A view from the hill

John Goerzen blogs about (how to start) cycling to work. As I'm now back in Freiburg, in which anybody not cycling will be treated as an anti-social enviromental sinner, I'm using my bike a lot more, including cycling to work, hence I'm interested. Basically, I'm fine with what John has put together, but I would like to share my own experiences.

First of all, I'm concerned with Johns reference to cycling helmets. It is not so that helmets are required for cycling. I believe that this misconception is a common reason why people in recent years have come to believe that somehow cycling is a dangerous activity in the first place, while statistics clearly say it's not (in comparison to other activities, obviously). For instance have a look at a collection of facts around the danger of cycling. There is also some doubt about the usefulness of cycling helmets, have a look at the results of the helmet law in Australia. Now, whether one decides to where a helmet or not is up to you, of course, but the main fact to keep in mind is that cycling is in no way particularly dangerous.

John also mentions that for safe travel a key point is visibility, to which I whole-heartedly agree. However, Johns's sentence starts with "Unless there are dedicated bicycle-only lanes or paths ..." which should be taken with a grain of salt. There are studies, which I unfortunately had more than once the chance to verify, that bycicle-only lanes add a risk of their own. First of all, more often than not, you will not be as visible as you should be, especially if the lane is behind parking cars . Next, any biker on such lanes should take good care of any interference with pedestrians and/or car traffic. Especially where such lanes cross exits of garages and houses or when cars are parked directly beside the lane, be extra careful. I generally don't like bike lanes because more often than not they're in a shape no car driver would accept, but that's not the real point: the point is that bike lanes lure you into feeling extra safe while adding in some little surprises of their own.

But there's also another point to be made wrt. visibilty: Being visible alone won't save you, i.e. you can't trust that others will always behave correctly just because you do. Instead it's a lot more important that you are aware what other traffic participants are doing instead of making them aware of what you're doing -- only the first option is an active one, the second is just passive.

Now that we've dealt with the safety issue, let's talk about the fun. How fast you're going is up to you. I find that I can't really go slow (well, at least I feel like I'm not slow and there are not too many people going faster). I like a light and fast turn, so I use a relatively low gear -- think Lance Armstrong, not Jan Ulrich. And I shift gears really often so that my pace stays more or less the same regardless whether it's going up or down. Of course, this is only possible if you have relatively many gears. Don't expect too much from yourself btw: it's okay that you feel exhausted after a seemingly small way at first. It's also okay when you don't use the bike every day right from the start -- actually it might make a lot of sense to take a break between your riding days, depending on your fitness and the amount of cycling you have to do.

Of course, going quite fast by bike means that I'm sweating -- bringing spare clothes helps. And another point: if the weather is hot (there is currently wind from Africa blowing all the way up to Germany which means it's unusually hot these days), go early in the morning when it's still relatively cool. I would also suggest taking rain clothes with you, regardless of what the weather report is saying. I use a bike bag in which I take my rain clothes, some repair stuff and an air pump. I never really unpack it, so that's simply not an issue.

Another point: try to find a nice way to ride. This might require trying several alternative routes, but if you're lucky you might find a route that is fun to go. This helps to keep the motivation up. I know what I'm talking about, since in my old job in Mannheim I didn't use my bike as much as I should have because there simply was no nice route for me to work -- I always felt a little hunted on the road. Now, in contrast here in Freiburg, I've found a route which goes besides the river Dreisam for about five kilometers which is just nice in the morning, which means that I'm far more motivated to go the 10km way here than the 3km in Mannheim.

Neben viel Schnee, den man sogar zum Skifahren genießen kann, hat mir der Osterhase diesmal noch mehr mitgebracht: das Ende meiner Mannheimer Zeit. Bye Nordbaden, welcome back Südbaden! Zum Auftakt hatte der Osterhase meiner Family dann auch noch ein paar kleinere Erkrankungen mit eingepackt, aber das soll die Freude nicht mindern.

Liebe Leser, zuerst die offensichtliche Nachricht: Es ist Mitte November. In other news, 2+2=4. Aber nicht so offensichtlich ist, dass der Schneebericht des Liftverbunds Feldberg 50cm Schneelage verkündet sowie fünf geöffnete Lifte am kommenden Wochenende. Schön, dass die Brettlemärkte in unserer Umgebung schon waren. Weniger schön, dass ich meine neuen Ski erst noch einstellen lassen muss. Aber Schlittenfahren dürfte auch genug Spaß machen.

Morgen abend wird in Freiburg eine der dezentralen Kundgebungen gegen Vorratsdatenspeicherung stattfinden. Die Demo unter dem Namen "Freiheit statt Angst" findet am 6.11. ab 17.00 Uhr am Münsterplatz statt. Ich werde leider nicht da sein können, weil ich mal wieder in Mannheim weile, aber hoffentlich finden sich auch so genügend Leute.

Joey seems to have inspired a "list of programming languages you know"-contest over on planet.debian.org, so this is mine:

1. Basic (forgotten)
   I've started using Basic on the Commodore C64 and have used it considerably, apart from the intrinsics of peek and poke, which some would claim was what Basic on the C64 was all about. I also used Basic on the Apple II at school, but was spared any further need to use Basic.
   
2. Cobol (forgotten)
   I remember my old computer science teacher bringing white and green prints on endless paper and teaching us the joys of Cobol. Having used Basic before, it looked somewhat suspicious but not too alien. Fortunately, we only had to solve some simple problems on paper, as the Apple II only had .... DBase II, I think.
   
3. Pascal (forgotten)
   (Turbo) Pascal was the language of choice in the first semester at the University of Koblenz at the start of the nineties. I've did what I had to do in it, but never really liked it. From the occasional look I throw in Wirth's algorithms book I know I can still read it, but the language looks just as baroque as the copy of the book I have.
   
4. Prolog (forgetting)
   I've really done a lot in Prolog, being first exposed in the second semester to it. I remember to marvel at some guys who grokked the language at first usage in the initial course -- to me, having used only imperative languages up to then, it was a mistery. I still think Richard A.O'Keefe's book "The Craft of Prolog" is among the best CS books.
   
5. C/C++ (forgetting)
   About 1992, I somehow got interested in object-oriented programming. Free software was still unknown to me, so I bought a student edition of Turbo C++ and some Addison-Wesley book and of I went inventing another wheel. At the time, I also had to do some C hacking for some course at the university, involving MS Windows programming. I've used C over time in several smaller projects, but would never call myself a C hacker.
   
6. Assembler (forgotten)
   My first exposure to Assembler was with some book for the C64. I was very interested but understood next to nothing. I should program some I/O chip directly instead of just using "load $,8,1"? WTF? Next look was in University, of course. I still know enough bits to be able to grok more or less the output of (disassemble 'foo) of some (tiny) foo-function in CL on an i386-style machine, but that's about it.
   
7. Mercury (had interest in)
   Mercury seemed like a nice successor to Prolog, adding several features of functional languages. I read several manuals, had several installations and never used it for anything.
   
8. Life (had interest in)
   Another possible successor to Prolog, which I've learned about at a summer school for language, logics and information. That's about all I remember.
   
9. XLisp (forgotten)
   My first exposure to Lisp in the context of a course for computational linguistics. The only thing worse than the editor used in the system was the tutor giving the course. A horror of parenthesis is about the only thing I remember.
   
10. Shell scripting (daily usage)
    I think since 1992 or 93 I've been using Unix systems and shell scripts. I no longer can remember whether our Suns dumped you into csh or sh or whatever, but since I've been using Linux systems (since 94), I've been using bash and written bourne shell scripts. Of course, I've also written the occasional csh script abdomination, but "Csh programming considered harmful" was an early lecture.
    
11. Emacs Lisp (forgetting)
    I remember seeing one of my instructors doing nearly miracles with XEmacs and wondering how his fingers could be that flexible -- I know that now. I've written several small utilities in Elisp and keep using it occasionally.
    
12. Common Lisp (improving)
    When I started a student job in 1995, I also started using Common Lisp, using Steele's CLtL2. Having used Elisp before, I no longer was worried about parenthesis. I still keep finding areas I didn't know or used before. And it's a language large enough that keeps you re-learning tricks you thought you knew. Which didn't stop me from giving a course on CL, which in hindsight didn't have the right focus: instead of showing that CL is just as capable of doing whatever you expect, it's also capable of doing you won't expect.
    
13. Smalltalk (interested)
    At the computational linguistics lab in Freiburg, the parser system was implemented in Smalltalk, so when I started there I took a small course in Smalltalk. As I worked more on the knowledge representation side of the system, I only rarely used it, though, so rare indeed, that I never got to do anything serious with the language. I still can read Smalltalk despite it's somewhat unusal syntax and have to do that even sometime.
    
14. Tcl (forgotten)
    We wanted to extend a linguistic annotation written in Tcl, so I bought a book and started digging through the code. Soon enough a student took over the job (and did it rather well), so I started the tiny bits I've learned quite soon. I remember finding the concept that every thing is a string to be rather messy and still see it as a lame excuse for dynamic/weak typing.
    
15. Perl (static)
    For nearly ten years, I had been using shell and/or Emacs to solve any data mangling tasks when I finally gave in and had a closer look at Perl. I still find it amazing how quick and dirty it's possible to solve problems in Perl, but on the other hand I've given up Perl for more complex tasks that require some thought and design, since Perl's syntax and language idiosyncrasies keep leading me to programs I don't even like myself.
    
16. XSLT (improving)
    At about the same time I started using Perl, I also needed to transform a set of XML documents and XSLT was all over the media, so I had a closer look. I dislike the noisy syntax of XSLT and particular the intermix with output elements and it's fever for being a "clean" functional language. But the concept of XPath and the idea of traversing a document via axis I find very compelling.
    
17. make (static)
    For a long time the power of make didn't occur to me. A colleague of mine, however, used it to implement a nifty workflow for document processing, of which I learned a lot of tricks when I needed to mimic it for a different task.
    
18. Ruby (improving)
    When I finally was fed up with Perl, I looked around to find Ruby as a nice halfway compromise between Common Lisp and Perl. It's still fancy and geeky and with Ruby on Rails has a lot of buisness ballyhoo around it, so I hope it will see more use in my current surrounding.
    
19. Java (not interested)
    Like everybody else, I couldn't avoid looking at Java. It seems to be the Cobol of today and as such is the job guarantee today. But Java looks so boring, I can hardly stand it. And this with regard to both the language and the results produced with it. Sigh But still, it's likely that someday I'll going to buy another book (that would be my third Java book, the first being O'Reilly's Java in a nutshell for Java 1.1 in maybe 1997 or so?), since just like Cobol at it's time, avoiding Java is hard ...
    
20. Python (not interested)
    When Python 1.4 hit the scene, there was quite some bubble around it. It burst quickly and as my latest review of the language reveiled last year, it still doesn't seem interesting.
    

Missing in this list is stuff like Scheme, Dylan, Oz, Oberon, Eiffel, Haskell and probably some other "tiny" languages which I looked at at some point in time and really didn't ever took a second look. Of those, I may take another look at Haskell in the future, but currently I have no concrete plans in doing so.

Was wir seit einiger Zeit an diversen Ereignissen, Vorhaben und sonstigen politischen Hirngespinsten präsentiert bekommen, habe ich neulich ja noch als Masche abgetan, möglichst maximalen Unsinn zu fordern, um damit deutlich mehr (im Sinne von Zugriffsmöglichkeiten und Einschränkungen von Bürgerrechten) rauszuholen als sonst möglich wäre. Aber entweder sind selbst die intelligenteren Mitbürger mittlerweile total abgestumpft oder durch das ganze Terrorgefasel derart weichgekocht, dass die selbst den größten Unsinn noch durchbekommen, wenn nicht bald mal mehr "normale" Leute sich ihrer Bürgerrechte und -pflichten erinnern. Da kommt doch eine Anleitung zum Lobbyismus für Nerds doch genau rechtzeitig. Allerdings wäre es wohl nicht im Sinne von Hannos Anleitung, zu einem evtl. Termin dann ausgerechnet in diesem T-Shirt zu erscheinen (via Kristian & Fefe). Aber vielleicht ist es das Wichtigste, überhaupt mal aus dem Quark zu kommen.

Zwei mal Politik, zweimal Freiburg, und doch keine Lokalpolitik: Man fragt sich ja wirklich, wohin unsere Politiker gerade unterwegs sind. Zum einem ist da ein Ministerpräsident, dem man die Nachhilfe in Geschichte bzgl. eines seiner Vorgängers nicht nur einfach nur geben, sondern schon aufnötigen muss und der damit beweist, dass der schon etwas ältere Spruch "Wir können alles außer Bildung" auch bzgl. seiner eigenen Person zutrifft.

Aber das ist ja vergleichsweise harmlos, könnte man meinen, denn das betrifft ja "nur" die Vergangenheit. Viel schlimmer sind da die aktuellen Ideen des anderen "Freiburgers der Woche", wobei ich mir recht sicher bin, dass diese "neue" kreative Idee das Unschuldsprinzip außer Kraft zu setzen nicht auch schon in Deutschland durch "prior art" belegt ist. Schönes Schlagwort dazu im Netz: Nach Web 2.0 kommt Stasi 2.0.

Wobei ich ja mittlerweile geneigt bin, zu vermuten, dass die beiden Dinge in Verbindung stehen: Vielleicht hat sich da einer bei der CDU gedacht, der Oettinger, der kann mal schön einen Sturm im Wasserglas veranstalten, und wir ziehen parallel mit viel weniger Aufmerksamkeit noch ganz andere Sachen durch. Und wenn man sich das doch eher geringe Medienecho anschaut, dann hat das doch ganz gut geklappt.

In BaWü gibt es seit einiger Zeit die glorreiche Idee, dass die Schüler, die im sog. Rheingraben in der Nähe (30km) zu Frankreich wohnen, ab dem nächstem Schuljahr an den Gymnasien in den fünften Klassen mit Französisch statt mit Englisch beginnen. Während die Idee auf den ersten Blick ja ganz vernünftig klingt (es ist durchaus hilfreich, wenn man die Sprache seines Nachbarn versteht), bringt sie auf den zweiten Blick eine Menge Probleme. Eine Webseite der Jungen Union (!) www.region-fuer-englisch.de listet einige davon auf (Danke, Kris). Am heftigsten sind m.E. nach folgende zwei Punkte: 1) Der Wechsel von Realschule auf das Gymnasium wird damit fast unmöglich gemacht. 2) Bei einem Umzug aus dem Rheingraben in eine andere Region hat man augenblicklich eine miese Note in Englisch. Und das, obwohl gleichzeitig überall mehr Durchlässigkeit zwischen den Schulsystemen und auch Flexibilität bzgl. der eigenen Lebenssituation gefordert wird. Liebe Politiker, wenn ihr schon das Verständnis zwischen den Ländern fördern wollt, solltet Ihr dafür nicht das Verständnis zwischen den Schülern im eigenen Land vergessen.

Da hat man mal endlich ein bisschen Urlaub, die Skier sind gewachst und dann ist es am Jahresende so warm, dass man im T-Shirt durch die Stadt laufen könnte (okay, fast). Aber mit dem neuen Jahr scheint endlich auch der Winter ein Einsehen zu haben -- aktuell sagt der Schneebericht vom Liftverbund Feldberg, dass 30cm Schnee liegen würden. Nicht viel, aber mal sehen, was draus wird.

Yesterday, I voted for Tool as the best live band, although I hadn't seen them yet, as the concert was tonight. Well, they didn't let me down, they easily did win the price as the best live band this year [1]. The concert hall, Mannheim's Maimarkthalle, was a particular disappointment. Or in fact it wasn't, it was just the horrible surrounding I've expected it to be.

The warm-up band, Mastodon, was also a nightmare. Usually, I don't care about bad warm-up bands, but this time the sound was so loud you couldn't ignore them. The loudness was really a problem. Sometimes I felt it was just too loud although I brought and used a pack of ear protectors. Apart from that, Tool were great, especially the light show was the best what I've seen so far.

[1] It was only the fourth concert for me this year. Tomte has been great, Til Brönner (my first Jazz concert ever) was very nice, too, and The Horror The Horror, this years' best newcomer in my opinion, played a nice concert, too (although they had to fight a rather tiny location, Freiburg's Jos Fritz cafe and its ridiculous time table). But Tool was way more exciting.

... wenn 40% der Bürger einer Stadt ihre Meinung kundtun: Der Bürgerentscheid über den Verkauf der kommunalen Wohnbaugesellschaft war erfolgreich.

Wollen wir sehen, ob dieselben 40% sich an der Diskussion, wie Freiburg künftig finanziell vernünftig agieren soll, ebenfalls beteiligen – zu hoffen wäre es.