Cycling UK Forum

I clean mine when I'm sufficiently embarrasssed by it, which is hardly ever. I get about 4000 miles out of a PC58 for 1% elongation. It takes a good half day to clean the chain, chainset, sprocket, F and R mechs. I once tried a chain cleaner and I'd give it first prize in the chocolate teapot awards. It plastered the whole bike and half the garage in muckite. I could have got the bike cleaner, and made less mess if I'd dipped the dog in paraffin and let him shake it off over the bike.

Just wondered what other peoples preferences were. I'm renewing the transmission and I'm tempted to stick with taper, but I've just seen that the UN73 has gone obsolete. Apart from alot of extra cost, the factor that makes me dubious about octalink is that tapers will naturally accomodate a bit of wear by drawing further up the taper, whereas once the splines start showing wear it's time for a new chainset. My bikes done 16000 miles now, and although the cartridge is knackered, the taper and chainset is fine. How many miles are peope getting out of splined joints?

I'm a bit disconcerted to see Settle have changed hands and moved. I started using them because they don't charge postage and yet still seemed to have the cheapest prices. I've always had excellent service from them, so it remains to be seen whether that continues.

(I called in at SJS last summer after my toe strap snapped on the way over the quantocks, and they were OK with me.)

I've got an A719 on the front, and a T520 on the back. The A719 replaced the T520, and as far as I can see the only difference is the name, a plastic ferrule in the valve hole, and a 60% price hike. So far, I've had 5741 trouble free miles out of the A719, and 10086 trouble free miles out of the T520. The T520 replaced the Vuelta Tempest that Dawes fitted from new after it failed with fatigue fractures on all the holes after only 6133 miles. By that standard, the Mavic rims seem to be doing alright so far. At 575g they're not light, but they're still 100g lighter than the Tempest. Somebody seemed to think that 7000 miles was good for a rim, but I got 10000 miles out of the orginal set of brake pads.

thirdcrank wrote:Finally, if I have misinterpreted anything you have said, I hope you will accept that it has occurred through misunderstanding rather than misrepresentation.

Mick Agar

It’s one or the other.
The reason that I first referred to Adams’ book on the forum was to fish for someone who has read it (or was willing to), in the hope of an interesting debate about some of the issues that follow from it. Debating with people who haven’t read it soon grows wearisome because it just amounts to transcribing the book onto the forum one paragraph at a time in an attempt to answer points that have already been adequately addressed by the author. Perhaps if you took the trouble to read Adams (and Poundstone) you might see what’s wrong with some of the points you’re making. Either way, I’m not interested in debating with someone who just resorts to personal sniping.

thirdcrank wrote:You still seem to have gone to a lot of typing

No typing at all, just cut and paste. I put it on because it had me in tears.

thirdcrank wrote:At least you have fully redeemed yourself of the plagiarism by owning up.

Terry Bisson, http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html wrote:(From OMNI, April 1991. This story, which was a 1991 Nebula nominee, has been appearing around the internet lately without my name attached. Several people were kind enough to alert me, but the truth is I'm more flattered than offended. )

Sometimes I reference books just because I've enjoyed reading them, and think others might too.

(P.S. I've just corrected an error in my last post on the Helmets thread.)

I've just bought an EL 320 which is nearly as bright as the 530 but alot cheaper. It's a handy size and shape to double up as a torch too. I'm not impressed with the bar clamp though, I think I'll make my own.

Si wrote:It's strange that the aliens would have a concept of 'meat' unless they ate it. And if they ate it then it suggests that at least part of them must be made of meat to derive the maximum benefit from it ?

To have a concept of meat but not sentient meat, they would have presumably had to encounter less sentient beings with brains (chimps? dogs? whatever.) This would then falsely presume that there is something fundamentally different in principle rather than degree between humans and chimps........

thirdcrank wrote: they are not quite so reliable as you seem to think.

I wasn't trying to suggest they're perfect, just better.

You seem to suggest that there is a sort of humpty-dumptyism so there can never be agreement because we are all defining things differently. You also seem to suggest that partly for that reason, research cannot help (Presumably the research conducted by Adams and Sneed is exempt?)

Adams' point is that no amount of research into mobile phone masts or MMR vaccines or this or that will ever alter the fact that that it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate risk.

Even further from the sentral theme, I keep returning to your prisoner's dilemma. I cannot get away from feeling that you use it synonymously with uncertainty which rather devalues the concept. Your seatbelt example is obviously very relevant to the overall argument but I am a bit lost as to how it is a p's d.

Firstly, if the public are unaware of risk compensation there is no dilemma.

It is more of a sort of reverse inocculation rule. (For anyone worried about vaccinations etc., the ideal situation is for everyone else to have one so you can safely opt out. With seatbelts, the ideal situation would be for nobody else to have one while you did.)

Not quite, what you refer to as a "reverse innoculation rule" is known as the Volunteers' Dilemma, which in turn is a Game of Chicken. (It's just given a different name when there are more than two players.) Each individual has the choice of cooperating or defecting, knowing that others have the same choice too.
When the payoff's rank in the following order it's known as a PD:
If you can get away with defecting whilst everyone else cooperates this is best of all.
Next best is if everyone cooperates.
But if everyone thinks that way and defects, you're worse off still.
Finally, the worst possible scenario is if your the mug who cooperates whilst everyone else defects.
The dilemma arises because you're better off defecting when others cooperate, and still better of defecting when others defect. Hence everybody defects, and then we're all worse off than we would be if everyone cooperated!
The ranking is: DC>CC>DD>CD
When the payoff's rank the following way it's a Game of Chicken/Volunteers' Dilemma:
DC>CC>CD>DD
Note that the difference lies in the ranking of the last two payoffs. Vaccination is a Volunteers' Dilemma because the worst option of all is that no-one gets vaccinated.
(To go off at a tangent, it's interesting to note that crime would be a PD, but since there is no rational solution to a PD we avoid the dilemma instead by using punishment to reduce the payoff for lone defection to below that of mutual cooperation. Global Warming is a PD too, so the only way to solve it will be with punishment for defectors. But there's no global government to administer the punishment. How do we obtain a global government without a third world war? Well, that's another Prisoner's Dilemma.....)
If you're interested in Game Theory, Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone is a good introduction. It's an intriguing mix of Game Theory, Nuclear Disarmament History, and biography of John Von Neumann, who's generally credited for developing Game Theory as a formal branch of maths.

I do not think ....that seatbelt wearers may be at greater danger from others.

No, but others are at greater danger from seatbelt wearers.

Naughty of me not to credit it really, it was written in 1991 by Terry Bisson, a science fiction author. Steven Pinker quotes the first half in his book "How the Mind Works" as a means lampooning those who think that a sufficiently complex machine could never think. It turns incredulity on it's head by imagining aliens who can't see how meat could think.

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."

"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

"No brain?"

"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."

"So ... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat."

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

"I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."

"That's it."

"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."

"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."

"They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."

I'm not really sure whether you're arguing with me or against me. Adams' point is that as a yardstick by which to assess risk, fatalities are much more accurate than injuries. Most of what you argue confirms this. Not only are there difficulties in setting standards for what constitutes an injury, but also difficulties for non medically trained staff in assessing injuries against the standard. I don't have any figures, but I find it difficult to imagine that those who die more than 30 days after an incident account for more than a tiny fraction of the total deaths. A further point that Adams makes is how many injuries equals one death? We don't have the data to know for sure that a policy that may reduce one won't increase the other.

Going back to what I said 11 Jan, the much deeper issue underlying the risk debate is the unquestioned, universal, and even subconscious presumption that risk is both bad and avoidable.

thirdcrank wrote:I keep having a look at all this and I am trying to crate a document where I can read it all properly.

Get Adams book out of the library, it's excellent, much better than I can hope to convey in summary here. (And so is Gigerenzer's.)

More generally, your choice of language seems to suggest you believe in Adams more than he does.

It's just that it's all such common sense.......

HAve you (or your sources considered the effect of improvements in survival rates because of medical advances?

I think Adams might have had something to say about medical advances, but the book's gone back to the library and I'm debating with reference to the limited notes I made.

You say 'Dead bodies are hard to sweep under the carpet'

What Adams means is that injuries are more subjective than deaths.

According to the BMA only 25% of injuries classified by Police as serious actually are serious. Many reported as slight are actually serious. The difference is medically defined by shock, but Police don't know what that is. Some think it is to do with electrocution. 30% of RTA casualties seen in hospital go unreported to Police. 70% of cyclist casualties go unrecorded. On a scale of seriousness, there are many more minor injuries than major ones. This means that if the threshold at which incidents are reported is fairly low, it only takes a tiny change in that threshold to make a large difference in the numbers.

Adams did an interesting survey on the stats for the London boroughs. He found that the death rates vary at random from one borough to another and from one year to another. This what you might expect. But when he looked at injuries, although they varied at random from one borough to another, each borough was returning figures that were virtually the same from one year to the next. Adams then compared the injury rates for each borough with the Police numbers, and found that they correlate almost perfectly. In other words the injury figures are nothing more than a measure of how many Police are available to fill in the paperwork at any given time.

Hugo: I'm not really sure I'm with you.

Graham wrote:I do sometimes whilst cycling.
She never does whilst driving.

As I think I've mentioned before, if the objective were to save the most lives, we would be making pedestrians wear helmets before cyclists.....