that I’m not so focused on talking at everyone that I’m able to see what individual students need to move forward. I’m happiest when a student learns things they weren’t able to do before and feel that they did it themselves. I know I’m important to the process, but students need to feel engaged and enabled in order to own their learning. Trust powers that process.

My school and board is at its best when we have clear, tangible goals and decisions are made transparently and rationally. The more this happens, the more effective these institutions become as places of learning, and the more I trust the people who are leading me. When I trust my leader there is little I won’t do for them because I feel that we’re all working toward the same goal.

Much of this article drills into the neuro-science of trust. We are social animals hard wired to use trust as a means of working effectively together. If we want to best make use of our powerful social habits, building trust is where we should be concentrating our efforts, especially within the entire educational apparatus.

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Really Annoying: Talent Show – Funny 2017 Kia Forte TV Commercial

I’d describe this as not funny at all. This ad is all over TV at the moment and it makes me grind my teeth every time I see it. KIA isn’t the only company pushing the “don’t worry if you’re useless, we’ve made a car that puts you on the road anyway!” sub-text.

From a motorcyclist’s perspective, especially one in you-can’t-lane-split Ontario where I’m expected to wait in a lane as clueless drivers imagining they are on reality TV approach me at killing speed from behind, do these systems work on something as small as a motorbike? This article by Consumer Reports suggests that pedestrian aware systems are distinct from vehicle aware systems. “…Some newer systems can also detect bicyclists.” That’s heart warming.

How long will it be before people, already willing to take my life in their incompetent hands while they take selfies and answer texts that just can’t wait, figure that they don’t need to be competent at driving at all? We’re already close.

I haven’t seen anything in motorcycle media about this, but this is turning into a life or death situation for people on two wheels. Someone with more resources than I needs to see just how big the blind spots are on these systems and then tell motorcyclists how best to be seen by them. Our lives increasingly depend on it.

“Motorcycles are the biggest problem, with systems detecting them a full 26% later than other vehicle types, and this with motorcycles already being the hardest motor vehicles on the road to see…” http://ift.tt/1Gu8Ng8

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Replacing Plastic Fuel Fittings: that was a pain in the ass

Well, that was a pain in the ass. It began well enough. Removing the metal clips from the plastic fittings was pretty straightforward. Push the pin in and then gently tease them apart and you don’t have springs flying everywhere. I’m a bit confused as to why I needed to save the bits as the new fittings come with clips, but I’ll hang on to them anyway.

Following the directions online, I next took out the lower plastic fuel fitting in about thirty seconds. The upper one (that leaks) immediately broke (I suspect it already was) and proceeded to spectacularly fall apart. I spent the next two hours with a hot pick pulling bits of brittle plastic out of the metal fuel tank threads. It turned into tedious dental surgery rather than a quick repair.

With the plate now clear of detritus, I should be able to install the new metal fittings and resolve my leaking fuel tank once and for all. Since I have to remove the tank to pretty much do any engine maintenance at all, this fix will make the Tiger maintainable again.

With the fuel tank fittings sorted I’ll next be doing the fork oil (never done that before), change the plugs and do a coolant flush (which requires multiple fuel tank removals). The Tiger will be fit should spring ever arrive.

Online Notes on Fuel Fitting thread sealant:
What to use for fuel fitting thread sealant:
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Don’t use teflon tape for fuel fittings!
http://ift.tt/2iA2FAX
These guys make it:
http://ift.tt/2iuLGwL
It’s available locally:
http://ift.tt/2izXotl

The metal plate the fuel pump is connected to on the gas tank has a couple of plastic fuel fittings screwed into it. The top one is leaking and was a pain in the ass to get out, the bottom one came right out easily.

The plastic male ends go into plastic female ends in a metal fuel pump plate. Shortly it’ll all be stainless steel.

Getting it that clean took some patience.

The big, orange Triumph Tiger in maintenance mode – the battery pack is on the back to raise the front wheel off the ground for the coming fork oil change.

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Scotland and Shetland On Two Wheels

Another piece of fantasy trip planning so I’m ready to go when I become pointlessly rich… this time Scotland and into the North Sea!

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Two days on the mainland working our way north to the ferry port in Thurso…

TWO WEEKS: SCOTLAND AND INTO THE NORTH SEA

Day 1: Ediburgh to Inverbroom Lodge
Day 2: Inverbroom Lodge to Thurso
Day 3: Ferry to Orknies
Day 4: Orkneys day 2
Day 5: Ferry to Shetlands
Day 6-10: Shetlands
Day 11: Ferry back to Aberdeen
Day 12: Aberdeen to Edinburgh
Day 13: Edinburgh

FERRY INFORMATION

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Thurso to Orkney Islands: 90 minute crossing: £112

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Kirkwall, Orkney Islands to Shetlands: 7 hour crossing: £225

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Shetlands to Aberdeen: 12 hour crossing: £289

ORKNEY ISLANDS

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Two nights and two full days on the Orkney Islands… Scara Brae!

SHETLAND ISLANDS

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The whole thing on Furkot:

Journey To The End of the Earth

Two weeks beyond John O’Groats…

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Institutionalizing Success and Teaching Millenials

This was shared online this week and it prompts some thinking about how we deal with the generation we teach.

Simon Sinek

Four social circumstances that have millennials struggling:

1) Failed parenting strategies include children being told they are special and can do whatever they want just because they want it. They have won awards their entire lives for simply showing up. This award inflation devalues excellence and embarrasses the failures these children experience. They’ve learned not to strive for excellence because it doesn’t matter.
2) Technology: Millennials are surrounded by filtered social media where everyone appears to have it figured out and puts on a good face. On top of that they have the same relationship with social media as a gambling addict has with a casino, except this addiction is only ever a touch away.
3) Impatience: They want to reach the summit and have a ‘big impact’ but are unaware that the summit lies at the top of a mountain. Is this related to number one?
4) Environment: Companies (and schools?) should be rebuilding the confidence and resilience of this generation by reconnecting them to personal relationships and long term goals. This means stepping up to combat number 1, something that most school administration really isn’t willing to do.

Now imagine standing in front of thirty one of them.

I’ve struggled with the vagaries of the millennial mindset in the classroom many times over the past few years. From the grade inflation of risk averse learners and five-ohs to the complaints of industry, I’m familiar with the millennial challenges Sinek refers to in his interview above.

Battling these frankly bewildering and fictionally driven parenting strategies seems to be a lost cause for most educators. Since banks and multi-nationals decided to burn the economy down and caused years of austerity, education (and governments in general) have taken on business-think in an unprecedented manner (some kind of Stockholm syndrome?). The modern approach seems to be ‘the customer is always right even if they have no idea what they’re doing’. Rather than expecting competence on the part of the student I often find myself defending a failing grade from a student who has never completed any work at grade level and has missed weeks and weeks of class. Parents don’t want to hear that their child is incapable and they certainly don’t want to accept responsibility for that incompetence. Their only goal seems to be finding ways to blame anything else.

We’re not doing a lot of either these days.

Technology is another place where education has thrown in the towel. Students can do whatever they want with their devices. Any attempt to redirect a student away from inappropriate technology use is wasted as these devices are now considered to be a constitutional right. It isn’t uncommon for me to ask a student to focus on what we’re doing and have them tell me they are in the middle of a text conversation with their parents which is obviously much more important than whatever’s happening in class. They’re probably planning a two week absence from school for a holiday – another exciting new millennial parenting tactic that would have been foreign to my parent’s way of thinking. Sinek’s no smartphones in a meeting rule wouldn’t fly in a modern classroom. You can’t helicopter parent without the tether.

How education is becoming less able
to manage these dangers we face.

Patience isn’t lost in all students but even the most capable are dwindling in attention duration. At the beginning of our last unit I showed exemplars of previous projects done over the past few years. The top student in my class asked, “are people getting dumber and dumber?” Good question. They certainly seem to be less and less capable of developing skills complex enough to tackle curriculum level theory and practice. Perhaps if they weren’t taking weeks of unexplained absences and holidays during the semester things would be better. Perhaps if they were expected to attempt all course work to the best of their abilities skill-sets wouldn’t be deteriorating.

In modern high schools students take the courses they want, not the ones they are capable of. Students who fail advanced courses get a variety of options to regain the credit and are seen at the same level next year regardless of how little they’ve proven they can do. Parents demand access to advanced classes for students who barely find time to attend school and are unwilling to actually do anything. If I fail anyone I have to justify the failure, not so the absent, incompetent student. Even trying to offer a range of courses doesn’t work because everyone is an academic all-star who should be getting the most advanced credits.

The complaint from people in post secondary education and the work place is that we’re producing graduates incapable of working effectively in the ‘real world’. Sinek’s comments go straight to this. Any absence or student failure isn’t an administrative issue; the system won’t even address it. There used to be a limit on unexplained absences and then a student was kicked out of a course, that doesn’t happen any more. There used to be criteria for failing late work, that doesn’t happen any more. There used to be requirements for staying within an academic stream, now it’s do whatever you want. When a student is absent or obtuse teachers are told to contact the parents who caused the situation in the first place and work it out. In Ontario this approach has been institutionalized using laws like school until eighteen no-matter-what. By keeping students in school at all costs we’ve effectively removed anywhere to drop out to. With no bottom to fall through, graduation rates are on the rise! We’ve effectively institutionalized failed parenting strategy number one: everyone is a winner!

The internet is full of memes that suggest the approach we’re taking isn’t helping.

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Daydreaming: Winter Road Trip to New Orleans & Key West

It’s an 11 hour drive down to Knoxville, Tennessee from here. If I took the bike that far south in a van to dodge the snowline, I could then do this!

With two weeks off over Christmas it’d break down like this:

Dec 24th: (van) Elora to Knoxville in the van 1147kms
Dec 25th: Knoxville to Talledega 271 miles the interesting way
Dec 26th: Talledega to New Orleans 420 miles
Dec 27th: New Orleans!
Dec 28th: New Orleans!
Dec 29th: New Orleans to Panama City 304 miles
Dec 30th: Panama City to Tampa 339 miles
Dec 31st: Tampa to Miami 252 miles
Jan 1st: Miami!
Jan 2nd: Miami to Key West to Miami 155 miles there and back
Jan 3rd: Miami to Jacksonville via Daytona Beach 346 miles
Jan 5th: Jacksonville to Greenville 388 miles
Jan 6th: Greenville to Knoxville 212 miles via Deals Gap
Jan 6th: (van) Knoxville to Dayton 304 miles 1/2 day
Jan 7th: (van) Dayton to Elora 410 miles home mid-afternoon
Jan 8th: chill out day before going back to work

Van mileage: 2300kms / 1440 miles
Bile mileage: 4500kms / 2812 miles

I could probably arrange with our Knoxville hotel to park the van somewhere safe and then head south on two wheels. The Tiger could totally handle the job one or two up, but there would be more specialized tools I’d select if given a choice from the new 2017 bikes:

One Up 2017 Minimalist Bike Choice

Kawasaki’s new Z900 looks like a lovely, light weight device to explore some corners with. It’s an upright bike that would be easy to sit on for long periods of time. It’s a minimal machine but that would be ideal for riding into the sub tropical climates down there.

It’s a brand new machine but the Z650 it shares parts with already has some luggage bits that might work. Keeping with the minimalist vibe, I’d try and do the whole 3000 mile / two week odyssey using only those two expandable panniers. If I have to expand half way through I could always throw a tie down duffel bag on the back seat.

One Up 2017 not-remotely minimalist Bike Choice

The opposite of the tiny, lithe, naked Z900 is the absurd, over the top and abundantly present Moto Guzzi MGX-21 Flying Fortress. It comes with its own panniers so that’s not a worry. It’s also the kind of bike that would swallow many high mileage days in a row without batting an eyelash. And it’s so pretty.

Two Up Touring Preference

A large, comfortable bike that Max and I could ride the southern triangle on would be the goal here. My default is always a Kawasaki Concours 14. We rented a last gen model last year in Arizona and it was a rocket ship that was also big and comfortable for both of us. The fact that it comes in candy imperial blue this year only encourages me to put it back at the top of the list again.

A more touring focused choice would be the Goldwing F6B which is a more stripped down version of the full on bells and whistles Goldwing. It’s a big, comfortable bike that is surprisingly nimble for what it is and comes with built in panniers. It’d cover the miles with ease while keeping us both in excellent shape for when we arrived at each stop.

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Naked ZG1000 Custom Inspiration

Some Andy Warhol-esque ZG1K shapes to get a feel for what the bike will look like:

I’m still thinking purple with asymmetrical gold racing stripes, but that might change again.

Cardboard cutouts of the side panels I need have gone to the metal shop. I’m going to prototype some 3d models on the printer at work and see what various shapes look like before doing the final cuts in metal for the rear section.

While that’s going on I’ve got to get the front cowling figured out, which is what led to the video…

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