Teemu Kalvas

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 15:18:38 +0200

More London underground porn at oskarlin.com.

This map of the underground focuses on travel time. Time is represented as length on the map.

The only problem is the colour change of the lines. The author agrees that it was only made for getting better marks on the assignment.

Pay no attention to the commenters unable to appreciate genius.

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:51:43 +0300

The recumbent has had a bump in the rear tyre for weeks. I've been lazy to do anything about it, and also interested in finding out how it will perform.

Today, I found out. Fortunately I hadn't managed to get even a kilometre from home, before the telltale feeling of running on a totally empty tube. I stopped to inspect the situation. The tyre had a slash about three centimetres long, multiple millimetres wide. Jury-rigging damage like that would be nasty even in the middle of nowhere, so I decided to walk back and pick another bike to get to the office at a sensible time.

Now I need to decide whether to put a Stelvio on or to decide it's winter and put the Innovas on. Last year the first spill because of ice was on the first of November. It is unseasonally warm now, but if the wind turns, it will change rapidly.

The Stelvio naysayers got it wrong. The rear tyre which broke was a City Marathon. The front which is a Stelvio has almost as much distance (around 2000 km) as the rear. The Stelvio is unblemished.

The place to get Schwalbe tubes and tyres in obscure sizes in Helsinki is Velotrade at Roihuvuorentie 30. Well, at least if you are not trying to find a 451. In that case you are out of luck anyway.

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:18:49 +0300

Bad local bike shops are good in exactly one way. They make it much harder to spend money. I rode 34 km and visited five shops to get myself a pair of Egg Beaters (which rule) and a new tyre, because the old one doesn't want to be round.

Did I mention that Egg Beaters rule? I'm seriously considering putting them on my road bike as well. Some sort of cleat unification has to happen, or the confusion will get out of hand.

One bike shop which didn't have a tyre for me, but has good mechanics, did offer some free advice though. I'm apparently supposed to lube the rim with dish washing detergent before putting on unruly tyres. This allegedly makes pressuring up much more likely to force the tyre to round, provided the rim is true. I haven't got to trying this, because I was determined to get my new tyre, and finally did so.

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 10:33:22 +0300

Between Monday 2004-04-05 and Friday 2005-04-01 I cycled my 6.1 km commute 323 times, roller skated it 51 times, used public transport 33 times, ran 9 times and rode in a coworker's car 6 times. This sums up to 422 trips in 211 days. I haven't counted the time spent on business trips out of the city into any of these totals.

My commuting is thus 90.8% petrol unfriendly.

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 15:23:49 +0200

This bike plow is so cool.

Here in the midwest there are a few months each year when bicycling becomes rather difficult. Early darkness can be overcome by a decent headlight, a reflective vest and blinking rear light. Cold weather can be dealt with by layering up warm clothing. The final hurdle in winter riding is dealing with the snow, particularly on the bike path.

I want one of these.

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:38:40 +0200

I used to opine that the fact of winter makes separate bike tracks a sensible idea, even though in conditions without a winter I would prefer wide outside lanes for cycling, for reasons well explained in most vehicular cycling advocacy texts. However, trying to ride to town and back yesterday, I came to add some caveats to this.

Riding on a bike track in winter is ok, if it is in good shape. It is in good shape if it has been ploughed after last snowfall over a couple of centimetres, and traffic in around-freezing conditions hasn't thrown a lot of irregular bits of snow and ice from the road to the bike track. Ploughs have their job cut out for them even clearing the actual road, yet alone the bike tracks, with the result that bike tracks tend to be cleared only after half a day even for quite moderate (and common) cases of snowfall. Brown mush from the road doesn't end up on the bike track if there is at least a metre and a half from the edge of the road to the track, but very often there is no space for this kind of finery.

On the other hand, if there was just a wide outside lane, the wide bit would not be ploghed at first, but bikes would need to ride on the ploghed part of the road, leading to sideways movement of car when passing. In winter, the exact sideways position of any vehicle can be far less accurate than in nice road conditions, so this is dangerous. When the ploughed surface reached the widened part, it wouldn't probably keep clean because of debris thrown there by passing cars.

So actually both solutions as usually practiced are bad in winter. Only bike tracks substantially separated from the road work well, and they need to be cleared of new snow rapidly enough. Fortunately some bike tracks here meet both requirements. Riding into town where horizontal space has always been at a premium is just not very nice.

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 14:47:21 +0200

A Zen teacher once asked his students why they rode bicycles. One said he rode to carry potatoes. Another cycled to observe the world. A third said it cleared the mind, and a fourth said cycling put him in harmony with all sentient beings. The Zen master was pleased, but when the fifth replied, "I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle," the teacher sat at the student's feet and said, "I am your student."

It is not possible to give just ten reasons for riding a bicycle.

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 21:28:34 +0200

Iain Banks once compared science fiction to the organ and the aptly misnamed mainstream fiction to the piano. I like works for the organ, and that shows in the kind of mainstream I read. DeLillo's Cosmopolis puts Banks' claim to the test.

The protagonist is the head of a successful business empire, fabulously rich and very young. The book follows one of his days by the minute. He is betting a significant proportion of his wealth against the yen, but the yen keeps rising against all expectations.

The storyline does not skip time much, but the story still kept me on the edge with new surprises every dozen pages. Slowly the momentum builds towards an unavoidable ending, but of course there is a twist in the end. Cosmopolis is hardly a comfortable read, but the catharsis is brought on by the vitriol.

Category: General. Recommendation: strong read.

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 19:23:23 +0200

Terry Pratchett shows no mercy for misogynistic religious practice in Monstrous Regiment, the latest Discworld installment in paperback. A young woman dresses up as a man to join the army and escape the bounds her society puts upon women. Unfortunately for her the neighbouring countries have finally put up with the continuous warfare and their alliance has a new member: Ankh-Morpork.

Most major characters are completely new, except for the journalist William de Worde and the Ankh-Morporkian special envoy, who just happens to be one Samuel Vimes.

Monstrous Regiment continues the facelift Discworld has been getting since The Truth. Defocusing from dusty old characters and inventing new ones has done much good to the series.

Category: Fantasy/humour. Series: Discworld. Recommendation: weak read.

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:42:16 +0200

Tigana is Guy Gavriel Kay's high fantasy take on 16th century Italy. The culturally consistent peninsula of Palm is split into nine sovereign dukedoms constantly involved in petty warfare. The peninsula is simultaneously attacked by invading armies from both west and east, and completely overrun.

With the backdrop of the subterfuge against the occupying sorcerors is developed a tragedy of memory, both by being too stuck in the past and by having a memory completely eradicated.

The novel has viewpoint characters on both sides of the political conflict. I suspect Tigana might be a significant source of ideas for narrative structure for George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, where there are even more viewpoint characters and which is also strongly cryptohistorical. Also like the Song, no clear dichotomy between good and evil is described by the narrator—although by some characters it is.

Category: Fantasy/cryptohistory. Recommendation: read.

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 21:44:11 +0200

What if we had the technological means to live forever? Vance develops a society where this is true, yet people still engage in reproduction. Physical resources being limited, this combination would be catastrophic without some control.

To control the excesses of immortality the society Vance has built in To Live Forever has enacted the Fair Play Act. Citizens are divided along a five-step categorization, where each category has a longer lifespan than the previous one. Step five is true immortality. Newborns enter the lowest step and advance based on their performance towards the advancement of public good.

Of course this doesn't work perfectly, and given sufficient strain it fails to work at all. Vance works it out as his typical ambiguous hero fights for his wrongfully taken immortality back. Not topmost Vance but a really enjoyable adventure.

Category: SF/social anthropology. Recommendation: read.

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 20:18:32 +0200

The BBC's coverage on Finland continues to surprise by not dealing with the irrelevant or downright ridiculous like it used to. Getting the most out of water covers Finland's luck with the water supply.

The Scandinavian country's lakes supply water for its five million inhabitants - and every Finn uses an average of 145 litres of water each day.

In 2003, a UN survey ranked Finland's water first out of 122 countries. So what makes their H2O better than anyone else's?

I feel silly covering this coverage. I hope the Beeb soon repents and returns to the feats of Olympic champions. Oh, I forgot, he's in prison so they can't.

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 21:18:17 +0200

Finland on the BBC: Education key to economic survival.

And in particular, she says the country's educational success can be attributed to the "unified" school system, which sees children staying at the same school between the ages of seven and 16, rather than having primary and secondary schools.

This is heavily debated in Finland. Large portions of the arguing crowd posit that both Finland and the kids would be much better off if the emphasis on unification was much weaker.

My take is that all that is beside the point. The primary purpose of school in western society is not to teach well. If that happens, it is a side product, considered welcome by some and unnecessary by others. The primary purpose is to build national identity and thereby large-scale social cohesion, not exactly consensual hallucinations come naturally to humans.

This is an issue where I both feel strongly and am wildly divergent from the common opinion. John Taylor Gatto wrote a book about what some of the criticism is about: The Underground History of American Education. I don't agree on half what he says, and had he ever heard of me he wouldn't agree on a third of what I say, but you should read it anyway.

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:59:34 +0200

I want to plug Making Light where you miss half the fun if you skip the comments. Teresa often manages to write these snappy summations of the human condition with the professional editing skill of, er, a professional editor.

Real people arent one-dimensional, and vice-versa. If you form a community around some shared interest, sooner or later someone in it is going to get Born Again and start preaching Jesus—unless its a born-again group to start with, in which case someone will begin selling Amway, or get into BDSM. Its one of those things human beings do.

This particular instance arose from the current hubbub on otherkin.

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 19:59:05 +0200

China Miéville's third novel is a world novel, set in Bas-Lag, the world introduced in Perdido Street Station. He dodges most of the problems of many series by having little in common between books. The Scar is set outside the city of New Crobuzon, and the protagonist wasn't a character in Perdido Street Station, although a connection to the previous book emerges along with a convoluted plot with the expected but unguessed final twist.

Considering Miéville's strong drive to rid fantasy of mandatory Tolkienesqueness, the world series approach has commendable points: he doesn't have to spend a hundred pages in each book just to get the setting straight. Quite the contrary, he continues filling out the vagaries of Bas-Lag, building on top of the previous work. Having read PSS is not necessary, but it makes it easier to drop into the flow of an alien world.

I'm charmed by the way he flouts the tradition of Tolkien to downplay technology. In The Scar, maybe even more than before, strange and definitely fantastic technology enables lot of the plot. The author takes care in introducing all vital technology hundreds of pages in advance of the need, so that the reader doesn't feel like being cheaten out of yet another dead end of the plot by the invention of new machinery.

The plot is criticized by many on failing Chekhov's rule: that all strings should become attached at the end and everything should then make sense. Miéville appears to do this on purpose, and it may well be the deciding factor for whether a given person likes his work.

Category: Fantasy/non-Tolkiensque. Recommendation: strong read.

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 13:09:23 +0300

I put a studded winter tyre on the front wheel of my road bike. The bike being designed for a strict maximum tyre size of 25 and the narrowest studded tyres in existence being 32, I had to hack together some steel spacers into the dropouts to move the axle and make the wheel still spin without touching the fork or the brake. From the image you can see how much the axle has been moved by the (since corrected) misalignment of the brake pads.

It's yet to be tested, though. So far it's hanging from the shed roof and waiting for the winter while I'm riding my new bike as long as possible.

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:19:31 +0300

I failed to tighten my new SPD cleats (never actually touched any before) tightly enough, so the loosened during the ride until finally I managed to not unclip and drop my new bike on its right side and snap the rear derailer. Then I managed to let the cable unwind when I was changing it, and the unwound cable managed to get stuck in the cable housing. Then I managed to not figure out how to disassemble the bar-end shifter assembly, to change the cable housing. At that point I was slightly depressed.

Fortunately, today when I walked my bike to the local bike shop, the bike shop person figured it out and fixed it for me in a couple of minutes and only charged me 6 €. For the record, the Shimano bar-end shifter is opened with a sufficiently large Allen key clockwise.

I'll need to install one of those twisty steel tubing things mountain bikers use to shield their rear derailers. It'll make my already wide-looking 406-wheeled rear look even wider, but I guess it won't be an actual problem before the bike can't be tipped 45 degrees without parts touching the ground.

My local bike shop and others are found on my list of bike shops in the greater Helsinki area. If you are a local, please feel free to contribute.

Oh, and new bike photos.

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 15:45:18 +0300

Got my new Nazca Fiero yesterday. Boys ten to thirteen nearby are excited to say the very least. I haven't taken any pictures of it yet, but I'll try to have some available soon. Here's someone else's pictures of an earlier model. Mine is an under seat steered model.

Actually, some of the boys at work, despite not being ten to thirteen, at least not physically, are excited. Some wanted to try it out but chickened out when seated on it. It's not even that low, the seat height is 44 cm.

The steering just gets better the faster you go. "One man's twitchy is another's precise" means just that: One man goes slow, another fast. On the other hand, it might be the reason my cow-orker jumped on his feet after his first quarter rotation of the pedals.

Fiero is pretty heavy, though, but it's not that evident before you lift it. I need to roll it in our shed on its back wheel because it's so long that the corner is unnavigable otherwise. The local hills are girly, even if you aren't a Californian governator. I only found one place to shift to the low (42 tooth) chainring on my 35 km sightseeing to try it out. The 63 tooth big front compensates the hills in manlyness.

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 18:42:47 +0300

First Tuesday. Everyone except me agrees on it.

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 18:09:46 +0300

Some cosmic coincidence has led to the largest concentration of SBCL hackers to live around Helsinki, in Finland. This has been known to us for some time now, but only yesterday did we manage to meet each other at a pub.

Beer was drunk. Hacking anecdotes were told.

A recurring event was agreed on, but I forget whether it was on the first or the second Tuesday of each month, at 19:00, in St. Urho's. I think it was the second.