what is the logical assumption regarding race for someone in the NAACP? or the Asian Students Coalition? yes, there are always exceptions, but it's logical to assume (and NOT racist) that members of said group have a common ancestry.
google "Black Students Union" and look at the images.
You're going the other way -- you're starting with social groups and inferring race from that. But that's not my point. I was responding to this comment:
If you can figure out what's wrong with responding to an article about a rape with "what's the bet he's black?," you can figure out what's wrong with your post
My point is that inferring behavior due to race is not valid (since one doesn't choose their own racial background), but inferring behavior due to social group membership is more valid. If someone doesn't believe in their social group's ideals, they probably aren't going to remain a member.
You inferred someone's racial background by looking at the social groups they hang out with... Which is entirely different than seeing that someone is anti-gay and guessing that he is a member of a group that is very public and vocal about their anti-gay stance. Which is also not the same as seeing someone commit a crime and inferring his race.
It's a good operating assumption. If you assume that is true, you won't get burned as often. However, it's not actually true.
And not a reasonable option for most of us. My employer has an internet portal with HR and payroll information. My credit cards all have online portals with my purchase information. The same with banks, utility companies, etc. Public records (property taxes, etc) are increasingly available online. Few people abstain from all personal discussions in email.
There's a vast amount of personal information online, much of it put there by 3rd parties we don't have control over, and we all rely on loose privacy regulations to keep it private. Your bank, utilities, etc may already be selling your account information to data aggregators.
If you can figure out what's wrong with responding to an article about a rape with "what's the bet he's black?," you can figure out what's wrong with your post. If you cannot, you're probably a bigot.
In what way is one's racial background equivalent to the social groups one hangs out with?
That's what it means in China. Bike riders don't have the folding money to spend on frivolities like specialized clothes to get that extra 0.1 mph in wind resistance.
I don't wear the clothes for any performance benefit, it's purely for utilitarian reasons. The padded shorts are much more comfortable on a long ride (plus my work pants tend to wear out at the tops of my legs due to rubbing against the seat), and they are uncomfortably warm on warm day. The bright yellow cycling jersey makes me more visible, wicks away sweat to keep me cool, and has convenient back pockets to stash things like my wallet and cell phone. Further, my city's climate tends to be foggy, so when I wear my cotton work clothes on the bike, I arrive with my clothes damp.
If I shopped around, I could probably find cycling clothes that look more like street clothes (like baggy mountain biking shorts), but I don't really choose my commute clothes based on what people think of them - I choose based on comfort and visibility.
It costs money to purify helium to greater degree and it costs money to store and transport such helium. Thus, it is possible to run out of medical grade helium without actually running out of helium.
I don't see how that's possible. Any helium can be purified, so if you have a truckload of "dirty" helium, you can purify it and use it for medical uses. But if you run out of helium, you have no helium for any use.
Some helium is pure enough to put in medical equipment and some is pure enough to put in party balloons. Make a guess what's in the balloon?
But all helium is able to be purified to any degree -- just because they can allow more impurities in helium meant for balloons doesn't mean that the same helium couldn't be used in an MRI machine if it were purified further. It all (mostly) comes from the same source, the only difference is in how much they purify it.
A lot of places, Kobnhavn and Amsterdam for example, have an extremely high density of parked bicycles (and city-sponsored parking) so a cop walking by with a RFID reader isn't anything like the police having to take 'custody' of a suspected stolen bike first.
Now obviously the further you get from Centraal Station such bike density lessens, (as does bike theft), but you get the idea. A cop with a reader walking a beat can read a lot of RFID tags and possibly find a stolen bike or two.
But the manufacturer's site confirms that the only way to read the tag is to dangle the antenna down the seat tube. Do people in your country typically take the seat off their bike when parking? (some here do to prevent theft of the seat)? Surely the police don't pull the seat posts out of a rack full of bikes to read the RFID tags?
I don't know if you're trolling or not, but I have a car and it gets regular use on longer trips... I find biking to be more convenient even if it takes a bit longer. And since I only get gas once a month or so, I don't really notice the price of gas, whether it's $3, $5, or $6/gallon doesn't really affect my driving much (though higher gas prices do mean higher prices at the store, so I'm not completely immune to energy costs). My 10 year old car isn't all that fuel efficient (19mpg city, 28mpg highway), but I'd pay much more buying a newer more efficient car than I'd save in gas purchases)
You'd superficially think the very slightly lower weight of H2 would make H2 lift more than He, but after all manner of handwaving it turns out that very cold low pressure helium displaces more air at altitude.
The density of H2 is about half that of He, though in air the buoyancy difference is around 8%.
So 100 Liters of H2 and He at STP, hauled up 100Kft, supposedly that results in a slightly higher volume of He than H2. I honestly don't care enough to research it, but urban legend or no its an entertaining story. And you're not solving it with ideal gas laws (need non-ideal gas laws/tables)
Do you have a reference for this? In school, we were taught that the ideal gas law works best at high temperatures and low pressures, even at -30C (240K), far from the boiling point of Hydrogen and Helium, it seems that the low pressure at high altitude would still enable the ideal gas law to provide a good approximation of the behavior of the gases.
Because H2 comes from natgas and He comes from natgas the obvious next calculation is if the larger balloon outweighs (get it?) the advantage of cheaper filling.
Since many sources are claiming that Helium is sold below its true value, it's not a fair comparison. Hydrogen can be cracked out of Methane in nearly unlimited quantities. Helium is more rare and has to be extracted from the natural gas.
Except that medical grade helium and the crap they fill party balloons with are two different things.
I thought all helium came out of the ground, captured from natural gas wells. There may be some grades that are more refined than other, but the ultimate source is the same - and is very limited.
Are you high or something? Or is scientific stuff only the stuff you approve of?
Well, I'm more interested in the medical usage - about six months ago, my dad had to reschedule an MRI, the imaging center said that there was a shortage of helium needed to run the unit. He had a non-critical need for his MRI so rescheduling was not a problem, but I have to think that the 30 million cubic feet of helium that they are venting to the atmosphere in this thrill ride would keep a lot of MRI machines running.
Why don't they use Hydrogen for things like this (one-time use balloon) and preserve more Helium for scientific and medical use (and for safe party balloons)?
Or is helium depletion no longer a pressing problem with the current natural gas boom?
Hydrogen has been largely discredited as the root cause of the Hindenberg disaster, is it possible to use it safely in a high altitude research balloon?
Interesting system -- I'd never heard of this system here in the 'states. Sounds like it could be useful if the tag really is non-removable from the frame, but it seems that the same criminals that figured out how to defeat u-locks will also figure out how to pull this out the frame or otherwise destroy it without destroying the frame. And given that many bikes are recovered with the frame's serial number intact, I'm not sure this would be much of a deterrent in the USA - it's great to help you recover your stolen bike the police have possession of it, but I'm not sure it's going to stop someone from selling the bike on the street.
It took a while to find the scanner that reads the tags, but it looks like it has an antenna that the police drop into the seat tube to read the tag:
The scanner Immobilise sells is the LID560 read only scanner which comes with a custom antenna. Immobilise provide an antenna because no RF scanner can read through metal and as a result the aerial is used to read tags within bike frames by placing the antenna inside the bike's seat-post tube.
you gonna put the dismembered hookers ? bikes have no trunk? no self-respecting serial killer would be seen dead huffing and puffing down the road on an old rusty huffy,
maybe they will get a little trailer ansd pull that around? dosnt seem too likely
captcha entice ?! lmfao
Just get a cargo bike, plenty of room for a dismembered body:
The damage caused by bikes and pedestrians does however pale compared to the damage done by weather and "normal" aging.
A normal road used by pedestrians and cyclists will not break down significantly earlier than a normal road that is not used at all...
I can second that - my commute takes me through a park. In one area of the park, there's a section of mixed use bike+pedestrian path, a section of pedestrian-only path, and there's a short stub of path that goes to nowhere, it literally ends after about 20 feet at a fence (it used to be a path but it's been closed for years), so for the past few years it's gotten effectively no use at all.
All 3 surfaces appear to be in about the same condition, some cracked pavement, some ripples apparently due to tree roots, but overall the paths are in decent shape, and the unused path looks about the same as the heavily used bike path.
You don't need a locked down container for holding the GPS gear as you infer. Just make it sticky, remove the seat-post, push it to the bottom, and replace the seat-post. Even cheap embedded RFIDs passing near to readers can be useful, for tolls and the like. In places where bike theft is high, police are even tagging bikes with RFIDs as I have described, so if the bikes are stolen, a police officer walking past with a reader might find them.
Unless the bike has a carbon fiber frame, neither GPS nor RFID is going to work from inside a metal bike frame. My toll RFID reader is blocked by the window tinting at the top of my windshield, I had to mount the box in the lower clear portion of my windshield to get it to work.
You want to consider the quality of the roads, and then shop for tires. For a commuter bike, solid tires make a lot of sense. You *can* patch a flat in a few minutes and make up the time difference, but it's not a lot of fun. Especially in adverse weather.
I've ridden a bike with airless tires, and I don't like the feel -- they feel much harsher than regular pneumatic tires. But worse, since they don't appear to have as much "give", when rounding a corner over uneven pavement (which describes just about every intersection in my city), they seem to skitter across the bumps instead of absorbing them, which could lead to loss of control when riding at a higher speed.
I have a quality set of Schwalbe Marathons and haven't had a flat in over 5000 miles of riding. And I've hit plenty of glass and other hazards on my commute. They aren't cheap tires - they cost almost as much as what I pay for my car tires, but they are good, durable tires.
Deaths per mile traveled are spectacularly higher,... You're "about" four times safer driving on road than biking... roads are for cars and motorcycles, not for bicycles.
Moreover, I think one of the points of TFA is that the bike infrastructures (i.e., bike lanes) is being expanded, which is likely to reduce the accident rate (per bike-mile) by quite a bit.
I'd also like to see stats that take into account the circumstances of the accident - was the rider on the correct side of the road? Was he on the road at all, or on the sidewalk and hit while crossing at an intersection? Was he wearing bright colored clothing? If at night, did he have reflectors? Lights?
I see so many darkly clad riders riding at night with no lights or even reflectors on their bikes and I can't help thinking that they are an accident waiting to happen. So I'd really like to know how many of these riders are getting into accidents versus a brightly clad and well lit bike commuter.
Sure about that 25 minute figure? I figure I'm doing well if from door to door I can shower and change clothes in 10 minutes so you're somehow claiming it takes 15 minutes in car or on bike.... That also messes up your exercise claim of 50 minutes now you're down to only 30 minutes, which really isn't much (thats about how long I go for a walk every day at lunch, admittedly not "real" exercise). For example, my flex time commute is about 20 minutes when I avoid rush hour (which I almost always do). There's no way I can maintain 75 miles per hour for about 15 minutes on level ground on my bike, so that's an easy 90 minutes or so each way on a bike at realistic long distance (for a daily bike commuter) speeds. Add some shower time and realistic break time (water breaks when its over 100, knock the ice off when its below freezing, etc) and we're up to a good 4 hours of commute per day, vs 40 minutes in my car and 3 hrs 20 mins of some mixture of relaxing exercising/.-posting whatever.
Obviously, biking is not for everyone, in this country it's very easy to design your life in such a way that biking is not a viable option.
Here are my commute stats (I timed each trip several times over a few weeks):
10 miles by car, 12 miles by bike:
1. Car: 47 minutes average. This includes the walk to the parking garage to get my car, and more significantly, finding street parking and then walking several blocks to the office. Best case was 40 minutes, worst case was 1:20 when there was an accident on my commute route and I got stuck in stop and go traffic on the freeway.
2. Bike: 66 minutes average. This includes 59 minutes for biking, and walking into the office, and 7 minutes changing clothes. Oddly, my biking time is almost always constant, ranging from 58 - 60 minutes. It's surprising since I ride through 8 traffic light intersections, so I thought my time would be a lot more variable. I've timed myself for over 60 rides, and the worst case was 65 minutes, but almost all of my rides have been from 58 - 60 minutes.
3. Transit: 73 minutes average. This includes walking to the train station (5 minutes from home), making a train->bus connection, and walking from the bus stop to the office. Best case was 55 minutes, worst was 90 minutes.
On thing I didn't include in these figures is the extra padding I have to allow -- even though on average it only takes about 45 minutes by car, I need to allow 60 minutes of travel time to work to account for delays, so I leave earlier. The same goes for transit, I have to add on another 20 - 30 minutes to my commute to account for delays. Since my bike commute time is so constant, I don't need to pad my departure time.
If by "leading the way" you mean "stigmatizing bike riders as too poor to own a car", then you're right. I see about 1-2 people per month wearing spandex, which means they're riding recreationally. The rest are working poor...to be looked down upon, in the same way that normal Americans look down on rural residents.
Clothing style alone doesn't determine whether a cyclist is commuting or on a recreational ride. I wear cycling clothes (padded shorts, cycling jersey) on my commute because it's far enough that regular street clothes are not as comfortable as dedicated biking clothes, and no matter what I wear I'd need to chance when I got to work, so I choose to wear cycling attire.
no it sounds like extra polution. Why are we going to in essence sell 2 times as much waste product just to encapsulate a liquid "for the children"
anytime something is done "for the children"* we should automatically vote no as it is never a good thing
for the children can also mean for your own good
Well, I think the belief is that more people will choose to accept the smaller portion size rather than purchase 2 separate containers.
Whether or not that's true remains to be seen, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis. If the 50 ounce big gulp option isn't available (yes, I know 7/11's big gulp is exempt for some reason), few people are going to purchase 3 16 ounce portions instead. Some will, but it's likely that the majority will not.
I don't live in NYC, but I didn't think this ban was meant to "save the children".
no bar is going to sell you that much booze, they would lose their liquor license. and on top of that, you wont die from drinking 1 litre of cola, you will from booze...
But it's likely that you'll die an early death if you drink that 1 liter of soda every day for years.
Slashdot Mirror
That's $9000 in 2015 dollars.
The VW Beetle came to the US, if memory serves, at $1666 in 1960s dollars.
The 1960 Beetle sedan cost $1,565, the convertible started at $2,055.
$1565 in 1960 is worth around $12,400 today.
what is the logical assumption regarding race for someone in the NAACP? or the Asian Students Coalition?
yes, there are always exceptions, but it's logical to assume (and NOT racist) that members of said group have a common ancestry.
google "Black Students Union" and look at the images.
You're going the other way -- you're starting with social groups and inferring race from that. But that's not my point. I was responding to this comment:
If you can figure out what's wrong with responding to an article about a rape with "what's the bet he's black?," you can figure out what's wrong with your post
My point is that inferring behavior due to race is not valid (since one doesn't choose their own racial background), but inferring behavior due to social group membership is more valid. If someone doesn't believe in their social group's ideals, they probably aren't going to remain a member.
You inferred someone's racial background by looking at the social groups they hang out with... Which is entirely different than seeing that someone is anti-gay and guessing that he is a member of a group that is very public and vocal about their anti-gay stance. Which is also not the same as seeing someone commit a crime and inferring his race.
It's a good operating assumption. If you assume that is true, you won't get burned as often. However, it's not actually true.
And not a reasonable option for most of us. My employer has an internet portal with HR and payroll information. My credit cards all have online portals with my purchase information. The same with banks, utility companies, etc. Public records (property taxes, etc) are increasingly available online. Few people abstain from all personal discussions in email.
There's a vast amount of personal information online, much of it put there by 3rd parties we don't have control over, and we all rely on loose privacy regulations to keep it private. Your bank, utilities, etc may already be selling your account information to data aggregators.
If you can figure out what's wrong with responding to an article about a rape with "what's the bet he's black?," you can figure out what's wrong with your post. If you cannot, you're probably a bigot.
In what way is one's racial background equivalent to the social groups one hangs out with?
That's what it means in China. Bike riders don't have the folding money to spend on frivolities like specialized clothes to get that extra 0.1 mph in wind resistance.
I don't wear the clothes for any performance benefit, it's purely for utilitarian reasons. The padded shorts are much more comfortable on a long ride (plus my work pants tend to wear out at the tops of my legs due to rubbing against the seat), and they are uncomfortably warm on warm day. The bright yellow cycling jersey makes me more visible, wicks away sweat to keep me cool, and has convenient back pockets to stash things like my wallet and cell phone. Further, my city's climate tends to be foggy, so when I wear my cotton work clothes on the bike, I arrive with my clothes damp.
If I shopped around, I could probably find cycling clothes that look more like street clothes (like baggy mountain biking shorts), but I don't really choose my commute clothes based on what people think of them - I choose based on comfort and visibility.
What hydrogen? If helium is nearly gone, then surely hydrogen, which is even lighter, is even closer to depletion.
Actually, Hydrogen is not lighter than Helium -- they are the exact same weight, when you compare samples of equivalent mass.
It costs money to purify helium to greater degree and it costs money to store and transport such helium. Thus, it is possible to run out of medical grade helium without actually running out of helium.
I don't see how that's possible. Any helium can be purified, so if you have a truckload of "dirty" helium, you can purify it and use it for medical uses. But if you run out of helium, you have no helium for any use.
Some helium is pure enough to put in medical equipment and some is pure enough to put in party balloons. Make a guess what's in the balloon?
But all helium is able to be purified to any degree -- just because they can allow more impurities in helium meant for balloons doesn't mean that the same helium couldn't be used in an MRI machine if it were purified further. It all (mostly) comes from the same source, the only difference is in how much they purify it.
A lot of places, Kobnhavn and Amsterdam for example, have an extremely high density of parked bicycles (and city-sponsored parking) so a cop walking by with a RFID reader isn't anything like the police having to take 'custody' of a suspected stolen bike first.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/fmzs/3911308473/
Now obviously the further you get from Centraal Station such bike density lessens, (as does bike theft), but you get the idea. A cop with a reader walking a beat can read a lot of RFID tags and possibly find a stolen bike or two.
But the manufacturer's site confirms that the only way to read the tag is to dangle the antenna down the seat tube. Do people in your country typically take the seat off their bike when parking? (some here do to prevent theft of the seat)? Surely the police don't pull the seat posts out of a rack full of bikes to read the RFID tags?
You can't afford a car?
I don't know if you're trolling or not, but I have a car and it gets regular use on longer trips... I find biking to be more convenient even if it takes a bit longer. And since I only get gas once a month or so, I don't really notice the price of gas, whether it's $3, $5, or $6/gallon doesn't really affect my driving much (though higher gas prices do mean higher prices at the store, so I'm not completely immune to energy costs). My 10 year old car isn't all that fuel efficient (19mpg city, 28mpg highway), but I'd pay much more buying a newer more efficient car than I'd save in gas purchases)
You'd superficially think the very slightly lower weight of H2 would make H2 lift more than He, but after all manner of handwaving it turns out that very cold low pressure helium displaces more air at altitude.
The density of H2 is about half that of He, though in air the buoyancy difference is around 8%.
So 100 Liters of H2 and He at STP, hauled up 100Kft, supposedly that results in a slightly higher volume of He than H2. I honestly don't care enough to research it, but urban legend or no its an entertaining story. And you're not solving it with ideal gas laws (need non-ideal gas laws/tables)
Do you have a reference for this? In school, we were taught that the ideal gas law works best at high temperatures and low pressures, even at -30C (240K), far from the boiling point of Hydrogen and Helium, it seems that the low pressure at high altitude would still enable the ideal gas law to provide a good approximation of the behavior of the gases.
Because H2 comes from natgas and He comes from natgas the obvious next calculation is if the larger balloon outweighs (get it?) the advantage of cheaper filling.
Since many sources are claiming that Helium is sold below its true value, it's not a fair comparison. Hydrogen can be cracked out of Methane in nearly unlimited quantities. Helium is more rare and has to be extracted from the natural gas.
Except that medical grade helium and the crap they fill party balloons with are two different things.
I thought all helium came out of the ground, captured from natural gas wells. There may be some grades that are more refined than other, but the ultimate source is the same - and is very limited.
Are you high or something? Or is scientific stuff only the stuff you approve of?
Well, I'm more interested in the medical usage - about six months ago, my dad had to reschedule an MRI, the imaging center said that there was a shortage of helium needed to run the unit. He had a non-critical need for his MRI so rescheduling was not a problem, but I have to think that the 30 million cubic feet of helium that they are venting to the atmosphere in this thrill ride would keep a lot of MRI machines running.
http://www.fiercemedicalimaging.com/story/helium-shortage-threatens-access-mri-services/2012-09-23
Why don't they use Hydrogen for things like this (one-time use balloon) and preserve more Helium for scientific and medical use (and for safe party balloons)?
Or is helium depletion no longer a pressing problem with the current natural gas boom?
Hydrogen has been largely discredited as the root cause of the Hindenberg disaster, is it possible to use it safely in a high altitude research balloon?
Interesting system -- I'd never heard of this system here in the 'states. Sounds like it could be useful if the tag really is non-removable from the frame, but it seems that the same criminals that figured out how to defeat u-locks will also figure out how to pull this out the frame or otherwise destroy it without destroying the frame. And given that many bikes are recovered with the frame's serial number intact, I'm not sure this would be much of a deterrent in the USA - it's great to help you recover your stolen bike the police have possession of it, but I'm not sure it's going to stop someone from selling the bike on the street.
It took a while to find the scanner that reads the tags, but it looks like it has an antenna that the police drop into the seat tube to read the tag:
http://www.immobilise.com/promotional_materials.html
The scanner Immobilise sells is the LID560 read only scanner which comes with a custom antenna. Immobilise provide an antenna because no RF scanner can read through metal and as a result the aerial is used to read tags within bike frames by placing the antenna inside the bike's seat-post tube.
you gonna put the dismembered hookers ? bikes have no trunk?
no self-respecting serial killer would be seen dead huffing and puffing down the road on an old rusty huffy,
maybe they will get a little trailer ansd pull that around?
dosnt seem too likely
captcha entice ?! lmfao
Just get a cargo bike, plenty of room for a dismembered body:
http://www.dazadi.com/Sports-and-Fitness/Cycling/Specialty-Bikes/Cargo-Bikes/Johnny-Loco-Camelback-Mountain-Unisex-Cargo-Coupe-.html
The damage caused by bikes and pedestrians does however pale compared to the damage done by weather and "normal" aging.
A normal road used by pedestrians and cyclists will not break down significantly earlier than a normal road that is not used at all...
I can second that - my commute takes me through a park. In one area of the park, there's a section of mixed use bike+pedestrian path, a section of pedestrian-only path, and there's a short stub of path that goes to nowhere, it literally ends after about 20 feet at a fence (it used to be a path but it's been closed for years), so for the past few years it's gotten effectively no use at all.
All 3 surfaces appear to be in about the same condition, some cracked pavement, some ripples apparently due to tree roots, but overall the paths are in decent shape, and the unused path looks about the same as the heavily used bike path.
You don't need a locked down container for holding the GPS gear as you infer. Just make it sticky, remove the seat-post, push it to the bottom, and replace the seat-post. Even cheap embedded RFIDs passing near to readers can be useful, for tolls and the like. In places where bike theft is high, police are even tagging bikes with RFIDs as I have described, so if the bikes are stolen, a police officer walking past with a reader might find them.
Unless the bike has a carbon fiber frame, neither GPS nor RFID is going to work from inside a metal bike frame. My toll RFID reader is blocked by the window tinting at the top of my windshield, I had to mount the box in the lower clear portion of my windshield to get it to work.
You want to consider the quality of the roads, and then shop for tires. For a commuter bike, solid tires make a lot of sense. You *can* patch a flat in a few minutes and make up the time difference, but it's not a lot of fun. Especially in adverse weather.
I've ridden a bike with airless tires, and I don't like the feel -- they feel much harsher than regular pneumatic tires. But worse, since they don't appear to have as much "give", when rounding a corner over uneven pavement (which describes just about every intersection in my city), they seem to skitter across the bumps instead of absorbing them, which could lead to loss of control when riding at a higher speed.
I have a quality set of Schwalbe Marathons and haven't had a flat in over 5000 miles of riding. And I've hit plenty of glass and other hazards on my commute. They aren't cheap tires - they cost almost as much as what I pay for my car tires, but they are good, durable tires.
I would like to see a source for that. One of the first pages that I found on Google reads: "However, there is no reliable source of exposure data to really answer this question: we don't know how many miles bicyclists travel each year, and we don't know how long it takes them to cover these miles (and thus how long they are exposed to motor vehicle traffic).".
Moreover, I think one of the points of TFA is that the bike infrastructures (i.e., bike lanes) is being expanded, which is likely to reduce the accident rate (per bike-mile) by quite a bit.
I'd also like to see stats that take into account the circumstances of the accident - was the rider on the correct side of the road? Was he on the road at all, or on the sidewalk and hit while crossing at an intersection? Was he wearing bright colored clothing? If at night, did he have reflectors? Lights?
I see so many darkly clad riders riding at night with no lights or even reflectors on their bikes and I can't help thinking that they are an accident waiting to happen. So I'd really like to know how many of these riders are getting into accidents versus a brightly clad and well lit bike commuter.
Sure about that 25 minute figure? I figure I'm doing well if from door to door I can shower and change clothes in 10 minutes so you're somehow claiming it takes 15 minutes in car or on bike.... That also messes up your exercise claim of 50 minutes now you're down to only 30 minutes, which really isn't much (thats about how long I go for a walk every day at lunch, admittedly not "real" exercise). For example, my flex time commute is about 20 minutes when I avoid rush hour (which I almost always do). There's no way I can maintain 75 miles per hour for about 15 minutes on level ground on my bike, so that's an easy 90 minutes or so each way on a bike at realistic long distance (for a daily bike commuter) speeds. Add some shower time and realistic break time (water breaks when its over 100, knock the ice off when its below freezing, etc) and we're up to a good 4 hours of commute per day, vs 40 minutes in my car and 3 hrs 20 mins of some mixture of relaxing exercising /.-posting whatever.
Obviously, biking is not for everyone, in this country it's very easy to design your life in such a way that biking is not a viable option.
Here are my commute stats (I timed each trip several times over a few weeks):
10 miles by car, 12 miles by bike:
1. Car: 47 minutes average. This includes the walk to the parking garage to get my car, and more significantly, finding street parking and then walking several blocks to the office. Best case was 40 minutes, worst case was 1:20 when there was an accident on my commute route and I got stuck in stop and go traffic on the freeway.
2. Bike: 66 minutes average. This includes 59 minutes for biking, and walking into the office, and 7 minutes changing clothes. Oddly, my biking time is almost always constant, ranging from 58 - 60 minutes. It's surprising since I ride through 8 traffic light intersections, so I thought my time would be a lot more variable. I've timed myself for over 60 rides, and the worst case was 65 minutes, but almost all of my rides have been from 58 - 60 minutes.
3. Transit: 73 minutes average. This includes walking to the train station (5 minutes from home), making a train->bus connection, and walking from the bus stop to the office. Best case was 55 minutes, worst was 90 minutes.
On thing I didn't include in these figures is the extra padding I have to allow -- even though on average it only takes about 45 minutes by car, I need to allow 60 minutes of travel time to work to account for delays, so I leave earlier. The same goes for transit, I have to add on another 20 - 30 minutes to my commute to account for delays. Since my bike commute time is so constant, I don't need to pad my departure time.
If by "leading the way" you mean "stigmatizing bike riders as too poor to own a car", then you're right. I see about 1-2 people per month wearing spandex, which means they're riding recreationally. The rest are working poor...to be looked down upon, in the same way that normal Americans look down on rural residents.
Clothing style alone doesn't determine whether a cyclist is commuting or on a recreational ride. I wear cycling clothes (padded shorts, cycling jersey) on my commute because it's far enough that regular street clothes are not as comfortable as dedicated biking clothes, and no matter what I wear I'd need to chance when I got to work, so I choose to wear cycling attire.
right, because a contagious disease is the same as not restricting someone from having a drink of their choice.....
So you're ok with public health policies that prevent death by disease versus policies that prevent death by poor dietary decisions?
no it sounds like extra polution. Why are we going to in essence sell 2 times as much waste product just to encapsulate a liquid "for the children"
anytime something is done "for the children"* we should automatically vote no as it is never a good thing
for the children can also mean for your own good
Well, I think the belief is that more people will choose to accept the smaller portion size rather than purchase 2 separate containers.
Whether or not that's true remains to be seen, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis. If the 50 ounce big gulp option isn't available (yes, I know 7/11's big gulp is exempt for some reason), few people are going to purchase 3 16 ounce portions instead. Some will, but it's likely that the majority will not.
I don't live in NYC, but I didn't think this ban was meant to "save the children".
no bar is going to sell you that much booze, they would lose their liquor license. and on top of that, you wont die from drinking 1 litre of cola, you will from booze...
But it's likely that you'll die an early death if you drink that 1 liter of soda every day for years.