An interlude. PNNL guest house provides its guest with low cost rented bicycles. I had a “free” day today (though I did some thinking) and cycled about 5+5miles through Richland to Bateman Island. But first, here is my bike:
Perceptive cyclists will notice that it has no brakes on the handlebars – in fact it has a backpedal brake. I haven’t ridden one of these before and didn’t find it very easy – if you backpedal then you stop, but if you put your foot down you keep going. I’m not sure what you do on steep hills. I think these bikes are popular in NL which doesn’t have many hills. I couldn’t go very fast, partly because the bike had only one gear, partly because it’s quite heavy and partly because of the air intake.
Zooming in we see:
All the bikes are named after elements. I got Technetium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium ). The trouble is that all technetium isotopes are unstable/radioactive. The one I know (and is used in medicine) is technetium-99m with a half life of 6 hours. This means that after 6 hours half my bike would have disintegrated (actually it depends whether the bike represents a single atom – if so, then there was an evens chance that after 6 hours I would have no bike). I was even more worried about Tc-98 because this probably only lasts for milliseconds.
I needn’t have worried. The thoughtful PNNL bike people had chosen the isotope with a half-life of 4.2 million years. I had more chance of a car crash than spontaneous disintegration.
A beautiful day and Bateman island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman_Island )was great (and isn’t Openstreetmap fantastic – it shows the cycleways unlike most other maps)– lots of birds on the river (which is quite wide here). I saw white pelicans, various grebes, ducks etc. which I’ll try to look up from memory:
And the causeway to the island
Backpedal bicycles are illegal in the UK, so don’t get too attached!
I’m not
It’s true, many of the cheaper bikes here in NL have backpedal brakes, but I wouldn’t say they are very popular. I had to use one for a few days once, and I hated it, a real pain in the zitvlak.
BTW, I really enjoy reading your blog, please keep motivating everyone, raising awareness and spreading the openness. I think many people care, and need to find their own way of contributing and swaying the system in a better direction.
Thanks – I really vaue gettiing comments. For some reason I don’t get many until I really upset people – which I don’t do for fun – it’s either by mistake or because there is an upsetting issue.
Anger is good, in a way, because it means people still care.