Comment Re:The alternative (Score 1) 492
I think that depends where/how you ride. I see flags on recumbents often enough.
What they have in their favor is better stopping ability (reduced chance of a flip).
I think that depends where/how you ride. I see flags on recumbents often enough.
What they have in their favor is better stopping ability (reduced chance of a flip).
You should probably get fitted, or at least read about it. Almost all of the books I've seen give about the same decent advice. The 90%-effective saddle height rule is that if you put the heel of your foot on the pedal axle (not the way you normally pedal) at maximum extension your leg should be dead straight -- no liftoff, no knee bend. That tends to maximize efficiency, power, and knee life. And your normal pedaling setup should have the balls of your feet over the pedal axle, more or less. If you catch yourself shifting from side to side when you pedal, that's too high, knock it down by 1/4-inch increments till you are happy. A little less height than the rule-of-thumb "optimum" is no big deal, but you want to avoid having your knees bent too much. I'm also assuming you are 6' tall or more, in which case there is no need to worry much about crank length (once you adjust gearing for reduced leverage, shorter cranks, e.g., 165mm instead of 170) are slightly easier on your knees. Tall guys with good knees sometimes go for 172.5 or 175.
Other rules of thumb -- too high is bad for your hips, too low is bad for your knees (plus you'll get serious burn in your quads).
Once you get close and find your happy place, you'll find that a millimeter here or there will make a difference -- the saddle tilt should be just so, the seat height, etc.
And if your knees are dicey, aim for a lower gear -- not spinning wildly, but back off from mash-mash-mash-mash. I'm 53, some days my knees feel a little off, I baby them till they are warmed up. Also, keeping them warm on cold days is a good thing.
I'm lucky enough that all this works like physical therapy for me, but if it doesn't work for you, find a professional. And you may have the sort of knee problem that cycling doesn't help -- those are not common, but they happen.
You might try "Lake" shoes. I have a hard time making sense of their size charts, but some of them seem to come in size "50" which is equivalent to 15. Be careful which one you select -- $ome of them are $omewhat $pendy. They're pretty nice -- I bought a pair of winter MTB shoes back when I thought cleats were important (the price is breaktaking, but they really are nice, and the lifetime warranty on the Boa laces is legit).
Or are you looking for toe clips? I think you could fit clipless on an exercycle -- that's kinda non-standard, but I am in no position to throw those stones -- and use bike shoes to click in (to "clipless" pedals, of course). One thing you might consider is quick-release pedals so you can swap them out -- MKS EZY, you can easily get clips ("Cube") and rat trap ("Promenade"). The one you probably want for non-clipless is MKS EZY Rezin, apparently only available from UK ( http://www.sjscycles.co.uk/mks-resin-ezy-detachable-pedals-prod14015/ )
Yeah, and guess how you figure out "did it right" from "did it wrong". Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
"Right" varies from person to person, and over time for any given person.
Stuff I did as a kid would rip tendons now, no telling what it would do to the joints.
The standard biking answer to "bad back" is get a recumbent, though I've never been able to get that enthusiastic about one myself (my back is not bad, but there are various engineering and safety reasons why a recumbent should be "better").
That is not, however, the case for most fat people in the US, and there are some cases of quite-fat people who decided to lose weight and did so. See http://www.bicycling.com/training-nutrition/nutrition-weight-loss/i-lost-320-pounds-riding-bike?page=0,0
On the other side of the argument, I find that my weight (220lbs) is surprisingly resistant to change. I like to eat, and the more I exercise, the hungrier I get. Doubling the exercise moves the set point down about 5 pounds, and it was 15-20lbs higher with no exercise (and that was 7 years ago).
And the professional sports guys have ruined things for the rest of us. Pushing your hematocrit up like they did is nuts (there were guys in Europe dying in the sleep from too-thick blood clotting), but a 10% nudge in my CV capacity would be right nice (though I am nowhere near anemic).
Awesome how many commenters, instead of thinking "aha, font problems!" leapt to the conclusion that you could not do math, nor did they have the faintest idea how poisonous lead really is.
Just tell all your friends to get vaccinated instead, and rely on herd immunity.
It is by no means guaranteed that the sea level rise will be limited to 1 meter per century, even for this century. The IPCC predictions are conservative, don't include melting ice cap contributions, and assume that we would be more aggressively cutting emissions by now. From a paper on the subject:
"Rahmstorf (2007) made an important contribution to the sea level discussion by pointing out that even a linear relation between global temperature and the rate of sea level rise, calibrated with 20th century data, implies a 21st sea level rise of about a meter, given expected global warming for BAU greenhouse gas emissions. Vermeer and Rahmstorf (2009) extended Rahmstorf's semi-empirical approach by adding a rapid response term, projecting sea level rise by 2100 of 0.75-1.9 m for the full range of IPCC climate scenarios. Grinsted et al. (2010) fit a 4- parameter linear response equation to temperature and sea level data for the past 2000 years, projecting a sea level rise of 0.9-1.3 m by 2100 for a middle IPCC scenario (A1B). These projections are typically a factor of 3-4 larger than the IPCC (2007) estimates, and thus they altered perceptions about the potential magnitude of human-caused sea level change.
Alley (2010) reviewed projections of sea level rise by 2100, showing several clustered around 1 m and one outlier at 5 m, all of which he approximated as linear. The 5 m estimate is what Hansen (2007) suggested was possible, given the assumption of a typical IPCC's BAU climate forcing scenario. Alley's graph is comforting, making the suggestion of a possible 5 m sea level rise seem to be an improbable outlier, because, in addition to disagreeing with all other projections, a half-meter sea level rise in the next 10 years is preposterous.
However, the fundamental issue is linearity versus non-linearity. Hansen (2005, 2007) argues that amplifying feedbacks make ice sheet disintegration necessarily highly non-linear. In a non-linear problem, the most relevant number for projecting sea level rise is the doubling time for the rate of mass loss. Hansen (2007) suggested that a 10-year doubling time was plausible, pointing out that such a doubling time from a base of 1 mm per year ice sheet contribution to sea level in the decade 2005-2015 would lead to a cumulative 5 m sea level rise by 2095."
Additional caveats and quid quo pros follow in the paper, but it's safe to say that there's a bunch of scientists who would not bet much money on at most a meter of rise in this century.
It's not a simple use-all-oxygen-burning-fuel anoxia -- it is a bad interaction with ocean circulation, chemistry, and biology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event .
Given that we show every sign of running the CO2-enhancement experiment to completion, it is reassuring to know that this low-probability but extremely-high-cost outcome is that much more unlikely. (To my warmist comrades -- given a choice between losing a toe, a leg, or a life, we know which choice we would most want to avoid, but that does not mean the remaining choices are good. Anoxia is among the worst of the outcomes, far worse than the middle of the US becoming uninhabitable or the seas rising 100 feet. And to you denier bozos -- greenhouse science is cut-and-dried stuff, with only the detailed outcomes unclear, but it's also clear that between natural human greed and your foolish efforts, we will almost certainly burn all the fossil fuels we can until something truly alarming occurs. Perhaps we have overestimated the effects of the current CO2 levels -- but that's okay, we're just going to keep on burning it till we see an effect, and a big and unambiguous one.)
Yeah. Jeff Bauman, who looked at the guy who left the bomb, got his legs blown off, and remembered it all, and described him to the police after regaining consciousness. Or Carlos Arredondo, who held a big artery shut running beside him in the wheelchair (that, or a tourniquet, but it looked like an artery -- it's cropped out of most of the photos you see now). Flawless. All those legs blown off could easily have been deaths, except that people got to them in time and took care of them.
The terrorists are NOT especially smart. Sometimes they get lucky. Witness these two bozos in Boston, or the underwear bomber who about set his nads on fire, or the shoe bomber who failed to execute, or the butt bomber in the middle east who (ahem) blew his own ass up. The jerks who tried to bomb a terminal in Glasgow caught themselves on fire, and one of the people who caught them in the act kicked one of them so hard he tore a tendon in his own foot. Several of the otherwise successful bombers (Spain, London) got caught because they screwed up security with cell phones in traceable ways.
I also know a few people who may or may not have at one time worked for the NSA, and they're all smart, and one of them was kinda intense. Don't assume that you're smarter than them; the risks, if you're wrong, are high.
How about with bicycles, and with tablesaws? Report back to us on how that goes.
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds
