Scope Creep, 2024-09-20.

It's the last Friday in summer, and I, for one, will be attempting to channel my inner lumberjack: belly down, in the dirt, trying to get as much cold water into my body as I can.

It's scope creep! Let's do it.

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SCOPE CREEP.

• After reading the first chapter of When We Cease to Understand the World, I spent some time on the SOW Members' Reading Group call googling furiously, trying to figure out which parts of Benjamin Labatut's story corresponded with history and which parts diverged from it. My search was mostly inconclusive; it centered around Fritz Haber, a German (mostly secular) Jew who seems to bear more or less direct responsibility for the fact that modern agriculture supports eight billion (and not a much lower number, like two billion) human beings. Haber won the Nobel Prize for his work on the Haber-Bosch process, which now produces something like three-quarters of the world's ammonia, and which therefore is the source of most of our fertilizer — and many of our explosives. According to the IEA, the ammonia industry's "current trajectory is unsustainable," partly because of the Haber-Bosch process' carbon intensity; ammonia production today accounts for 3% of global CO2 emissions. This is unfortunate, but we might choose not to blame Haber for the gentle upwards slope of the agricultural trajectory on which he set us — at least when his other life's work, the advent of chemical warfare on behalf of the Kaiser, is so obviously abhorrent.
• Grant Petersen, of Rivendell Bikes, profiled in the New Yorker. In conversation recently, someone (whom, I can’t recall) expressed disdain for the downtube shifters (many of which were also friction shifters, which Petersen has been a vehement advocate of) that were common on road bikes into the 1980s. I withheld my opinion, part of which is that reaching to the downtube to shift actually isn’t that inconvenient — and with practice it can feel downright graceful. In other words, I have an appreciation for the now-outdated technologies that Petersen continues to peddle. But I am confused by Petersen’s disdain for more modern technologies, and for the business and marketing strategies that enable them, and am rather puzzled by his advocacy for “putting a twenty-eight-dollar derailleur on a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bike.” A few (somewhat) related notes:
  • A short piece on Wired about Strava, the exercise tracking app which Grant Petersen derides — and which I agree with the writer’s assessment as a positive and supportive social media app.
  • Jason Kottke on modern mountain bike control systems, some of which have “AI” in their names and which purportedly might be making on-the-fly decisions about suspension and gearing settings in response to rider preferences and trail conditions. 
  • In 2020, Lachlan Morton (a pro rider who races for the EF Education team) completed what he dubbed the Alt Tour and produced a pretty compelling thirty-seven-minute documentary about the ride. His route was identical to the Tour De France route that year, but Morton rode it mostly unsupported and also rode all of the transfers (the sections of road that are between stages of the race, and which therefore are not part of the Tour De France’s official route). While I won’t go so far to say that the Tour De France should readopt Morton’s methods, I do relate to his attitude — and think that there certainly are some aspects of it which might be integrated into modern bike races.
  • A good video breakdown of how the Tour De France is filmed and broadcasted.
• An explainer on log measuring tools in use in Maine over the centuries; viz my notes last week on log scaling. 
• Before the advent of refrigeration (viz the recent conversation that SOW’s Members’ Reading Group had with Nicola Twilley), it was apparently common practice in Ireland and Scotland to bury animal fat (either dairy or adipose) in a bog as a way of making and preserving it. The result, appropriately enough, is called bog butter, and a twenty-two-kilogram slab of the stuff was found in County Donegal.