posts per month to this blog

This year I went through a bit of a slump in posting to this blog: I was involved in a coding project which in the end turned out to be essentially unsuccessful since I had issues with dealing with the Strava API I was unable to resolve, and other priorities took over. In any case, I still had things I wanted to say here, so went back to posting after the slump.

Here's my accumulated posts each year, by month, since I started way back in 2008:
posting per month

I'm never sure for how long I'll go on with this, but I find it personally valuable to go back and see what my perceptions and feelings were at various points in the past. For example, 2008 was when I first started running after a long, long delay, and I like going back and reading race reports I posted then. Or I refer to equations I derived relating factors such as mass, aerodynamics, and rolling resistance to cycling speed.

I'll stick to it to some degree as long as I find it valuable. Facebook and Twitter, which have largely replaced blogging as an activity, don't do this nearly as well.

Comments

NadiaMac said…
I like your blog :)
November 26, 2012 at 5:28 PM
djconnel said…
Well, I like your blog, too! (hint, hint)
November 26, 2012 at 5:31 PM
Dirk dB said…
If it helps, I find your blog really valuable. I fondly remember the analyses/speculation of the Metrigear Vector days, and I've also used one or two race reports of yours to get an idea of what I was getting myself into.

Not much like this on Facebook/Twitter, and forum threads (where good information can sometimes be found as well) are often deeply buried in obscurity, so I'd say there's a place for blogs.

(easy for me to say, when my own activities are currently fairly dormant)
November 27, 2012 at 2:34 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i...
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over...
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc...
Read more