walking a bridge on weakening cables

so we were all excited about the first shop ride of the season, last sunday morning, the great lakes cycling crew getting together and hitting the road at 9:00 a.m. sharp to kick off a new season of sunday morning group rides. and while the weather had been nice up to that point, soon after we headed off a thunderstorm slipped in, big drops of rain pounding down at about 42 °F, and just like that we were spraying each other with grit-laden stream of water, soaked and chilly. but loving every minute of it. it was actually not easy for me to keep up with the carbon-fiber guys, bruised ribs and all, but it is never really a bad thing to be out riding a bicycle. i was a little sorry i had gone to so much trouble to clean and lube the izumi super toughness chain the night before, but hey - i got to do it all over again.

last night after uploading to flickr the pictures i took that afternoon along fleming creek (i let my class out a little early and had the brilliant idea of checking out the bot gardens, where i hadn't gone in quite some time) i poked around looking at other photos tagged with "ann arbor", sort of an exercise in vanity, and found myself somewhat disturbed by the description accompanying this picture

overbuildingannarbor?please.the loudest complaints i heard about this project were from the condo dwellers in one north main who didn't want their skyline views interrupted. and we didn't want that building built either, but somehow, here we are.

i was tempted to respond but thought the better of it. it just seemed so precious - or maybe parochial, or%20even chauvanistic. i am tired beyond lucid description of persons wanting ann arbor to be the small town that isn't really a small town, but is still like a small town, but isn't really like a small town, but is small anyway. what i grieve is the loss of open space and woodlands and waterways, which i have seen in my lifetime of living here. the only sensible answer is to develop the urban core, to build up instead of out. unless of course you believe you can somehow keep the people out, and impose restrictions on who moves in. and that would be one slippery slope.

part of the reason i don't even want to get started arguing with these people is that i would be compelled to bring up my lifelong residence in town, and i find that distasteful. my "native" status is a combination of accident, intent, coincidence and resignation, and ultimately adds up to something totally uninteresting. even so there are some people who always need to bring that sort of thing up. now and again i see these bumper stickers that say "ann arbor native- right from the start", and i just want to stop those cars, and drag those driver out ontothe street, and pour something corrosive all over their shoes while they wring their hands in apoplectic angst. i love this placeas much as anybody does, or even could, but guess what: the forces working on it are larger than me. i'm not powerless but i am only a part of the flow. are you happy that pfizer is leaving town and taking thousands of intelligent jobs with them? are you angry at google for opening their adwords office here instead of in scio township? do you ever just wish you could decide who stays and who goes?

anyway. i am ranting and it is late. go ride your bicycle. spring has come 'round again, and honor her by going 'round yourself.

gluing tinsel to your crown

many are the county road maintenance supervisors vexed by michigan's infamous freeze-thaw cycles; this worm appears to have received the coldest end of this particular stick. but relief is in sight, as the equinox wraps around us.

a week ago sunday i rode the follis to fleming creek, to parker mill that is, to see if all that melting snow had flooded the portion of the hoyt post boardwalk that passes underneath the old michigan central railroad bridge. judging from the creek's stage in the park, the flooding was indeed taking place, but naturally i had to see for myself, so i walked the bicycle along the boardwalk because bicycles are not allowed, but i have walked the bicycle down the boardwalk before, on low-pedestrian-turnout days, and i feel that holds to the spirit of the rule, and anyway i have been coming down there for far too long to be kept away by the parks department. so along one stretch i got up and rolled along, and when i spied a couple of walkers ahead and through the trees i made to stop the bike and get off, but at that very moment came onto a wet patch and the bike slid out from under me, and while i caught myself fairly well with my hands i miscalculated the effect of the 4×4s along the edges of the boardwalk and hit one, squarely, with the lower part of my left rib cage. this was not something my rib cage was intended to do.

i got up right away, to act as though nothing had happened, and fortunately the couple of walkers did not engage me in conversation, because my gasping might have alarmed them. sure enough, the boardwalk was flooded, as this picture attests (note also the 4×4s along the edges):

so for the last week i have been in something of a cloud, intermittently pained. the injury was not serious, with no discoloration or swelling or anything ominous, so i have been simply taking it easy, or as easy as i can, which is never easy enough, but notably i haven't even ridden the bike since last wednesday, because i decided it was slowing down the healing process. i'm felling a lot better now (thank you), and yesterday i had a bit of a breaktrough: i actually sneezed. so i'm thinking thursday, back on the bike.

another aspect of that cloud has involved developing FORTRAN code for the numerical model we are developing to analyze surge issues in a large combined sewage storage tunnel that is being designed for a city somewhere. the model itself was developed at u-m as part of a doctoral thesis by a very hard-working young man from brazil, who is currently teaching at the university in brasilia but is also working with us to further develop his model and apply it to this very visible project. actually it is rather exciting for us to be doing this, because we had to convince the project owner to have us do this innovative thing rather than go with the "experts" who have done all this surge modeling in the past, with models that aren't really vetted and can't necessarily answer all the right questions. it has been something of a personal struggle for me to define a role in the project, but i have hung on and when it came up that the code could be ported from delphi-pascal to fortran, for speedier execution, i spoke up and was allowed to run with it.

so the cloud involved a problem with continuity, with volume disappearing throughout the trial runs. my recoding bascially ran, but somehow the volume of inflow was continuously vanishing even though the velocity and cross sectional areas were there, just going off into the ether or attaching itself to some string with a loop, or some parallel universe or similar science fiction. it was driving me crazy, until yesterday when i finally figured out the problem. i had mistakenly declared a vector of indices as floating point, which produced one of those classic moments in computer programming: give the computer ambiguous instructions, and you can never be sure what the result will be.

so that's fixed, but i am having other issues with stability associated with the flow regime transition, which of course is the hardest part of the problem. but if i can get this licked, we'll all be rich and famous. when my royalty check comes, i think i will buy a mustang. no, that's not what i will do. i think what i will do is buy a corvette. no...