After almost three weeks of cold, last Saturday arrived with amenable conditions for a team ride. Temperatures were in the high 40s, winds were light and variable, skies were overcast. Brad, our ride coordinator and Team Vice President, planned the ride for the warmest three hours of the day. We started assembling in the shop parking lot around 11:30 and rode out by noon.
The plan for the day was an endurance pace on flat to rolling hills for the first hour, then an hour of endurance mixed with tempo (in Brad’s words, halfway between easy endurance, and god-awful threshold) over a hillier route, then another hour of endurance as we rode back the shop. Most of this plan went well.
We rode out Del Rio in a double paceline, talking and taking things easy. A quick turn onto the broken pavement of Old Natchez Trace broke the formation up as everyone worked to avoid the worst of the potholes. After the short gravel section on Temple, we regrouped and headed towards the Natchez Trace Parkway. Some of the faster guys pushed the pace a bit on the first climb coming up from Hwy 100, but most of us were still staying together this early in the ride.
Brad coaxed me into keeping the chain in the big chainring up the climbs to work on leg strength, which I did for the next few miles. Our goal for this ride was mostly endurance paced riding, and I knew that Brad, Les, and a few others with a good sense of discipline would stick to that game plan regardless of what the speedsters chose to do. I tried to do a little of both. Stick with the front group as much as possible while not letting my heart rate and wattage blow up in any single effort. Read More »
…When this solution was proposed.
I saw this post on Make Magazine’s Blog while sittingn Portland Brew with Daryl and Carolyn from the Mid TN SORBA (southern offroad bicycle association). We met today to discuss rebuilding the www.sorbamidtn.org website in Wordpress.
The Make Magazine article states that the scientists had attempted to calibrate the fusion reactor using a stationary neutron emitter, but it wasn’t accurate enough, hence the toy train, which increased the accuracy ten fold! This is genius at work. The ability to go fr0m high level technological work (calibrating a fusion reactor) to a decidedly low-brow solution (toy train). Sometimes the simplest solution is indeed the best.
Frequently when I find myself stuck looking for a solution to a difficult problem, I need an outside perspective to help crystallize the solution. I wonder if something similar happened here.
Read the original article here: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/01/toy_train_used_to_calibrate_fusion.html
Posted in News | Tagged ideas, innovation |
That’s the weather forecast for Saturday, February 6th in Dalton Georgia. If you read my post about Snake Creek Gap #1, you’ll know why this is a good thing. I would gladly take sunny and a high of 47 degrees over cloudy, windy, and 8 degrees with windchill.
