Wouldn't it be easier if there was no dating? No sitting by the phone, no wondering how people feel about you, no awkward moments where you have nothing to say?

Much is said about the culture of the internet, how people communicate with nick names they know nothing about, leaving the possibility of anonymity and impersonation wide open, only to encourage abuse. Or something like that. To put a spin on that, I've met ten of these phony, introvert, psychotic aliases in the flesh, and I have to say it's been a positive experience for the most part. What strikes me the most is how the virtual personality can present itself from a much different side than it will in real life, and so the people you meet sometimes appear to be warped reflections of the people you know online. Of course, the better you know the person, the bigger the potential surprise when they appear as the reincarnation of some altogether different persona.

People from the internet I've met in real life:

• stephanho
• ErikP
• nina1981
• Torkel
• Majed
• Diavolo
• yohy
• Psycho
• Haroon
• Boyo

If you're not careful, your name could be next on the list.

• trying to lift off with the flaps on
• sprinting in knee deep water
• walking in quick sand
• drag racing with the hand brake on
• playing tennis at the beach

What else can you think of that approximates the sensation of biking in wind? The whole concept of a vehicle on wheels is that you apply energy to the system, whereby the mechanism propels that into kinetic energy, which yields momentum (the product of velocity and mass). Once momentum is obtained, friction permitting (air resistance included), it will allow the vehicle to travel at constant velocity indefinitely. In ideal conditions, friction is such that a bicycle will slowly decelerate, at a rate of [negative] acceleration a fraction that of the [positive] acceleration, which set it in motion in the first place. In English, that means you pedal hard for 10m and you roll for 60m or 100m. Now, in the case of wind, especially wind hitting you from the front (actually, speaking in terms of aerodynamics, it may be the case that diagonal wind [from the front] is trapped by a greater area of body, which imposes greater friction), the obtained momentum will decrease more rapidly. The result is that the energy applied yields much smaller gain in terms of motion. Now, in a psychological context, this breaks with the assumption that biking is an efficient process, thus causing trauma. See, the beauty of the wheel is that of playing on dynamic friction (which is much smaller than static friction). Ie. it takes more effort to set something in motion than it does to sustain that motion. When you're walking, taking one step will get you exactly one step forward. If you push a big rock forward, it will go forward exactly the distance you push it. But if you push a shopping cart in the supermarket, it will roll on wheels and travel much further than a rock to which you apply the same amount of energy (try this experiment next time you go shopping, it's very instructive!). Let's repeat: dynamic friction. But in conditions of strong wind, the magnitude of dynamic friction approaches the magnitude of static friction, rendering biking no more efficient than walking. Of course, it never actually happens that these two quantities take on the same magnitude, but consider that when walking the energy applied is proportional to your mass. But when biking, you are also moving the bike itself, so it actually takes more energy. When you then experience strong dynamic friction, the benefit of being on a bike falls away, rendering the whole experience very traumatic.

Goddamn flat land. Put up some mountains to trap the wind already!

As an exercise for next week, perhaps you could figure out why stopping at traffic lights at every intersection is greatly traumatic and impeding to the concept of biking?

Finally, if you think all of this theory sounds somewhat familiar, you may suggest the possibility that it is simply high school physics, in which case you would be absolutely correct. And that leads me to a big shout out to Nawaf, who is currently learning all this fascinating material by way of a nice booklet of physics formulae and a calculator to compute all these exciting quantities.

I finally found a nice place to live and I'm moving there at the end of the month. It took a lot of effort and patience, I've been looking at apartments for 2 weeks and I've seen some really naaasty ones. But the main problem is finding something in a good location, most of what is advertised is on the brim of he "city" or outside of it. But today was my lucky day, I finally found something that doesn't suck. :party:

Sending post cards is normal practice, right? You're on vacation, you're thinking "I should send one to Bob, we got one from him when he went to Barcelona last year". You reciprocate. Or sometimes you want to emphasize the importance of a relationship and you send a card. Or you want to revive an old friendship. Either way the post card does the job just fine. But when you shop for post cards, do you think to yourself "I should get a different card for every person"? You do, don't you? But why? Why do we get 5 different cards to send to 5 different people? The cards are not for us, we bought them just so we can send them to people, so we might as well pick out the nicest one, get 5 prints of that one and send them out. What, do people get together and compare cards they got? "I can't believe Martin sent us both the same card!!" No, they don't do that, in fact they don't even know that they both got a card from you, because it rarely comes up in conversation. And even if it did, it's not a crime to send the same one, noone is going to reprimand you for it. And even if by some freak of nature that did happen, you could always say "I liked this one so much I sent it to both of you". See, there's just _no way_ you can get in trouble over this. So why bother shopping for 5 different cards? If you have two friends and one likes architecture, you can send him a picture of the cathedral, then you can send the other one, a soccer fan, a picture of the stadium. That makes sense. But if there's no circumstance like that, there's really no point in being selective, just pick one and duplicate. See, this has nothing to do with the people you send these cards to, this is all about you. Not wanting to go the easy way, putting in an effort, a pointless one at that. Why should one person get a nice card and another person get a mediocre one, just because you couldn't find two different ones that were both nice? I'm sure both would prefer getting the nice one.

So that's it for me, no more shopping for unique cards, from now on you're all getting the same one.