Bike porn

So like many cyclists out there I have on occasion classified bicycles as sexy. Given the aesthetics of their designs, high quality paint jobs and styling it’s not hard to see why they can come to be viewed as sexy. Of course I am limiting this description to the higher end bicycles. I’ll admit it, the bicycles that you can pick up from Walmart or any general sporting good store are just a bit too “plane Jane” for my tastes, in some cases I may go so far as to call them rather homely. For me the epitome of a sexy bike is any of the race ready bikes that you can find; the curved lines, exotic materials and choice components just make them look fast standing still.

Now every year most bicycle magazines do a “buyers guide,” which for most cyclists is really nothing more than pornography, and we’ll admit it. Now I should note that the mailed catalogues that we all get are nowhere near the level of pornography of the “buyers guides.” Sure, the catalogues may have the occasional rare beauty, but mostly they are similar to sleazy pulp porn; grainy images, nowhere near the quality of the “buyers guides” and rounded out with plenty of “fetish” accessories for you to chose from. The “buyers guides” on the other hand are the Playboys of the cycling world. With glossy, full-page spreads with pictures from all the flattering angles and even close-ups on some of the sexiest curves the comparisons are easy to make. They even go so far as giving “bios” of the bikes with their measurements and characteristics: ...with 3.5 lbs. frame weight and geometry that just begs you to hug every curve of the road at speed…

So with all that I can almost understand how a guy in Scotland came to be caught having sex with his bike. However I have never, and I cannot stress this enough, I have NEVER, tried to have sex with my bicycle. That’s just taking things too far...but if I ever did try I certainly wouldn’t do it in a hostel, though maybe he had one of those homely bikes, after all a relationship like that should be kept as private as possible.

Teaching enthusiasm

So this whole teaching thing really is taking over my life. It’s stunning how much time you need to put into getting the material ready for what turns out to be all of one hour and fifteen minutes of class. It’s also really interesting to see how the enthusiasm I show for a subject changes the students reception of the material.

This past week has been exemplary in that regard. I’ve been teaching electrochemistry. Electrochemistry sucks. I hate electrochemistry. I’m convinced that electrochemists don’t really know what they are doing, but it’s too confusing to anyone else to figure out that they are just doing a lot of hand-waving so we just let them get away with it. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I wasn’t really chipper about having to teach my students how to do electrochemical analysis.

What I notice on Tuesday though was that my students were just dead. I knew that I was sucking it big time with my presentation of the material and I felt pretty bland but I never expected them to be even further out of it. It really took me a day or so to realize that the problem wasn’t the material itself, it was my presentation. I had gone into it with dread rather than being excited to present the work and they seemed to sense that.

So for Thursday’s class I decided I needed to pick things up a bit. After all, I can’t really stand being stuck in front of 30 bored people for that long every day. So since we were dealing with redox chemistry I decided to try and find a neat reaction that I could use to intro the subject and at least grab some of their attention. Well, after thinking about it for a bit I realized that one of my favorite reactions is a redox reaction. The combustion reaction of thermite is technically an oxidation and a reduction, but the really cool part is that it become flaming liquid metal. I actually had a couple of pictures from some fun I had camping back in grad school, but here’s a video of some Brits playing with the stuff:


Now if only I could do demos like that in the classroom without causing the building to be evacuate my class would surely be the most popular one on campus.

Shut up brain!

So last night Deirdre and I rented the new Transformers movie. Yeah, I’m sure most of you saw it in theaters, but we were rather busy moving across the country this summer so give us a break. Anyway, we decided to pick it up because it would be an entertaining movie and to be honest, rather brainless. At least that’s what I expected. I really need to learn how to turn my brain off when watching action/sci-fi movies, but I just can’t seem to do it.

As you may imagine, I was able to notice many blatant scientific/technical mistakes. At this point I really should point out how great Deirdre is at me pointing out all the stupid mistakes. And she gets into it too, like pointing out that the NSA computer specialist had an Australian accent rivaled only by Paul Hogan. Or that after showing the White House and the Pentagon the text at the bottom of the screen pointed out that we were in Washington D.C.

Now being the science nerd that I am I tend to focus more on the technical errors that they make. That and the wonderfully insightful scripts that are just a litany of scientific buzz words strung together to sound good but say literally less than nothing.

But I think the one that really got me the most, even more than somehow having a PC magically communicate with a short-wave radio, was the explanation of the sighting of a Transformer on Mars. That part I didn’t care too much about, what just annoyed me was that they claimed that NASA got he signal from Beagle 2. Anyone see the error there? Sure, it’s cool that they were actually able to get the name of a Mars rover right, even on that failed, so kudos on that level. The only problem is that Beagle 2 (named in homage to the British ship that carried Darwin - The Beagle) was a British satellite, launched by the ESA.

You would think that if they were going to go to the trouble of informing us that Qatar is in the Middle East and that the Pentagon is in D.C. maybe they could just pick one of the many NASA made Martian exploration vehicles that failed to use as a plot device. But then again, maybe I should just shut up and enjoy the movie for what it is. If only I could figure out how to get my brain to just stop being so analytical

Back to work update

So things got back to normal this week. The fires are still burning of course, they are simply contained. That's always been one of those things that just kind of surprises me. With a forest fire you don't even try to put the whole thing out, just let it burn and make sure it doesn't spread. But then again I guess it really isn't practical, or even feasible, to put out a fire that's hundreds of thousands of hectares. Incidentally, a single hectare is 10,000 square meters, though that sounds big, that's really only about the size of two football fields placed side by side. So, I guess several hundred thousand football fields worth of land being on fire is a pretty big fire, but it's really just hard to grasp the magnitude of the area.

So this past week classes got back to normal and it seems like just about everyone that I know of at the university didn't lose their homes or anything like that. It was kind of odd getting into San Diego again, I somewhat expected it to be still very smoky or at least smelling of smoke, yet there really didn't seem to be any evidence of the fire anywhere along my route to work. For all I could tell there never had been a situation in the area in the first place.

The other thing that happened of course was that everyone lost a week worth of classes. I remember when this happened to me as an undergrad, we really didn't care at all. That is until the university decided to cancel spring break so that the profs could have enough time to teach their material. Of course I was pissed with that. Now as I prof I've learned that we won't be extending the semester or changing the schedules at all. We just have to suck up the lost time and cram more teaching into the little time left. So yet again I'm screwed by the administration, I really don't think I'm ever going to get what I want from them anytime soon.