Monthly Archives: January 2023

Respectful Communications, Diverse Viewpoints, and Social Networks

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When Elon Musk bought Twitter, some of us hoped that he would have something brilliant to contribute to the problem of social networks that have become cesspools of hate speech, angry and mean comments, and collections of folks who just want to shout each other down. I’m still hopeful that Elon’s smarter than we are aware and actually has something to contribute here, but I’ve become more and more despondent about the possibility of actual change.

I’ve been using social networking since it exists. Page through this blog and you’ll see that I’m one of the early adopters of what are now the major social networking platforms and a few that didn’t make it. I tend to join the new ones when they surface as well (Mastadon, Post.News, Substack, etc.) just to see what they have that the others don’t.

So far I’m just disappointed. Unfortunately, when Peter Steiner drew the above cartoon in 1993, he was spot on.

My first significant experiences with social communications on the Internet was via USENET. I participated in a bunch of different newsgroup and was amazed at the diversity of topics and membership. I recall being particular enamored with the groups discussing Jewish topics – Torah, Jewish law, etc. I pointed these groups out to Jack Moline, the rabbi of our synagogue (and someone now quite well known), who played around in them for a while. Eventually he came back to me and said that he wasn’t going to continue reading or commenting in the newsgroups because the discourse always ended up being disrespectful and impolite.

There’s something significant lost when we “talk” online. We say things that we wouldn’t ordinarily say to someone’s face. And, often, we can take comfort in anonymity and distance when making distasteful remarks. As Steiner pointed out, nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet.

That’s Twitter today. I don’t have any solutions to this problem but it is “the problem” to solve if we expect Twitter to be useful as a place to share ideas and have thoughtful discussions and conversations. Maybe we need something like “stakes” – things that are at personal risk which penalize bad behavior. In the real world, this is your face, your identity, your job, your home – you don’t say or do things that create risk for these things. Platform content moderation doesn’t quite do this; maybe it’s just better community reputation building (like Stack Overflow). But something needs to change unless we just want these platforms to be just like Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park – a place where someone can say whatever they want, without repercussion, in a place where no one really wants to listen.

PS. As a side note, I started looking at who is writing on post.news. I searched for topics that are interesting to me, looked at the posts, and then had to spend some time figuring out who the posters were. It’d sure be nice to have those “stakes” I mentioned readily available so I can evaluate the poster not just on the immediate comment they are making but also on their history and agenda.

Water For Long Bicycle Rides

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Someone on Reddit asked about how to secure a bike while stopping to refill water which reminded me of similar problem I face when riding in Hawaii – there is just no water to refill with on some of my routes. This happens in particular with long gravel rides, but there are areas I ride which just don’t have convenience stores or gas stations – so what is one to do?

I carry an Ottolock, which is super lightweight and enough of a deterrent to prevent some kid from running off with my bike. Before someone shouts me down about these locks, note that it’s only a deterrent. A dedicated bike thief will cut right through it but for a quick water stop, I’m more concerned about some kid doing a grab and go. If you are primarily out for the ride (versus intending to stop and have coffee or eat lunch or something), a deterrent lock should be just fine.

If there’s no place to lock it up, I often bring the bike into the store with me (like a gas station or convenience store) – no one has ever complained.

As I mentioned, where I ride I often have a different problem – no shops or water anywhere for longer rides. I just recently added a saddle cage holder to my road bike so I can carry a total of 4 bottles with me for those rides. This one in particular is pretty inexpensive, mounted easily, and left plenty of room for a saddle bag. Carrying more bottles adds weight to the ride, but this allows me to do much longer rides in places where refilling water bottles just isn’t an option. If you’ve never used a saddle cage holder, be sure to get a good bottle holder (I can’t remember what I have, but it looks something like the profile design holder). If you use a bottle cage that isn’t a “complete loop” around the bottle, the bottles will go flying when you go over bumps. You can also add a strap to the bottles to hold them in since you’ll likely stop anyway to move the bottles around on your bike. I like this configuration a lot better than using a camelback or similar.

What Distance Is A Good Starter Triathlon?

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I’ve often see prospective triathletes ask about what distance they ought to pursue for their first event. Most of the time the question is tied to concerns about the swim; everyone can sort of imagine that they will be able to bike and run (or walk) but the swim always seems daunting. The reason it’s daunting is because most swimmers don’t ever do distances like those in a triathlon. if you watch the Olympics, most of the races are far shorter. And if you’ve goofed around with your buddies in the pool, you probably didn’t race more than a length or two. So it’s hard to imagine a long swim.

Nonetheless, my answer to this question is almost always Olympic.

I was in a similar place with the swim when I did my first triathlon (it had been many years since I was really in the water and I never was a swimmer). 6 months is plenty of time to get accustomed to the distance and to get some open water practice in as well so you know what it’s like when it’s time to race.

Funny story – when my older daughter decided to do a half-IM, she jumped in the swimming pool and swam like a fish. When she was in elementary school, she was on the community swim team. That experience left her with swimming “muscle memory” and, even though she wasn’t a top swimmer as a kid and hadn’t been swimming in ages, it came right back and she was easily outpacing me.

Olympic is a good distance to start with because it’s long enough that you’ll be serious about training and it’s an endurance distance which means you’ll focus on moderating your energy throughout the event. I’d only recommend sprint triathlons to those athletes who aren’t looking for endurance events; most of the folks who ask this question, though, are endurance athletes.

While this isn’t a totally fair comparison, I tend to think of sprint vs. olympic the same way I’d think of a 100m dash vs a half-marathon. Sprint triathlons are not “starter” triathlons – they are short distances meant to be done hard and fast, kind of like a 100m dash. Olympic distances are long enough (especially for age group athletes) to become endurance events and your training will reflect that. FWIW, I’m not a “sprint” kind of athlete, so I’ve only done Olympic and longer distances.

Given my lack of real athletic talent, I think that triathlon is mostly about commitment to training. If you are willing to commit to train, the Olympic race should be a great place to start and you’ll feel a real sense of accomplishment when you finish.

Triathlon

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One of the things that happened in the break between posts (after 2013) is that I became a triathlete. I started this journey in 2016, first completing Ironman 70.3 Augusta in the sweltering September Georgia humidity and escalated from there to complete two half-IMs and my first full Ironman (Coeur d’Alene) in 2017. At this point I’ve finished 3 full Ironmans and several half-IMs. The COVID pandemic slowed things down in 2020, but I managed to do three half-IMs in 2021 and was planning on another full in 2022 until a bike crash left me with a separated shoulder.

I’m sure there will be plenty of blog posts from here talking about my various triathlon activities, but it occurred to me today that I posted three long answers to questions about cycling, swimming and triathlon that I should preserve. I’ll follow this post with those questions and answers for the future reference of others.