Sandy Sandy

Well I seem to have much more pleasant memories of Sandy than the people on the US atlantic seaboard are gaining right now.

What we are seeing on TV just goes to show how vulnerable the US infrastructure is. Overland power lines (ours are mostly underground, there being very little risk of earthquakes) are more susceptible to storm damage by falling trees etc and thus millions are without power. Also there are six old nuclear reactors in the NY area being flooded; shutting the chain reaction down will not stop isotopes being washed out if the water level rises enough. But despite power losses, I see the neon advertising in Times Square etc is still going full blast even when hospitals have no power. Somehow they've got their (power distribution) priorities wrong in the US.

I wonder how the infrastructure problems over the coming week will affect the presidential elections? Enable the GOP to steal the election (again)?

Talk about getting sand in your (gear)box!

Meanwhile, we will be pestered by trick-or-treaters. Halloween is another of those pieces of American 'culture' sadly imported here; so I shall have to don a soutane and a Jimmy Savile wig to scare the little beggars away :-(

Comments (2) :
David (DC, USA) asked "Just curious : have your stats dropped off? How much?" Not noticably. Got 370 hits/day on tuesday. During the night (here) I got eastern seaboard hits from Baltimore(Maryland), Hudson (NH), Buffalo (NY), North Dartmouth (Massachusetts), and Central City (Pennsylvania), so some people out there still have power and are surfing the storm :-)
Demeur (USA) wrote "Stu you need to remember that our grid was built in the 50s and 60s. This is much like remodeling your house while you're still living in it. Underground cables and such work well until they flood. Most hospitals have been around for some time especially in NYC. To dig up and replace their power supplies would be quite a job in crowded New York. As for me I haven't been around because we had a neighbors' tree fall on our building the other week. No major damage but the clean up was something to see." You saw the tree? ;-) FWIW, our hospitals (and many companies) have diesel-powered UPS & fuel for 2-7 days. As even your (old) reactors should, because they need to keep the core-cooling going, lest you get a Fukushima effect :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 31, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Yet more Baseball Caps :-)

Early this morning (in Germany) we put the clocks back 60 minutes so we are now on winter time (CET=Central European Time).

Recently, my wife has been touring some of the national parks in the Americas, before the US elections in november, when - if Romney 'wins' - the clocks will be set back about 60 years, not 60 minutes. Vote suppression, miss-counting, etc is the stuff of a Stalin- and Kafka-esque separate post, let's keep this one light-hearted.

As usual, she has collected some baseball caps from places she visited. Here are the 10 new ones in her collection. Back row, L2R : Berlin (starting point), Valdez (Alaska), Grand Teton National Park (Wyoming), and two from Galapagos. Front row, L2R : Rocky Mountain NP (Colorado), Devil's Tower (Wyoming), Denali NP (Alaska), some Bulldog club, and Yellowstone NP.

Interestingly(?), judging by the length of the adjustable size-strips provided, Australians have the biggest skulls and Mali (Africa) the smallest. This is a chance observation, not a representative survey. It interests me because I always have a problem trying on crash helmets because most shops don't stock any that large, me being out at the 3-sigma mark. And before you mail any sarcastic remarks, yes, skull size correlates positively with brain size and brain size correlates positively with I.Q, so yes, I AM a big-head ;-)

Is this blogpost boring you? One sigh fits all.

Comments (5) :
Pete (USA) grins "Your wife looks stacked, judging by the photo ;-)" Yup :-)
Pergelator (USA) wrote "My old Windows XP computer switched to DST this weekend. Officially, we haven't. So some time in the last ten (+/-) years somebody changed the date. " Or you have the language option set to UK English, maybe?
Cop Car (USA) wrote "According to the US Naval Observatory web site (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.php): 'Starting in 2007, daylight time begins in the United States on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.' I've never cared for 'Daylight Savings Time', but no one asked me. As to head size: Gee, Stu, I must be smarter than I thought. If your observation on the correlation between head size and IQ is correct. I vote 'yea'." I'll look up the correlation coefficients and cite the research papers by pointing you to the Wikipedia paragraph on humans' skull sizes.
Pearl (Bahamas) wrote "I thought all crash helmets were one size and only the padding thickness varies" Most manufacturers produce 4 hard shells (S,M,L,XL), so someone who needs XS gets an S shell with extra padding, and I, needing XXL, would get an XL shell with thinner padding. However I buy Schubert helmets which are labelled by the circumference of the skull in centimeters, so I need a 65 cm helmet.
Xtreme English (USA) wrote "In my first year at Catholic School (grade 5) the nuns all admired my large forehead. They said it was a sign of 'great intelligence.' Be that as it may, yes, I have a rollicking IQ. Or had. They still worshipped all my older brothers, though. Said they were 'real gentlemen and scholars.' I, on the other hand, was a hell-raiser. Still am in my own quiet way...." ;-) Reminds me of Cheiron, who 'had a forehead like a mountain wall' :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 28, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Anagramming 'Binders full of women' ;-)

• Wombs ruffled online
• Fun : Minor bedfellows
• Foul newborns filmed
• Nerd Snowmobile Luff
• Nerf Bowlful Misdone
• Slow fumbled Inferno
• Women's runoff billed
• Inbred Woollen Muffs
• Wino Blonde's Muffler
• Snuffed moll brownie
• Buffed swollen minor
• ...and last but not least : Bone wonderful Milfs ;-)

Comments (2) :
Chad (USA) suggests "Shorten that list to ten then submit it to the Letterman show. He does a spot called 'The Top 10 reasons....', which is always funny." I suspect it would be too hot for Letterman to handle, just before your elections.
Dave (USA) says "You forgot 'Blown for fluid semen' ;-)" Just as well ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 21, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Telegraph line protocols

On monday I blogged about the Royal Prussian Optical Telegraph Line and Li (Hong Kong) asked "What happens when messages collide?", thus opening the hornet's nest of questions about duplex (=bi-directional) message protocols along an essentially simplex (one-directional) line.

Simplex communication is permanent unidirectional communication. You must use connectionless protocols with simplex circuits as no acknowledgement or return traffic is possible over a simplex circuit. Examples are satellite communication, broadcasting, smoke signals, walkie-talkies, or Citizens' Band radios which are all good examples of connectionless communication. IP, UDP, ICMP, DNS, TFTP and SNMP are examples of connectionless protocols in use on the Internet. Given no/little interference and plenty of speed, connectionless protocols work well. An example on the optical telegraph line is the time synchronisation protocol as outlined in the next paragraph (my translation follows).

At 11:55 initiate no new messages. Drop all 6 semaphore arms to the vertical. Watch the uplink (i.e. direction=Berlin). At noon Berlin will raise the centre right semaphore arm to the horizontal. As soon as you see this raise your centre right semaphore arm to the horizontal and set your clock to noon. Now watch the downlink. As soon as endpoint Coblenz sees the timing signal they shall raise the centre left semaphore arm. As soon as you see this, raise your centre left semaphore arm to the horizontal too. When Berlin sees this 'echo-back' they have a measure of the timing delay along the line.

The telegraph line is really a half duplex link and so can communicate in only one direction at a time. Two way communication is possible, but not simultaneously. Walkie-talkies and CB radios are like this, you have to take turns (aka 'Over'). Half-duplex is connection-oriented meaning that when devices communicate, they perform handshaking to set up an end-to-end or station-to-station connection. The handshaking process may be as simple as synchronisation like the internet's transport layer protocol TCP.

Protocols were not internationally formalised back in the 1830s and developed ad hoc. So the telegraph line handshake might have been like this:

During the even numbered minutes watch the uplink, during the odd numbered minutes watch the downlink. Both until the watched station sends an 'intent to transmit (uplink/downlink)' message. Then set your telegraph to 'ready to receive(uplink/downlink)'. The sender may then signal his message. Write down what you receive. After end-of-message has been received, clarify any misreads via a request for repeat (sentence number). Then send a 'intent to transmit (uplink/downlink)' message to the next station along the line and when they are 'ready to receive(uplink/downlink)', send the (corrected) message you wrote down, clarifying by repeats as necessary. Then resume the time-based surveillance.

Note that this is a store-and-forward protocol as used on the internet. Messages are stored at each telegraph station and then forwarded to the next one. Messages are corrected at the point of failure (by the repeat-sentence-N convention). Now, and only now, can I get around to answering Li's original question, viz. "What happens when messages collide?"

Let us consider our local station 36. During an even numbered minute they watch the uplink (=towards Berlin, = station 35). Station 35 may then initiate a downlink transmission (=to station 36) and start a message which takes several minutes to send. Meanwhile station 37 may want to send an uplink message. But station 36 does not acknowledge this until it has received (and perhaps corrected) all of the message from station 35. Station 36 can then decide either to forward the message downlink to station 37, or, more likely, since station 37 has been waiting longer to transmit, may elect to receive the pending uplink message from station 37. Thus, Li, the messages do not 'collide', the store-and-forward mechanism merely delays them until they can be sent simplex (actually half-duplex) one after the other.

Why was a store-and-forward protocol used ? Well, weather conditions may have blinded one or more links. Each station was line-of-sight on a ridge or hilltop. This implies that as clouds roll in high-humidity air condensed on being lifted by the rising ground of the ridges. This would have meant that an end-to-end protocol (Coblenz/Berlin) would have only worked on rare clear days along the whole line. The store-and-forward protocol enables a horseback messenger to forward messages to the next (temporarily invisible) station. The bandwidth of a horseback rider with a pouch full of messages was not to be ignored ;-) A long 1200 character message (200 words) would take 20 minutes to telegraph station-to-station or an hour by horseback (10 kms between stations). A short message (10 words) would take 1 minute to telegraph station-to-station but still an hour by horseback (10 kms between stations), so messages would have been collected in a pouch for a couple of hours on bad weather days.

I'm afraid I know nothing about the use of message priorities. Presumably a character at the front of a message declared its priority and so each station could let a high priority message overtake a low priority one, or send the messenger out immediately on local bad-weather days. As far as I know, messages were not split into packets as is done on the internet nowadays; this was a later development.

Kevin, I'll answer your question about coding messages separately, this blogpost is long enough already :-)

Comments (1) :
Li (HK) answered "That half-duplex rules can't be quite right, it implies everyone see each others backs. So I guess even numbered stations watched uplink while odd numbered stations watched downlink, then vice versa a minute later." Sounds reasonable, thankyou for the correction.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 17, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Lotr Felix jokes starting; here's mine ;-)

Comments (1) :
Brian (UK) asks "Did anyone actually hear the sonic boom?" Dunno. You startin' a conspiracy theory?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 16, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

The Royal Prussian Optical Telegraph Line

Continuing on the theme of local historical landmarks, let me tell you today about the Royal Prussian Telegraph line which had a signalling station up on the ridge in Helmern, near the tree I mentioned on friday.

Friedrich William III, king of Prussia, had regained the Rhine area after the Vienna Congress around 1815 and so needed fast communications between his palace in Berlin and the Rhineland fort at Coblenz. The two/three days it took for a horseman messenger to ride there was too slow for the king. So he adopted the optical telegraph system invented by Watson (UK) and Chappe(F) and in 1833 set up the 400 mile 61 station ridge-to-ridge route shown above.

Station 36 was on the ridge to the south of our valley, at Helmern. Each station was a hut with a telegraph pole on it. The pole bore 6 movable arms each with 4 possible positions, LU(left up 45°), LL(left level), LD (left down 45°), (left vertical), RU,RL,RD and RV =12 bits or 4096 possible combinations, several being used for line administration purposes.

The hut also had a telescope window slot in both the uplink and downlink walls as shown in the painting below. The senior officer would keep a permanent watch for a ready-to-send-message signal from the adjacent station(s), whereupon the junior telegraphist would signal back a ready-to-receive message (different for the simplex uplink and downlink, obviously). Then the message would be sent letter by letter and/or code-group by code-group if a nomenclatura code-book was being used.

Sometimes the messages were for intermediate destinations in which case the station-number was included as a destination hut number. Each hut then had a horseman messenger who would deliver the telegram to the local addressee. The painting below shows such a messenger and to his left a telegraph inspector who did quality control of each of the signalling stations along the line, checking the log-books, response times etc etc. The system was reasonably fast, on clear days it would take a message about an hour to go the 400 miles. If visibility was too bad, the messenger could still take the message on horseback to the next station, on average 6½ miles away.

Most of the messages were in plaintext and anyone who could "read the pole" could read the messages being exchanged. The Prussian military realised this - as did merchants transmitting pricing and/or contract data - and the need for secrecy arose. The state of cryptography at the time was pretty primitive; traditionally nomenclatura (code books) had been used. Polyalphabetic (Vignere) ciphers were used too and it was not until 1863 that Kasiski (who was a Prussian officer) discovered how to break them. Bazeries didn't come up with his cylinder until the turn of the century. Prussia also used (single-) columnar transposition, strong enough at the time. Even in WW1 Germany was still using double-columnar-transposition, not realising the the British knew how to break it even back then.

The whole line was synchronised to Berlin time. At noon a special signal (RL only) was sent to Coblenz. Transit time (61 stations pulling one lever as soon as they saw the RL from the next uplink station) was about a minute. The echo-back enabled the Berlin station to estimate the total delay. This was the precursor of railway timetable synchronisation.

BTW, Terry Pratchett has a great novel called Going Postal which features the Clacks, a shutter telegraph system (and thus usable at night as well) like the 6-lamp one used by the GB Admiralty. Pratchett is a great read, as always :-)

Comments (3) :
Li (HK) asks "What happens when messages collide?" That'd be a long answer, so that'll be a separate post, coming up soon, OK?
Kevin (UK) asks "WTF is (single-) columnar transposition?" Reply coming up after I've answered Li's question.
Richard A. Fowell wrote (in Dec.2012) "Those interested in learning more about the Prussian Optical Telegraph should see the English [A] and (more thorough) German [B] Wikipedia articles on the topic, and the Wikimedia resources[C]. [A] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_semaphore_system [B] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preu%C3%9Fischer_optischer_Telegraf [C] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Prussian_optical_Telegraph " Thanks for the citations.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 15, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Local linden tree turns 525 today :-)

W ay back in 1487 - that's five years before Columbus landed in the West Indies^* - this linden tree was planted in the village of Helmern (just up the ridge on the south side of our valley) to mark the new border after a border dispute.

Who disputed what? Back at the beginning of the 15th century no-one lived in that area any more. In 1315, the local abbey diary tells us, it had rained continuously from May through August and so the crops failed. Many peasants living there died of hunger. Then in 1342 the great flood eroded a foot of topsoil over much of the country, so many more died of hunger then too. In 1350 the Black Death took off a third of the country's population. In 1369 the abbey at Dalheim was burned down, driving the nuns away. Then during the 1391-1394 Bengeler Fehde squabble, the local robber baron fell upon the remaining population. Come 1427, the monks of Boddeken (about 6 miles west) started to rebuild the Dalheimer abbey as a monastery, much to the disgust of the Count of Westphalia who also laid claim to the deserted landscape. Abbey records from 1451 claim the land was all officially theirs.

To avoid a renewed fight, this tree was planted in 1487 to mark the border, lands to the east belonging to Dalheim abbey, to the west belonging to Boddeken monastery, to the south to the Count of Westphalia and to the north to the Archbishop of Paderborn. In 1519 all parties ratified this agreement. All this squabbling history is gone now, the land is owned by others, but the magnificent linden tree is still with us, thriving strongly.

The squat short main trunk may be only 6 feet high, but it is also now over 6 feet in diameter and the leafy canopy now covers an area of over 4,000 square feet. Happy birthday, old linden tree! May you live another 525 years, having survived many wars - including 2 world wars - droughts and floods and even being used as a gallows.

^* : Columbus Day notwithstanding, you do know that Columbus never set foot in America, right? He just piddled about in the West Indies on each of his journeys. Just fact-checking, Mitt ;-)

Comments (2) :
Mike (USA) points out that "Coincidentally, on this very day in 1773 in America, the first insane asylum for ‘Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds’ was set up in Virginia. Today the name has changed to The Tea Party ;-)"
Jenny (usually Ibiza, but UK this week) tells us "Did you know that the expression 'kicking the bucket' (meaning to die) came from standing people to be hung from a tree on a bucket, tightening the rope, then kicking the bucket away from under their tiptoeing feet?" I do now, thanks for the heads-up (sic!).

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 12, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Go forth and multiply

On several occasions in this blog I have shown y'all methods of doing multiplication that differ from what you may have learned in school. Here's another one.

Let's multiply 97 by 96 as an example. How much is 97 short of 100? 3. And how much is 96 short of 100? 4. Now add the 3 and 4 giving 7. How much is 7 short of 100? 93. Write down the 93 as the left half of your result. Now multiply the 3 and 4 giving 12. That's the right half of your result, so write it down behind the 93, giving 9312, which is the correct result!

Try again? Multiply 98 by 92. The intermediate numbers are 2 and 8 respectively. 2+8=10 which is 90 short of 100, so write down 90. 2 times 8 is 16, put it on the right of 90, giving 9016, which is again the correct result!

Sometimes you will have to do a carry, because the number on the right has 3 digits. Example? Multiply 80 by 80. The intermediate numbers are 20 and 20 respectively. 20+20=40 which is 60 short of 100. Write 60 down as the left half. 20 times 20 is 400. Write it down as the right half. So the 4 overflows (=carries) into the 60 that was in the left half, giving the result 6400.

Does this method blow your mind or what?

Now you can do a mental arithmetic party trick, multiplication faster than some people can do it on a pocket calulator, and win a free drink in the pub! That's something Four Dinners (UK) and Pinkest Menace (RSA) could try ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 10, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

The Decline and Fall of Felix Baumgartner

For lack of any real news today there will be TV live(?) coverage of the sponsor's logo a foolhardy Austrian free-falling from the stratosphere and hoping to exceed Mach 1 while doing so. Should he fail to recover from his supersonic descent, at least he'll go out with a bang AND a whimper :-(

Still, I suppose it's no more foolhardy than jumping from over 10,000ft without a parachute and betting your best buddy will hand you one for you to don on the way down to the cloud-tops far,far, below ;-)

Comments (2) :
Demeur (USA) wrote "Good old fearless Felix might hit more like a splat and no whimper. As to the motorcycle suspension problem isn't that much like our own bodies? The older we get the more the suspension fails :-)" Is it just coincidence that 'Felix Baumgartner' anagrams into 'Tumble? Arrange fix!' ?
Jenny (usually Ibiza, but UK this week) has "Breaking News: Stratosphere jump delayed, Baumgarter has too much wind." That's the sort of headline that Wendy (Oz) would write! ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 9, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Suspension upgrade :-)

When I bought the Triumph Street Triple back in 2009 it was OK that the monoshock rear suspension was a bit soft and somewhat underdamped because the idea was that SWMBO (70kg in full leathers and helmet) would be riding it most of the time. But over the last three seasons, it has turned out that I ride it mostly, often with SWMBO on pillion. And for that the setup is too soft (= I'm too heavy). Besides which, the only possible adjustment is to change the spring preload. The soft spring and underdamping mean that the bike squats down when cornering hard, the front forks extending, so the bike understeers (=runs towards the outside of the curve). So for this last season I've wound down the preload as far as possible which lifts the rear and makes the forks steeper resulting in a somewhat more agile bike. Cornering speed increased, but there's a limit as to what the soft standard suspension will do.

So, I've decided, time for a suspension upgrade. People with lots of ready cash would go for the Wilbers or even Ohlins (€700-€1300) but my budget was much more limited. So I bought a used "R"-type suspension from someone who had upgraded to the ultimate Ohlins kit.

Advantages? The spring (B) is stronger than the standard spring, so I've wound down the preload(C) to about 110 kg, which is 20kg more than I weigh but less than the two of us. That way, it's agile for me riding solo but still a bit on the soft side for when we are two-up. The damping is adjustable both on the compression stroke (by turning the clickable screw at D) and on the rebound/tension pull (at A). I've set the two screws to the recommendations given by the Streety riders' forum. Now all I have to do in the coming week is to swap out the old for the new suspension and should get a significant improvement in the handling (i.e. sportier, neutral or even oversteer). I'll update this article when I know how it feels. And the great thing is that everything is adjustable, so I can set it up for best performance (increased corner speed) for me and my riding style (late straight braking then a large radius to a late but stable apex).

My setup motto? As soft as possible and (only) as hard as necessary.

Update 10/10/12 : Well, this is a significant improvement. The understeer is gone, the rear end is about 1 cm higher, no squat in deep corners. The temperature was only 10°C today, so I couldn't get the tyres hot enough to take them all the way down to the edge, but I've no doubt they'll go there in summer. Good solid grip, no hopping at manhole covers, at which I deliberately aimed instead of avoiding as usual. The setup isn't quite right yet: I need to back off the pre-load by about a ¾ turn and put one more click on the compression damping. Tension damping is OK as set.

Comments (1) :
Jenny (usually Ibiza, but UK this week) asks "What is a deep corner?" One where your high corner speed means you have to crank the bike over a lot thus lowering the bike's centre of gravity (putting it deeper). I call corners with over 40° of bank angle 'deep'.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 8, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Anagram fun, USA version.

Boer blogger and erstwhile occasional commenter here Penis neck meat Pinkest Menace (RSA) knows I am a great fan of anagrams. Seeing that Romney debated better than Obama on Wednesday, he teasingly informed me that "Joe Biden" anagrams into "I Need Job" ;-)

Nice one, Nic, but remember that "Try Mormon Lie Set" and "Smiley Tormentor" are both anagrams of "Mitt Romney, Loser!" ;-)

OT, I wonder if "Amelia Earhart Travels" were sponsored by Apple Maps? :-(

Comments (3) :
Jenny (Ibiza) tells me that "...after some effort, 'Amelia Earhart Travels' anagrams into 'Hamlet's earlier avatar'." Well done lass!
Klaus (Alaska) points me to a USA rock version of Bang shattered planners ;-) David (USA) grins "Since the VP debate we know that 'Joe Biden' is 'Done Jibe' ;-)" Nice One ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 5, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Indian Summer 2012 begins :-)

Autumn is now beginning here in Germany and the radiant reds and golden yellows of our Indian Summer make motorcycling a visual joy. These photos were taken just a couple of hundred of yards along our valley yesterday. Mind you, after the first frosts there will be a kilotonnage of slippery wet leaves on the road, so enjoy the Indian Summer while it lasts!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 4, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Bacon's Revenge ;-)

Shiver me timbers in a frying pan! In a grotesque article in this morning's papers, we are told about a 70 year old Oregon(USA) farmer - Terry Vance Garner - who went to feed his animals last Wednesday, but never returned. His false teeth, bones and an inedible piece of his body were found in the pigs’ enclosure by a family member, but most of his remains had been consumed. The pigs had eaten him! Shades of animal farm! George Orwell and Freddy combined. Cannibals tell us that human flesh tastes like pork, which is why it is referred to as "long pig", but I wonder if the porkers thought he tasted like chicken?

Be interesting to see if the local McBurger-bar in that part of Oregon experiences a drop in turnover in the coming weeks.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 2, 2012 permalink . Comments Email

Million Mile Man

Just noticed the mile-o-meter on the yellow New Beetle is coming up to the 300,000 kilometer mark. It got me wondering how far I have driven in my life. Extrapolating my recent mileages back to when I got my respective licences, I must have about a million miles on four wheels, plus a third of that on motorcycles and about half a million miles flying light aeroplanes. Of course, fellow blogger and professional taxi driver Torsten probably has MUCH more! And you?

PS : Back in 2005 I noticed that I had 122,600+ kms on the Beetle tacho and did some careful calculations as to when I should reset the trip-counter resulting in the photo shown above of all-the-digits. The photo even appeared in the national press (Auto-Bild) back in 2005. My Warholesque 15 minutes of fame ;-)

Comments (1)
Schorsch (D) asks "And how long did that all take?" Average speed in cars about 40mph, so 25,000 hours in cars. Assuming at most a 50 hour 'working/driving' week, that'd be 500 weeks or 10 years! Average speed on bikes about 50mph, so another 2 years there, and 110mph ground speed in planes, so almost 2 years there too. Makes almost 14 out of 50 mobile years, unbelievable how much of our limited time on Earth we spend on mobility!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on October 1, 2012 permalink . Comments Email