So my goal this morning was to get some base kilometres in. I was originally hoping to do >100km but in the end my ride on Friday just took a bit too much out of me. It turned out being a slow and grinding 90km. I tried to mix things up by going a route I normally wouldn’t for parts of the ride.

Went from Karori out to Johnsonville via Makara. Then back past Karori, down throug Aro Valley and up and over past Happy Valley. Then around the bays once, over the hill from Mirimar to Worser Bay, back around past the airport and home via Oriental Parade.

The little spike out the side of the map in J’ville was me riding towards Churton Park and then seeing the weather. In the end the weather was fantastic- a touch windy around the South Coast but apart from that lovely.

Average power is understandably a chunk lower than Friday. Climbed 1130 meters which is a nice reflection of my efforts to include a few more hills today.

I listened to a bunch of interesting podcasts on the bike today.

1. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Point of Inquiry talking about the Pluto Files. I listened to the Pluto Files audio book last month while on holiday so was interesting to hear this interview. Unsurprisingly (CFI is a secular lobby org) they got to talking about ‘teach the controversy’- the answer of course… there is no controversy. (Cool shirts here for all of you readers who think the earth is older than 10,000 years… and yes I do have readers who think it’s less than 10,000 years old.)
2. Charles Platt talking about Working at Wal-Mart on Econtalk. I found this very interesting if maybe a little shallow. Platt worked at Wal-Mart for a week which I don’t think really qualifies him to reach some of the conclusions he did. Nevertheless a interesting interview particularly about the aggressive devolution of tactical decision making at Wal-Mart.
3. Professor Doug Richards on TVO Big Ideas as part of their best lecturer series. Richards is a Bio-mechanist and was talking about stretching. An interesting topic given how much my legs were hurting at this point in time. F couple of interesting ideas I drew from this lecture.
1. I think there are some great opportunities to build on the use of Elasticity when I talk about cloud computing to use other metaphors from materials science- viscosity, plasticity…. look out for an interesting blog post on this some time.
2. It confirmed my feelings that whitewater kayakers (of which I am one) should be VERY careful when stretching their shoulders. I’m a big believer that shoulder stretching is actually qhite risky for paddlers as it means we end up with shoulder joints far more prone to dislocation.
4. Austin Dacey on Point of Inquiry talking about the United Nations ‘Human Rights’ Council and the Religious Defamation resolution. As you’d expect, my position on this is that it’s a steaming pile of manure and I do also agree with Dacey that hate speech laws in general are free speech stifling bullshit. The answer is more speech not less speech. I’ve not listened to Point of inquiry for a while and it was good to get back to listening to some of these again.
5. I finished with making a start on this weeks Economist which is my regular read. I got through the whole of the technology quarterly on my Friday ride.