On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

[b]Comment:[/b] The following post is in error. The geometry chart on the Cannondale site is still the 2015 bikes. Bikerumor had an article where they described geometry changes for 2016, including adjustments to stack-reach in small and large sizes, and a general drop in bottom brackets consistent with the trend to wider, deeper tires. I'll post a follow-up post when I get the geometry chart for 2016. Cannondale just announced it's 2016 Evo . There's been a flurry of really attractive new bikes announced this year, including the new Madone 9 from Trek, the incredible Venge ViAS from Specialized, and the new Scott F02 update to the Foil. A common feature of all of these is increased focus on aerodynamics and comfort. Aerodynamics isn't new, with bikes going back to the Kestrel Talon and Cervelo Soloist Carbon examples of carbon frames designed for aerodynamic efficiency. However, the bikes have never been as popular as was predicted because in the end riders lik...

SCRainmaker has a "hands-on" (as opposed to an "in-depth" review; still way more in-depth than any other reviews on the web) of the new Garmin Edge 20 and 25. These are, finally , Garmin addressing the simpler/lighter-is-better market for GPS. On bikes, a huge amount of attention and money is directed towards minimizing weight. The best way to minimize weight of a GPS unit is to ride without a GPS unit. But the prominence of social networking website Strava has increased the value of GPS data. So for many, GPS has become a virtual requirement. What's the point of riding if you can't get kudos? Yet despite big push for lighter bikes, and with real estate on the handlebars and stem so limited, Garmin has seemingly ignored the value of lighter-and-simpler-and-smaller by producing a series of increasingly complex, heavy, and bulky GPS units. The Edge 500 came out more than a half-decade ago, and yet it has remained the lightest and most compact unit pro...

The Golden State Warriors lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers in basketball last night. They're now down 2-1 in the series. The first team to win 4 is the champion. I don't care about basketball but there's one thing I like about the game and that's that scores generally increase relatively at random (I hope -- I hope the near miraculous comeback yesterday from a 17-point deficit after three quarters wasn't programmed), and that games are won to some degree seemingly at random. I like random. As an aside, I do find it remarkable in basketball how often a team with a big deficit claws its way back only to lose in the end by a small margin. I'd like to see a statistical analysis of this. A huge amount of money is at stake for games not being a total blow-out. I do wonder at this. Basketball has long seemed to me to be more about the show and less about a fair contest. And that makes it very difficult for me to care about the result. But this is an aside. As...

First I saw it on the UCI list of approved frames for June , then I saw a teaser video posted to the Trek website , and then this uncredited photo was posted to the Weight Weenies forum: My that looks fast. Maybe it's the color, but it reminds me of the Canyon Aerooad. The Canyon has done rather well in the tunnel, not in the class of the Cervélo S5, but fairly good. See for example Tour magazine data here . So I expect the Trek will be at least this good. But then there's weight. The Madone 7 was quite light with the vapor coat -- under 800 grams. But then the Emonda came out, pushing that lower, but there's only so far you can go below that. So the Madone was a bike of compromise. Now they want you to buy two bikes: the lightweight Emonda and the "aero" Madone. So the pressure's off on weight. But I wonder how they did. Nothing on this one looks particularly heavy. From what I see I really like it. The days of bad-riding aero frames are over...

I looked at how grade variability affected average power when climbing a hill. Honestly I thought the result was going to be larger, but the reality was it was a relatively minor effect. When the hill is very gradual, for example 1%, variations in grade of a certain fraction have little effect on speed. When the hill is very steep variations in grade are more significant, but since they increase power only via wind resistance, and wind resistance is relatively unimportant (assuming still air), again variations in grade have little effect. It's only important in the middle ground where speeds are high enough that wind resistance is relatively important but where grade variations have a relatively large influence on speed. A virtually equivalent logic applies to rolling resistance variation. A variation in rolling resistance about an average value (averaged over distance) will have the same effect as a variation in grade by the same absolute amount. So the effect of variabilit...

I've looked at this matter before, but one factor which I've seen continually neglected in all of the climbing power analysis estimates is the effect of grade variability. Road grade on climbs is almost never constant: it varies about a mean in some fashion. Yet the estimates are almost always done assuming constant speed, constant power. Now these estimates end up remarkably accurate anyway. Why? Because the grade variability effect is negligible? Well, no. It's because you're canceling one mistake with another. For example, you neglect grade variability, which always increases power, but you also neglect drafting, which always decreases power. How does grade variability increase power? It's because grade variability typically results in speed variability and speed variability yields variability results in variability in wind resistance and wind resistance, by virtue of being superlinear, is increased more by increases in speed than it is decreased by d...

Watching the Astana supremacy in the final kilometers of today's stage at the Giro gave me an idea... The biopassport is based on the assertion that there is a statistical uncertainty in testing values. But the more data you have, the tighter the bounds which can be set under a given threshold of certainty. If you're examining data from 8 riders in a batch, while any one of them may exhibit variations consistent with normal variation, if they exhibit correlated variations then that becomes less consistent with random chance. So does it make sense to apply testing protocols to teams as a whole in addition to individual riders? If the team fails analysis while each individual on a team passes, do you eliminate the whole team from the race? It seems a promising idea. No two-year bans, of course:, that would be unfair to individual riders, but disqualification from a race, at least. The key is you're introducing an additional source of variation in addition to tempora...