“Road bike food and fresh air philosophy / rambling post - BikeRadar.com” plus 3 more |
- Road bike food and fresh air philosophy / rambling post - BikeRadar.com
- The end of an era in Belford - Asbury Park Press
- Fantastic Free Form Frolic & Physical Philosophy Files - Salon
- Christian Science Monitor - YAHOO!
| Road bike food and fresh air philosophy / rambling post - BikeRadar.com Posted: 24 Feb 2010 11:17 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. I recently bought my first road bike (Defy 3.5) and I love it, although I can't wait for this gawdawful weather to improve so I can actually use it properly. I see a lot of colourful road cyclists fly past on the weekends in large groups, clubs I guess, and struggle to see the appeal, so was curious about whether I am in a minority and if there are others out there who have the same road cycling philosophy as me.
An ideal Saturday for me would be anything from 40 to 80 miles, stopping for leisurely pub lunches - pie and chips for example, and maybe a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea for breakfast. The goal is not speed - I'd be happy to average 15 mph. The goal is not to lose weight - I enjoy food too much. The goal is simply to enjoy the vast amounts of fresh air and countryside you can see when moving at a bike's pace - and having a fast enough bike so that I'm not wasting effort on fatter tyres or a heavier frame. And to enjoy the pleasures of food when you're pleasantly exhausted from a long, fat-burning workout. I don't object to company, but I don't see the attraction of riding in such a big group that your only view is the buttocks in front of you. And I like to stop when I like. I ride wearing whatever jeans, shorts, t-shirt, wooly hat or jumper I choose for the day. I have no interests in looking good, wearing lycra or shaving any part of my body. I haven't yet figured out the benefits of pedals which stick to my feet but I think I might get there eventually. Planning on riding the 230ish miles from Cambridge to Swansea in May with a tent and sleeping bag in panniers on a rear rack, enjoying the b-road scenery and pub lunches on the way. Love the outdoors, and I love the speed and lightness of my road bike. Can anyone relate to this? What are your favourite pub lunches? Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| The end of an era in Belford - Asbury Park Press Posted: 24 Feb 2010 02:45 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. (2 of 2) When he returned, he bought two acres on Main Street for $2,500 and built the shop for another $10,000, borrowing the money from his father and uncle. Business started slowly, but his timing was fortuitous. The Garden State Parkway was under construction, bringing with it suburban sprawl and lots of cars. "It was not a high-volume shop," Lentz said. "We catered to the customers. Service was our big thing. Service and reliability. Credibility is the big word. To me, credibility means everything." Lentz made a steady living. He focused on the metal repairs while others in the shop painted. He was married to Catherine Lentz for more than 30 years. She died in 2006. He has three children — David, John and Kathy — from two previous marriages. That's how it went, day after day, nothing more complicated than that. But the rest of the world changed. Cars became computerized. Doing business in New Jersey became a burden. And even customer service seemed to fade; Lentz still is steamed that Comcast made the History Channel part of its pricier premium line-up. It forced him to switch to Verizon's FiOS, which he isn't thrilled with either. Lentz decided he'd had enough, and he put the shop up for sale. He found a buyer in Anthony Guerriero, 37, from Union Beach, who had been working at an auto body shop for two years and was looking for a chance to go out on his own. Guerriero said starting an auto body shop from the ground up would have been prohibitive. He plans to make one change — it will be called Dentz Auto Body beginning Monday — but the philosophy will remain the same. "(I'm) trying to give everybody a comfortable feeling when they walk through the door, instead of being a dollar figure or a number," Guerriero said. Not that Lentz's run is complete. He has set aside space at the shop where he can continue to practice his trade, helping explain why his answer to the question — do you feel nostalgic at all — shouldn't have been surprising. "I don't" he said. "You know, 56 years is a long time to do business. After a while, your joints hurt. I'm going to go back and tinker and build stuff, and that's my thing." Michael L. Diamond; 732-643-4038; mdiamond@app.com; www.twitter.com/mdiamondapp Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Fantastic Free Form Frolic & Physical Philosophy Files - Salon Posted: 23 Feb 2010 06:56 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Copyright 1979 & 2009 by Robby Robertson. All rights reserved.
For more cost free rhythm and reason, please consider a season that resonantly sings beyond theories of strings.
Asked the people on the 6 O'Clock news; they said on that we have no views. Same thing happened in a physics lesson - a picture of Newton gave a puzzled expression. Still wanted to know what gravity is, so I went outside and continued the quiz. Asked a mathematician and he took all day saying gravity is numbers. So I lit one up and, went into suspension, tintanambulating beyond the 3rd dimension. Where are the dimensions and where are they not? Boundless dimensions of music and thought. Infinite dimensions of cold and of hot. But countless dimensions of space there are not. Dimensions of beauty and wine and of thee. Occur in spatial dimensions of which there are three. A 3-D you anna 3-D me, munching 3-D apples from a 3-D tree. 3-D up and 3-D down. 3-D apples to the 3-D ground. 3-D fall anna 3-D 'thump'. 3-D sugar inna 3-D lump. 3-D smooth and 3-D rough. 4-D Einstein sayin' "Three ain't enough". 4-D guitar and 4-D strings. Albert's 4-D song about 4-D things. 4-D amplifier and 4-D gear, singin' 4-D music into 3-D ears. 3-D professors on a 3-D jag, stuffin' 4-D physics inna 3-D bag. If yer lookin' for a message in here. It's of 4-D headaches from a 3-D beer. 3-D professors tellin' 3-D lies, gettin' 3-D money for the Nobel Prize. 3-D scientists onna 3-D pension, refusing to recognize, gravity is the 4th space-time dimension. Poetic science appliance. Einstein's presently abandoned Unified Field reinstated w'out mathematics. Scientific 'mainstream' panics at the joining of Einstein's field with Planck's quantum mechanics Democritus foresaw the invisible atom, but since then his discovery is found with substratrum. From antiquity, and ubiquity the continuous wave was the rave. Faraday found the cathode ray. Thompson uncovered electrons one day. Rutherford encountered protons a different way. Understood Maxwell's waves beneath the celestial hood, discovered electromagnetic fields as no one thought he would. The wave emitting electron could not be subdivided - at first it was whispered, then openly confided. Yet along came smaller mysterious articles, of Max Planck's curiously indivisible 'particles' :
Conceptual doors were opened for the entrance of protons, but no comprehensive vacancy for the residential photons. Other atomic tenants varied in weight, height and disguise, but the photon is always the same null value and size. An undulating atom might change its balance or valence, while the unchanging photon showed no such talents. Vigils are kept to find it changing its station, while its stubborn identity confirms in black body radiation. At dollar conventions where no change is invited, twenty nickels sit down to an audience excited. If you're looking for a message in here, it's of Max Planck's quanta and Niels Bohr's spheres. Invincible in principle, Newton's Mechanics are sure as shooting, while quantum mechanics are robbing and looting. As though these convulusions are not enough, reality panned out some other stuff. Einstein's fort was special & general relativity, while his Nobel Prize was for photo-electricity. This century old issue of size is how Einstein won the Nobel Prize - how the peace loving master-blaster stayed alive, in the timely year of 1905. Anaxgoras of pre biblical days took big and little to greater heights and stays - he said "There's always something larger than large, and always something smaller than small." May this admonition of illusion be this brief sonnet's conclusion. The 20th century path has been historically rough - to the point of surrendering enough of this stuff. Though this ballad may be spiritual or mental, any semblance to education is purely coincidental. Readers are invited to this paragon of camp, may the poetic winner be rewarded with writer's cramp? Whoever may think that here is no thought, please feel free to continue and provide yer best shot. Free Reading On-Line Book Follows : ) Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Christian Science Monitor - YAHOO! Posted: 24 Feb 2010 01:11 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Tokyo – Over the past few decades, Toyota has built a strong presence in the United States by serving its consumers well and doing what the US government has wanted. Now, it has stumbled badly, largely because its greatest strength – the Toyota way of "accumulation of small improvements," or kaizen philosophy – has turned out to be a weakness in the age of complex electronic engines. There is every reason to believe Toyota will fix its technical and management problems. The question is whether, panicking in the very un-Japanese glare of the American media and political spotlight, it will dig a deeper hole by losing the air of trust and reputation for competence among customers it has spent so long building up. That would be bad for Toyota and for America. Most auto companies in the past, including Ford and GM, have had recall problems like Toyota. They all seem to try to hide the early evidence of flaws, even if they affect safety. This goes back to the American consumer advocate Ralph Nader's "unsafe at any speed" campaign in the US in 1965 that involved the Chevrolet Corvair produced by GM. Today, however, with the electronic programming of cars, many of the problems emerging – such as the braking system of the Prius – are of a new nature. They are judgmental engineering calls. If they can be corrected by readjusting the setting on recalled cars, then Toyota can handle that quickly. But what we are seeing may be a more fundamental problem that has to do with the engine control unit as a whole. In an average Toyota, there are about 24,000 inputs and outputs, with as many as 70 computer chips processing information and sending it on to other chips to operate the engine control units. It is a very complex system. Such complex systems are a problem these days for all auto manufacturers – Germans and Americans as well as Japanese – because about 60 percent of a modern automobile is electronics. Toyota is the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, since it is the world's largest manufacturer of cars, with more than 50 plants across the globe outside Japan. Toyota has been expanding so rapidly it has more models on the road than any other carmaker. What we see with Toyota in particular is that this new electronic complexity has overwhelmed its famous concept of kaizen – the accumulation of small improvements – that has made Toyota such a quality brand worldwide. This company has so perfected the practice of kaizen from the bottom up at the assembly line that it has lost the big picture of how the whole electronic engine – and thus overall safety – works. This is a limitation of the kaizen philosophy that has helped Japan become the headquarters of quality manufacturing. If Toyota does not recognize this and tries to chalk all its problems up to floor mats touching the accelerator, or resetting a computer, it will miss the real issue. Where Toyota has failed is that rather than review the overall safety of the engine operating unit, it has focused instead on diagnosing the function of many thousands of pieces of an electronic engine. What this company is missing is the human factor â€" a single person who has a comprehensive understanding of the details of the engine and how the parts interact and work as a whole. In the old days, one chief engineer used to design everything. This was true with ships and airplanes as well as nuclear reactors. Now, design and production is broken down into so many details that there is no one in the current generation of Toyota engineers who seems to have the whole picture. A 45-year-old engineer at Toyota today would have spent the past 25 years working on "the accumulation of small improvements." What this suggests is that Toyota has to come up with a new organizational ethos beyond kaizen that can oversee the crucial safety features that may have been compromised by so much incremental improvement over the years. This is a philosophical problem of management, not a technical issue. A new system of man and machine interface needs to supplement the kaizen philosophy – in other words one that perfects the big picture of engine control safety instead of just the small picture of components. I believe Toyota can meet this challenge. The challenge I fear it will fail to meet is the psychological one, enveloped as the company's leaders seem to be in a sense of panic at being attacked politically and in the press in their most lucrative market, the United States. For the modest and taciturn Akio Toyoda, whose English is only passable and who has difficulty finding the right words, to testify in front of the US Congress invites the wrong impression. There is such a clash between aggressive American political and media culture and reserved Japanese ways. As America brings Toyota to account on safety, it must also put the company in the right perspective. Toyota has also always done what the American market and politicians demanded without losing quality or productivity. The US asked Toyota to come to the US to produce cars instead of export them from Japan, and use up to 50 percent local content. Today, 2.5 million cars are produced annually in the US at more than a dozen plants; this has created many jobs. Toyota’s annual spending on parts, goods, and services from hundreds of US suppliers totals more than $22 billion. Ninety-five Japanese component companies were transplanted from Japan to supply Toyota through its "just in time" manufacturing process, building up a component supply network along the Mississippi Valley that didn't exist before. Toyota is on the hot seat today. But everyone should understand that the issue at hand is the trade-off between complexity and safety in an age where electronics and computers dominate the vehicles we all use on a daily basis. Kenichi Ohmae, Japan's most prominent management guru, was a senior partner of McKinsey (AMPERSAND) Co. and a cofounder of its strategic consulting arm. He is author of numerous books, including "The Mind of the Strategist" and "The Borderless World." His comments are adapted from an interview with Global Viewpoint Network editor Nathan Gardels. © 2010 Global Viewpoint Network/ Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor. --Did this essay make you think? Join the conversation on Facebook! We're also on Twitter. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Philosophy - Bing News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment