ERA journal rankings ditched!

[OFF-TOPIC] "There is clear and consistent evidence that the [ERA journal] rankings were being deployed inappropriately within some quarters of the sector, in ways that could produce harmful outcomes, and based on a poor understanding of the actual role of the rankings. One common example was the setting of targets for publication in A and A* journals by institutional research managers." - Senator the Honourable Kim Carr.

Really? Let me count the ways. And it took how long and how many dollars to be squandered in order to figure that out? For crying out loud. The only thing worse than the presence of the rankings was their application as a means to gain quantitative measures of research quality. To some very small extent my faith that commonsense sometimes prevails has been vindicated. Of course I am not so naive as to believe that this system won't be replaced by something more insidious. But until then...
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the chickpea and the stone

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I was enjoying some chickpeas when, CRUNCH. Ouch. That hurt. I bit into a stone that had somehow infiltrated my lunch!

Years have passed since that incident. I seldom eat at that restaurant anymore. Instead, I frequently eat sushi and Californian rolls for lunch. Today, I was happily eating a salmon roll when, CRUNCH. Ouch. That hurt. I bit into a chickpea that has somehow infiltrated my lunch!

So now I want to know, was that the chickpea I should have had in my lunch all those years ago? Why was it back? Was it trying to force me to visit the dentist first by its absence and now by its presence?

The world is a strange place. Eat carefully.

the ratchet

Like anyone who has worked on bicycles for more than the last few years, I have seen them change from machines equipped with bolts requiring a good set of spanners, to those that require a few allen keys and now, Torx screws. Whilst I am the first to admit that hex keys and Torx screwdrivers are portable — ideal for keeping in your jersey pocket in one of those pocket-knife like mini-tools — in the workshop I miss the tactile sensation of tightening and loosening bolts with a hefty set of spanners. That sensation has been eliminated apart from on the wheel nuts of my track bike.

The snug fit of a Torx driver is comforting, but turning it is not satisfying. I have never been a fan of allen keys. The bolts always feel to me like they will round out and the keys break, especially in the smaller sizes when operating stuck bolts. The keys themselves lack the solidity of a properly made spanner and operating them is fiddly and uncomfortable. Until now...

I recently acquired a 1/4" drive (square tip) ratcheting handle that takes the set of Torx tips and hex heads from my torque wrench. Where the torque wrench is slightly wobbly due to its two-piece handle (that releases when correct torque is reached), the new ratcheting wrench is firmly and sweetly made.

I can now tighten hex or Torx bolts with one hand, without needing to extract and reinsert the key tip in the limited space amongst the bicycle's many restricted working areas. The other hand can now be used to hold a cable tight, or to keep the bars from turning, or to stop the seatpost from sliding or to maintain seat level. I am a convert! Sure, I will revert to the torque wrench when working on carbon fiber. But for a real workshop experience, when I dig out the old steel machines, I can now enjoy the sensation as much as I like changing wheels on my track bike.

Happy wrenching!

insect mating

It is autumn in Melbourne. The days are getting shorter, the mornings frostier, but the weather has been glorious for cycling. It is also Preying Mantis mating season. I narrowly avoided one on the road this morning, bright green against the bitumen. The second I saw this afternoon as I left work had not been so lucky. It was squashed flat by a bicycle tyre before my arrival. If it was a female it might not yet have mated or laid its eggs. If it was male, it could not yet have mated or it would already have lost its head! (It hadn't.) It was probably too big to have been a male anyway.

Funny how sometimes I really need to look hard to notice the insects on my daily activities. This is true even when they scream at me from the trees (summer cicadas) or the grass (autumn crickets). At other times they are hard to avoid... such as last spring when dozens of pairs of mating ants fell from the sky to copulate un-ceremoniously on our deck table whilst I read emails!

bicycle naming conventions

So you have a new bicycle and are wondering what to call it? Or if you should call it anything at all? Some have said that to avoid the inevitable loss that accompanies a destroyed or stolen bicycle, you should refrain from loving the bike, just love the ride. I am not of this opinion and so I offer here some "guidelines" on how to name your bicycle.

1. Ignore all conventions including these. It's your bike. Name it what you like :-)
2. Follow convention 1.
   
3. A bicycle is not a ship, you do not need to name it by conventions for naming a ship.
4. Choose a name that somehow suits the bicycle's character.
5. Have a theme that you can carry through all of your bicycles from the time you are born to the time you die. For instance, mythological creatures, birds, insects, cartoon characters... just don't name them after cats or Apple may sue you.
6. Bicycles can be masculine or feminine. Look at the bike, ride it a bit. You can tell its gender if you listen carefully.
7. Take your time in naming your bicycle. The name is important.
8. When you are happy with your bicycle's name, head down to the newsagent and see if they have some Letraset transfers so that you can embellish your machine's top tube. Alternatively, a professionally made sticker, although expensive, can look terrific.
   

Here are some examples from personal experience. I have thus far named only a few of my bicycles:

• Reynolds 531c, custom road racing bicycle built by Doug Gould: Bandersnatch

This is a name taken from Lewis Carroll's poems and "Through the Looking Glass". Says the White King, "She runs so fearfully quick. You might as well try to catch a Bandersnatch!"

• Reynolds 853, custom road racing bicycle built by Kevin Wigham/Paconi (bright yellow and black): Wasp

The bike really is very black and yellow. A wasp was an obvious choice being a powerful insect with a nasty sting in the tail.

• Columbus EL Oversize, custom track racing bicycle built by Kevin Wigham/Paconi (deep metallic red): Vampire

A fascination with all things macabre, the rich paintwork, a jersey worn by Russell Mockridge and my plan to suck the wheels of the big guys before finishing them off on the line inspired this name.

• Pinarello, mass-produced carbon road bike (red, white and carbon): ???!

This bike, despite two years of consistent riding, still doesn't have a name. It is as bright as a fire engine, fast as a Ferrari, muscular as Mr. Universe and curvaceous as... well, you have the idea! :-) My wife has suggested "Maximilliano" but it doesn't quite ring true. I like the Roman approach though. Maybe "Lucilia" is better? Lucilia was the wife of Lucretius (the Roman philosopher). Apparently she gave her husband a love potion so powerful it destroyed him. Given the number of k's I have ridden on the Pinarello I suspect something similar has been slipped into my bidon!

Good luck in naming your bicycle, happy riding.

a selection of cycling's sunglasses and weirdness

Was there ever a more strange and ubiquitous item than the frames of eye glasses? They range from the minimal wires that hold the lenses where they need to be, to the extravagant eye-enlarging shades of the seventies and recent revivals. Fashion clearly has a lot to answer for. Some of my favourites are the sunglasses sported by cyclists since the 1980s. These are amongst the most ostentatious designs. Why would that be? Surely in the case of athletic eye wear function must take precedence over fashion?

Fortunately not. Whilst function may originally dictate the form, this becomes the fashion and from there the designers seem keen to push things to extremes, especially the Italians. Thank goodness for the Italians! Certainly there are an abundance of sleek visor-styled lenses that protect the wearer from glare and dust whilst smoothing the airflow over the eyes. But these are often so dull. The best designs make a statement that, despite (or perhaps because of) their weirdness, represent an era. These are to me the most interesting.

At the start of fast mechanised transport motorists, motorcyclists and aviators were certainly in need of eye protection. Tour de France cyclists' goggles resembled these in style. Of course when riding a bike things tend to fog up a bit. How long would it be before specialist eye wear was designed for this activity?

I guess it was somewhere in the early 80s that I first saw a pair of cycling specific sunnies — on the eyes, actually on the face, of Phil Anderson. At first glance these looked quite bizarre. But there was no discouraging a teenager mad keen to emulate Anderson. The wide field of view, the sweat band across the top, the large single lens, and the fact that Skippy himself was wearing a pair, all made these highly desirable. As far as I know, from these Oakleys springs the weird world of cycling specific sunnies.

There were various forms of these glasses and lots of imitations for the next few years. I know. I could only afford the cheap imitations :-(

As far as I am concerned it was the Italian Briko manufacturer that next defined an era... the 90s. Cipollini and Pantani, two of the most colourful members of the peloton at the time were both seen sporting Briko Stingers and Jumpers. The Stingers remain my favourite glasses of all time for both their visual appeal and functionality. Stingers transformed the clunkiness of the 80s into a very Euro-cool but equally bizarre, alienesque face for the times.

At one stage or another Pantani sported a pair of Briko Zen specs which are reminiscent of the earliest goggles, only with a much wider wrap-around lens. These were not as iconic as the Stinger but distinctive nonetheless.

And then nothing much happened for nearly 10 years. Various companies experimented with snap-in lenses, including many from Taiwan, but none was a notable or particularly distinctive design.

Maybe the last couple of years have seen the introduction of the next classic: the Oakley Jawbone. They are competing against Oakley's other popular design, the Radar which I feel lacks any innovative features over and above those offered by the myriad of other blade-style lenses. They just aren't wacky enough to make an impression.

The Jawbones also feature interchangeable lenses, but more importantly, the bizarre frame form with multiple components whose colours may be mismatched as garishly as desired might be just what is needed to define the next classic. Peripheral visibility is not nearly as good as the old Stingers. The lens quality is great though and they hug the face to keep out dust and debris. Slots around the side of some lens models allow for a little ventilation in steamy conditions, hopefully to keep the fog at bay. Will these define the era?

If the 2010 road race world champ sports the Infrared Jawbones... will they help the rest of us ride faster? No. But we can all look just as silly ^h^h^h cool!

The Grid and The String in Music

[Image of the Tenorions from synthtopia.com]
Yamaha has a pretty looking device, Tenori-On for fans of MIDI-triggering LED grids. I have been a fan of portable LED grids since I discovered Maywa-denki's Bitman in Tokyo. Tenori-On is a 16x16 grid... four times more little LEDs than Bitman ;-) OK, seriously now... The Tenori-On's LEDs act as push buttons, much like the buttons on the old Novation Nova synths, another favourite of mine. Incidentally, Novation have their own LaunchPad controller which also plays on the pixel grid idea. This has been a common theme in this area over the last few years. In the Yamaha product, the grid is used to control a sequencer in various ways. In some modes the hardware acts like a step-sequencer, in others more unusual metaphors are employed to trigger music events, for instance a bouncing ball metaphor is employed to trigger an event when the ball (a lit LED that moves across the grid) hits an edge for instance. The user then controls the distance the ball moves between bounces to shorten or lengthen the delay between triggers... in discrete steps.

And this is the thing about "the grid": Whilst beat-based, typically 4/4 music is so seductive, popular, easy to make and therefore marketable to teenagers with home studios and greying electronic music buffs alike, it would be nice if these new tools enabled the subtlety of a string on a fretboard when it came to placing notes in time. For experts maybe a fretless fingerboard is better... no need for the guidelines, place the notes in time by feel. But no, even after all these years of computer-hardware and software based music production the "new" instruments by the big manufacturers return us to our neatly discretised rhythms (and pitches). They can't afford to venture into the territory that brings us an instrument like a violin or the shakuhachi because these are just too hard to master. Even a recorder which, despite its regular finger holes offers the player a chance to over-blow, stutter, tongue, tremolo and shriek their way through a piece, merging notes, individuating notes with staccato punctuation, placing notes wherever and whenever they darn well like, is more subtle.

A drum-machine? Well, I absolutely love the new rhythms that have been moving into electronic music since Kraftwerk, through 80s synth-pop, jungle, drum'n bass, techno... right through the 90s and 00s up to the stuff so popular even on mainstream radio today. It has really transformed the way I think about rhythm. Most of it I could never have hoped to play live on a drum kit (even when I practiced). But a lot of it is just sampled old drum loops. I know this is a little tired. We have heard all this before. But every new instrument that comes out is a chance to revitalise electronic music. Every new instrument based on the grid is a chance lost. All the complexity of which music is capable is being missed by a generation of music makers.

The Tenori-On looks like fun to play. And don't get me wrong, I love a range of electronica based around the grid. But really Yamaha's sequencer/instrument is just another toy with a pretty pixel grid. Funny then that there is a pop-group (well, it is surely OK nowadays to call a group of 3 sexy girls who make music and dance around a bit on stage a pop-group right?) called the Tenerions. From what I have heard of their music it sounds pretty much like the product demos on the Yamaha website. Not particularly exciting.

Although I haven't played with my poor dusty synths for years, sometimes I am tempted to look longingly into my cupboard, dust off their cool metal surfaces and twiddle the knobs... analogue knobs. Knobs that spin smoothly and continuously. And then I remember that I waved goodbye to my last truly analogue synth well over a decade ago. Even the boxes I have with knobs are analogue emulations. The knobs might spin, but the values they represent are discrete. And so it goes. In the name of suplesse (a cycling term... grace? suppleness? elegance... on a bike) I have given up many things. Music-making was an early casualty. Who am I to complain about grids? Maybe count me as a concerned music-citizen who would like to hear the newcomers make something different, sometimes. I guess the best of them do and I should just listen harder and more widely. No disrepespect to the Tenerions. The fact that I have even heard of you means you must be doing something right!