Rat Races, Paradoxes, and Other Stuff I Don’t Quite Know What Else To Do With
A Year-End Collection of Assorted Drivel
Audio version (30:53), reader - Mr. Subjective
“Riding makes every trip a bit of an adventure.” - Mr. Subjective
Several years ago a couple of my co-workers encouraged me to start writing an Aerostich blog. This was about when we did the Zero Below Zero project during the winter of 2015-16. Here’s a collection of random topics from the past year which for one reason or another were not appended to one of our regular email offers. If you’ve read some of my blogging efforts over the past year, thank you. Happy Holidays from all of us here. We wish you and yours a good new year, with lots of riding.
– “Mr. Subjective" 12-2023
Shiny Stainless Reflections
On December 8th of this year (2023), a week or so after the initial release of the Tesla Cybertruck, Road & Track magazine’s Victoria Scott wrote a wonderful short essay that included this:
“…our vehicles reflect (widespread cultural) anxieties. More than half of vehicles sold today in America are trucks and SUVs; this fueled a new all-time high for the average weight of a new passenger vehicle in 2022, which hit a staggering 4329 pounds. Pickup buyers, more frequently than other types of vehicle owners, say they enjoy their trucks because they are “powerful” and “rugged”. Most new vehicle buyers rate vehicle safety as a top priority in their purchases, and larger vehicles are indeed safer for occupants than small ones (although they have vastly more negative externalities, such as tire particulates and dead pedestrians).”
Totally Rideable
After I made the youthful transition from pedal-bicycling to motorcycling I’d often find myself daydreaming about riding motorcycles. Almost anything could trigger a lapse from reality into moto-fantasizing. The moment I’d obtained my driver’s license and a small license-plated moto I was out exploring my local world by simply wandering around looking for interesting trails to explore, obstacles to overcome, and hills to climb. Even when not actually riding it was hard to be in the natural world without silently visualizing, evaluating, and projecting its ridable potential. Didn’t matter if the passing landscape was a smoothly mowed manicured residential lawn, a golf course or park, an overgrown dense forest, or a steep rough, rocky slope.
I’d be sitting in the rear seat of my parent’s car going somewhere just looking out the side window daydreaming and constantly calculating what riding ‘there’, and ‘there’, and ‘there’ would be like. Suddenly I’d see a gap in the passing scenery which suggested a route and think: “That is totally rideable.” A few moments later I might spy a forest with a relatively open understory and I’d look into the gaps and tell myself this forest was “totally rideable”.
Not Another Paradox
We humans have spent the last few hundred years very earnestly, carefully, and diligently building a world where it is ever easier to move about efficiently, comfortably, and conveniently in order to obtain all of the things we want or need. From groceries to manila envelopes to lipstick to health care to haircuts, to you-name-it, everything we seem to require or desire has become ever more interconnected via a superbly organized carefully constructed highly engineered system of roads, rails, and other mobility augmentation technologies. Including ever-improving motorcycles and rider’s gear. After centuries of work and an incalculably large investment, getting stuff and going places has never been easier, safer, and more comfortable. But in this pursuit maybe we’re about to be like the proverbial dog that chases passing cars until one day finally catching one and is bewildered because it doesn’t know what to do with it. If the car had been a rabbit, and the dog had been a wolf, it would be a meal. But those days for dogs are long gone.
A Funny Science Experiment
This link is to a write-up of a very funny science experiment. Back in 2014, someone wondered what would happen if a hamster wheel was placed in a forest. Would wild mice use it? And if they did, why? I only fast-scanned this. I’ll spare you the effort: If you place a hamster wheel in the forest, wild mice will run on it when nobody is around. The scientists who set up this experiment are not sure why.
ICE vs. Electric
These days lots of people are thinking about the future of ICEs (Internal Combustion Engines) vs ‘electrics’ and are trying to make realistic projections about various things related to the widely anticipated transition. One personal thought experiment involves today's excellent electric fireplace inserts, which provide both room heat and a highly realistic simulacrum of a traditional fire.
Managing combustion is so old within us it may have become partly encoded in our human DNA. I recently read about an experiment done by scientists in the UK which slightly bears on this. They wanted to find out if wild mice in a forest would use a randomly encountered hamster wheel. They do, which means this behavior is something deep within the neural architecture and chemistry of field mouse brains. Aside from questioning how those scientists obtained the funding to do this crazy experiment in the first place, it probably usefully informs lots of other kinds of mammalian things like, for example, why we enjoy riding motorcycles, making and hearing music, dancing, why we seem drawn to fire, why some run for recreation and why dogs put their head out the window of a moving car.
By The Numbers
Based on over 140 years of record keeping, today, January 17th (2023), is supposed to be the coldest day of the year in Duluth. I think the average low temperature here on this day is something like minus two (ºf) and the average daily high is nineteen. Instead, what we actually got was a high of 37º under dark cloudy skies. This after an unusual two-day steady and sometimes hard mid-winter rainfall which cut our five feet of already fallen snow down by at least half.
A Quirky Video
This morning (March 29, 2023) I watched this sort of tedious and longish educational video about traffic problems in the largest city in the Bahamas. Enjoyed it enough to think maybe you’ll find it interesting as well, if you have the time...
What is Technology?
Technology is our creation and the resulting array of physical things that are useful. There are two types of technology: Physical and metaphysical. Physical technologies are things like making a fire, doing agriculture and husbandry, and making tools and buildings and machines. Metaphysical technologies are ideas and beliefs. Things like (for example) religions, which are useful for raising good children and dealing with the forever unknowable vastness and neutrality of the universe. Mathematics is a kind of bridge between the realm of physical and metaphysical technologies. What is Morality? The creation and application of metaphysical technologies.
Happy New Year, 2024! Let's hope it's a good one.
- Mr. Subjective, 12-28-2023
PS – A note about blogging and vlogging. I have some good help. I never thought of myself as a blogger or a vlogger (video blogger) but these days print catalogs are largely obsolete and everyone does business online, so I have been forced to adapt. Still, I miss the challenges and fun of making print catalogs. Now that Aerostich’s pioneering recipe for modern rider gear has gone worldwide via many others, one way for us to differentiate our brand and ideas (simplicity, non-fashion, many sizes, etc) from all the other constantly “new and improved” (mostly marketing BS) gear is to tell stories by blogging and vlogging, in the hope that our audience will find us and our products and service more appealing than someone else’s. This is working, in the sense that we are stable in our niche but most recreational riders are vulnerable to the marketing claims of "new and improved”. And again, we are grateful to be where we are. Apart from most of that. Despite developing/designing many rider-gear products, I’ve never been a “new and improved” person. Last week I was grocery shopping and picked up a bag of my favorite chips (blue corn chips) which I’d been buying for many years. The bag read “Now even better tasting!” and I silently wondered if I had been eating bad-tasting chips all these years without realizing it, and regardless of that, I was perfectly happy with the way the chips tasted before. Marketing is ridiculous. People are so vulnerable to techniques like this. If you have read all of this, you know marketing. You know this.