Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, March 27, 2006

So I've been reading through the various news sites and taking in the incredulous prose regarding the 15 cent rise in the price of a gallon of gas over the last two weeks. Oil surpluses are high, refining capacity is coming back on line and supply isn't in bad shape. A warm winter has eased demand and if simple economic theory were to hold then one would expect prices to be falling not climbing. But that's not how it works because markets are effected by a lot more than just supply and demand. They are affected by futures and perception and uncertainty all of which are at historic levels of hysteria in this particular market.

A lot of people are really seeing this whole thing as a negative but not me. I'm actually thinking good things about higher gas prices. The low milage, carbon dioxide spewing SUV is a thing of the past as are the prehistorically slow to change paradigms at the big three automakers. People want more efficent vehicles and even if Detroit is slow to deliver, they will come around or they will perish. The other upside is that people are going to have to start thinking very soon about the types of decisions they make in terms of their transportation. We have an infrastructure that was built and the basis of massive availability of cheap, portable, liquid fuels. That assumption is obviously a thing of the past. What I'm really looking forward to seeing is how people resolve that. When gas hits $4-5 a gallon this summer (assuming it follows the run up in prices seen in the last two summers) I think people are going to question their choices on where they live, how they get to work and what types of recreation they participate in. I think we may see a rise in de-urbanization where people choose to live in smaller towns with less congestion and do most if not all of their work there, either from home or from a more local office. I also believe you'll see a lot larger public outcry for cheap, fast mass transit. Here in Georgia the high-speed rail line might finally get pushed through and finished.

Some industries will be negatively impacted, of course. With fewer drivers there will be fewer hotel stays. I think airlines will benefit in that they do offer mass transit but only if they use modern load balancing modeling and the like. Some convenience will likely have to be sacrificed in order to deal with high fuel costs or low passenger load aircraft. Some airlines seem to have found a way to deal with these challenges while many others are floundering. Tourism to far away places will likely be negatively impacted but the local tourism industries may well benefit. Trips to DisneyWorld, Branson, Missouri and Vail may well drop off but the local state park may once again find increased traffic from families wanting to get away from home but not willing to spend a sizable chunk of their travel budgets on gas. If they are able to partner with local attractions, hotels and motels may be able to offset the loss of the long-distance traveller.

Finally, I see a time of real challenge ahead for small colleges like Gordon unless they build more living space and deal with issues related to families who have someone trying to retrun to school. Right now we have a lot of students who drive 50+ miles one way to get here. If their communte cost becomes $25 per day theat's going to keep a lot of them from coming. While flexible scheduling can allieviate that (all classes on Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday) such solutions are often enacted at the expense of student success in the classroom, especially in an era of low academic literacy among students whose high school experiences amounted to little more than extended babysitting and social control. It seems that the two-year college model will have to change to include significant residential support as well as possible extended academic support in remote locations. This would be different than academic class centers that are now common in that students would go to the support centers for tutoring, student skills seminars and exclusively remedial classes before coming to the main campus.

Anyways, I see a lot of changes in the near future for American society as fossil fuels become more precious and more necessary to ration towards industrial uses only.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

This weekend was the official road race kick-off for me. I signed up for the Omnium at the Perry-Roubaix, "Hell of the Middle", race weekend held about an hour south of here. The Omnium consisted of a morning time trial which was a middle distance affair, an afternoon circuit race around a 2 mile loop and Sunday road race of about 50 miles. I signed up to do the Cat IV races because I need to get the upgrade points and I haven't done a mass start race since last May. If you're wondering about the name for the race, the races were held around Perry, Georgia and the 12.5 mile road race course actually had 2 miles of dirt road we had to traverse. More on that in a bit.

Saturday morning came pretty early and as we pull up to the start area for the TT the wind was already blowing at about 10 miles an hour. We'd have a tail wind the entire way out but when we turned around we'd ride back into it. This would prove decisive. I set up Spinblade and proceeded with my warm up. I got to the line and took off and realized that I was, as long as the wind was at my back, Lance. There were several places where I was pushing my 54/11 which meant I was doing in excess of 40 mph. I was climbing hills at a scary speed of over 25 mph. Then I turned arouond and hit the wall of wind that had been my friend just minutes before. The problem here is that I'm a smaller guy and we little guys don't do so well in the wind and was definitely the case here. I managed a second place finish but I was disappointed by the fact that I had done so well at Tundra and then faltered here. I believe the combination of the wind and a few training let ups where responsible. The guy who won was about 3 inches taller than me and a good bit broader so the advantage in the wind went to him.

The Circuit Race was a pretty interesting affair due to the now howling wind. By the time we went off it was 20 mph with gusts up to 30. By the time the pro/1/2 guys would go off late in the day it would be sustained at 30. We started with around 35 guys and for the first 3 laps things remained pretty boring with a small two man break getting off the front and being left to dangle. On lap number four I decided to shake things up and attacked on the stretch of road that was into the wind and then turned onto the long 2% uphill drag. It was a text book attack and I had about 15 seconds pretty quick. I didn't expect to really get away but I wanted to see what everyone had. When the pack got back up to me there were only 18. I had split the field and made the race. That was cool. Over the next couple of laps my team chased the break to try and set up our sprinter. We did some pretty impressive work and I think the rest of the field noticed. In the end I finished 14th which is great for me since I can't sprint. The picture is of me coming up over the top of the long climb on one lap. You can see how much I'm enjoying the wind.

Sunday's road race was held over a really great course. We had two pretty solid climbs and some rollers but the highlight was the two miles of dirt road we had to negotiate. The cool thing about the dirt is that I sort of felt like I was doing one of the spring classics where there was a race to get a good position going into the dirt and then a lot of single file hard riding. I split the field again with an attack on the climbs on the second lap and then did a lot of work for the team through the rest of the race. I tried to set a guy up for a final breakaway on the last lap but he didn't really seem to have the ability to make anything of it. He could hold wheels and push a bit on the climbs but he couldn't seemt o do much on the flats. Anyways, I ended up finishing 11th and 6th overall in the Omnium which was pretty good considering.

Today will be a recovery ride and then I'll head back into hard training. The one thing that I didn't like was that I didn't seem to have the "extra gear" I needed at some points and I think some hard interval training will help that.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, March 26, 2006

I thought I'd update my five faithful readers on some of the things going on in my life of late. Here's another picture from the bike photo project. Actually, I took this a while ago and it's one of my favorites. My wife has done a photoshop rendition of this where the red of the bike has been left in that's pretty cool. I call it "Pure Motion".

The cooking gig went ok. The school dining room has a station called "Innovations" which is basically a saute bar. Me and the regular line chef there whipped up plates of "Pasta Pronto" which was basically ziti, an alfredo sauce and a couple of veggies. Not the most difficult thing I've ever cooked but the students seemed to like it and it was good to see so many of them in a different environment.

I finally finished my gig teaching physics up at the local technical college. Georgia is a bit unique in that there are two parallel two-year college systems; one for transfer to four year schools and the other as a technical/job skills system. I've always taught in the transfer track so this was an interesting experience. The students were a lot more motivated than some of my students at Gordon but not as well prepared for the most part so I had to teach harder but they were willing to work harder. Anyways, the gig is done and hopefully I'll regain a little of the flexibility I once had in my schedule. I need that now that the weather is turning better and the grass (there are actually a lot of weeds too) is starting to get taller.

I'm torn as to exactly what next school year will be like. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want to do deep down. So many of our students need so much help and I think I have something to offer a lot of them. The problem is I don't know whether they want to hear it from me. Part of it is a culture thing. I'm a smaller town white guy and a lot of the students in our residence halls come from the south Atlanta metro region due to the vargarities of geography. It's hard to reach the communiting studnet because they show up, take classes and then jet but the dorm students are more available and more interested in things that can be delivered to them. So I'm thinking of taking a series of "student skills" seminars into the dorms. My other option is to continue to work in faculty leadership by taking the next step towards becoming Faculty Senate chair. I like the idea in some ways but in others I'm not so sure. How much time will it take and will it help me offer what I may have to the students, assuming they want to hear what I have to say. In any case there's a lot of good I think I can do so I have to make a decision. Maybe some of that will be determined by how I do at Nationals.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, March 18, 2006

For those who don't know, we're spending the weekend down in Lower Alabama doing some things for my wife's mom. Since there's really not a lot that I can do I'm just along for moral support and strong arms when that's needed from time to time. This leaves me with ample time to spin through the country side. Today's ride was going to be from Enterprise to Elba down the Pea River Valley to Ino and then back. When I got to Elba I decide to explore new pavement and changed course to head out to Opp. Other than nearly being run down by a Wal-Mart truck it was a good ride though it was surprisingly hilly. You'd think being this close to the Gulf thing would be flat but the road from Enterprise to Elba was all up and down and so was the last section of the ride. My legs were pretty fried by the end but damn if it didn't feel good. Top that off with some Mellow Mushroom (yes, they have one of those down here) Pizza and it's been a fine day.

One thing I've noticed is that folks down here are, well, different. First, look at the town names. It's like there was a shortage of letters letter for town names after places like Tuscaloosa used them all so you get places like Opp and Elba and Ino. Who calls a town Opp? The second clue for me is the shrine. That's the picture you see here. In Enterprise there is a monument to, of all things, the Boll Weevil. For those who don't know, a boll weevel is a tiny little critter that eats cotton plants. Under a microscope it's a surprisingly ugly critter. Yet in downtown Enterprise there is a statue of a woman in the classical Greek style (Demeter maybe?) holding up a huge reproduction of this bug. The monument was erected to honor the bug for eating the cotton because in this calamity the local farmers discovered that peanuts would replenish the soil (via nitrogen fixing...gotta love those legumes) the cotton had been rapidly wearing out thus introducing them to the joys of crop rotation and an additional revenue stream.

What I've always wondered is what an alien civilization would think of they found the monument. I think they'd decide it was some sort of shrine to the bug who must actually rule the planet or be an object of great spiritual importance. I wonder if they'd leave gifts of some purely alien sort at the base of the pool of water that surrounds the statue of the woman thinking that we humans. or at least the variety of humans in the place named Alabama with either very short of very long town names, worship the bug. All bow down to the great and holy (and really, really ugly) Bug God Boll Weevel. I mean, look at the picture. What would you think if you were some sort of alien athropologist who stumbled across this thing or the image of it in the memory of some poor rural soul you happened to abduct on a county road on the way to Ino and are conducting memory tests on.

Anyways, I call it the bug shrine to the annoyance and, I think, secret bemusement of my wife and I think it stands as definitive proof that Alabamans (at least those in the lower portion of the red clay state) are just a leeeetttlllle different than a lot of folks.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, March 16, 2006

I had something of a pleasant surprise this week from an unlikely source. I received an email from the campus food service vendor telling me that I had been overwhelmingly nominated by the students as the one person on the College's faculty and staff they'd most like to have cook for them.

I'm really humbled to have been nominated/elected because I guess the votes came from students who have eaten at our Bible study on Thursday night and they wanted more of my cooking. I guess that means I must not be poisoning them or some such.

I guess I'll be working on the cafeteria line's "Innovations" station where I'll get to do some sort of fast pan frying such as the meat/peppers for fajitas or some kind of pasta and sauce combination. Hopefully I'll be allowed to do a little of my own inventing but even if I don't, it'll be nice to be able to interact with my students in a pretty non-traditional way.

Sometimes I really wish I had a lot more time to cook. I've been trying to do a bit more lately but with my schedule as busy as it has been, there hasn't been as much time as I'd like. Fortunately things look like they'll be easing off here soon. I've been trying to get myself to slow down when I cook so that I don't feel like I'm rushing to get a meal done so I can get on with other things. To that end I've been pouring myself a glass of wine at the beginning of the meal as well as lighting candles in the space and putting on some acoustic guitar music. My favorite wine of choice is Gewurztraminer though a Reisling will do in a pinch. I'll sometimes have a beer but I find them to be just a little heavy when I want to be moving around...they're better when putting the feet up and relaxing.

So I've done my Waldorf Chicken recipe a couple of times and I feel like I'm getting that down pretty well with a couple of tweaks this time around thatr I think just about set the recipe. I've also been working on a Chicken Carbonara recipe that has been tricky. The first time I made it, it was awesome. The last two times have been so so. The first time I added the Gewurztraminer I was drinking so that might be the key. What I'd like to do next week is identify five recipes I haven't made in a while or at all and try them. I've been enjoying my time in the kitchen and I think I'm going to really push to get back in more often. I always cook on Thurdays but the food is often a large batch type of cooking. Cooking for a lot of people is fun but you don't have as much time to work on presentation and the batch sizes are too big to be all that subtle with your spicing.

In a way I really envy our friend Shaun who has gone to cooking school. I'd love to have that opportunity to create and experiement in a way that's really out there. My wife isn't a big "outside the box" food person so any really wild experimentation stuff I want to do haas to be for me only and that's just not as much fun.

Anyways, I doubt you'll be seeing me on Iron Chef anytime soon but maybe they'll have some sort of live at the improv cooking thing for regular folks and I can do that sometime.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |