Tony Yarusso's Blog

In addition to the bike posted about previously, I now have some of the other things to go with it. Here's the list of other things for me to try out!

Also on the way is a Burley Nomad cargo trailer for when I need to take some gear with me. - picture

They all feel great so far; looking forward to riding on them.

So when I got into work this morning, I had an e-mail saying my bike had arrived at the warehouse, so after doing a couple of repairs I left for a few hours and picked it up. Towards the end of the day I had a chance to start unpacking it from the box and building it up, so now it's sitting in the stand mostly done, just finishing up the cables and such. Tomorrow Matt and Doug are going to help me get it adjusted to my fit right too. Only the bike came, so I'm still waiting on some accessories and such, and I'll have to borrow Adam's pedals until some are available, but that's not too bad. It looks just like this one; hopefully I'll be able to get pictures of mine later on, preferably with the full package.

Note: I'm still looking for people to go riding with me...c'mon guys, you know you want to get outside this summer (I'll got slow with you - I can get my fast rides in with the other nuts from work).

Well, from our perspective anyway. It seems that someone has done calculations recently to show that not only is the universe expanding, but it's accelerating its expansion such that portions will gradually become beyond our visual and radio reach by moving at or beyond the speed of light as seen from Earth, leaving us cosmically isolated with only our immediate neighbors within a few billion years.

Unfortunately, it seems this study has not yet reached the printing presses of publication, so I wasn't able to look at the math (it's a subscription-only journal until the article is a few months old anyway), and don't have the time to work through it myself at the moment. Consider that a challenge to work out some provisional numbers to see how/what/when things could be expanding beyond the speed of light as seen from earth. Is it just things on the opposite side of the universe, our side, or all of it? Which things will we lose first? Are any of the more notable stars/clusters/constellations/objects on the list for the (cosmically) near future?

The article also talks about a "frozen" ghost image left as things blip out, but I couldn't tell if this means we just see an unchanging image for a brief time before nothingness, or if the ghost images remain somehow, but are just never updated. I don't have quite enough grasp of the things involved to work that portion out - anybody have some insight?

Regardless, it's all some pretty weird stuff - the idea that portions of the universe that we can see now and have used to prove very fundamental portions of the physics governing things will no longer be within reach later is a bit disconcerting. Some portions are already beyond the event horizon, and who knows what information we may have missed by not having those data points? So, SETI@Home contributors, you may want to fire up a few more dual-cores, because your time is (sort of) limited. :P

Read the full story on Space.com, and a related article with some extra details.

So today I had the opportunity of experiencing that weird phenomenon common in places were parts are stripped from bicycles and replaced with new, working ones - that of the "shop bike".

In case you can't guess already, what this means is something resembling a bicycle, constructed out of mismatched parts of all kinds that had something wrong with them to begin with, and then were coerced together in ways that sort of work. In our case, this means a Cannondale cyclocross frame, mountain bike disc brakes, a seatpost rack with a lock not worth using, who knows wheels, and a stem off a kids' bike. The front brake almost works. The rear one is 100% useless. It's pretty funny all around.

But it saved me a minute and a half to run to Panera for lunch. And isn't that what it's all about? ;)

So says the FBI. I'm amused.

Categories I fit:

Are you a terrorist?
Read more at Homeland Stupidity