24-27…. aargh!

For the second year in a row Washington came within a touchdown of beating USC…. aargh! That said, I think this could be UW’s best year in a while. Don’t let the 2-3 record fool you: they blew out Syracuse (who beat Louisville) and beat #22 Boise State, and none of the three losses (to #10 Ohio State, #1 USC, and to UCLA who would still be ranked were it not for a slipup against Utah) were blowouts. That said, there are still four ranked teams remaining on their schedule, but if the Huskies keep playing consistently they should end up bowl-eligible.

By the way, this should be proof enough that the Pac-10 is not a weak conference… any team with 7 or 8 ranked opponents on its schedule isn’t going to have an easy time no matter what.

Of Eminem runs and monster chess

Warning: nerd talk ahead that may not be of interest unless you’re into running or chess.

So I’m trying to get back into running again. The trouble with doing this in Texas is that it’s really frickin’ hot. Even now, at the end of September, the highs are well over 90 degrees. Morning and night runs seem to be working all right, but it’s still way too hot to run comfortably. Thus far I’ve been keeping the pace slow and trying to build up some endurance. I managed an 8-miler last Saturday and things seem all right, although my knee needed a little ice afterwards. The good news is that my feet are holding up fine, since some badly bruised sesamoids were what stopped me from running regularly a few years ago… I’ve done some reading on proper gait and I think that’s helping. Anyway, I’m running a 5K in a couple weeks just to see where I’m at before starting some speed work, with an eye towards a few races in December.

Also, this week Mohamad introduced me to a chess variant in which white starts with only two center pawns and the king, and makes double moves. The black army is intact and moves as normal; games are won by capturing a king, rather than checkmating. Sounds ridiculously unfair for white, but it’s tricky, and Deepak and I working together only barely scratched out a win (in fact, as it was a casual game, we had to take back a move or two). It takes a lot of firepower to “checkmate” a double-move King, who effectively can move to 24 squares (compare to 21 squares for a queen in the corner!)… King and Queen can’t do it; a King and two Rooks can checkmate but I’m not sure if they can force it. You can forget about any of the minor-piece only mates. The only forced mate that I see right away involves both Rooks and the Queen.

However, after some thought, I’m pretty sure Black can win with careful play by overworking White’s king… Black can start pushing the wing pawns and White will have a hard time stopping them both from promoting while simultaneously defending his own pawns. Since Black has such a huge material advantage anyway, it seems fine to sacrifice a few minor pieces to take out the White pawns; as mentioned above, two Rooks and a Queen is enough to force mate.

Any chess players out there care to chime in on my analysis?

On cycling, Part I

I’ll get on a small soapbox today. The topic? Vehicular cycling… repeat after me, kids: vehicular cycling. I’ve cycled a fair amount these last four years (until my bike got stolen last month, grumble grumble) and spent a lot of time thinking about transportation in grad school, so I have a lot of opinions on bicycle issues. I’ve also noticed that a lot of people — both cyclists and drivers — don’t really know what to do around each other… hence this post.

To start, it’s a shame that vehicular cycling even needs its own term, since it really just boils down to following the law. At its essence, vehicular cycling means that bicycles should be treated like any other vehicle. In particular,

• Cyclists should follow the rules of the road
• Cyclists should stay to the right, except when moving at the same speed as traffic, or if the rules of the road (or safety) require otherwise
• Drivers should treat cyclists as they would any other slow-moving vehicle (think cement trucks or city buses)

That’s really all there is to it. See, it’s not so complicated. The trouble is that almost nobody (cyclist or driver) does this.

I’m convinced that a big reason for this is simple ignorance. There is no licensing process for riding a bike… no drivers’ ed, no drivers’ test, no safety inspections, etc. Most people start cycling as a little kid, as a toy or a way to get around your neighborhood. Then they hang their bike up in their garage once they learn to drive, and then once they’re in college they pull it out and start riding again, never having learned how to ride properly and still treating it like a toy.

So, they start doing things like blatantly running stop signs in front of cars, which pisses drivers off and doesn’t really make them feel like giving cyclists the rights they deserve… which they may not even be aware of, since dealing with cyclists isn’t always covered in drivers’ ed classes.

The cure for this is pretty obvious, at least from my view: if we cyclists want drivers to respect our legal rights, we need to ride more responsibly. This alone isn’t enough; education is needed to fight the ignorance that grips both drivers and cyclists alike. Education on things like “if I’m riding a bike and making a left turn, I’m going to be in the left lane, because that’s what the law demands all vehicles to do, slow-moving or not, so don’t honk at me.” Or “If there’s a row of parked cars, I’m not going to ride six inches away from them and get doored.”

That said, I also think that any driver who complains about cyclists needs to get on a bike for a few weeks to understand things from the other side. If it’s 100 degrees outside and I’m riding uphill, you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to come to a complete stop at a stop sign and lose momentum. (I mean, most of the time I don’t even come to a complete stop when I’m driving.) If it’s raining, you’ll forgive me for running a red light if there’s nobody around. I try not to judge the things that truck drivers drivers do, because I have no idea what it’s like to drive a semitrailer, but I imagine it’s way different than driving a compact car. Likewise, I ask drivers to temper their judgment against cyclists unless they’ve spent some time commuting in the saddle themselves.

That’s all for this time. Happy riding (or driving)!

THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAAA

Busy busy busy last couple of days… Friday was the Clyde Lee lecture and lunch (yay Asti), Saturday was filled with volunteering at Saturday Outreach, a trip to Fado’s to celebrate with Avi and friends, groceries, running, and downtown with Laura (who’s back in town for ACL), and today was church, more church, and watching 300 with Jason. In other news I’ve been fiddling with Lilypond to get some music typeset, and trying to write some code to get LaTeX to generate the worship bulletins for church automatically. All this adds up to a great weekend but means I’m also dead tired. So glad the TxDOT meeting tomorrow was canceled.

So, goals for this week:

• Get the Networks paper out
• Finalize INFORMS travel plans
• Get everything together for the ITS project
• Finish Dr. K and Dr. Zhang’s homework

And, for now, the most important:

• Sleeeeeeeeeeeep (bonus points if you can name that movie)

Yay Linux

So earlier this month my Windows installation got corrupted. Sure, I could have dug around for a backup, or a Windows 2000 CD (my computer is way old, XP is out of the question), but I’d been meaning to give Linux a try for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity. Download an Ubuntu LiveCD, make sure hardware works fine, backup data, partition, install, and BAM, new operating system. Took some fiddling around to get multimedia to play (still working on DVD playback) and all the right programs working but I’m happy. Better security, free software, a decent command line, and a stabler OS to boot… I wish I had switched over earlier.

In unrelated news, anyone who does any writing that’s vaguely mathematical needs to learn LaTeX. Actually, make that anyone who does any writing at all. It’s about a billion times better than Word.

In even more unrelated news, the name on my jersey for transportation intramurals this year is APPLES. I haven’t decided if this is a good thing or not.