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I <3 Soma FM

Lately I’ve been listening to Soma FM a lot. I especially like their Groove Salad channel. They play Boards of Canada all the time, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, their 128k MP3 stream has pretty decent quality – I guess it’s technically the same as a DAB radio station – and it plays on just about anything. Winamp on my PC, with its Delta 1010 hooked up to the stereo, no problem. Linosaur, my Linux server, was a little trickier, but once I figured out the stream URL, I pasted it into phpMP and saved it as a playlist, and off it went. I have a LCD and keypad hooked up to linosaur using LCDproc and a modified version of lcd-stuff, and I can play stuff from that.

Perhaps the coolest thing is that it plays on my Pocket PC (an old Ipaq hx4700) using GSPlayer. When you visit Soma FM’s page, it downloads a Winamp playlist onto your machine to start playback. That contains several streams, I guess as backup if some of them are down. I just got this groovesalad.pls file and copied it onto my PDA’s memory card. (I prefer to keep stuff on a card, since my hx4700 crashes and wipes its RAM with monotonous regularity.) When I run GSPlayer (which I also keep on the card to save reinstalling every 2 weeks) the playlist can be opened and the fat beats begin.

So, if I do this, and dangle my DSL modem/router out of the window, I can listen in the back yard while washing my bike. I’m off to do that now 🙂

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Have your pi, and eat it too

I don’t remember when it was that I first heard of pi. I was home schooled, but my mum and dad said that all attempts to get me interested in maths failed, and this was one reason why they finally sent me to school aged nine. So maybe my dad explained the concept of pi while we were plodding through the Leadhills looking for dippers to ring. Or maybe it was one of a succession of long-suffering teachers and lecturers. Whoever it was, I’m grateful, because pi is a lovely number.

Now, anyone who knows anything about maths knows that pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, and that it has a value of 3.1415927 or thereabouts. If you know nothing about maths, just imagine a circular lake with a bridge right over the middle. It’ll be 3.14… times further to walk all the way round the lake than to walk over the bridge.

If you’re a real math geek, you’ll also know that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has more digits after the decimal point than anyone can ever imagine or calculate, and hence it can never be written exactly. If you’re a really serious math geek, you may even know a piem or two. And if you’re totally hardcore, you’ll object that pi could have any value you like in a non-Euclidean geometry. But I’ve never met any math geek hardcore enough that they could tell me what the meaning of pi is. Why should an everyday thing like a circle manifest itself in mathematics as a number so big and exotic that nobody can ever know it exactly?

Maybe a discussion of where circles come from would help. The circle, and its 3-D cousin the sphere, appear in nature because they are the most effective way of enclosing space. If you have to make a bag to keep stuff in, as Nature did when evolving eggs and tomatoes, then a spherical shape bags you the most “stuff” for a given amount of eggshell or tomato skin. And, since Nature abhors waste, these objects turn out spherical. Well, eggs aren’t quite spherical, but luckily for chickens, they’re not quite tetrahedrons either. So maybe pi is just a mathematical way of saying that Nature doesn’t do corners. And if it’s irrational because it’s natural, then the endless series of decimals is no more worrying than bugs in your organic lettuce.

Then again, the state of Arkansas recently redefined it to 3.0 exactly. If they’d chosen 4, maybe eggs would have turned cubical overnight and chickens would have really had something to squawk about.

Or then again, maybe pi doesn’t have any meaning whatever. I struggled with math at university because I insisted on believing that it had some kind of correspondence with reality, and looking for physical metaphors to understand it intuitively. The laws of physics can be described as mathematical equations, and the behaviour of some physical systems can be predicted by mathematics, so it’s easy to believe that the universe is somehow made out of mathematics, and learning it will unlock all the mysteries of the universe. But in the end, the universe is made out of universe, and maths is just a game that mathematicians play.

Níl i mata, a shaoi, eolaíocht nó feidhm. (“Wise one, mathematics has neither science nor use.”) – an Irish piem giving pi to 7 decimal places

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The Darwin Diet

We’ve had the GI Diet, the Atkins Diet, and a hundred others. But what if Charles Darwin wrote a diet book?

Well, ever since “Man… descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped“, until the discovery of fossil fuels, human populations were limited by competition for resources. What that presumably meant was that, just in order to survive, Man had to eat everything and anything he could lay hands on. So there’s the Darwin diet right there. Eat anything you can lay hands on if you want to live.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t fit well with a post-industrial society where fossil-fuelled machines do all of our manual labour for us, and the market economy brings us a cornucopia of processed foods designed for profit. Yes, people complain about McDonalds, but it’s exactly the foodstuff you’d expect a free market to produce. Looks nice, tastes nice in an addictive, trashy kind of way, cheap to mass-produce, and who cares what it does to your health. McDonalds don’t, because they don’t have to pay for your healthcare.

The amazing thing isn’t that some people are fat, as the media keep telling us. It’s more remarkable that some people are still thin, while they have the chance to consume everything and do nothing, and the evolutionary mandate for it, too.

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“An engine that knows what it’s missing”

So after a couple of weeks of commuting, I finally got my first puncture on the Skyline. I wasn’t looking where I was going, ran over a tiny rock the size of a marble, and got a pinch flat. Even blown up to 100psi, those skinny tyres really are wimpy compared to mountain bike tyres. But I guess that’s the price I pay for getting to work in 20 minutes instead of 40.

Fixing a puncture on a commuter bike is much the same as in a car. You pull over to the side of the road and empty all the stuff out of your “trunk”, a big messenger bag full of junk, in order to access the spare inner tube and tools buried right at the bottom. Then you sit the bike upside down on its handlebars and saddle, unscrew the afflicted wheel and lever the tyre off it. You locate the hole in the inner tube, check the corresponding place on the tyre to make sure the sharp thing isn’t still there, put in a new tube, blah, whatever, done it a million times.

As I was doing this, sitting on a kerb under a tree in the rain, with Asian kids yelling and playing football in the street, I wondered if I hadn’t strayed too far from my roots in mountain biking, by buying into the whole “Quest for freeride” thing. Mountain biking is getting fragmented into more and more different disciplines, driven by bike companies, who want to sell you a different bike for each one. And who could blame them? They need to eat too.

But as some guy on some bike blog once said (I forget which) the cyclist is “An engine that knows what it’s missing”. Riding singletrack on the Frankenstinky feels like shooting squirrels with a cannon. When you hit something it’s spectacular, but I really wish it was lighter and easier to aim… I actually miss my old Inbred 🙁

Then I found something that made me feel a lot better. According to Colleen Smith’s blog, a cyclist can get 300 miles to the gallon… of ice cream! Or 1000mpg if they ate nothing but peanut butter. Even if the ice cream were entirely made from fossil fuels, which Ben & Jerry’s probably is, that’s pretty damn environmentally sound. I need to test this claim some time. Maybe 100 miles and one-third of a gallon of ice cream to start with.

While I was there, I couldn’t help but notice that Colleen Smith is a 6 foot 6 pro beach volleyball player and really hot. Hey Colleen, if you’re reading this, can I get your number? I’m only 6′ 5″ but I could wear platform shoes.

Oh well, back to reality.