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Sarah and I took the better portion of today to visit the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture 2005 exhibition in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.AirVenture is among the biggest airshows in the world. It routinely sees 10,000 planes fly-in and while the show is running, the Oshkosh airport is the busiest airport in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people attend the show every year. It is a really, really, really big airshow.

Sarah and I arrived in Oshkosh early this morning and left around 16:30 because we needed to get home to let the dog out. During our time on the show grounds we walked by literally hundreds of aircraft and probably didn’t stop to look at more than a handful of planes for a significant amount of time. For all the walking we did, we probably saw or walked by less than a quarter of the planes on display. The number of warbirds on display was endless. If there was a warbird you wanted to see, and if it wasn’t at Oshkosh, it probably doesn’t exist in flyable form anywhere in the world.

Upon entering the grounds, we immediately encountered a field of P-51 Mustangs. Let me repeat that, a field of Mustangs. We’re not talking about one or two or even five. We’re talking about a whole field of P-51 Mustangs. We saw all sorts of warbirds, some so obscure I couldn’t even begin to guess at their names, numbers, or heritage. There were numerous B-17 and B-25 bombers on display. Supposedly, there was a B-29 somewhere on the grounds but we never found it. There were replicas of WWI biplane bombers, modern military jets, and everything in between.

Every afternoon, an airshow starts overhead. Today, the airshow featured plenty of formation flight by single-engine warbirds, numerous P-51 flybys, some P-51 formation flights, flights by various other sundry military craft, and a USAF so-called Heritage flight where US military craft from different eras fly together in formation.

For me, the highlight of the entire show was hearing Burt Rutan, the man behind SpaceShip One, White Knight, Voyager, the Beechcraft Starship, and the Verieze, speak on the future of manned spaceflight. For those who don’t know or remember, SpaceShip One completed not only the first private manned space flight in 2004, but two additional space flights that year, as well. That feat made Rutan even more of a star EAA attendees than he already was.

In his talk, Rutan repeatedly took NASA and the US Government to the woodshed for their lack of vision and courage. Rutan presented some startling facts and figures about innovation and safety in space (or the lack of both) that really brought home just how mismanged the US manned space program is. In Rutan’s view, the Space Shuttle (which coincidentally had launched earlier in the morning), is about the worst possible vehicle for space flight. It is complicated, prone to failure, extraordinarily expensive, and offers no advantages over platforms like the Saturn V. I wonder how the folks in the NASA tent, which was just 50 yards away, might have felt had they heard Rutan’s speech.

Rutan’s speech profoundly affected my thoughts and feelings about aviation. After hearing his speech and seeing SpaceShip One up close and personal, I started to perceive just how warped and ineffectual much of the aviation and space industries are. Instead of doing really bold, creative things and learning from our mistakes, we tend to do safe, boring things that don’t fail all that often. As Rutan noted, in just eight years (1961-1969), the US went to the moon. Where have we gone in the thirty-plus years since then? Well, we built a space station. No, that doesn’t count because we had Skylab in the seventies. Umm… We launched some probes? Well, we did that in the seventies, as well. Essentially, we’ve gone to Earth orbit. Oooooo….

In many ways, I started to feel as though the fascination with warbirds is really just a sick manifestation of airplane geekiness that lacks an appropriate outlet. You should have seen the crowds around SpaceShip One (SS1). There was a Dornier Do-24ATT across the flightline from SS1. There is exactly one Do-24ATT in the world. For all that anybody looked at it, the plane may as well have stayed at its home airport. Maybe people get excited about warbirds because they are rare; maybe people get excited about warbirds because WWII was among the last times that aviation was a grand and glorious affair.

Given something really new and really exciting, the aviation community came out in force to hear all about it and shower glory upon its creator. Ask almost any EAA attendee and Rutan not only can walk on water, he can repeal gravity and cure the common cold given enough time and money. I don’t feel that way about him, but I definitely drank the Kool-aid he passed around during his speech. The man is clearly a visionary and an asset to this country. In many ways, Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, is more valuable to the nation’s future success than all the oil under Alaska.

Look what the man did: he got a man into space twice in less than two weeks with a plane smaller and lighter than a C-141, without government money, without government tax breaks, and without government advice. Who else among us can say that? Who else among us has even tried that?

We took some pictures at the event, for those interested in seeing a very small snapshot of the day.

For the last month or so, my main bicycle has had a wobble in the rear wheel. I’ve been busy with other things, so it wasn’t until last weekend that I got the bike up on the stand to true the wheel.After getting the wheel off the bike, I started checking the spokes to see if any were broken before putting the wheel on the truing stand. Unfortunately, I had a broken spoke. That explained why the wheel was so out of true. What it didn’t explain is why I had several prominent cracks and holes in the rim.

I bought that set of rims five years ago while we were still living in Alameda, CA. Over the next five years I put several thousand miles on those rims. I rode that bike in the rain, in the cold, in the blistering sun, on gravel, on limestone, and on pavement.

What I had done, essentially, was wear those rims out. The rims weren’t double-walled and they were the cheapest aluminum alloy rims that I could get at the time.
The manufacturer most likely didn’t anticipate that anyone would buy those rims and then put several thousand miles on them in short order. Between the stress and strain of hitting bumps in the road; being worn down by the brake pads and road grit; and carrying myself (185 pounds) and sometimes up to fifty pounds of gear those rims suffered through quite a bit.

Now, however, they can go to that great aluminum scrap heap in the sky. I just got a new wheel custom built for me by one of the local bike stores. It’s a Surly track hub (read: bolt on and designed to be used with a single-speed freewheel) that is connected to a Velocity Deep-V rim (read: double-walled aluminum alloy; known in the MTB community to be rock solid). Combined with my usual tire (Panaracer Pasela Tourguard), it all makes one really nice wheel. The bike shop even threw in a new freewheel for nothing.

For the last week, I’d been riding my Miyata frame which I also got in California. That’s a nice bike, don’t get me wrong, but for around town riding, I’ll take my beat-up old Schwinn. The Miyata is a zephyr meant for long, speedy road rides; the Schwinn is a beast of a bike with its single-speed freewheel, collapsible metal panniers, and a trunk. All of that is attached to an old-school steel frame. While the Miyata also has a steel frame, but it is stiffer and lighter which gives a much different road feel.

I took the new wheel out for a ride today and it is fabulous; it’s worth every penny that I paid for it.

A disclaimer: I am not currently, nor have I ever been, an Alabama Crimson Tide fan.

Having said that, I found Warren St. John’s book Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer to be a funny, entertaining book.Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer is both a discussion of what makes sports fans act like they do and a memoir of one fan’s relationship with his team.

The fan is St. John and his team is the Alabama Crimson Tide football team. Over the course of a season, St. John travels to all of the Tide’s games while drinking, eating, and talking with die-hard Tide fans. While you don’t need to eat, sleep, and breathe football to understand the book, it helps to at least know which part of the field is the end zone and how many attempts a team gets to travel ten yards. In other words, you’ll need some basic football knowledge.

On the other hand, while action on the football field certainly is part of the book, it is only part. A great portion of the book is spent examining what is going on off the field. After all, there aren’t many fans to be found playing in the game itself. The fans are all in the stands, the sports bars, and the like.

You can read the book’s introduction on-line, but here is an excerpt to prime the pump:

It would be easy, perhaps, to dismiss such hardcore fans as freaks, except for the fact that the world is practically brimming over with them. Open your daily paper’s sports pages to the box scores. You might want to pause and ask yourself why your hometown paper devotes an entire section to sports. The implication is that the readers’ need to know the outcome of sporting contests ranks up there in importance with their need to know about global politics, business and the arts. Compare that with the amount of column inches per week on religion; it’s not even close.

In the excerpt below, St. John attends the first Alabama game of the season on a blisteringly hot and sunny day. The opponent is Vanderbilt.

Pretty soon, the players come barreling onto the field, and when they do, it’s perfectly clear who will win. Vanderbilt, the home team, is wearing solid black jerseys, while Alabama is in white. We don’t even have to try; we simply have to wait until sunstroke kicks in and fells their entire team.

…

But there’s only so long even a well-trained athlete can endure temperatures of ninety-something degrees and blistering midday sun in shoulder pads, a helmet, and a photon-slurping black jersey. Apparently, the limit is about two hours and fifteen minutes, because that’s how long it takes before Vandy begins their collapse.

St. John’s writing is thick with information, yet easy to digest at the same time. The book is filled with clever turns of phrase and scientific studies packaged up for mass consumption.

While this book certainly isn’t one of the great works of American writing, it is a good read and you’ll feel happy with yourself for taking the time to read it.

One of the biggest reasons that I lobbied to purchase an XM radio earlier this year was to listen to Minnesota Twins games. The other night while Sarah and I were eating dinner, I had the game playing softly in the background.It was the bottom of the fifth inning in a scoreless game against the Orioles. The Twins had a man on second base and with one out. Lew Ford stepped up to the plate and out of the blue Sarah said, “Lew Ford sucks.”

Somewhat taken aback by this sudden interjection, I said, “What do you mean? Lew Ford is a good player.”

She said, “All he ever does is strike out.”

So, we listen to the game, and Ford strikes out holding the bat on his shoulder.

I thought about it for a minute, and I asked Sarah, “Did you ever foresee a day when you not only would recognize the name of a Twins player, but you would also have an opinion about the efficacy of that player?”

She replied, “And that my opinion would be radically different from yours? No.”

I’ve always hated going to see the eye doctor. Invariably, the madman would put dilation drops in my eyes sometime in the afternoon, and I would remain dilated not just into the evening, but often until the next morning as well. Of course, this prolonged dilation was nearly always accompanied by a splitting headache that only a dark room and sleep could cure.

As it turns out, all of those previous visits could have ended much more happily had I just possessed a bit of knowledge about eye dilation, the chemicals that drive the process, and the eye itself.The purpose of eye dilation in adults is to allow the doctor to easily look inside the pupil at the retina (back and sides of the eye). Normally, the pupil would slam shut when a bright light is shined directly into it. Dilation medicine forces the pupil to stay wide open even as painfully bright lights are repeatedly shined into and through it (causing the eyes to tear up, the eye lids to slam down, and the doctor to wonder out loud why being repeatedly blinded is such an uncomfortable procedure). That all makes a perverse sort of sense.

In children, who apparently have wildly active eyes, eye dilation also allows the doctor to more accurately assess the state of the eye’s lens since the dilation solution also temporarily paralyzes the muscle that manipulates the lens. This paralysis is also why dilated adult eyes cannot focus since the lens cannot be manipulated to clearly view objects at a variety of distances.

Like most people in most professions, eye doctors operate on a least-common denominator paradigm. That is, if something works well for 95% of the population, and it works well enough for the remaining 5%, that process, procedure, or medicine is what eye doctors will use. When it comes to eye dilation solutions most doctors will direct their techs to use just one solution on all their patients. They do so regardless of the fact that eye dilation solutions come in a variety of strengths and chemical formulations.

Where this paradigm breaks down is that people are neither numbers nor machines and the least-common denominator solution is not always the best choice. The eyes of different people react differently to various eye dilation solutions.

The key variable is the amount of pigmentation present in the iris. Brown eyes have more pigment in the iris while blue and green eyes contain less pigment. The pigment (melanin) acts as a physical filter to slow and obstruct the dilation medicine from reaching the muscles responsible for pupil dilation. Brown eyes posess more melanin and therefore filter out more of the dilation chemicals and slow the transfer of the remaining chemicals to the muscles responsible for pupil contraction. If you have light eyes (small amounts of melanin) you possess a relatively weak filter that is easily overcome by the chemicals present in the dilation solution. In blue eyes the dilation medicine not only reaches the muscles faster, but it also reaches them in significantly higher quantities due to the reduced filtering done by the melanin. These higher quantities then lead to prolonged periods of eye dilation.

Eye doctors can afford to use just one solution for the most part because having one’s eyes dilated for a prolonged period of time may be inconvenient, but it is hardly life threatening. If you possess blue eyes and if you call the eye doctor the next morning to complain about the fact that you’re still dilated, he or she will essentially give you a version of the football “Walk it off!” speech dressed up in some medical-feel-good mumbo-jumbo.

I have light blue eyes; my current eye doctor has repeatedly commented on how lightly pigmented they are. That means I need less dilation solution to achieve the same results as a darker eyed person. But that’s not what I was getting all these years. Because I didn’t know, and because I didn’t understand, I got the least common denominator solution. I was getting the same solution as a dark brown eyed person. It’s no wonder that I was often dilated for periods of 16 hours or more and that I suffered some pretty awful headaches. That was something like asking a non-smoker to chain smoke two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes and then wondering why they were all fucked up by the experience.

Now when I go to the eye doctor, I know to direct the tech to check with the eye doctor before dilating my eyes. The doctor can then recommend a dilation solution appropriate for my level of pigmentation.

As it turns out a solution half the strength of the least-common denominator solution is still a bit too powerful. My eyes were dilated at roughly 15:00 yesterday with the half-strength solution and they were still ever so slightly dilated when I finally got tired of the whole mess and went to bed at 23:00.

The moral of the story is that if you have light blue eyes or green eyes, make the tech check with the doctor before dilating your eyes. As GI Joe says, “Knowing is half the battle.”

Sarah, Dalla, and I spent the weekend camping in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Friday, we drove up to the Northern Highlands-American Legion State Forest; put the dog and our camping gear in our canoe; and paddled out to a primitive backcountry camping site. We spent Friday night, Saturday, and part of Sunday at Allequash Lake Primitive Site 613 (there are only four sites on the whole lake and one of them is closed because it is currently occupied by a bear; so, no, I don’t know why the site has such a high assigned number). We arrived back in Madison this afternoon smelling strongly of Deep Woods Off, wood smoke, and BO.

For those interested parties, we took a few photos during our trip.

From a news story about the shutdown of the Minnesota government:

“We can’t get to North Dakota fast enough,” Reid said.

Yes, that’s right. An otherwise sane individual just stated that he can’t get to North Dakota fast enough. I can safely say that I have never, ever heard that before. As anyone who has ever visited North Dakota might explain, no one is ever in a hurry to get to North Dakota, and for good reason.

In this entry:

• David and Sarah test a new mosquito repellent
• Whoopie Pies
• Wind Farms
• Double Butterburgers with Swiss
• Rhythm and Booms

Perhaps you caught the press release from the CDC earlier this year that carried the agency’s announcement that it was endorsing two new ingredients in mosquito repellents:

• picardin, a chemical used for years in Europe
• oil of lemon eucalyptus, a plant derivitive

This was considered news because the agency has only endorsed products that contained DEET for years. DEET, while effective, has been known to damage plastics and posesses a certain chemical odor that not many people find pleasant.

Sarah and I bought a bottle of Cutter Advanced, a product that contains a 7% solution of picardin to try out this new ingredient.

In Madison, we’re in the middle of a moderate drought so we have few mosquitos, which has been very pleasant. Until this hike, we hadn’t had a chance to test the new repellent due to that (wonderful) lack of annoying buzzing, biting insects.

So, we packed the dog into the car, and headed out for Wyalusing State Park to do some hiking. Almost as an afterthought, I threw the new insect repellent into our backpack, just in case they had more mosquitos there than we did in Madison.

We got to the park, got our hiking boots on, got the dog properly geared up, and headed out onto the trail. We hadn’t been hiking for ten minutes before we stopped to apply the picardin-based mosquito repellent while we took a picture.

Wyalusing overlooks the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers and is nestled up against the vast wetlands that border the two rivers. As you probably guessed, the wetlands are vast breeding grounds for mosquitos.

The weather was mild and sunny. We hiked about 1.6 miles past an array of Indian mounds and the famous Passenger Pigeon Monument while high above the two rivers on the Sentinel Ridge trail. Eventually, the trail brought us down to a boat launch on the Mississippi River. From there we hiked a bit over 3.5 miles through a variety of terrains and ecosystems, including forests, grasslands, and wetlands back to our car.

Shortly after leaving the boat dock, the repellent we had applied started to fail and the mosquitos swarmed around us. As long as we kept moving at a good pace, they were almost, almost tolerable. But, if we stopped for even five seconds somewhere without a breeze, the mosquitos were upon us without mercy. Dalla, underneath two fur coats (her outer coat and her undercoat), couldn’t have cared less about the bugs. Sarah and I, meanwhile, were being slowly driven crazy by the innumerable little biters.

Finally, we crested a hill on the Turkey Hollow trail and a breeze there enabled us to catch our breath, drink some water, and relax for a few minutes. It was the first time in several miles that we had gotten a chance to enjoy the weather. While the forests and grasslands were lush and green, and while many different wildflowers were blooming, the mosquitos were so dense that we hadn’t had a chance to stop and enjoy them.

We eventually got back to our car, and jumped in (along with a few mosquitos for good measure). Our original plan had been to find somewhere nearby that had an outdoor patio with seating where we could eat dinner. After that mosquito onslaught and the complete failure of the picardin-based repellent, we decided to head back to Madison and leave the swarm behind.

On our way to Wyalusing, we saw an Amish buggy parked on the road next to a farm stand. Written on the buggy were the words “Baked Goods Today.” I am an absolute sucker for high-quality baked goods, so I vowed to stop on the way back if the buggy was still there. After providing a mobile buffet for the Wyalusing mosquitos, our fortunes changed the buggy was still present as we topped a hill on US Highway 18. We stopped, and browsed the selection.

There were homemade pies; big, tasty looking cookies; big jars of homemade pickles; a variety of homemade jams; homemade loaves of bread; and freshly harvested potatoes. We were like adults in a baked goods stand on the side of a highway. I used remarkable restraint and only bought a (homemade) whoopie pie, a loaf of whole wheat bread, and a big jar of dill pickles (for Sarah, of course). We were getting ready to drive away and I was commenting on how difficult it was to not buy one of the blueberry or cherry pies they had on display. Well, thirty or forty words later, we backed the car up and Sarah jumped out to get a homemade cherry pie ($3.75, cheap).

The whoopie pie ($0.40, really) was fantastically good. It didn’t last five miles. The cookies were soft and moist with a great ginger and pumpkin flavor. The frosting between the cookies was sweet and so light as to be nearly weightless. If the Amish farmstand wasn’t over an hour and a quarter to the west, I’d visit it all the time just for the whoopie pies.

We also stopped on the way home to listen to a wind farm’s turbines run. Since some people complain about the noise of a wind farm, we decided to stop at the windfarm just west of Dodgeville and have a listen for ourselves. As it turns out, the noise of cars on the highway fifty yards behind us was louder than the noise of the windmills.

As got closer to Madison, the issue of what to do about dinner became more acute. It was getting nearly 21:00 CDT and we were both hungry. Half a whoopie pie, some pistachios, and water can only delay a starving hiker’s hunger pains for so long. We decided to stop at Culver’s in Verona to pick up some burgers. I had never eaten at Culver’s before last night, even though it seems nearly everyone else I know has. So, I ordered the Double Butterburger with Swiss and an order of fries. Sarah had a Butterburger with a variety of toppings. We grabbed our food, headed back to the car and our waiting canine companion (who promptly tried to insert her head into the Culvers bag), and got back on the road to home.

How was the Double Butterburger with Swiss? Not bad. Much better than I would have gotten from a big national chain like Hardees, McDonalds, or Burger King. Was it better than a burger made on the grill at home? No. Would I eat at Culvers again given similar circumstances? Yes.

After dinner, we sat down with a few slices of the pie to watch Rhythm and Booms on television. Rhythm and Booms is an event held in Madison that routinely gets 250,000-300,000 plus people to pack themselves into a park on the north side of Lake Mendota to listen to music; picnic; and watch fireworks set to music by the Madison Symphony Orchestra. For those of you who attended our wedding, the park used is the same one where we got married. You can probably imagine the logistical nightmare involved in first getting that many people into the park, and then, getting them all out at once because they all want to leave once the fireworks are over.

Sarah and I were quite happy to watch the whole mess on television from the comfort of our living room with some great pie.

This morning, I read the various attendence figures for the Live 8 concerts that were held around the globe yesterday. Interestingly, there wasn’t one that had a higher attendance than Rhythm and Booms did yesterday.