Netherlands to Belgium bike ride, day 4-5

Part 3 of the series. Part 1 Part 2

Robb riding through the Belgian countryside.

Saturday morning we awoke to a bright, shining sun—a wonderful sight, though after the previous day I had to wonder how long it would last. The air was still cold, made worse by the fact that the dampness still had not left. But at least we wouldn’t have to endure too much - today was the day to complete our trip, 40 miles to Brussels.

Netherlands to Belgium bike ride, day 3

Part 2 of the series. Part 1

Very, very wet. Photo by Robb.

Netherlands to Belgium bike ride, day 1-2

(First in a three part series, because this got long)

Spend some time reading the literature of cycling and alternative transportation devotees, and you will quickly gain the impression that the Netherlands are some sort of Shangri-La for two wheels. Time after time, bicycling advocates in the US will say “if only we could be like Amsterdam” - when we’re not trying to be Copenhagen or Paris or Bogota instead. Not for nothing is this a well-worn trope—I remember visiting Amsterdam a few years ago and being greeted with a practical sea of bicycles parked just outside the train station. The Dutch do like their velocipedes, quite a lot.

Amsterdam train station. The upper ledge in the middle of the picture was completely full of bikes.

And then when the Dutch (or the tourists) get stoned, they throw the bikes into the canals. Thus completing the circle of life.

So, given my status as “the bike guy” at Caltech (that’s what running a bike co-op does for you), when one of my fellow let’s-move-our-labs-to-Switzerland-expats, Robb, asked me if I’d be interested in doing a bike tour from Amsterdam to Brussels over a long weekend, I knew the answer had to be yes. I had never actually ridden around there, and now I too could properly experience this utopia of cycling.

The trip was to go as follows: on Wednesday night (October 9^th) we would fly up to the Netherlands, get ourselves settled, and get some rest. The next morning, we’d buy ourselves some nice bikes for the ride, load up on provisions, and do a pleasant 40-mile warm up trip down to Delft. Friday would be our push day, 100 miles down the Dutch coast, until we reached the Belgian border and made our way over to Ghent. This was to again be followed by another 40-mile light day down to Brussels, at which point we would get some well-deserved beer, rest, and further beer. Finally, Sunday we could take a high-speed train back to Zurich, by way of Paris.

A bit of Google Maps for you.

One syllable synposis

Trying to write an account of my bike trip last month has ended up taking longer than I expected. Oh well, something else in the meantime.

Kurt Gödel, a man operating in a different dimension than most of us. Image from Wikipedia

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a fun paper, Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Described in Words of One Syllable. The paper's behind a paywall (sadly) but here's a taste of the sort of writing we get:

Now: two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is not five, and  so on.

Thus: it can be proved that two plus two is not five. Can it be proved as well that two plus two is five? It would be a real blow to math, to say the least, if it could. If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that  five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk.

So, we now want to ask, can it be proved that it can't be proved that two plus two is five? Here's the shock: no, it can't.

He manages for nearly a page of this. Impressive! It's actually one of the better descriptions I've found, and certainly much shorter (if less fun) than working your way through Godel, Escher, Bach.

So, the natural exercise is to try and do the same with my own research. So, here goes:

********

There are a lot of times you might want to aim sound at some spot. It can help you try and find a crack in a plane's wing, say, or to look in you to see if your health is good. You can build a few sorts of things to do this: for one, you can make a lens. For two, have a bunch of spots that make sound that are timed just right, so that the right place all the sound adds up and gets loud, while far from that the sound waves don’t mix well and it all ends up soft and still. The last one is a bit hard to do: you have to know just when the sounds will play, and since the best way to make the sound will use a kind of clay that does not move that much, it’s hard to make it loud. But there’s a quite good thing with this way—you can choose where to aim the sound, while a lens will be fixed and thus can just aim at one spot.

My work is to build a new kind of way to aim sound, one that is based on how sound moves through a bunch of steel balls placed in a row. In most stuff, the key kind of sound is a tone: the stuff moves back and forth, and the sound goes through at one speed. All other sound can be made if you take these key sounds and mix them up. But, for the balls, the sound goes through in a new way; as a short pulse, one that can be quite strong as well. What’s more, you can change how fast the pulse goes if you squeeze the balls first*. The more you squeeze, the more swift the pulse.

This lets us make the new type of tool to aim sound. First, get a bunch of rows of balls and put them on a thing you want to aim sound in. Next, squeeze the rows in a way so that when the sounds hit the thing, they hit at just the right time so the sound they make will add up at the right place. Last, give the balls a good whack** to make the pulse. And that’s all there is to it.

I have two big goals with my work. One, I need to show that all these words are true, and that you can make a tool that will aim sound in the way I just said. And two, there are some ends to how well this can work, and I need to learn where these bounds are.

********

An "-ing", an "-ing", my kingdom for an "-ing".

EDITED 12/5 as someone pointed out I had a few 2-syllable words (basic, away, about, uses) in there. It's fixed now. Thanks Crowder!
12/6 Eve pointed out "inside" and "pulses". Thanks!

*My research also has pretty limitless potential for double entendre.
** See above.

Testing

Some years ago, one Dr. Paul Padley at Rice recommended that if I'm interested in science communication, I should try and start a blog. Well, here it is. Timing!

Here are some solitons (colliding, to appropriate music)

And here is some electrical tape.

All other aspects can be derived from these two axioms.