AllModern 'Who..What...Why' Competition

Cozy Beehive is a unique cycling blog with its own niche. Although it is not as popular as some of the other ones on the web, I get readers from far and wide, all the way from Anchorage in Alaska to Porirua in New Zealand.

From small interactions on this blog, I have come to know that some of my readers are from reputed places such as MIT, U Cal, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and from a variety of cycling companies. Others are everyday people (like me) who love to bike and connect with like minded people across social media.

Thank you very much for reading. I'd still like to get to know you all, so I thought I'd ask you to chime in and tell a little about yourself while having a chance to win something special from AllModern. AllModern has a great selection of modern furniture and home accessories from many leading designers. Part of CSN Stores, All Modern is just one of over 260 retail sites that offer a diverse array of products from Herman Miller’s popular Aeron Chair to cookware by Rachael Ray. Now the following tells you how you can get involved and win :

All you have to do is tell me who you are, what you do and why you like to read my blog (if you'd like to tell me that I should try harder, that's absolutely welcome!). All the comments I receive below the post will be put in a sophisticated Bee gooey and a random winner will be selected by nature. The winner will have a chance to pick anything from AllModern in the $100.00 price range. This could include an office accessory, a lamp, some wall décor – anything that appeals to you. AllModern will collect your shipping information, email and phone number, place the order and pay to have it shipped to you.

While I come to know you folks through the exercise, one of you will have a chance to also win. So leave a comment! I'm taking a week or possibly more off from blogging so you have time until then to do this. To say the least, I'm looking forward to the interaction.

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The Crash General Classification

Participants in this year's Tour will heavily contest the Crash General Classification or CGC for short. The coveted prize has more to it than the crappy yellow and green jerseys. Winners of the CGC will receive an emblematic white top with gory blood stains all over it. To go along, they will be presented with torn black shorts, a Polaroid photo of the moment they crashed and full medical expenses paid for the surgery/surgeries required.

But winning the C.G.C, as it turns out, is no small feat. It takes several hard years of experience and training to loiter about precisely in the dangerous back end of the pack, while correctly timing when to scrape wheels with riders in front, or to slam into a traffic island at 70mph, or to hook your handlebar on a bystander's bag or his wife's long hair, or to ride over a stray water bottle, somersaulting in the air and falling on top of others while they ride, or to select the biggest, deepest, darkest dungeon of a ditch to drop into, or to get entangled in myriad team radio wires to strange yourself momentarily like a helpless chicken while other riders look on, lose their focus and in turn crash.

Riders crash in turns like a deck of cards, feeding off each other's energy for mishap. This is the purest form of motivation. "Its addictive, like yawning," said one rider in the peleton, who is prominent for causing crashes.

If you're going down, you might as well get something for it, remark Tour officials. "Its not fair to riders," snapped one French official when the Tour's details were released last year. "Those who crashed got a big zero in the past. In our Board meetings, we were like 'WTF??' Its all about to change now."

You might think that riders who crash but fail to injure themselves and others cant have a dig at the spoils of war. You're so wrong. Since it is likely that they would destroy their ultra high modulus carbon fiber bikes in the process, Tour officials decided that those who have the best looking exploded bikes will receive "Carbon Credits". This will technically up the candidate's ranking in the CGC by about 10%. "Its like intermediate sprint points....same idea," said another Tour official.

All this may sound like one bloody party indeed. But the defending champion of the CGC from last year isn't going to give it up without a fight. So dream on...

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How Its Made : Bicycles

1. Mass Produced Metal Alloy Bikes : Episode 3 from Season 1 of Science Channel's How Its Made series explores the making of bicycles. The narrator was the show's first ever anchor, Mark Tewksbury. Now some of you might be bothered that this is not the "enthusiast" level bicycle and may even ridicule it for its lack of craftsmanship. The manufacturing steps are really interesting to look at regardless. Some of you may also be bothered by Mark's accent. It may help to know that he's a Canadian with an interesting athletic background and How Its Made is a Canadian documentary. For nerds like me, watching this show is better than having ice cream. Let's hope they run it on Discovery forever.

The part on bicycles starts from 0:43 seconds. Video courtesy --> bamboopasia.




2. Colnago & Milano Carbon Bikes : Part of Bike Radar's 'Industry Insider' series, they have a video revealing the full production process of a Colnago EPS frame. It shows how the filament wound carbon fiber tubes are cut and glued together with lugs. They are then placed in a jig to ensure proper alignment and cooked in an oven to cure the bonding agent to create the carbon frame, after cooling ofcourse.

While you're there, also check out the recently uploaded section on how Milani Bicycles in Italy create carbon fiber prototype frames. The video shows the laser cutting of carbon fiber sheets, making of small prototype parts, and the vacuum bagging and autoclave baking process for carbon fiber frames. There's a really hilarious section towards the last 3/4th of the video when an employee at the company comes from behind, blocks the camera and admonishes out in Italian yelling "Hey kids, what are you doing here? You can't film. Everyone out!!" Ha, that was classic. I really think it may have been a joke. Or else, Bike Radar may have forgotten something in the editing process. Surely that uomo can't drive out a bloke like that. Che cazzo...?


3. Cyfac Custom Carbon Frames : Chris from Texas shared with me this video from French custom bike manufacturer Cyfac. The video shows carbon tube assembly and "Carbon Stratification" which is basically their multi-layer reinforcing procedure. In this process, they combine custom molded carbon fiber tubes, epoxy, and three layers of carbon - Kevlar, serge carbon (twill) and taffetas carbon (crisp, smooth, plain woven). Now I have read that as a result of the differentiated fiber layers, stratified composites are particularly susceptible to bending at the side of the composite where the lower denier fibers are located, or in other words, its not as stiff as a homogeneous composite. I wonder whether this structure affects the Cyfac frame in certain situations. Feel free to comment.

Thanks Chris, and thanks also to Teamcyfac1.




ADDITIONAL READING :

See All My Articles Tagged With 'How Its Made' to Learn How Bicycles Are Designed And Created.

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Tour Wins, Probability & Sporting Misconceptions

We have more or less 3 days to go for this year's Tour de France. It is that time again when various websites, blogs, forums and paper publications devote many many words and pages in prediction of who will win the yellow jersey in Paris. The focus is often on a handful of men. The other 200 or so odd racers who participate with them never grab much media attention at all.

However unfair that may sound, there's some interesting things an astute observer can spot here. Most predictions will pick as favorites a band of individuals based solely on good results in the past. These ones then go into the Petri dish for review. Then one or two are picked and we tell ourselves or our friends, "You know what, I think he's so going to win because he can climb well, 'cause he won so and so stage in the mountains in 2003....and he can time trial like a beast because he won so and so stage at this pace in 2006 and 2007."

This sort of thinking to me is a little absurd. In fact, its a fallacy of the human mind. How do you know your theories about a certain individual winning a race are true? The first mistake of this fallacy is that you pick as your favorite already given their performance. You know something about him before making your decision. Then, you make positive attributions about that individual and even extend the praise to his team, his bike, his coach, his muscular makeup, his lung size, his pedaling style, his cadence, the support of his mommy. daddy and wife and possibly everything under the sun you could conjure up.

Extension of positive attributions based on performance : In this example of self-marketing, the message seems to imply that just because Fabian Cancellara won the Swiss Tour, the product offered must be great. Well, what are the odds that he couldn't have done the same on another competitor's setup? Courtesy : SRAM.

The point here is that it isn't very likely that one would make positive attributions about such things if past performance wasn't known. Because with no certainty can you say that your prediction for the Tour winner can time trial faster or 'hang on with the bunch' on the climbs better than say, rider number 9 in that obscure European team over there. Neither can you attribute with certainty that his team fares better than the other, or his coach is greater than the other, just because he won a race. All this can change. Follow on.

From a statistics perspective, every winning cycling performance should have two components to it. A) The racer's true ability. B) Chance. Chance can be any random event. It could be bad weather, mood fluctuations, an untimely crash, good luck (being in the right place at the right time), the presence of race radios, a mechanical failure... almost anything that could influence the race one way or the other.

The principle of 'regression to the mean' says that today if someone gets podium, tomorrow, they could finish somewhere back in the bunch closer to their true ability. By the same principle, someone who's having a slump can outperform his rivals in the next race, driving his performance closer and past his true ability. This is a scientifically validated phenomenon and I urge you to do further reading on it.

But a number of media journalists suffer from not heeding the role of chance. If someone wins once or in streaks, they'll go after him, his winning bike, his family, his coach, his nutritionists, his team mechanic etc and write excellent things about all of them collectively. This is journalism in retrospective - making positive comments about someone or something after a positive event has happened. In the process, the winner's bike, the bike manufacturer, his manager, his coach and his coaching service, his sports drink maker, his sun glass manufacturer...everyone are in for the limelight and big bucks.

There is a great deal of money to be made and lots of sales potential in this exercise. Sadly, the other folks who also raced in the peleton are veiled in absolute obscurity and we may never come to know who and what their backgrounds were.

There is a natural variation and fluctuation to events in our world that could be seen by sports analysts and fans as the true thing when its not. Random events can make one rider unexpectedly lucky on one day than the other. But the natural world has it that this luck will soon subside and an individual's performance will fall down closer to his actual norm.

Not many consider this role of sheer chance, and randomness in race outcomes. Why? Its plainly boring and too erudite, I suppose. There's no story in it, is there? I think in every sporting fortune, we as humans love to hear a good superhero fairytale. We're made that way. We like to make superheros, superhero stories, and idols out of these individuals. We also like to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about them.

There are also innumerable books written on superstars, their race winning strategies, their mental prowess, the odds they overcame, their nutritional preparations, the amount of detail and attention they devoted to their bikes etc. Some of these books promise similar results if their readers would stick to the rules mentioned in its pages, while failing to discuss or explore an important topic in our natural world, that of the statistical nature of performance.

Having said this, I'm tempted to discuss the role of regression to the mean, and random events in the life of George Hincapie at the Paris Roubaix (where he tried to ride for himself to win). We could do that another day, I suppose. But feel free to take it upon yourself to analyze his past results. Find out what happened, and why he never won the Queen of the Classics to this day. Check out the variability in his performances. He probably rode as hard in every one of those races as the previous one, but something caused him to be in the top 10 one year, while pushing him beyond 50th place in another.

Its time we appreciated the hidden roles of these events before we stick the superhero label on one rider rider, or disapprove another for a poor show. Let's embrace everyone alike who's racing in this year's Tour. Its one of the greatest human endeavors of our time.

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Bike Shop Dreams

"As long as you're going to think anyway, think big."

- Donald Trump

Be cautious. Have you ever found yourself, that day, fooling around in the bike shop, looking at mediocre bikes with modicum price tags when a clever little salesman decides to reel in your interest by quoting Donnie Trump (see above) ? And then he escorts you like a long lost brother towards a sleek and voluptuous looking bike hanging on the wall at the premium end of the shop.

Your eyes suddenly widen and you stare at it for a long time. You are entranced as it captivates you in a spellbind. You are gaping like a hippo. You are literally drooling from the mouth. There is a puddle of it near your feet. Now there is so much of it that it has become a scaled down human version of Lake Baikal.

Ofcourse, in no way is he asking you to make the purchase. You see, bike shop salesmen have an innate sixth sense. Without much physical contact, they already know how worn out your wallet is, the amount of cobwebs residing inside with its intricate architectural designs, that black and white photo of you in front of your house before you couldn't afford it anymore and it was foreclosed, those finger print grease marks on it from the engine of your vintage automobile that would spontaneously combust into flames when it was driven in the sun, those business cards handed to you by sympathetic employers after interviews with "Don't Contact" handwritten behind them, that credit card whose magnetic stripe won't work anymore due to the mountain of overflowing debt, those food ration stamps creased and folded so horribly that an art connoisseur would mistake it for Origami and may actually even offer you a price for them....

..Sigh.

Like a child who first wet his bed, you slowly furnish him your embarassing wallet with a strange sort of smile. Perhaps blue from shame, the last thing you do to save yourself is flick the lone green colored penny from in there like David Blaine the magician and quickly wipe it off with saliva to clean the copper oxide.

"Its okay, " he says in a morose tone and pats your shoulder. Then he points you to the door as he turns around to help another customer. His face has a smirk that you never caught properly.

"The exit is that way," he finishes off.

Its high time school textbooks corrected themselves. Mayflies don't have the shortest lifespans.

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