On Saturday Becky and I moved forward boldly on our bike-riding initiative. We went out to Easthampton to ride the Manhan Rail Trail.

The Rails-to-Trails program takes abandoned railway lines and repurposes them to biking and walking trails. It’s a great idea, and it’s sad that the residents of Springfield are too stupid to realize how good having one or two would be for the city.

This particular trail is four miles long. It’s well-paved and there are a lot of shady parts. The scenery is great, with a nice view of the Oxbow and Mt. Tom. It does cross some streets, but the drivers were all pretty courteous and respectful of the crossing. We saw a lot of folks out on the trail: families, older couples, joggers, a dad with a stroller, and a fellow walking along listening to his mp3 player and playing air guitar. We started in the middle, went to one end, then went to the other end, then back to the middle, for a total of eight miles. That’s three more than our usual afternoon five!

More importantly, eight miles didn’t really bother us much at all. We weren’t tired, we weren’t hurting, and we didn’t nap afterwards. That’s a pretty big deal for us. Granted, the trail is relatively level, but even so, it definitely shows some progress on our part.

We’re now looking to hit some of the other nearby rail trails.

BONUS! My spell checker doesn’t think too much of Easthampton, I guess:

I have enough insecurities already without you telling me I have this:

I got a new bike!

It’s the red one in that picture. My old one was just about 15 years old and hadn’t really worked in some time, so we headed out and bought the finest velocipede that Target had to offer that wasn’t stupid expensive. It goes well with Becky’s bike, which was a replacement for her purple one that someone nicked from the garage one night when I accidentally left the door open. I tell myself someone grabbed it because their car broke down and they had to get that kidney to the hospital in time to save that orphan’s life!

Becky covets my red bike and has been asking me for my social security number a lot recently. I’m just putting that out there.

So we found a sneaky back way to Forest Park that doesn’t involve Sumner Avenue, which is nice. And I just used Google Earth to find out that our route to Forest Park is 1.25 miles one way. Once around the main route there is three-quarters of a mile. So yesterday, when we “only” went to the park and did one lap, we biked 4.25 miles! Yay us! I know that doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a lot more exercise than I’m used to, and I really dig it.

Do you have a bike? You should!

But today’s the Lord’s day, so no blogging.

BOW TO THE WILL OF SY-NUSS!

Q: How many marshmallows does it take to make me go “Ugh, I ate too many marshmallows!”?

A: Fewer than I ate.

Really, the only question is: will this eventually be adapted into some kind of horrifying sex device or has it already been. As my man Caparoon pointed out, it’s not hard to imagine this thing existing in some seedy back alley in Osaka.

ROBOT

BABY

“O” FACE

Still not creeped out? Have another video of the quacking robot baby!

And now, caption contest time! What is robobaby thinking here?

I think it goes a little something like this:

or this:

Found here via somewhere I don’t remember, which is unfortunate, because oh how I owe them.

My buddy Jeff and I are co-authoring a mathematics paper. It’s primarily in the field of Topology, but we’re pretty sure our ultimate findings will influence a number of disciplines.

The title of the article is “On the Multi-Dimensionality of Lawn Bags”. It investigates the ability of lawn bags — which are normally 3-dimensional objects — to suddenly transform their openings into n-dimensional spaces (where n <> 3) when you try and put leaves into them. A lawn bag at rest may be perfectly shaped and opened, but get some leaves near it and suddenly it will recoil into twisted, non-Euclidean horrors, sliding effortlessly into domains that physicists and mathematicians have only theorized.

Here are some of our preliminary equations:

And those of you with an interest in Complex Modeling will find this graph quite surprising!

I don’t want to say much more until we’re published.