Further to yesterday’s post about atonement, it included the following AI-generated image:
People find AI frightening and dystopian, but I think it would be a lot less intimidating if we simply referred to it as Fausse Intelligence.
Though no matter what you call it this guy lurking in the crowd is going to haunt my dreams forever:
I’m pretty sure I met that guy in Portland with Stevil in like 2009.
Also haunting my dreams in an “Out, damned spot” type of way is this faint stain on the bike path, which you’ll see in the lower right of the photo below:
That’s liquid SPOG, and it’s now been there for nine (9) months, though blizzards, flash floods, heatwaves, and everything else Mother Nature has thrown at it.
Here it is from back when it was fresh:
And yes, that’s the same stain, you’re just looking at it from the opposite direction
Here is the puncture that caused it:
And while the glass that caused that puncture is long gone, fortunately the drunks who hang out on the bike path are constantly replenishing it, and there were plenty of fresh shards as of yesterday:
Fortunately, the farther from the city you get the less glass you encounter, though you’re increasingly likely to encounter obstructions of the ungulate variety:
So it would…
…
…
Wait for it…
…
…
…be-HOOVE you to be careful.
Speaking of SPOG, I eventually sold the PRJCT GRVL bike in April:
I enjoyed my time with it, but the Roadini is sufficiently gravel-able for my needs while also being better suited to all the non-gravel (or I suppose technically processed gravel) roads in between, as well as being generally attuned to my mechanical sensibilities:
It also has a front derailleur, a component we all know is on “borrowed time:”
Why? Because it creates excessive “cognitive load,” which is a polite way of saying it’s too much of a strain on the modern rider’s feeble intellect:
But there’s also another advantage. Cognitive load is the unspoken piece that actually created change on gravel, and it’s not always something people think about. Unlike gravel, on a road ride it’s easy to look at the cassette, or your computer, and manage what gear you are in. Modern groupsets can also, in theory, handle cross-chaining without too much complaint. That leaves it as merely a question of marginal gains. It might be easy enough to deal with a front chainring but what if you didn’t have to? Up or down, easy or hard, that’s it. There is no cross-chaining, just decide what change you want at any moment during a ride. That’s an advantage.
Oh please. “Cognitive load?” This is just a load. If you can handle having more than one light switch in your home you can handle front and rear shifting. If we took this same approach to interior lighting you’d just have a single dimmer that controlled every light in the entire house.
But it’s not just the high cognitive load tripping the circuit in the modern Fred’s brain. It also “isn’t practical:”
The problem is that accessing those extra gears isn’t practical. The first issue is that no one jumps around between the front chainrings to optimize cadence. When you ride a bike, you generally stick to the large chainring and you shift across the cassette. At a certain point, you change from the big front to the small front and you continue the progression…
I’m sorry WHAT? You don’t shift front chainrings to “optimize cadence?” Of course you do, which is why 1x systems can be so annoying on the road. Here’s how it works: you get to a hill, you drop into the little ring, you climb to the top, you shift back up into the big ring. This is way more “practical” than shifting across an entire 12-cog (or 13, is that where we are now?) cassette. I mean yes, I get that we’re now in the electronic age, and you can just press and hold your “blip” like a preschooler smashing the like button on a Baby Shark video, but still, being able to make that jump when you need to is way more efficient than the (LOL) 1.4-watt savings you get from ditching a front derailleur according to the article. Plus, any Fred worth his PNS jersey is using a front derailleur fairing anyway:
So wait. A front derailleur adds 1.4 watts, but a front derailleur fairing saves 5.8 watts? If five gets ya ten, ten’ll get ya twenty. I love Fred math!
But objectively speaking he’s absolutely right, and the front derailleur is most definitely on borrowed time, because there’s no way they’ll let something so simple and effective stick around.