without proof or editing, everything al dimond 2016

1. The thing that always left me cold about Bernie Sanders was all the “big banks” stuff. It's the political version of Walter Sobchak ranting about Vietnam: it has nothing to do with anything! Did the banks have something do do with the housing bubble and its 2008 collapse? Sure. But the banks aren't behind what underlies so much pessimism about the economy. The recovery since then has been very unequal, jobs haven't returned in many cities and many sectors. They point to larger concerns about our future: trends toward wealth and resource consolidation, how automation and ubiquitous information affects the future of work and the value of knowledge and understanding and the project of humanity and living a meaningful life. We need a conversation about that stuff that's smart, humble, and inclusive.

2. In my professional circles (in the field of software) people often say that the top n% of devs are m times as productive as the average dev, where both n and m are somewhere around 10. Over time this statement seems to be spoken with dread, not joy, as we all realize, “There's a (100 − n)% chance I'll be one of the people out of a job when the n% write an AI that's m − 1 times as productive as me.” The AI will make some embarrassing mistakes and its work will lack taste and craft, but will have speed to make up for it. Its biggest problems will be fixed quickly by the smartest people. My biggest problems are harder to fix and I only have myself. For the project of humanity and living a meaningful life, I really hope we can all have eachother.

3. I'll repeat that link from #1 about economic pessimism. I had a bit of a similar thought when I saw a flowchart about how to vote in mid-primary season, including both Ds and Rs (I think Matthew James drew it), where the top-line question was, “Is shit fucked?” A “Yes” answer led to more questions, and ultimately, Bernie, Trump, or Cruz; a “No“ answer ultimately to Clinton or Kasich. Shit is more fucked for, broadly, people that aren't white in America, but for white people shit is fucked in relatively novel ways. This is part of the story behind the demography of the 2016 Dem primary, but probably not all of it.

4. I can't find it right now (so much for ubiquitous information), but I remember reading some quotation of a famous existentialist author upset that his novel was called a “psychological” novel by a critic, because of course the novel was not about some particular psychology (the author's own?) but about some fundamental fact of the human condition viewed soberly, or something. This is how I made sense of it before filing it away but I don't really know about this stuff; anyway, I wondered if maybe the lowly critic had it right, and if maybe the author knew it. That's what I think when I listen to any album Kanye West has made after his... err... 2008 collapse. It doesn't put him in bad company. I think the same thing when I listen to any album Bob Dylan has made starting with Blonde on Blonde.

5. Some U.S. Senator just quoted Psalm 109 (of the Bible), to pray for U.S. President Barack Obama, “May his days be few.” You wouldn't have to be in an age of ubiquitous information, any U.S. hotel room in the last hundred years would do, to be able to quickly check the context. The “days”, unambiguously, were the days of a ruler's life, not his days left in office. Anyway, you wouldn't have to be in an age of ubiquitous information, any room with a calendar in it would do, to know the number of days a lame-duck President has left in office, except in the case of death or impeachment, and a Senator need not pray for an impeachment, merely call some like-minded Representative! Seems pretty clear-cut: the Senator openly prayed for the President's death! On the other hand, people use scripture in weird ways sometimes. A few years ago I was at a Christian service that featured a reading from a psalm that was excerpted in a strange way (with no explanation given), starting near but not at the beginning, and with several verses snipped out in odd places; that might be a reasonable way to quote exposition or dialog, cutting irrelevant or repetitive parts, but not poetry! Later that day I was in a hotel room, and I'm a curious fellow, so I got out the old Gideon Bible and looked up the psalm in question, and it turned out that all the cuts were basically done to hide the context, involving military triumph. Anyway, I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of churches when it's more important to quote the words of the Old Testament (because that's what fits in the liturgy, and liturgical authority is all today's church has left, having lost all reasonable claim to authority on matters of truth or morality — I won't go any more into that but I heard it from the pulpit so I'll leave it here without proof) than to quote words in a way that basically preserves their meaning and tells you something about why they were written. So the prevalence of this practice gives the Senator at least some cover. Which is kind of dumb.

now we can make ice

there's a ton o' shit we gotta do before we can start to make ice
gotta buy an ice tray and wash an ice tray before we can make ice
then we'll be
making ice, making ice, making ice, making ice, making ice

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3JaOAynaeE)

An account of the 2016 Golden Gate Relay...

... by yours truly, noted useless asshole Al Dimond, may be read here.

How to remove a cassette without a chain whip (for real, y'all)

I used to own a chain whip! I think I left it in the basement of a place I used to live. I don't think it would be polite to call the landlord and say, “Hey, Ed, can you check if it's OK with your tenants if I sort of rifle through the basement looking for some of my old stuff?” So I've had to invent a way to remove cassettes without the chain whip. I still have the cassette lockring tool; as far as I know that's still a must-have (unless you have a head bolt from a Caterpillar engine lying around or something). There are a few different kinds of lockring tools, and the differences don't matter for these purposes.

The gist of the problem is that you have to turn the lockring counter-clockwise relative to the cassette to remove it. When you turn the lockring counter-clockwise it pulls the cassette by the teeth that were locked in place when you tightened it during installation, and the cassette freewheels in this direction. So you need to immobilize the cassette against the wheel. A chain whip does this with two separate pieces of chain and a handle for leverage. We'll do it with one piece of chain attached to the cassette in opposite directions, looped around so it can be braced against the wheel by a screwdriver. A similar approach involves attaching the chain to the rim/tire with zip ties or string; my zip ties were all too wide, so I tried with string and broke the string. Some people say they can get their lockrings off just by grabbing the cassette by hand with a rag for protection. My lockrings always get on way too tight for anything like that — even with a chain whip it's always a lot of effort to remove them!

Equipment list:

• The cassette lockring tool
• A wrench that fits your cassette lockring tool
• A reasonably sturdy screwdriver
• An old chain, full-length (broken and off the bike)
• The wheel should have an inflated tire on it!

Steps:

1. Do all the prep you'd do if you were using a chain whip: take the wheel off the bike, remove the quick-release skewer, insert the lockring tool according to its instructions (some have a dummy skewer attached, while others have a hole in the middle, and you stick your skewer through it and secure it with the screws).
2. Put the chain around the top half of the second-largest cog, with almost all of the excess hanging off to the right.
3. Extend the excess chain on the right out past the edge of the tire.
4. Loop the chain, to the left, back to and around the cassette, one or two cogs smaller than the first. The loop should extend a bit past the edge of the tire, enough to stick the screwdriver through. At this point, with the chain around cogs in opposite directions, turning the cassette counter-clockwise (in the freewheeling direction) shortens the loop.
5. Stick the screwdriver in the loop, with the chain loop around the handle and the shaft against the tire. This prevents the loop from being shortened, so the cassette cannot turn relative to the wheel.
6. Stand the whole thing up between your legs, with the screwdriver against the ground. Brace the screwdriver in place with your feet on either side of the wheel.
7. Turn the lockring tool counter-clockwise with the wrench. This should pull the screwdriver tight against the wheel, allowing you to put a lot of force into the wrench. Eventually the lockring teeth should break free and the ring should loosen.

And here is the world's worst diagram, since I didn't feel like staging a photo while I was working on my bike earlier:

Oh, while I'm posting crap on my blog

After hearing that Seattle was delaying its downtown bike network plans in order to first create a “center-city mobility plan” of some kind, I decided to write my own plan. If we adopt this plan we can get the bike network started tomorrow.

ahem

1. Cap the number of office parking spaces in greater downtown Seattle (i.e. including Pioneer Square, the International District, First Hill, Capitol Hill, SLU, and lower Queen Anne).
2. Set the cap below the current number of parking spaces, because there are already more cars during rush hour than the streets can remotely handle.
3. This means that some parking spaces have to close. Hold an auction over rights to keep parking spaces open. Where will prices end up? Who knows! Similar to cap-and-trade markets for carbon emissions, the cap is based roughly on science (here, how many cars can enter and leave downtown during rush hour without insane congestion), and prices are lovingly guided by the wise hand of Adam Smith.
4. Enact a permanent ban on the phrase “center-city”. Seriously, who says that? Nobody in Seattle, that's who.
5. Get lunch.

Why we can't just get along

So there's this thing with “Bernie Bros” doing and saying blatantly sexist things, largely online, and Sanders telling them to cut it out. Maybe you've heard of it. But that stuff — rude, derogatory stuff that any decent person can just stop doing — isn't half the story with the sexism someone like Hillary Clinton faces. I just read a politically neutral article on the New Hampshire primary scene where Clinton was introduced (i.e. per the journalistic convention of introducing people by full names with some context at first mention) as the former First Lady. A lot of the sexism someone like Clinton faces is like that.

It's certainly true that she was First Lady, and it's not a fact irrelevant to her political career (she certainly was an active political figure in the '90s). But more recently she served in the U.S. Senate and as Secretary of State, and narrowly lost the Democratic nomination for President. That's the record she's running on, and it's the record that (most of) her opponents are running against. Any one of those facts would make a more appropriate introduction.

Now this random story about New Hampshire is hardly worthy of comment. But some of these things accumulate. They're not things you can simply “cut out” like online trolling, they're widespread habits that no single person can stop. They're as much the result of sexism as the cause. All of the people running for President and covering the race have been shaped by decades of sexist double-standards. While the sexism of any particular act during campaign season can be hard to separate from the constant stream of often-unfair attacks by and towards everyone, looking at the big picture, you can see its mark.

ADDENDUM: As this post was inspired by the journalistic convention of introductions... I feel like pointing out that I added in Clinton's first name at her first mention while editing the post, just because I was thinking about the convention, even though I thought it didn't match the style of the first paragraph, which I might describe as, “awkward informal references to assumed shared context, because I'm too lazy to write a good introduction or even link to a relevant article, because this whole post started out as a Facebook status update before it got too long, and I was WAY to lazy to edit it down.” I just noticed that I didn't add Sanders' first name at his first mention. I'm going to leave it like this, because, damn, this post is a trainwreck of writing whose victims are every form and style of the English language. Like my dad said when my brother was making fun of his receding hairline, "Would you make fun of me more if I went on Rogaine or got a toupée?" And the answer was, of course he would have made fun of him more.

Bike Master Plan Implementation Plan Changes: 2016

Tom of Seattle Bike Blog posts another Seattle Bike Master Plan Implementation Plan update. This is how it is different from what they said they'd do in the Fall 2015 BMP Implementation Plan:

First, a lot of stuff listed in 2015 in the previous plan that didn't get finished is listed in 2016 here:

• Roosevelt Way south of 65th
• University Bridge
• N 34th (Fremont Ave to Phinney Ave)
• Admiral Way
• Dearboorn
• Westlake Cycletrack

A few things are moved up to 2016 from later years:

• The “Dexter Ave N” entry, which appears to stand for an inherently mediocre connection from the Westlake Cycletrack to Dexter an the Mercer underpass, moved up from 2017.
• The “9th Ave N” entry (more on that later), moved up from 2018.

A few things are pushed from 2016 to later years:

• 2nd Ave north of Pike Street is pushed back to 2017 (more later).
• A PBL on Swift Ave S is pushed back to 2017 (more later).
• The Broadway Cycletrack extension north to Aloha is pushed back to 2017.
• The long Rainier Valley N-S Greenway is pushed back to 2017.

Some 2016 entries are a bit different than before:

• The “6th Ave S” entry (from Forest Street to Spokane Street) is now listed as “SODO Trail”, and as a trail project instead of a bike lane. Perhaps this means they've found space to extend the trail next to the busway? In the original BMP project list this was a SODO Trail extension, and it showed up on 6th Ave S in the 2015 Implementation Plan.
• The 2nd Ave Extension entry now shows up as “2nd Ave”. That's probably just a typo. More troubling: the southern extent has been cut back from Jackson to Main. That's a really important block!
• The 9th Ave N route from the Westlake Cycletrack into downtown, moved up from 2018 to 2016, is extended westward from 7th to 2nd! That's awesome!
• I'm not sure which previous entry corresponds to the “Central E-W Greenway” at all. Maybe it's one shown primarily along East Columbia in previous documents, which was on the 2017 list in the 2015 Implementation Plan.
• The northward extension of the 2nd Ave PBL, pushed back to 2017, is now extended farther north, to Denny rather than just Broad.
• The Swift Ave S PBL now extends from Albro to MLK, which I believe is the whole BMP corridor instead of the mere 20% of it originally in the Implementation Plan.

Finally, a few 2016 entries have disappeared.

• Pike Street PBL. This was a stand-in for part of a downtown network that was supposed to be planned in 2015 but wasn't, and is now being held until after some new kind of “center city mobility” plan is completed.
• 7th Ave. It's possible this isn't listed because it's already partially open, but it's only open to Virginia and the plan lists the route continuing all the way to Union.
• Royal Brougham, west of Occidental Ave. It may have dropped off because of Deep Bore Tunnel delays. This area is super confusing at the moment.
• NE 130th from the Interurban to 5th Ave NE. Maybe this is replaced by an entry for a greenway on 128th, from NW 8th to NE 1st... all the way out in 2019.
• Some sort of work on the Holgate overpass of I-5 was previously listed as a “Catalyst Project” with a 2016 date, and does not appear on this list. I have no idea what this has ever meant.

I didn't look at 2017-2019 projects aside from these. There are 2020 projects listed for the first time, so I scanned those. Aside from stuff that's just pushed back from earlier years, they include:

• An extension of the Pinehurst/15th Ave NE bike lanes from 125th to the city limits
• A northbound complement to the one-way part of the Roosevelt PBL

Somehow they do not include extending the planned Airport Way route to the city limits, where a route into Tukwila is ready and waiting. Aside from the further delay to downtown network planning that's the thing I'm most disappointed in. The best news is that the 9th Ave N project, one of the connections between the Westlake Cycletrack and downtown, is both expedited and extended farther into downtown. In light of previous comments from SDOT where they seemed afraid to touch the streets at the south end of the cycletrack it's a pleasant surprise.

A Message from the Distant Future: on Bicycle Equipment Regulations and the Founding of the Glorious Nation of Cascadia!

At the time of this post, the end of 2015, some American cyclists are frustrated with bicycle equipment and behavior regulations that differ by locality. Targets of frustration include King County's all-ages helmet law, Oregon's mandatory-sidepath law, bike path “hours of operation” that apply wherever bike paths fall under park-department jurisdiction, and various suburbs' single-file riding laws. I write from the future to tell you all that these are no idle frustrations or concerns. Similar questions have, indeed, shaped nations.

Sometimes the world, after all, turns on the results of low-turnout elections. Back in 2027 King County elected to its council a Dadaist Alternative After-Party majority. This group could not agree on repealing the all-ages helmet law, but managed to pass, in protest of it, a measure requiring all motorists to wear full-face auto racing helmets. As it applied, drivers on I-5 had to take their eyes off Twitter for a few seconds to don their headgear as they approached the Ballinger Way exit! Thousands of RTs and ★s were lost!

Twitter was (at the time) a California company (it would later be purchased by a NoVa military research concern), so a Washington county's interference in its business naturally ran afoul of Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution. The resulting constitutional crisis could only lead to one thing: THE FOUNDING OF THE GLORIOUS NATION OF CASCADIA!

Of course, due to the particulars of its founding, Cascadia had no Article I, Section 8 in its constitution. Indeed, quite the opposite. In Wallingford it was deemed illegal for cyclists to use tires narrower than 40mm, due to the danger of getting tires caught in streetcar tracks. On Capitol Hill, where there actually were streetcar tracks, freewheeling was deemed a "bourgeois freedom" and restricted to the elderly (those over 30); tires wider than 28mm were banned entirely as a crime against aesthetics. A narrow sort of aesthetics, to be sure, but PR Capitol Hill was a narrow jurisdiction, particularly after its territorial losses to the downtown retail core and the various colonies, buffer nations, and puppet states of Broadmoor Country Club.

Cycling equipment rules were soon rendered moot, though. A voting bloc of UW freshmen and out-of-town Seahawks attendees (yes, visitors can vote in Cascadia, we have this thing called hospitality) pushed through strict laws first against unannounced passes, then against interrupting conversations to announce a pass, so we effectively couldn't ride on MUPs. Drivers literally owned the roads in Cascadia but refused to pay for their maintenance, so they banned bikes on all roads out of spite after conditions degraded. By 2040 the only bikes to be seen were on advertisements for $6,000/mo studio apartments. Oh, right, and there was that guy with a routine that biked down the shoulder of I-5 near SLU once a year or so, jumping off just in time to dodge the cops; that kept on until the freeway collapsed.

We finally broke the stalemate on transportation when a bunch of laid-off techies and airplane manufacturers, squatting in an abandoned Boeing plant, invented the first affordable jetpack. One declared herself Queen of the Sky, to be succeeded by anyone that could kill her in her dominion. She then proceeded to fall off her jetpack from a thousand feet up before enacting any laws. Because it was the ground that killed her no succession or lawmaking was possible, leaving Cascadia's skies in permanent anarchy, the perfect legal environment for personal jetpack transport. What's the carbon footprint and death toll of the resulting transportation system? It turns out to be illegal to keep count, according to a ruling reached by the Supreme Court of Jesters in the halftime show of a 2046 Sounders-Timbers game. When you're up in a jetpack you can't put your head in the sand, exactly, put there's plenty of room to put it up your own...

What 3 Words II: Silence Heart Nest

Silence Heart Nest's W3W address is, sadly, not silence.heart.nest (which is, sadly, not an address at all). It is truly.hope.visit. I truly do.

Just nearby, the Center of the Universe is located at the edge of a median island in the busy intersection of Fremont Avenue and Fremont Place, which even confuses locals sometimes (Douglas Adams, are you there?). It's at prefer.admiral.herds. I truly do.

When you walk out the door of Cult of Smalltrain you step from home.shack.exit (it was a fine brick building, perhaps shotgun-shaped but not a shack) to picked.poems.cotton (something about the dandelions in Illinois). It doesn't make much sense the other direction, but then you always can go in through the back. IIRC. YMMV. HAND. I truly do.

Like the troll I am, I was married under a bridge at stamp.pose.that. I truly do.

I just won a race!

This is only the second time I've ever won a race, excluding those with extremely limited entry criteria (i.e. I don't count things like office-wide races, but I do count small open-entry races, as most of the races I run are pretty small). The first was the North Park River Run, a rather small two-mile race held by Chicago's North Park University. This one was the Santa Runs Tacoma half-marathon, which would have to be considered quite small for a half-marathon (700 runners). Winning or not, I'm very happy with a time of 1:15:00. It was a PR by over 7 minutes. My previous half-marathon best was on a much harder course almost 10 years ago, and had been my last remaining PR set in my 20s. Knowing what I do about my recent running improvement, I guess this qualifies as old age and treachery beating youth and exuberance. Age, treachery, and magic hip-flexor stretches.

The course was a significant net-downhill, enough that it's not eligible for records per USATF (max 1m/km drop), which nonetheless certifies its distance. The drop of 36m was essentially all in the first mile, which I cruised through in 5:13; after that the course was a mostly flat out-and-back, with a couple overpass "rollers" in the early and late miles. The big first-mile drop was actually a nice feature, both to be able to throw out my first mile split, and to be assured that I'd be ahead of my goal pace early. On a "fair" course I'd probably have been 30 seconds slower. The day was cool and the ground was wet, but no real raindrops until late in the race; there was a very slight breeze with us on the way out and against on the way back. Overall, about the best conditions you can hope for in December in the northwest. I was a bit slower on the way back than out, probably due to the slight breeze, plus general fatigue and tightness. In the last three miles I couldn't stretch out my stride much but was able to pick up my turnover and keep a reasonable pace. I brought some food along but didn't use it. I hadn't really thought of this, but on an out-and-back course, if you're near the front, using water stations on the way back is really against the grain. So I didn't take any water, either, because by the time I really wanted it (mile 9 or so) I couldn't have got through effectively.

I rode down from Seattle with Rhea, Toffer, and Susan; Rhea and Susan finished first and second among women. So we were the fast van!

The Left is tearing itself apart.

The Right is tearing itself apart.

Soon we will come jumbling together to redivide ourselves, split as bitterly as we were before:

between the mindless and the soulless.

What Three Words I: Galaxy Logic Dame

Remember Nambers? That thing that gave every IP address a DNS name made up of four words behind mysteryrobot.com?

Well, mysteryrobot.com doesn't remember, either.

Anyway, now the same thing has been applied to the real world: What 3 Words, which assigns three words to 3x3-meter square-ish divisions of the Earth's surface! The open area next to my apartment building where I work on my bike is galaxy.logic.dame. Galaxy Logic Dame! The only dame that can save the galaxy... using logic!

“But Al,” Galaxy Logic Dame protested, “aren't galaxies made and broken by forces far beyond the grasp of any one dame? Logically I am powerless to affect their salvation!”

And Galaxy Logic Dame was no more.

2015 Voting Guide for Seattle Techies

“How cool is it that in our brief lifetime we get to participate in Seattle's first council elections by district? This feels momentous!”

“Not as momentous as it would feel if we'd been born in time to be optimistic about space exploration or liberal Twitter...”

“Whatever, anyway, I'm so informed about local politics, I know who to vote for in every council position. They should let me vote for every position. Maybe I should take up residence in every district.”

“Even if that was how voting worked you still wouldn't get to vote for position ten.”

“Which one is that?”

“The sky.”

“The sky?”

“By the 1869 Charter Doc Maynard was recognized as sole owner of the sky. He subdivided and sold it to people he knew—”

“—let them in on the ground floor—”

“—yes, as it were, and its ownership has remained a fairly small, though gradually growing, group.”

“Your Boeingses, your Kenmore Airs—”

“—and, typically enough, Ma Bell. Its portion of the sky passed down to Century Link, whose only remaining profitable business is charging cellular providers for easements.”

“Well, that and tricking out-of-towners looking for football parking into entering their company garage, then fining them.”

“Sure. Anyway, until now most of the owners have been businesses, and businesses can't vote, but I figured out how to suspend a hammock from an array of drones, and I'm claiming residence in the sky for this election.”

“Who sold your ass sky? You've lived here like eight months.”

“I'm renting... well, technically it's sort of a squatters' rights situation...”

“How long does that take to kick in exactly?”

“...unh-unh...”

“Fine... so who are you voting for, then, for position ten?”

“Myself. I'm the only one that meets the residence requirement.”

“... What's even, like, your ZIP Code in the sky?”

“That would be nine-eight-one-go fuck yourself—”

“—hey, now—”

“—not you, personally. The postal service would like to establish a branch up—”

“—and I suppose you're still a two-oh-six, or did they stick the sky in four-two-five?”

“Six-five-oh. I got my phone in college.”

Going Theory

Until today, my going theory was that my performance improvement in running this year was due to more consistent training and the sequence of a few years of minimal/"barefoot"-style running (which improved my turnover and body control) followed by going back to regular trainers and adding some new stretches (thanks, Tom Cotner!) that helped lengthen my stride. Turnover plus stride length equals speed; the body control helps keep me consistent and healthy. Also, though I mostly train in cushy trainers now, I'm continuing to forefoot-strike and use minimal shoes occasionally, so that I can race in minimal shoes (providing an advantage similar to racing flats) at any distance I want.

Then I read some articles citing studies claiming that typical doses of caffeine can improve performance by perhaps up to 3% in endurance athletes. This is my first season where I trained remotely well since becoming a coffee drinker. 3% more than covers my 5k improvement, and of course I'm racing in much lighter shoes than in the past. That really popped my balloon. I thought I was doing all this smart stuff to improve, outsmarting my younger, dumber self. Turns out it's just coffee and shoes.

, and the banker said, "Do you have savings anywhere else?" and I said, "Yeah, shoeboxes," and he said, "Shoeboxes?" and I said, "Under my bed, filled with solid gold bars, which is pretty space-efficient," and he paused, and I continued, "It's not like I was making much use of the space under my bed anyway. In the interest of diversification I bury some of the boxes secretly on other peoples' property; this adds some risk. But there's growth potential, too, because who knows, someone might put more gold in 'em!"

The Broken Promise on Mercer

Everyone hates the Mercer project. Activists campaigning for district-based city council elections attacked it as a symptom of the at-large council's downtown-centrism. Meanwhile, everyone hates an enormous parking-lot of a road, no matter how they're trying to travel along or across it. And it's an expensive parking-lot of a road -- no matter how much money we spend, “Mercer” will still be a code word for bad traffic, and we're spending a lot of money on it.

Complete streets rules, however, require that projects like this take into account bike and pedestrian access. Since bike and pedestrian routes across Aurora in the vicinity of Mercer and Broad were so horrible before the project started, almost anything would count as an improvement. So there's some promise at least. The removal of the worst parts of Broad Street and an Aurora underpass with sidewalks that are more than an afterthought will be great improvements when they're finished. And what's the plan for biking through east-west in the corridor? Instead of trying to build a cycletrack along the expanse of Mercer, plans called for a route mostly along Roy. OK, so it'll use a cycletrack along the expanse of Mercer for a couple blocks to get under Aurora, and east of there Roy will turn into Broad for a block and then Valley as it runs south of Lake Union Park, for reasons that I'd describe mostly as historical -- anyway, I'm going to call it the Roy route for the rest of this post.

The Roy route looked pretty good in the plans' overhead views. Not a centerpiece of our AAA (All Ages and Abilities) bike network, perhaps not always a ride full of delights, but a reasonably direct and safe way to get from A to B. In fact, by these standards, the lines drawn on the ground today are already pretty good. The temporary version of the Aurora underpass path is a little tight, and on the wrong side of Mercer for people riding through, but considering that it's an active construction zone, it's not so bad.

So what's the problem? Two things, and without fixing them the Roy route just won't live up to its potential to sew up the fragmented neighborhoods all the way from Fred Hutch to Lower Kinnear.

• Signal timings. Too many of the signal cycles, particularly at 9th Ave N and Westlake, are way, way too long. Maybe, maybe, this can be justified during peak hours as a way to maximize vehicle throughput on Westlake. Personally I don't think any possible throughput that could be gained extending cycle lengths from kinda long to extremely long is worth delaying the bike route or pedestrian access to the park and bus stops... especially because the peak-hour queue for Mercer often extends past Valley. I think prioritizing pedestrian, bike, and transit access over vehicle throughput aligns with the city's stated policies. But even if SDOT disagrees about the relative value of peak-hour vehicle throughput, there is no possible justification for these cycle lengths off-peak, when there just isn't much traffic trying to use Westlake at all. If Seattle wants to develop a jaywalking culture, this is how it will develop a jaywalking culture.
• Construction closures. There's a lot of construction coming to this corridor in the next generation or so, especially east of Aurora. If the Roy route is going to fulfill the promise of a pedestrian/bike route in the Mercer corridor, it must be continuously open, both ways, all the time. Currently construction on a building has closed the route eastbound for a single block between Westlake and 9th (it hasn't just closed the bike lane, it's actually closed the street to eastbound traffic generally). There's not really a great detour route, and the lousy one that exists (taking Dexter north to Aloha, crossing Westlake at the north crosswalk after a stupefying wait, and taking one of the various paths through the park) isn't indicated. The closure of sidewalks and crosswalks has had typical effects also, especially at intersections with long signal cycles and especially near bus stops. Making the Roy route one-way for a block is, for people biking, just like making Mercer one-way for a block would be for people driving, and the city needs to start thinking about it that way when it issues construction permits.

Seattle BMP Implementation plan!

So, now, a clearer look at what the Bike Master Plan's lines on a map will actually mean for the next five years. Here are the big takeaways for me:

• It's weak in West Seattle. This isn't all that surprising, as the BMP has always been weak in West Seattle, but this plan throws it in relief. The two greenway routes in the eastern residential neighborhoods are great, but there's little help in here for access to businesses in Alaska and Admiral Junctions, and little help for getting between the junctions (and adjacent hilltop neighborhoods) and low-lying destinations (primarily the bridge and Alki). These connections are menaced by a junction without a name, the junction of Fauntleroy, Admiral, and the high bridge, and that doesn't look to change.
• It's not totally clear that a plan has cured SDOT of opportunistic bike planning. Opportunism is a problem when it becomes a game of, "We'll build bike access where there's room," rather than, "We'll build bike access where we need it." Nothing in this implementation plan looks like the great routes needed between the U District and three key destinations to the south: downtown, Capitol Hill, and the Central District. There's growth coming to Northgate and Alaska Junction and still these are places the bike network goes to die. And we've continued to allow retail, entertainment, and even residential incursion into industrial areas like SODO and Interbay while transportation planning remains exclusively freight-oriented.
• Paging Mr. Newmark, we'll have some missed connections. Northeast Seattle is probably the worst. The recent NE 75th St bike lanes stopped just short of Roosevelt to the west and 39th to the east, and will stay that way. New lanes on 130th make it to the Interurban but stop at I-5, a few blocks short of both Roosevelt and lanes on 125th. The 68th St greenway will end into nothing at both ends, even though it's just a few blocks from other routes. Elsewhere, the plan for existing ROW on 6th and Airport to extend a good bike route south from the end of the SODO trail is fine, but what happens in the east-west jogs? In particular, the jog on Spokane from 6th to Airport? There isn't a lot of room among the highway ramps... and this is a route filling one of the biggest gaps in our cycling network, so it's one we really should get right.

  EDIT: There are a few things to be happy about regarding connections. The plan includes work on N 34th and Fremont Ave in Fremont, an opportunity to fix some of the awkward turning situations at 34th/Fremont and 34th/Stone, to patch a short gap in the Interurban Route, and to improve wayfinding between the Interurban Route and the Burke (or even to suggest alternate Interurban Route connections for people that find Fremont Ave too steep).

• Neighborhood greenways will prove their worth in SE and Central Seattle. What's awesome about the plans to blanket these parts of town with greenways is how easily they connect together, at simple side-street intersections, while separated arterial routes require more complex connections.
• Don't sleep on the suburbs. During BMP discussions some people expressed concerns about planned routes near the edges of the city, especially the southern edge near Boeing Field -- "Will these routes be useful if they drop off at the city limits?" Yesterday I saw some new bike lanes out the window of the train on the way home from mountain biking and went down to check 'em out this morning. Tukwila has recently built a half-decent bike route using East Marginal Way, parts of Boeing Access Road and its ramps, and Airport Way, and they're waiting for that connection from Seattle that, by this plan, won't be complete until after 2019. It turns out Tukwila's lanes really lose a lot of their usefulness because the connection north into Seattle is so bad. The ball is really in Seattle's court when it comes to connecting to several neighboring cities, especially to the south, where routes are affected by the SODO gap as well as gaps closer to the borders.

A more interesting anti-Pono screed

Yeah, I'm talking about Pono, the silly $400 audiophile music player that makes the typical silly audiophile claims about why it's better. I could write a typical anti-audiophile screed and denounce their marketing copy as pseudoscience. I already did this on a G+ post and feel sort of silly about that, not because what I wrote wasn't true but because it wasn't very interesting. I have much more interesting things to say about the Pono than, Your claims are silly and you should feel silly!. Here they are:

• Pono might actually sound better than your phone. But less due to the expensive hardware in the Pono than the expensive hardware in your phone. The worst audio fidelity problems encountered in the real world are much more prosaic than those Pono talks about in its ad copy. One of my old computers, the dearly departed talkingcookie, suffered from noisy interference in audio I/O during hard drive, mouse, and keyboard activity. This sort of thing is caused by simple board layout and shielding problems that could just as easily occur on a phone. If I had to guess, though, iPhones have probably never had this problem.
• Pono is Prius-shaped. Some people have commented on Pono's weird triangle shape, speculating that it wouldn't fit well in your pocket. They weren't buying one anyway. Driving a Pontiac Aztek sets you apart as someone that bought an ugly car. Driving a Toyota Prius sets you apart as someone that bought a green car, at least to people soft-headed enough to think the environmental difference between a Prius and a typical car is anything but incremental --- fortunately for Toyota Americans are notoriously soft-headed about cars. To those that are soft-headed about audio fidelity the Pono's wacky shape sets them apart as discerning, and fortunately for Pono Americans are notoriously soft-headed about music.
• Pono isn't straight-up elitism, but it's sideways elitism. Neil Young said something about wanting to take the experience of listening to music back to his beloved 1970s. In the 1970s the parts of the audio chain the Pono represents really made a difference. They were the quality and condition of the vinyl disc and of your turntable. Today the other parts of the audio chain vary as much as ever: the mixing and mastering of the music on one end, and on the other the amplifiers, speakers or headphones, and listening environments. But the fidelity of the record from the master copy to the DAC is solid for everyone. This must gall the elitist, who subconsciously sees ubiquitous access to high-fidelity audio as desacralizing it somehow. If there's a case to be made that recorded audio quality is worse today, it's about the loudness war, and how the listening environments of loud cars, buses, and trains have contributed to it. Of course the Pono doesn't try to elevate the living room as the preferred environment to entice tomorrow's engineers to master for nice, quiet spaces. It instead promises flat frequency response (hmmmmmm...) no matter what kind of lousy headphones you're using (their ad copy elsewhere dares to utter the word earbuds, so... hmmmmmmmmmmm...) by virtue of its... low output impedance? Well, I said I wasn't going to harp on the pseudoscience, so...

/micdrop

(EDIT: formatting derps)

Do you believe in conspiracies?

So there's a poll about conspiracy theories that is asked of Americans, by Public Policy Polling, with at least the veneer of procedural propriety. Among the questions: was the moon landing faked, is global warming a hoax, is Obama the damn Antichrist, and... “Do you believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to promote the Iraq War, or not?”

We-e-e-e-lllllllll... one of these things is not like the other, right?

How do I answer this question? Am I a lefty conspiracy nut or a sane moderate adult? Was I a lefty conspiracy nut in college (when this all went down, for me), and a sane moderate adult now that I'm almost 30 (WAT WAT WAT WAT WAT WAT WAT)? Was Bush involved in some sort of plot that led people off to die just to enrich its profiteering members pockets? Probably not. But I think something happened sort of like what happened with the (currently stuck) Deep Bore Tunnel in Seattle.

Tunnel supporters (oh, geez, here Al goes on another tunnel rant) decided they wanted a deep-bore tunnel built before they set out to make a case for it. They knew the existing viaduct wasn't seismically sound and needed to be replaced. They knew it couldn't be rebuilt in similar form because it wouldn't meet building codes or highway design standards. These are near-indisputable facts, and no amount of future-nostalgia for the viaduct will make them go away. They believed they needed a full limited-access freeway in that corridor; that's an opinion I disagree with (at the very least, I think it's a bad assumption to go in with), and I think it's really the crux of the matter. All the rest of the questions flow forth from there. They believed a surface-level freeway or a cut-and-cover tunnel would be too temporarily disruptive to public waterfront access and existing businesses; these are widely popular opinions and I agree with both. At that point, the only option is to build a tunnel, and the task ahead is to sell it.

The way they sold the tunnel is through studies. Good leaders involved in a sound decision making process would have started the study by determining goals and needs. This process would have identified many important needs that really will be met well by the planned work in the Highway 99 corridor: providing vehicular access to the Port of Seattle and industrial district from the city at large, reconnecting the local street network across the highway between Lower Queen Anne and rapidly-growing South Lake Union (the tunnel wasn't necessary for this, but it's kinda part of the plan), providing a legible route for Highway 99. It also would have identified needs our plan doesn't readily meet: ensuring fast, reliable, and direct mass transit access between downtown Seattle and southern and western corners of the city, maintaining the pedestrian network of Pioneer Square, managing surface traffic in downtown and SODO, providing a bypass of downtown Seattle congestion for long-haul traffic in the corridor that actually carries such traffic (I-5, the reasons for which could fill a whole blog post), addressing all our environmental goals, and being fiscally responsible. Phew, that's a lot of stuff the tunnel sucks at — and I only really disagree with supporters on one thing!

But the studies weren't designed to find how to meet our needs, they were designed to sell a freeway. The metric placed above all others was vehicular travel time between Green Lake and the Port of Seattle, a race designed to be won by a freeway tunnel with few exits between these points and none between Mercer and Yesler. The necessity of a pure limited-access freeway seemed self-evident without examination to most people, and was never effectively challenged. Studies and arguments showing that a non-freeway alternative met our full slate of needs better than the tunnel, for less money, were dismissed without official acknowledgement, in ways that stifled discussion. Cascadia prides itself on open government, but what we saw was a farce of that: advisory votes on confusing measures without any real discussion of what we needed and why. I don't think that's a nefarious conspiracy, but it's bad leadership and bad decision making that ultimately misled all of us, public and leaders alike.

Similarly, the Bush administration determined it wanted to invade Iraq before building a justification based on WMD. It had a number of reasons it wanted to go, but the WMD case was considered likely to gain support in the media, so the administration assembled what evidence it could find (including the erratic and evasive behavior of Hussein's regime when pressed) and presented it widely. It wasn't a back-room conspiracy; it was put together by people whose various earnest reasons for wanting to replace Saddam Hussein were no secret. The public case was disingenuous and held together by wishful thinking. I'd say wishful thinking for a war is pretty perverse on the face of it, but if you believed in the rest of the case for invasion (as many Americans did and continue to do) you'd continue to support it (as many Americans did and continue to do).

So when the WMD evidence turned out flimsy this didn't change the opinion of many on the war (though the experience of being a country at war did, which could fill another blog post... by someone else). In Seattle, when new traffic and tolling revenue projections showed the tunnel in a worse light, this didn't change a lot of people's views on it. WMDs were never really the leaders' reason for war, why should they determine the people's acceptance of it? Because the media ran with that narrative and wanted to hold the administration's feet to the fire? Even that didn't matter much; people that opposed the war all along simply had a loud new ally, and people that supported it got to exercise their well-earned skepticism at the media. In this age of polarization few were left in the middle aside from that very media, trying desperately to hold together a common narrative, being duped badly, acting as stupid as it looked (that could fill another blog post).

Back on topic... I don't think that's a nefarious conspiracy, but it's bad leadership and bad decision making that ultimately misled all of us, public and leaders alike. Do I believe the Bush administration intentionally misled us? To Public Policy Polling, as I read the question, you can put me in with those that believe in the New World Order and Reptilians: a true conspiracy believer. And not as crazy as all that, either.

LaTroy Hawkins and the 2004 Cubs

I was reading a bit about the Cubs today, and the subject of the 2004 Cubs came up. And, unsurprisingly, LaTroy Hawkins was prominently featured as one of the reasons that team did not make the playoffs, even though it was in many ways better than the 2003 Cubs, who did. When this happens I usually like to make a little comment that Hawkins wasn't actually as bad that year as many perceived, and that he never really deserved much of the criticism he received from fans and the media that year. But blog comment space doesn't allow for a full analysis of Hawkins' 2004 season, and the reasons that different stats paint a very different picture of the sort of season he had. This format does, so here goes.

The popular narrative is that LaTroy Hawkins was a talented pitcher that couldn't perform under pressure and was thus uniquely poorly suited to be a closer. Indeed, in 2004 as he closed for the Cubs, his ERA was stellar at 2.63 and his strikeout and walk rates excellent but he blew 9 saves.

Aggregate stats like ERA and strikeout rate have the weakness that they don't use the individual game as a unit. A closer's save record, like a starter's W-L record, hold the individual game up and attribute its result to a pitcher. That's why they resonate in ways that aggregate rate stats don't. Unfortunately they can also be pretty inaccurate measures of a pitcher's impact on the games he pitched in. And sometimes, as in Hawkins' case, they're even misleading indicators of what happened while he was pitching.

Measuring a single player's actual impact on a game is impossible, but measuring what happened while he was pitching is done regularly with WPA. Hawkins' WPA didn't shine as brightly as his rate numbers, but it was pretty good, around 1.2. It's better than any other Cub reliever that year, and in line with what many other good relievers did. You'd expect a reliever that blew so many saves to have a bad WPA. His decent WPA suggests that his blown saves were not as bad as those of many others. Indeed, my recollection is that several times he blew saves in games the Cubs won; he held the tie and often was credited with the win himself. Even if he performed poorly he left with the game still in reach. WPA will rightly say this sort of blown save is better than the stereotypical reliever meltdown, where the closer gives up the tying and winning runs.

So what do the game logs say? Let's look at the 9 blown saves of LaTroy Hawkins in 2004.

1. April 28: Hawkins entered the game with one out in the 8th and a one-run lead. He gave up a home run to tie the game and finished the inning with the game tied. The Cubs happened to score one in the 9th and win (this does not bear on Hawkins' WPA, nor on any rational analysis of his performance, though he was credited with a win). Although it occurred before Hawkins was installed as the closer, this fits the pattern of a blown save that was, while not good, about as good as a blown save can be.
2. May 28: In the second game of a double-header Hawkins entered in the bottom of the 9th with a two-run lead and gave up a two-run homer to tie the game. He finished out the 9th and was replaced for the 10th by Francis Beltran, who threw one pitch that was hit out for a home run and a Cubs loss. Again, Hawkins allowed the tying run but not the winning run to score, though this time he blew a larger lead.
3. June 13: In the bottom of the 11th Hawkins entered with a one-run lead. He allowed three singles (one which he fielded; it is possible though not certain that he fielded poorly -- either way, WPA counts it the same as any other single) and the tying run, finished the 11th, pitched a 1-2-3 12th, and exited with the game tied. The Cubs went on to win. The pattern holds.
4. July 4: A one-run lead going into the top of the 9th, a solo home run, a blown save, a tie-game departure, a Cub run (on an RBI walk by Todd Walker), and a win. The pattern is four-for-four.
5. August 21: Another one-run lead in the bottom of the 9th. Hawkins recorded only one out before allowing two runs and picking up the loss. A throwing error on Aramis Ramirez contributed; still, the pattern is finally broken.
6. August 25: Exactly like July 4, except in the details. Hawkins gave up the tying run on a double to a guy named Magruder, and the Cubs won it on a solo shot from Corey Patterson. Pattern is 5-for-6.
7. September 21: Another for the pattern (6 out of 7), and another blown save-win for Hawkins. This time it was the bottom of the 9th, and Patterson (another Cub that had a pretty solid season that many remember as disappointing) scored the winning run on a wild pitch, setting up a save for Ryan Dempster.
8. September 25: Hawkins entered with two on and one out in the bottom of the 9th and gave up a 3-run jack to tie it up. That's -0.4 on the WPA scale, which is exactly halfway between 0.1 (what he'd have got for the save) and -0.9 (what he'd have got had he given up another donger instead of finishing the inning). That's the very mathematical signature of the pattern. 7 out of 8. Oh, yeah, the Cubs lost in extras, holding onto a slim half-game wild-card lead.
9. September 29: I'll have the regular. The real orthodox regular. In a one-run save opportunity in the top of the 9th Hawkins gave up one run. The Cubs went on to lose in extras and fell a half-game back in the wild-card race.

So the final score: in nine blown saves LaTroy Hawkins finished out the inning with the game tied eight times, giving the opponents the lead only once. On top of that he picked up losses after entering tie games three times. This does not amount to a great season, and the stretch run was particularly mediocre, but it does amount to a better season than the blown-save count and popular narrative would lead you to believe. And that bit about a decent-but-not-great season with a mediocre stretch run? That describes the 2004 Cubs to a T, the whole team. Singling out any one player is silly.