Author: Richard Masoner

Wuhan bike lake jump festival

Do you remember when that kid at summer camp dared you to ride a bike off of the end of the fishing pier? In Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, they’re apparently calling this a “festival” and using it to raise awareness of environmental issues.

If you decide to try this at home, be sure to use a junk bike because water will damage the moving parts. Attach flotation to the bike frame so you can more easily retrieve your bike from the bottom of the pond. In the United States, polyethylene foam swimming pool noodles wrapped around the frame are a popular form of flotation.

Now I wonder: do fat tires provide enough buoyancy to keep fat-tire bikes afloat in water? If a cheap, discount retail fatbike weighs 50 lbs, what volume of air in a tire is required to displace that weight?

Hazy skies, lazy rides

About a decade and a half ago when I lived in Colorado, I continued my Boulder County lunch rides in spite of smoke blowing towards Kansas from several Front Range wildfires. I think I did permanent damage to my lungs because of that stupidity, so I’m very reluctant to exert myself now with smoke wafting into the Bay Area from the Soberanes Fire in Monterey County.

Soberanes Fire Satellite image - NASA July 24 2016

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Global heatmap overlay on your bike route

I don’t often mention my online bike route tool because it’s mostly a recreational programming thing for me, but it has features that some people might find interesting.

Like most such tools, you enter a start and destination, hit “Bike There,” and the tool will (hopefully) give you a somewhat reasonable route. This screen capture shows the route selected by Google in blue, vs the route suggested by Mapquest in red.

Bike route compare: Google vs MapQuest

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