Sine Waves and Disney Princesses

I didn’t pack my bike and clothes last night like I planned. I was already late when I started packing this morning and it was 11 freaking degrees out. I decided to leave my bike at home and ride on the trainer after work.

I mentioned before I don't hate riding the trainer. I like it more than I would admit; it is my own time where I can stop thinking, actually I can think about nonsense, a long line of loosely related thoughts. I am smitten by mechanical things. I listen to the mechanical sounds and examine the moving parts. I notice the chain doesn't move perfectly linear; it vibrates. It actually makes a sine wave y(T)=A*sin(wT+O).

It is hard to notice if you have a perfect pedal stroke but when your pedaling gets choppy you can see the wavelength, frequency, and speed of propagation change; the waves appear to move back and forth along the chain stay. I concentrate on this sine wave to try and improve my pedal stroke.

The nonsense thinking continues: they make electronic eyes that could detect a change to the chain’s sine wave…I could mount an electronic eye above the chain so I can tell when I am pedaling poorly...but the data could change with every stroke...maybe 180 times a minute...and I couldn't process that much information on a display...but I could establish a range of acceptable variation and have it send a signal when I went out of that range...and send the signal to an electric dog collar that I would mount in my saddle...one electrode under each cheek...I would use control-stimulus/control-response to train myself. How long would it take for me to perfect my stroke? Jim trained his English Setter to not break point when pheasant hunting using an electronic collar in only four hours and his dog, Dorsey, is the dumbest English Setter I ever met...I am not belittling a friend’s hunting dog…Jim is the one who named his dog Dorsey after the fish in Finding Nemo that had short term memory loss…Finding Nemo is a great movie, it isn't really a fictional story about fish, it is about a father who loves his child unconditionally but struggles to be both a mom and dad...Marlin represents single dads well, I should know since almost all the TV I watch are Disney cartoons I am an expert on how single fathers are portrayed…Ella's father accidently left his daughter with a wicked stepmother who could never love Cinderella as her own; he should have had a better interviewing process to filter women like her out. Belle's father, Maurice, crazy o'l Maurice, loved his daughter and she seemed to turn out a well adjusted girl and the hottest of all Disney princesses but Maurice was destined to die alone, he was smitten by mechanical things and he was bright but he was just a little different, too odd to find a woman, other than Belle, who understood him and in the end, even the hideous beast found his soul mate, taking Belle away, leaving Maurice even more alone than he was before and that is just a tragedy…

And so the thinking goes for 90 minutes.