blog.fogel.ca

Stanford has a few warnings posted in some of their garages:

Nice of them to advertise that the parking garage isn’t a healthy place to hang out, at least not according to your lungs and your junk. But really, a few things.

• If a parking garage deserves an air quality warning, how about a congested freeway on a hot, still day?
• The garage is not the source of that bad health stuff. Specifically, it’s the incomplete combustion of gasoline in the 100’s of internal combustion machines sitting around in the garage. Maybe we should put the warnings directly on the source of the problem?
• If we should be concerned about the health effects on our lungs from our cars, what about the bigger effects – like cars being the leading cause of death for Americans 35 years old and younger? Or being a vital component of our awesome 73% overweight/obese rate? Or pushing our communities and ourselves farther and farther apart – to distance scales that work well for a two-ton block of steel, but not so great for a 150 lb chunk of human?

It’s easy to see and point at air quality numbers. They can be measured empirically, their effects can be studied in laboratories, and it’s easy to say “this is bad. See proof by X.” But more often than not cause-and-effect relationships don’t end with a nice, clean number at the end. As such, it’s harder to talk about these relationships, it’s harder to reason about them. The unfortunate wrench is that sometimes, these ‘unclean’ relationships are actually the most important ones of all. Which probably explains why you never hear of a mathematician being elected to public office.

… is tomorrow, Thursday, May 15. Here’s the deal. I know a lot of people who ‘cycle’ but don’t commute by bike. I also know a lot of people who take the bus or train into work. Occasionally even someone who casual carpools or <gasp> drives in alone. All these modes work. They each have their own advantages, like personal space, or time to get work done, or low direct user cost. But here’s what they don’t have.

A party on the street!!

(image ruthlessly stolen from an SFBC flyer)

I’m joking – but I’m not. The commuting cyclists form a community that you don’t see often. Every morning, you’re thrown into a semi-hostile, fast-moving environment with a few other people – and you spend 10 mintues shooting down the street riding with them, reacting to them, managing the traffic together. You sure don’t get that on a smelly bus, a sleepy train, or a congested freeway where that a-hole loves to cut you off, just because he can.

Now, it’s fun to have this little bonding experience with a few other bikers on the way to work each morning. But on Bike to Work Day? You hit a critical mass where, on major transit corridors, you get more bikes than cars. Coming up to a red light where there’s 10, 20 bikes already waiting for a green – the dynamic is awesome, uplifting, exciting. Suddenly everyone isn’t out riding super defensively, people are more relaxed, forgiving, and perhaps best of all… that d-bag in the 3-series behind you doesn’t have the balls to lay on the horn anymore.

I encourage all of you out there, if you’re not already planning to, to give commuting by bike a shot. Hit me up if you have questions, want route recommendations, or have thoughts/concerns about that critical factor, whatever it is, that keeps you from joining the bike commuting community!

Oh Grand Jeep Cherokee, you may have won the battle, but the war is far from over.

Normally, the clavicle actually meets up with the rest of your shoulder. This is called an AC separation:

Rib’s aren’t supposed to zig-zag. The GJC (Grand Jeep Cherokee) sacrificed it’s dreaded Side View Mirror to do this one, which apparently was completely ripped off by the impact.

And, this one’s a little harder to see. That black line between my lung and my chest wall – that’s air. Air’s supposed to be inside your lung, not next to it. That’s called a pneumothorax, and it’s caused by one of my broken ribs poking a small hole in my left lung.

Any guesses for the number of zeros in the ER bill? I got treated right there at Stanford.