Cycling Tube Boob

Cycling should be boring to watch, and I'm sure for many folks it is. This is natural. The act of cycling is simply the act of pedaling over and over and over again. Sure there is much more amazing scenery in cycling than say basketball.But what goes on should be mind-numbingly dull. one guy pedals while other guys pedal until one goes a little faster...wow.

I can set up my rollers and pedal away for hours re-watching Fabian Cancellara win the 2006 Paris Roubaix, or Tom Boonen win the 2005 tour of Flanders, or my favorite...watching Floyd Landis win the 2006 Tour de France.

When I watch movies on my rollers I turn the speakers up loud so I can catch the dialog. With the cycling I am as likely to be listening to Jimi Hendix as Phil Liggett.

I'm not much of a fan of cycling. I kinda follow it. I was very pleased that Cadel Evans won the 2009 world road race, but I did not find out for a couple of days. Most sports writing bores me to tears. Yet I can watch what should be one of the world's most boring videotaped events with my attention glued to the tube.

Part of it is the exhaustion. Changes in body English or bike control as well tuned athletes are ground down by their own effort. The cyclists are not performing they are expending themselves. Little changes in position alter the amount of power they must generate to maintain speed.

I've watched a couple of marathons and they are not that intriguing to me. The runner tries so hard to conserve energy that the signs of exhaustion and effort are subtle. When the mobile cameras get in close to show what the runner's face looks like they always appear to me to have a “get that camera out of my face” type look. It is not just the exhaustion that makes cycling so interesting to me, as marathon runners also exhaust themselves fully in their discipline.

Perhaps it is the drugs. The riders' not mine. Is “doping” the same as “using”?

This season's marathon training coupled with my gym membership have robbed me of important bicycling DVD time. When I get back from CA the Kestral is going on the rollers and the covers are coming off the DVD's. I have this one of a guy called Alberto Contador (Stephen Colbert says his name means “douchebag” en Espanol) winning the 2007 TDF. I hear the "flying chicken" is in rare form that year!

Star Wars Jesus

Just the other day I made contact with an old friend. Perhaps I would be better to say a friend of old as I had not communicated with them for a couple of decades. In the communication there were several allusions to things of a “spiritual” nature. For no particular reason this made me think of Star wars Jesus (SWJ)
If there was a Jesus that I could really like it would be SWJ. Bleeding cross Jesus and fatherly overlord Jesus actually make me a bit nauseous. The bible pounding poorly defined “you must repent Jesus” often causes me to imagine the late stages of tropical skin diseases.

I am so very pleased that SWJ has become so very popular these days. There are even some folks trying to codify SWJ. They have written a book.

The SWJ I am talking about is the Jesus that is everywhere and nowhere at all. You simply “have to believe” and have “moral thoughts” attributed to SWJ and you can go to heaven. Let the force be with you. A couple reasons why I like SWJ are these:

1) It requires a personal moral compass to exist. Right and wrong exist independent of SWJ and she simply augments this. I like it when people believe it is necessary to know the difference between right and wrong. I do not like it when people say believing in a mythology anoints them with “moral truth”.

2) It is so ephemeral that it can be mapped onto physical attributes of the universe like simply being or the interaction of mater and energy. It is almost the fabric of the universe itself and is therefore as undeniable as chanting OM.

3) It’s existence relies on a self referential positive thought device that is probably quite healthy (mentally speaking).

In fact the only reasons not to like SWJ is the terminology, and perhaps an unfortunate allusion to iron-age mythology. If an alien had no idea what the vestigial terms meant when they had SWJ described to them it would sound pretty cool. It might be a bit pedestrian, as theoretical constructs go. As a mental exercise it could rank up their with Yoga or TM.
I don't think SWJ is a new or compelling idea in and of itself. SWJ is more of a sign of a theological coming of age. The secularists did not have many new ideas when they ushered in a age of liberal theology but they opened a window in society that let people look out. I think SWJ is such a window for our age. I can only hope that SWJ matures from a vague set of notions to a firm religious doctrine taught and canonized. The major obstacle to this is that SWJ is by her very nature a vague set of notions.

Chaos from life

I really like the Logistic equation. It comes in a couple useful forms, the simplest is the iterative form that can be used to model a time discrete biological population.For instance if one has a population that produces new members at a rate “r” of the current population we can generate the new population by iterating the equation:

Where an+1 is the next years population, spawned from this years. “r” is obviously the fertility rate (or better the “fecundity” rate) . This equation just demonstrates an ever expanding population. Lets assume that there is an upper limit to the population given by some constant like “K”. Then one model of the population is given by the logistics equation:

In order to make it simpler I can define A=a/K or simply set K to 1 (which may appear weird, setting a population maximum to 1, but I can use units like “metric tones of wheat” or “boxcarloads of bunnies” so the maximum population of 1 represents more that one individual). This gives me the super simple equation:

This is the equation of a parabola. To show it is nothing special here is a plot of it. I choose a few different values for r to give a feel for what it does. It is no less elegant than any parabola.

We cannot get this equation to do interesting things until we begin using it iteratively.

What I mean by this is that we use the output of running the equation as the input of running the equation again. We do this over and over and see what happens. If we choose r-2.9 the iterations look like this:

If I clean off the first 500 iterations you can see that the oscillations shown in the fist graph have settled down to a single value. If I choose a value less than 2.d the iterations also settle down to a single number. With decreasing values for r this number decreases to 0 at r=0.

If I choose a value for r slightly higher than 3 this is what happens.

That’s right we get a stable oscillation between two values.

If I choose r=3.5 I get four values like in this graph:

If I choose an r=3.7 a bizarre thing happens here is the graph for the first 100 iterations:

It almost looks like there could be oscillations settling down to a pattern. If I just plot the iterations after say 100 you can see that they apparently do not.

This is cool. In fact there is an infinite level of complexity here. If I vary r from 0 to 4 and plot the values obtained for 100 iterations after iterating the function 1000 times I would get a picture like this.

I can stare at this picture for hours. Look at the areas where order appears to peek out of chaos. Is this a metaphor for life from the plot of an equation that rustically describes life? What about those apparent lines in chaos? I love to blow up the picture and look at the bits of it. The more it is enlarged the more complexity it reveals.

Part of the cool thing about this is that if people used the generally available computation methods available when I was born (slide rules!) then a person calculating this picture would only recently have finished. This is a pattern almost unknown to previous generations. Now one can buy a t-shirt with it printed on it.

More will be revealed!