mauvehaus

All 21 pelican-bicycle images, across all seven labs, face right. No other animal/vehicle combination does that.

However, facing right is common: 60% of all 1,008 images do it. How common depends on the animal and the vehicle, and bicycles are one of the two vehicles where it’s strongest

Of course the pelican on the bicycle is facing right. The drivetrain on a bicycle is on the right side. If you want any representation of a bicycle that shows the drivetrain you're going to show the right side of it if you want to do so without the frame occluding it. It's an excellent bet that their training data reflects this.

Citation: https://www.rei.com/c/bikes

Edited to add:

As near as I can tell, all of the bicycles are shown facing right, regardless of the direction the animal is facing (GPT 5.6-Terra, Sample 1/3). Also, in every case where the rider has legs (i.e. not the whale) both of the rider's legs are on the right side of the bicycle. This suggests a pretty serious lack of actual understanding of how a bicycle works.

Counterpoint: I always found WERS to be a slightly broader interpretation of adult contemporary programming than the commercial stations.

My goto was WUMB, which is out of UMass Boston, and played a consistent format (folk and Americana, I guess?) throughout the day. Blues Hangover on WHRB (Harvard) was always worthwhile when I caught it.

Because multi-family buildings (required for higher density) come with more complicated ownership models. Owner occupied triple deckers in Boston, for example, often come with their own condo associations because there needs to be some way to handle the shared maintenance and expenses.

That's for a three unit building. Now scale that to a twenty or one hundred unit building. At some point, it makes sense for a single entity to handle the common maintenance through outright ownership and rent. Individual families have the flexibility to leave if things suck without being financially tied to the building long-term and subject to changes in housing prices. Yes, moving as a renter is expensive. It's still lower cost and friction than moving as an owner.

Source: rented for years in cities. Now happily a homeowner in the hinterlands of Vermont.

Approximately no one on the US home front had to fear harm coming to them from a Mitsubishi product. This stands in rather stark contrast to the experience on the British home front:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/second-world-war/blitz/blitz-...

Why does 911 even exist?

Because liquor stores get robbed sometimes, but they aren't usually found in the middle of a national forest.

It's more that if you're that far off the beaten path, you'd better be prepared to hunker down and live with any kind of emergency that comes up for several hours up to a couple of days anyway. Which, for the record, is my standard and expectation for myself.

On the other hand, if you're dealing with being eaten by a bear, having a dangerous encounter with another person, or are at risk of being overrun by wildfire or flooding, a phone isn't likely to help much with the next 30 seconds of your possibly soon-to-be-abbreviated life. That's the risk you (and I) take by being out in the woods. You can't mitigate all or even much of that with technology.

What harm are you worried about coming to in the middle of a national forest that having the internet could possibly save you from? You're in a van, for heaven's sakes. You can roll up the windows, lock the doors, and/or drive off from most dangers save a breakdown or a wildfire, and the internet won't save you from a wildfire.

I've tent camped a lot on forest service land (and BLM land) both out west and in the east. Generally having arrived there by human power. Not once have I been confronted with a situation where the internet would've added to my safety in any way whatsoever.

I find this usage less objectionable than the education jargon. It suggests that we all have a latent understanding of the turboencabulation principle just waiting for the right activity to force air into its ballast tanks and make it pop above the waves.

That said, I don't love this non-education jargon usage for its passive-voiced-ness. The letters didn't "surface" of their own accord. Somebody found them, decided that they were noteworthy, and made the choice to bring them into the public view.

In my brief and abortive foray into education, I discovered that they friggin' love to use "surface" as a verb. As in: This activity surfaces an understanding of the turboencabulation principle for learners. Or somesuch. It's been a while, happily.

Unless you're a submarine, "surface" is not a verb.

King Arthur has classes in Norwich, VT! Come and take some! My partner got me a pretzel making class a couple years ago, and it has made baking soft pretzels a treat.

Boston Logan is probably your closest truly useful airport, and the Dartmouth Coach goes direct from there to Hanover.

The problem with a French 75, which is a mighty fine cocktail, is that you'd have to drink an unhealthy number of them to finish a bottle of champagne before it went flat.

This has nothing to do with TFA and the math therein other than it's a cocktail on the list.

To have regenerative braking, you'd need a hub motor or a bottom bracket motor with a fixed hub and the freewheel on the crank, which admittedly does exist, just not in conjunction with a motor in the bottom bracket AFAIK.

You'd also need some way of controlling the regenerative and friction brakes together. No, it cannot be separate levers. A lot of casual cyclists don't use their front brakes because they're worried that they'll go over the bars.

I've never worked on a motorcycle, but I have worked on hydraulic brakes on several cars, including when I was recently given the opportunity to learn how to bend and flare rigid brake lines.

The problem on bicycles is that everything is small and light, and that nothing is really standardized at this point. You need a bleed kit for mineral oil, and a different one for DOT fluid. Each of those probably comes with a few different adapters for the various threadings. Barbs, olives, and flare nuts aren't standardized across manufacturers either. There are three or four different ways to just put a caliper on a fork or frame. There are a further three or four ways to put a rotor on a hub. That means you're stocking more hubs and pre-built wheels as well as rotors. There are easily a dozen common brake pads, probably many more if you start looking at the obscure stuff.

At the handlebars, the drop-bar brake and shift levers are super tightly packaged and integrated. At the high end of the market, you might be able to get rebuild parts, though I never had to do that. Otherwise you're replacing a pretty expensive component, assuming it's even available. The market is still moving pretty fast as we've gone from two-by to one-by drivelines.

Cheaper non-integrated flat-bar brake levers are relatively benign to replace if you have to, but you still have to chop and reterminate the hose and bleed them. On the flip side, you can probably forget about getting rebuild parts.

Compared to a car, and I assume a motorcycle, the tolerances on everything are tighter. The room for gaskets and O-rings is smaller so leaks develop more easily and water contaminates the fluid more easily. The size of the fluid reservoir is vastly smaller so there's less reserve if you have a small leak. You're moving less fluid overall, so the margin between mushy and useless is pretty small.

We've come from a world where you needed two types of cable (road and MTB), one type of housing, and generously a half-dozen kinds of pads for cable actuated rim brakes to this. It's all doable, but the amount of stuff and tools you have to have on hand in a bike shop has goddamn exploded.

They came on to the downhill MTB market 25-30 years ago now, spread into XC and from there into road and gravel. Sadly, they've now made their way down to the mid-low end of the hybrid/city/comfort market as well. Low-end hydraulic disc brakes are a huge downgrade from cable-actuated brakes.

The components range from OK to outright crap and the labor to screw around with them easily adds up to a significant fraction of the cost of the bicycle. What would've been a 15-30 minute cable and housing job can easily turn into a 60-120 minute hose and bleed job. Assuming you have the parts on hand to terminate the hose on both ends, that is.

In 10 years, there will be an absolute glut of bicycles that are basically fixable except for their totally unsupported hydraulic brakes.

The braking performance ranges from better than the equivalent price-point rim brakes to absolute crap. I hadn't ridden my mountain bike for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to realize that the 20 year-old Avid BB-7 cable-actuated discs on it compare favorably to most of the hydraulic systems on the market.

Virtually every user-serviceable problem can be solved by one of the following:

Reading the fine manual and making sure the machine is threaded correctly.

Replacing the needle.

Adjusting the tension, starting with getting the bobbin tension grossly correct, then balancing it with the top tension. <- This is not hard; it's just that most people haven't been taught[0].

Removing the accumulated lint from the bobbin driver and feed dogs.

Lubricating the machine.

If none of those work, have it serviced. If the service person tells you the machine is crap, go to a thrift shop and buy a Singer 66, 99, 15 or equivalent Japanese clone for $25-$100. For a little more money, you can get a 201. A Featherweight is a joy to use and takes up no space in storage, but is much costlier than any of the above options.

Don't buy a slant shank machine (400 or 500 series); that was an evolutionary dead-end. If you absolutely need a machine that zigzags, ask the service person what they recommend.

[0] This is applicable to Singer class 15 machines and their clones, but the general principles apply to any lockstitch machine:

https://ismacs.net/singer_sewing_machine_company/manuals/ha-...

If you have a transverse shuttle (you almost certainly don't) or a vibrating shuttle (you probably don't), you may need to look up information specific to your machine.

Yeah, the SRAM ones require two syringes and seven hands to bleed. And DOT fluid is great at removing paint if you spill it. I haven't done any Magura ones, but the Shimano ones were clearly engineered to be maintained by someone who isn't an octopus.

I recently learned that if you live in a place where Citroën LHM is readily available, it's a less-expensive and compatible substitute for Shimano mineral oil brake fluid. Conversely, if you're in a place where LHM isn't available for love or money, you can substitute Shimano mineral brake oil instead of going on a wild goose chase of the Citroën product.

I can hardly think of a worse thing than a bleed kit to lend out from a library. They're full of small parts to lose, and they'll never be clean once you use them. And you don't want people mixing up the DOT and mineral oil bleed kits.

I have worked in a bike shop as a mechanic, and we periodically ended up misplacing the various adapters. This is in a place where everybody using the kit is getting paid to do the job and has been trained. The librarians would go nuts just replacing O-rings and adapters that people had lost.

If you need one for your specific bike, you're probably as well off just buying the one you need from e.g. bleedzone.com [0]. Most of them are around or under $25, and if it's your kit, you always know who the last idiot to use it was :-)

[0] I haven't bought from them, but probably will when I need one. The shop I worked in has sadly closed.

This is true, but the problem has become more concentrated with the advent of RNAV. Depending on wind direction and which runway Logan was operating, I had flights departing directly over my place in both JP and later Somerville every 60-90 seconds. The precision with which they do this is incredible, and also kind of annoying.

Spreading out the traffic would do wonders. Having witnessed this firsthand, it's not super surprising that complaints are concentrated when the noise is too.

What are the criteria for inclusion on this site? In no particular order I have a couple that could be added:

Plymouth Municipal in Plymouth, NH. GA grass strip, I believe. Follow the signs towards Quincy Bog from 93. If you go through a covered bridge shortly after turning off 25, you're on the right road.

Blueberry Hill in Western MA. Private grass strip. Former(?) home of The Cookie Lady. PYO Blueberries. About 10 miles north of Upper Goose Pond cabin on the Appalachian Trail. Northbound hikers will appreciate it greatly if southbound hikers bring blueberries for the pancakes the next morning.

Post Mills, VT. Grass strip, has very active soaring and ballooning communities. Home to the Vermontasaurus and a great deal of other folk art-type stuff. Worth a trip if you're in our particular middle of nowhere already. No, I did not know Brian Boland. He died before we moved to the area.

Tonopah, NV is on there. I spent a night with my tent pitched in their hangar (with permission) in 2006 bike touring out west. That one remains active.

Post Mills is most definitely active and they release sailplane tows over our house regularly. Often you can find someone setting up for a baloon flight on a nice morning. I've driven by Plymouth Municipal a bunch going to and from Rumney for climbing when I lived in Boston, and there were a bunch of planes last time I did that. Haven't been by Blueberry Hill in a while, but sure was happy to gorge myself on blueberries on my way to Katahdin in 2010!

The Tajima ones [0] are phenomenal, though the hook leaves a longer blank stretch than I'd like. They make a super nice snap knife too. Highly recommend Tajima for anything they make. Annoyingly, they don't sell a rip saw, only crosscut.

[0] https://www.tajimatool.com/product_category/mt/#chalk-rite

Yikes. That sounds like the kind of lesson one tries to learn secondhand, or at most once. Like the time I stalled out a tow-behind wood chipper (the kind tree services use).

It was a smaller one, and the process for getting the log out involved taking the jack off the trailer tongue and hooking it up to the feed roller springs assembly to spread the rollers far enough to pull the log out.

Red Dead Redemption 2? The birding simulator also has firewood splitting and horse feeding simulators?

https://www.audubon.org/magazine/birding-its-1899-inside-blo...

Vertical splitters are better since the splitter comes down to ground level where your rounds already are. Much less lifting.

I'm not super quick with a maul, but I can pretty easily keep up with the hydraulic splitter I've used. The hydraulic splitter is nice for the ones that have really gnarly, interlocked grain.

You don't wear it out. You land the head long of your aim point, and splinter the handle on whatever you were trying to hit. It's certainly not hard to ruin a handle if you're learning to swing a sledge by driving steel splitting wedges.

Not that I disagree with you, but as US society, and AIUI many other modern societies, are organized around a growing population. In order to have Medicare and Social Security in their current forms, you need n increasing number of working age people to keep the programs solvent.

Changing this, and moving to a society where AI and robots solve the problem of letting people retire (presuming that's possible, technologically) would require a massive shift in how people are, for lack of a better word, valued by society. Right now, we assign a lot of value to individuals based on their level of economic productivity.

It would be a change of considerable magnitude to let AI and robots create the economic value and then distribute it to individuals on some "fair" basis. I suggest that based on the current situation, finding agreement on what constitutes "fair" would be challenging, at best.

I'm a basically monolingual white guy from the Midwest USA, transplanted to Vermont. I discovered kimchi in a restaurant and learned to make it from the internet[0].

I'm sure people who come by their kimchi-making through their family or culture natively probably have words that work better for them that I would stumble over and mangle is truly epic fashion :-)

[0] https://www.maangchi.com/recipe/tongbaechu-kimchi

"Blorp" is the notional noise of kimchi or sauerkraut fermenting as the carbon dioxide escapes the airlock. Vigorous fermentation can be described as "the kimchi is really blorping along today". It's almost onomatopoetic, but not quite.

We ferment wine or beer in a different vessel with different airlock, so it does not blorp. We don't have a word for that yet.

The crock we used that birthed this word is this one:

https://www.lehmans.com/product/striped-european-style-ferme...

15 years ago is about when they broke up with Pininfarina. Your opinion is probably not a coincidence.

You definitely have to let the tool do the work with the harder lead for that exact reason. I'm typically going for really faint lines, and I don't erase or ink anyway. I usually get into the groove trap when I'm going over my lines to darken them with a softer pencil, which suggests I should go softer still.

I own one, but it's an almost completely different tool. The fat lead doesn't stay sharp, and isn't really something you'd use for drafting or drawing figures for inking. They are great for marking lumber though.