Can’t Fool Gravely Baked
If my title looks like a secret message, that is because it is an anagram, or to verb the noun, “…to form the letters of a text into a secret message by rearranging them” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/anagram). Hint: It is a perfectly appropriate title for the first activity described in this Blog post. I’ll decrypt it for you at the end, if you haven’t already worked it out. Don’t peek! The second part of this post is more about the Zen (i.e., Physics) of Bicycling, my penultimate installment, on rotating tires as gyroscopes and why steering bicycles and motorcycles is so counter–intuitive. It’s all about angular momentum, torque, and precession, Hahahahahahaha! It is difficult to convey the gestalt of the evil laugh when constrained by the written word.
What Up, Dog?
I’ve been riding regularly lately, and recently I’ve been recording them on the Strava App, which uses the GPS on my phone and is linked to my Great Cycle Challenge page. You can see my more recent rides here on my Strava page, where I am also following my GCC Team Leader, Mike McIntyre.
Mike has racked up over 700 miles and expects to exceed 1000 miles by the end of this month. I am up to over 200 miles since I started riding less than one month ago, and if I put in one typical 20–mile ride every other day, I’ll go over 400 miles by the end of the month.
And now, it is my heartfelt hope that others will join the two generous donors who have already contributed to my fundraising effort for research into Childhood Cancers. You can donate on my GCC page. As I said, I have ridden over 200 miles to date, which shatters the modest goal of 75 miles I set for myself when I took up the Challenge. I had no idea I would be able to do so, or even more, that I would enjoy it LOL. But I have raised only $125 toward what I thought was also a modest goal of $500. If you are able and so inclined, please donate whatever you can toward defeating these pernicious diseases. Kids should be living their lives, not fighting for them, and every life saved is precious beyond measure.
The Rides
My two most recent ones have been on the Schuykill River Trail, which runs from the Art Museum in Philly up past Valley Forge National Historic Park and Oaks, out U.S. 422, then takes a bend and joins up with the Perkiomen River Trail. I may have mentioned this previously, but I am involved in the startup of the new member–owned King of Prussia Bridge Club. I’m only teaching Mondays and Wednesdays at the College this semester, and the other days on which there is a bridge game I have been showing up a few hours before the game, playing in it, and staying a little more afterward. I’m the IT guru of sorts, and I’ve been doing a lot of work on the KOPBC WebSite and the software we use to run the game, which I am migrating from a very old desktop machine to a newer donated laptop.
Anyhoo, we are very close to Conshohocken, so when I get done at the Club I drive over to the bottom of Harry St. just over the river, where I can park in a big office building lot, take the bike off the SUV rack, and get right on the Schuykill River Trail, so convenient. I then have been heading West toward Valley Forge, and that is where the last two rides have been. On the first, I failed to take the trail where it branches off just past the U.S. 422 overpass, and I wound up going all the way up to Oaks. Yesterday on the second ride, I took the correct branch and made it up into the Park as intended. Both rides are recorded on Strava and GCC, and they were relatively routine so I won’t say more, other than to include this pic of the route (pronounced “root” not “rout”, as “root” is a noun, a path taken to a destination, while “rout” is a verb, as in “the aircraft was re–routed around the bad weather”.) Just saying. Again. For the fourth time.
There is a Season, Turn, Turn, Turn
Pete Seeger actually wrote the song in in the late 1950s, and it was first recorded in 1959. It wasn’t until 1965 that the Byrd’s cover of the song turned it into an instant international hit. The lyrics are taken almost verbatim from Ecclesiastes 3. The words are well known to many but perhaps not all that well known with respect to their origin. At any rate, the Turn Turn Turning I want to discuss is that of bicycle and motorcycle tires, and the Physics of why turning left or right on one of these machines seems familiar to those who ride them, yet profoundly unfamiliar when you peek beneath the hood, so to speak.
I’m going to go ahead and post this now, but come back later, alligator, in a while crocodile, as I will continue with that peek in a subsequent post. Oh yeah! The anagram! Hahahahahahaha!!
All the best,
From Broomall, PA, on Saturday 10/09 at 8:50 AM.
Rex
