A Great Day with my Boy

Yesterday, I rode with Ian down to the Austin Energy Regional Science Fair, where he had was judged on a poster he put together at his home school coop on water molecules. It was fun to be there with him, but we actually only spent about 20min at the fair. We arrived there at 11:00 ad he was finished being judged by 11:20, and awards were not announced until 3:00. We decided to take a nano-risk of missing anything significant at the awards ceremony and go get cheeseburgers instead.
The real fun, for both of us, probably, was that we traveled to and from the site on bikes, about 30 km round trip. You can see the route profile plotted below courtesy of my new friends at Veloroutes.org. Click here for the route map.
Ian was on the tag-along trailer pulled by me on the Crosstown 7, and at one point on the way home nearly fell asleep. Needless to say, we were both wiped out pretty thoroughly by the ride. I call that just about as perfect a day as you could get.

Veloroutes

So, it turns out there's already a nice online tool (Veloroutes) for doing what I did yesterday. Here is a link to a route similar to the one I posted, except that this one does not deliver you directly to my doorstep. I considered that to be slightly imprudent. Here is the profile produced by Veloroutes.org:


With Veloroute, you can export .kml files that are importable to Google Earth, and they already have the elevation data, so you don't have to go through the ordeal of filling in the .kml file. I still want to be able to play with the profile, so my next step is to write an Excel macro to import .kml files. More to come...

My Route

What started as an innocent curiosity expedition with Google Earth turned into a rather longer journey through data manipulation, which I will explain presently. What I was trying to do was plot an elevation map of my ride to and from campus. Since I commute by bike, elevation changes are important: to be sought out if I want a workout; to be minimized if I'm low on energy. If it was easy enough to do (it was not, with present tools) I was going to plot out several routes and compare them based on elevation profile.
In any case, here is the elevation profile for my route when I ride along Shoal Creek Boulevard:


To get this, I first drew the path in Google Earth and exported the path as a .kml file. kml is the "keyhole markup language", a sort of xml for maps. Unfortunately, and this is a BIG unfortunately, Google Earth does not include elevations in its exports.
It turns out there is a web service for filling in the elevations, though, found here, which is cumbersome, but ultimately useful. I copied out the trip coordinates from the filled-in kml file and reformatted it so that Microsoft Excel could read it. Then, I put in formulas to convert latitude and longitude to distance traveled, and plotted the results.
I know this can all be streamlined, and maybe I'll make a minor goal of posting a one-punch processor for turning Google paths into elevation profiles. In any case, it's kind of cool to see the result. My trip is semi-hilly with about 50 meters net elevation change from school to home. Overall, the ride home has 213 meters of climbing, and the ride to school has 94 meters of climbing.

Mellow Johnny's

I'm very happy to see that Lance Armstrong is opening a commuter focused bike shop, right here in Austin. When I first heard about it I was worried it would be a racing-bike focused shop, of which we have a plethora already. This one is going right into the downtown in a conversion of an old building from the 50's. The idea is to make a bike shop, cafe, bike-storage, shower, and changing-room facility right on the soon-to-be opened Lance Armstrong Bikeway which will provide an East-West corridor into downtown Austin for bikers. This is a great idea that I hope we see more of in the future.
BTW, the name "Mellow Johnny's" is a pun on the French word maillot jaune, for the yellow jersey worn by the Tour de France leader.
Note that I have a newer post on Mellow Johnny's.

The View From Up Here

I think I may have reached the dizzy height of nerd-splendor today in the gas dynamics class when I actually understood Dr. Varghese when he said "This is a five-dimensional hyper-spatial surface subset of our eight-dimensional space." Here are the accompanying equations:


In case you care, this is the development of the distribution of molecular velocities based on intermolecular collision mechanics. Sounds esoteric, but your life depends upon it.
So why am I posting this on my blog? Why would anyone care? In the spirit of Chubby Grum Grum, I'm attempting to at least publicly acknowledge my innate nerdiness and make peace with it, to not take myself too seriously, and to join with you all in a good hearty laugh at the joy I experienced today in wrapping my mind around five-dimensional hyper-spatial surfaces. All together now, ROTFLOL!

How Cool is That?!

Today was one of those days that I live for at school. Full of excitement and adventure and really cool things. The coolest thing of all (if you grok the engineering mind) was that I got to use a Scanning Electron Microscope to examine some of the diesel soot particles exhaled by my dear Thumper. You can see the zoom-in in the series of photos below. The magnifications go from 200x to 10,000x. For reference there is a little bar that shows a distance scale. 1µm is a thousandth of a millimeter. For reference, one of your hairs is about 50µm across. The fibers you see in the pictures are glass fibers that make up the filter paper I trapped the soot in. We're zooming progressively in on the particle slightly left of center in the first image.




Incidentally, the smaller soot particles less than 2µm across (the individual clumps in the last image) are perfect for delivering carcinogenic compounds deep into your lungs. When they clump together like the one shown above, then your nose filters it out, but if they remain small (and hard to see, which is good for visibility but bad for lungs) they pass right on down and deposit all sorts of wonderful benzene and other toxics straight into you most sensitive tissues. This is actually a special concern for bike commuters, who tend to breathe deeply right next to the exhaust pipes of trucks and buses. For that reason I try to ride on road where the diesels don't go...
I guess that sort of explains part of why I'm doing what I am in graduate school. Hope you thought this was a neat as I did.

Answers to the Ultimate Question

...because the weather was beautiful: clear, sunny, cool; I had spent way too long in the cave, I mean lab, breathing diesel fumes with Thumper; and finally, in a stroke of wonderful coincidence, I passed a line of 42 cars waiting for the stop sign at Shoal Creek and 45th.

Now, what was the question???

While we're talking about why we like to be outside so much, check out this pic of our happy family enjoying the great outdoors last weekend. Hannah commented on this on her blog...