D&F 6/25/23

One snapped chain, four beers, and two sandwiches later, I’m back from a weekend bike camping trip with friends. It wasn’t a long ride to China camp, but the way home was made longer by blowing apart my bike chain on an off-road ramble headed home. It’s been quite a week.

With that short preamble, I’ll get right into the…

Links

• Flown recently? Did it seem more turbulent than when you were younger? It is! This is yet another climate-change symptom that is particularly awful for folks like me with loads of flight anxiety. Guess I’ll just stick to cycling more than flying.
• I’m not sure if the main guy in this story actually changed his views, but there are some interesting effects being noted in MDMA studies regarding empathy and shitty opinions.

While the Tesla needs to use 1 kilowatt hour of electricity to travel just over three miles, my e-bike uses 1 kilowatt hour of electricity to travel more than 85 miles. The $4.92 I’ve spent on electricity to travel 4,500 miles would move the Tesla 167 miles (and a normal ICE vehicle about 50-60 miles).

• If you really want to save money and make big planetary changes, try an ebike! It’s wild how good ebikes have gotten recently, to the point that a few people I know have replaced their cars with them. This weekend on my bike camping trip a few people brought ebikes for their gear and their dogs, which really opened-up the trip to all levels of fitness. Non-electric bikes are still the most efficient, but if everyone considering an electric car, or even thinking about a better way to commute or grocery shop got an ebike or regular bike we’d be in a much better place.
• Can’t stop laughing about Chinese teens making sad white people’s lunches as a joke.
• Stop filling your websites with extraneous javascript—it’s exclusionary and wasteful for most of the users of the internet. I built my site using HTML and CSS only at 61.2 KiB, and with mobile devices in mind. Sadly, all over the internet on blogs, retail sites, and news outlets the size of the site download keeps growing. My top tip is if you make a website, think about speed and simplicity first.

Closing

I’m wiped out, and hoping for a good vegan burger tonight before I dive back into work tomorrow. With my work onsite over, I should have time to ride again this week, despite a series of armed robberies happening in the hills of Berkeley. Fuck bike thieves, but up with cycling, space cowgirls~