I got in some good work today. For about three hours and change I worked on straightening out one of my fall courses. I have the first six weeks of lecture notes all set up. Everything is organized through mid-November. Then it got confusing, because I got blurry-eyed. It happens. I’m surprised I was able to keep it together that much.
It isn’t the material. The material is fine, but rather the organizational part. All of those dates, all of those moving parts.
I did realize that one of my better lectures lines up nicely an important part of the football schedule this year, so there’s that.
After a time, I took a break for lunch, which was my first mistake. Lunch was good. We sat around and talked about this and that, as people do. Then we decided on the thises and delayed the thats. We moved some furniture around. We sat and had a little read. I called my mother for a chat, as people do. And, somehow, that was the day.
Oh, and I checked a few of the growing things in the backyard, where some things are having a great year.
Especially the weeds. As in not here yesterday, embarrassing large today, and pulled this evening. So I pulled a few weeds — I need to get more yard bags, and so I can’t too invested in that.
Besides, I just went to look at the things that were a-blooming.
The things we want to bloom, anyway. I can hear my old teacher, and all of my old friends who studied horticulture even now “a weed is anything undesirable. A rose could be undesirable if you don’t want it where it is growing.”
Well, I don’t know for certain what this is. Stonecrop, I think. And I’m not sure if it has grown in this spot before. Or if we want it there. Good thing I don’t have those yard bags, right?
I’ve said that a lot in the last month or so, which goes a long way to explaining all weeds which must now be addressed. Well, soon, anyway.
This evening watched today’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes. We watch a lot of sports, of course, and more than our share of bike races, as you might imagine. At the risk of testing your patience, this stage had what became one of the greatest climbs in mathematical history. (That phrase has never been written on the web.) Here’s the highlight version.
Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, who has previously won the Tour, attacked on the lower stages of Mount Ventoux, one of the sport’s most iconic climbs. This is the first time women have raced up Ventoux in the tour — how you say … patriarcat. The two women in the lead group with her were Demi Vollering and Marlen_Reusser, two of the most accomplished riders in the modern peloton, and they found themselves locked in their own tactical battle behind. As they all progressed up the mountain Vollering and Reusser botched their own responses to the attacking Niewiadoma-Phinney, who stormed up at such a blistering pace that it changed the circumstances for Vollering and Reusser two or three times as they made their way up.
Usually, the circumstance and the interpersonal dynamics of a bike race, and how each determines the other, are what I found most interesting, but Niewiadoma-Phinney’s metrics are what matters here.
In men’s cycling, the greatest road racer of all time, Tadej Pogačar, recorded a 6.98 w/kg performance for 40 minutes on his 2024 rampage up Plateau de Beille. That’s considered the best climb ever, in terms of the data. Here’s one estimate of her data today.
This is all about how much power the ride can generate relative to their mass, which is how the datapoints are equalized among different people. Niewiadoma-Phinney’s averaged that sort of output for 55 minutes, so 37 percent longer than Pogacar did. And, she was pointed into a headwind for most of the climb.
Also, Taylor Phinney — Niewiadoma-Phinney’s husband, my all-time favorite rider and now on the comeback trail to become an Olympian once again — said her number was actually “more like 5.6” w/kg.
It’s an astounding thing. An awesome thing, in the truest sense: that ride should fill one with some awe. And she did it in the big race on the biggest climb on the hardest day. Most of us can’t produce power like that under ideal circumstances. Certainly we can’t hold it for long. Guaranteed a lot of people will be trying this weekend, but a lot of people are going to realize, very quickly, you cannot match one of the greatest rides of all time.
Sometimes conceptualizing work requires several different techniques. Today’s involved handwriting a bunch of outline-style things from an old semester. Then I had to scribble between all of the lines, merging some things and separating other things. And then I typed all of that up and did it again, removing some things as I went. It sounds easy, and it is, but there’s a lot of thinking that goes on in between those scribbles and merging and separating. Eventually, that became a good stopping point, and I needed to clear the old cobweb attic so that I can return to this again later this week.
Next I need to go through, line by line, lesson by lesson, to make sure all of the dates and the units and the lectures and so on all line up. After that, I’ll have to go back through it once more and make sure the assignments all line up. And then that class will be prepared.
Then I’ll do all of that, more or less (sometimes more) for two more classes. Later this week, maybe by the weekend, this will pick up speed.
You know what didn’t pick up speed today? Me. I set out for an afternoon ride and there was no wind and no legs and that’s really all of there was to it. I did the first half of our river run, which takes you seven miles to, you guessed it, the river. Instead of turning left to follow the route I did something unusual and I turned right. A mile and change down the river road I turned right again, creating the beginning of my double back, as I pedaled through Warehouse Town. I found a map of that area that goes back to 1927. All of the roads we know today are on that map. The land would have been different, of course, they built those warehouses right up to the muddy edges of the slough.
That that road was there a century ago means some kind of bridge was there, too. Now I want to know how long that’s been the route. The little crossroads town has been around since the late 17th or early 18th century. People have probably used that little water inlet in one way or another for all of that time. What all is sitting out there in that muck?
Anyway, you can think about that when you aren’t riding too fast. But when I got into that town I turned left and headed home. For a change, there was no headwind, no wind at all, and so I just tried to keep my tempo up as well as I could and timed myself on little segments, to that tree line, to this stop sign, and so on. I had to get home, get cooled down and cleaned up.
We went across the river this evening to see a baseball game with some friends. Sat in the shade that the parking lot affords (the shade of a car, that is). Someone brought chicken nuggets and other people brought cookies and drinks and we brought some fancy bread snacks. The conversation was pleasant until the appointed time of walking into the stadium. We got in just in time to see the first run scored on a TV screen.
Tonight we were sitting well down the first base line, close to the fair pole. It was a warm evening in the sun until …
And then the latter ends turned into a perfectly lovely evening. And how could it not be a lovely evening? Nice people on either side of us, beautiful views, some woman taking her social media influencer photos below us. The good guys with a lead.
Also, the video board operator likes it when the all-star pitcher gets two strikes on batters on a bad team.
When the hometown team is at bat they have some slickly produced montages. I assume this is meant to be evocative of the city’s iconic clock tower.
Anyway, the good guys scored early, put three more up in the third and added an insurance run in the seventh. Jesus Luzardo scattered four hits across eight innings before giving way to Caleb Kilian, who closed out the game in just his second appearance. The big star of the night was the other new guy, three-time batting champ and four-time All-Star Luis Arraez, who was traded yesterday and drove in two tonight. He was somewhere between San Diego and Dallas when San Francisco moved him. I wonder if he even knows what hotel he’s staying in right now.
Well, tonight, at least, he’s on a winning team trying to move back up in their division. After tonight’s win they’re about five games back, I believe.
The production crew was excited to use the winning graphics package, for sure. The Liberty Bell light lit up and the fans went home happy.
Perhaps no one does local imagery better than these guys. They have a lot they can use, and they incorporate it all. The old Fightin Phils are haunting the stadium, a replica of the Liberty Bell is parked just outside. There are statues, there’s that clock imagery from above. And there’s the graphics with the bell, and a little restaurant bar in the park named after John Pass and John Stow, the two founders who cast, and recast, the bell.
They need more Ben Franklin and cheesesteaks, but there’s enough here they could just rotate through the years. Maybe it’s down to the whims of the Phanatic, himself now a timeless institution. Many schools and professional teams are steeped in their local or manufactured iconography, and they should be — it’s important. I’d tell you why, but I’m saving that for an in-class lecture this fall. Enroll and find out!
It was oppressively muggy — central Arkansas muggy — last night. Also it rained. Rained all night. Rained into the morning. Thunder was my alarm clock. The storm front blew away mid-morning. We’ve been in triple digits with the heat index into the early evening. I’ve sat here to sweat.
I spent several hours doing work stuff today. Don’t you want to know about it? I had to find the notebook that held the fall 2025 notes for a class I’m teaching again. I figured it was in one of three places, and I found it in the third place: a bookcase. Also, there were two notes books. So many notes I made for myself! I’d forgotten that.
When last this class met it was a twice-a-week class. This fall it will meet once a week. So the bulk of my day was in starting the reorganization process. Moving things around, renaming modules. Oh, and I updated this document I maintain with pages and pages of university resources. And I updated the syllabus for the course. It’s funny: some parts of working through all of those details can be easy, and some parts seem like a huge effort.
Apply that nonsensical observation for most of my days for the next five or six weeks.
Tomorrow I’m going to restructure the outline of that class. Hopefully that will be done by Wednesday. The rest of the week will be spent in making sure the work works right for both the style, and schedule, of this new version of the class. And I need to figure out how I’ll update the old slides in an efficient way.
That, I think, will be solved by some inspired bit of epiphany. Or I’ll just do it the long way 15 times in the next few months. Copying and pasting is such a bother, innit?
Also, I have to work on two other classes. I suspect I’ll begin one of those next week. The good news is that they aren’t starting from scratch. I’ll just agonize over them as if they are.
There’s a new look to the site, and if you go to the front page you can see it now. It starts like this, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.
Go ahead and look. That link will go to a new tab. Give it 60 seconds of zen. This page will be here when you’re ready.
The new idea for the front page is to update those images each month. If I don’t mess that up I have front page updates prepped to take us into next June. If I don’t mess it up.
I also updated the mobile version of the site. Just some easy text corrections and changing a few buttons that needed changing. Still not sure why it looks as intended on a phone, but broken in a computer browser. That’s an issue for another day. I wonder how many times I’ve said that about this issue.
And, of course, because the first of the month was this weekend I also did all of my regular monthly computer updates, changing various files, updating spreadsheets, cleaning up files, and so on. It’s not the most fun thing to write about, but this is is an old machine now, and it’s necessary. Fortunately these are easy chores.
Do you know that feeling when you learn something new and you just have to tell someone about it? I learned this yesterday and I have to tell people about it. Admittedly, I like this tale more than anyone else will, but I have that feeling, and so now you get to learn about this too. And for that we must return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy.
When the Augusta’s ammunition and gunpowder burned off the explosion was heard more than 50 miles away. The vessel’s remains sat in the water for about 90 years, a sometimes navigational hazard. I found a great 2015 lecture that talks about the ship, recovering the vessel’s remains, a tourist attraction, scavengers, and then …
Here’s one other, unrelated, Revolutionary War note for the day. Just 250 years and one day ago, John Adams wrote to Richard Cranch, the colonial watchmaker, clockmaker, and repairman of Boston. He talks about the inoculations against smallpox and a few other events of the day. But also this.
You mention the Exultation at a Declaration of Independence. Is not the Change We have seen astonishing? Would any Man, two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments, and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own it? Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.
I’ve rambled on a bit, as it turns out, a few times recently about the public moods of those heady, dangerous, uncertain days. It’s not as if they had a bunch of surveys in the field to gauge things on the home front, or beyond their own social circles. They just knew what they knew, heard, read, and felt as they did. But there’s the great John Adams, certain of a sea change all the same.
It’s a remarkable kind of public politics, really. A revolution of its own, perhaps. Gauging the public interest like that wouldn’t have mattered quite the same way to a monarch. And it matters, of course, more and more now. Also, we still find the pros guessing at it often as not.
I guess you could say, at both points, Adams knew what time it was.
Cranch married Abigail’s sister, so they were all related. And while the couples remained close, John kept his friend at arm’s length over money-making schemes. Cranch was not lucky in business. But, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, and was a trial court judge for almost 30 years. He and his wife died within a day of one another. He was apparently a forgotten man until modern historians wrote about him in just the last few years. His son became a federal judge in D.C. Two of his grandchildren became a painter and a minister. One of Cranch’s great-grandchildren was a man named Henry Ware Eliot, who became president of a brick making operation in St. Louis. And this is how history never ceases to astonish me. This man, the great-grandson of a Revolutionary War era man, died in 1919. Henry Ware Eliot, by the way, was also the father of T.S. Eliot.
I didn’t see that coming, either.
I had a nice ride Saturday evening. My lovely bride was off having a girls’ day and by the time I set out I had most of the roads all to myself. It’s quite lovely to be out when most everyone is already where they need to be. I did the river ride, which is the second route we designed for ourselves when we moved here in 2023. We haven’t done it in a good long while because a bridge has been closed since July of last year and there’s a sad and spooky part after that, but the road is opened once again.
Just behind me in that photo is where that new asphalt begins. If they’d just paved down another 100 feet or so (and, again, this road was closed for a year, they had time) they could have repaired the biggest mess of potholes you can find in the county.
When you get to the bridge it has that new overpass smell.
New overpasses have smells. Turns out it is not a pleasant smell, but surely it will descend upon the highway below it.
On the other side of the overpass we regained a pleasant little downhill, and a stretch of land that gives you three or four houses on one side, and a cornfield on the other. There is an intersection soon after that, so it was only ever a closure effecting about 1.5 miles, but still, it’s nice to have that road back. This corn is a definite change of pace.
From there you go up a little hill, through more fields, past the famous local artist, respectfully cruise by a memorial, and sprint through a tree canopy so you can get to an access road that’s a half-mile, tree covered stretch of brand new asphalt. A car followed me down that road, but the driver stayed respectfully behind me while I tapped out something in the 20 mph range. After that, back off the access road, another overpass, more trees, watch out for deer, go as fast as you can by the house where the people always yell, and then into the wind.
If I go the way of our designed route I would eventually get to a four-way stop and go straight, but last year the county made a shambles of that stretch of road. If I turn to the right I can stretch this ride. The weather was nice, I was not pressed for time, and so I went that longer way, making my road selection as it suited my whim and wind direction.I stunk it up on the one real hill on the route, as usual. Twice, though, I broke 34 mph on a flat stretch. Haven’t done that recently.
I spent the day reading and playing with cats. These were excellent choices. If this day came around again, I would do much the same thing. I’d just also do other things. There are always a lot of things I could do, a lot of things I want to do. You just can’t fit them all into every day. I’m never sure how to remedy that, but I’d like to figure it out. I’d like to figure out how to do all of the things I want to do, to the degree and extent I’d like to do them, so that each day has all of those things, nothing was overlooked, and there’s nothing to regret.
Or, how do you put 10 pounds of your interests in just two hands?
Also, how have I not figured out the solution to this dilemma by this point?
At the show last weekend, they brought Ed Robertson back on the stage to do a medley. Train played their shockingly ancient breakthrough hit “Meet Virginia,” and Robertson has been coming out for a little “Country Roads” ad lib. I expect he’s been doing the Canadian bit throughout. But Pat Monahan has a topical lyric in here.
I can’t not hear Country Roads anymore without thinking that we need some profound exploration and explanation about why it has such a growing, lasting resonance.
That’s a weird thing to think about at a rock ‘n’ roll show.
My lovely bride went out for a run. I went for a ride. I did a part of what we call the marsh ride, turning left before you get to the marshes. So it’s the non-marsh ride. It was one of those rides where I set out just to move my legs a little bit, having gotten started too late in the day. When it came down to it, I was riding well on the flat portions. Every time I looked down at my bike computer I was impressed by the speedometer. I was riding fairly poorly on the little hills. No need to look down to realize that. Some things you sense in more ways than one, and you do not need an LCD screen to convince you.
Anyway, cut over from one road to the other on some quite side roads, which was my plan, and then spent the next four miles wondering if I had enough daylight to add on a few more miles. I did not. One must be near home before dark if one did not bring along headlights. And one must never be late for dinner. This was what I saw over my shoulder at 7:55 p.m.
It was a nice little 17 mile ride, just enough to make me feel like I’d had a nice little bike ride.
We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. This is one of those little supposed anecdotes that hits on all of the themes I’ve been thinking about the last few days.
The question is whether you believe that. The anecdote here feels as much like wartime propaganda as something that really happened. But let’s assume that Moses Dunbar’s dad made that offer. He was the second of 16 children. His dad, John III, had fought for the British in the French and Indian war, but was supplying rebel forces during the revolution. They disagreed on politics, but also religion. As a young adult, and freshly married, Moses joined the Church of England. This was a problem for John, a strict Congregationalist. And of course that little passage omits other details. Moses had been arrested once before, and released. He’d thought about fleeing. He enlisted. He was captured, escaped, and was re-captured. The emotions of those times were running high. Connecticut’s Nathan Hale, a 21-year-old Continental officer was hanged just six months prior in New York, and people in Connecticut were surely thinking of that.
Moses Dunbar was eventually hanged in front of a large crowd of onlookers. He was apparently the only person to be convicted as a traitor and executed in Connecticut. Rumors were that his remains were later moved by his family, and there is another marker in another cemetery, but apparently this is still something of a mystery. He was buried, initially at least, at the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, where the founder of the Nutmeg State, one congressman and four governors are also interred. You can read a bit more about Moses, including his last letter to his children, here.
You should also read Atkinson’s book. It offers some great insights into the times.
Poison ivy update: today marks three weeks from my careless self-exposure. Tomorrow marks three weeks from the first itchy symptoms. I am much improved — which is to say healing, not healed. Eventually I worked it out to alternating between Calamine and cortisol. I also had a few very long oatmeal bath soaks. Now, my skin is mostly dry, itchy, flaky, or some combination.
Also, I found some on a tree while puttering about the yard. I dealt with that one in a much more sensible manner.
In short, I will survive, but the ivy probably will too.
The actual poison ivy vines I plucked, meanwhile, have surely returned by now.
Enjoy a nice little solo ride this evening. My lovely bride was off doing a workout elsewhere and that let me visit some lovely little roads at my own pace.
I made some new sheep friends. They couldn’t even be bothered to look up as I soft pedaled past their evening graze.
The corn is coming along nicely. Took me three tries to get this photo, and it wasn’t quite what I wanted.
The chores never end in farm country. I wonder what else this guy could be doing right now. I wonder if he’d rather be pedaling around, like me. I think most people would rather be riding a bike than doing evening work. Then again, combines aren’t connected to bikes.
Sometime after that I dropped a water bottle — a fate worse than dehydration. So I had to turn around and fetch it. Stop, put your foot down, wiggle the bike around and coast a few feet the other direction. Then bend waaaaay over to the ground without hurting yourself. And then you stab yourself with greasy gears.
I have joked that I should just get that as a tattoo and save myself some time. I won’t, but then again it has been a while since I gave myself the ol’ grease tattoo, too.
I wore a new jersey today, a loose fitting number, which was perfect for one of those days when it didn’t matter that everything clung to me. And on the back of the tag …
Sure, now you tell me. Good thing it fit.
It’s actually too big, but I took that tag off.
One last clip from the Guster show, last Friday. Their alt-breakthrough, now 28 years old (that was a great time to be listening to 99X), somehow, fell off the live show list for a long time. I guess you get tired of playing the same things every night at some point. Also, the ping pong balls were probably becoming a problem. (People used to throw them onto the stage at the end of the song. It makes sense with the song, moreso than having to bring the things into venues, I’m sure.) Also, you have other things you want to play. Or maybe you’re just looking for ways to do old things. I think they called this version Airport Song 2000 for a while. It has an entirely different feel.
I wonder if they’ll have another re-instrumentation for the 30th in 2028.
Anyway, great show Friday night. I’ll put up a little clip of a DMB song from Saturday’s show tomorrow. Also, we’ll be talking about generators.
