Bicycle pedal care

I mostly get around on bicycle. I'm a bicyclist in the sense that it is my primary means of transportation, but I'm definitely not an enthusiastic bicyclist in the sense that I want to spend time on my bicycle. I want my bicycle to be as care-free and as cheap as possible. Yes, these two can easily be at odds, but they can also go together. For instance, some of the low-weight, high-speed bicycle gear is definitely not care-free.

Now when it comes to the pedals, there are a couple of things I've learned from 20 years of maintenance.

Which ones to buy

First, there are two kinds of cheap pedals. There are the ultra cheap ones that claim to be completely sealed, hence needing no maintenance.

This turns out to be a lie. The sealing means that it is really difficult to maintain them, but it does not stop water from leaking in and ruining the oiling of the ball bearings.

It took me some years to understand how, but I think it's simply a basic physical property of the metal that when you apply pressure to it, it will flex just a tiny amount, and that tiny amount is enough to let water in when you're bicycling in wet weather.

So eventually, the drive train starts creaking, and it turns out it's the pedals, and then it is really difficult to get any kind of greasing into them, so you end up having to buy new ones. I thought for some years that this was okay, due to the low price. But for me it's really just cumbersome (buying stuff takes time) and distasteful to have to discard a big lump of metal each year.

And it turns out there is another kind of cheap, just slightly less cheap, pedal which allows you to remove the end cap that faces outwards so you can easily get to the ball bearings. That end cap is not under pressure, so I don't think it makes the pedal more leaky, but it does make it trivial to get the ball bearings re-oiled. So these pedals last a lot longer.

Preventive maintenance

One thing I did learn is that pedals is a wear part. In retrospect that should not be surprising, after all it's the main interface for transferring power from your body to the bicycle. So you need to be able to take pedals off, even if it's just for oiling.

Unfortunately, pedals can get stuck pretty hard on the pedal arms. It probably does not help that many pedal arms are made of aluminium while the cheap pedals are steel, so they tend to grow fond of each other.

So, first, when you screw in pedals, give the thread a bit of oil to try to prevent the metals from exchanging electrons.

Then, and here comes the repetitive part, each time you fix something unrelated on the bicycle, take a wrench, give the pedal a nudge so it is no longer tight, and tighten it up again.

You don't need to tighten it hard. So if you are a strong, independent, fair-skinned, but not pale, okay, perhaps somewhat pale, computer scientist like me, and do this a couple of times a year, it should untighten with a little nudge, no trouble at all. The whole procedure takes 10 seconds per pedal plus two minutes to find the wrench and put it back.

Wrenching pedals

The fun thing about pedals is that they turn around as you pedal. And if you think about it, they don't turn the same way with respect to their axle, since one axle is pointing to the right and the other to the left.

Now someone, and I suspect this happened early in the history of the pedalled bicycle, figured out that the spinning motion is great on the right side as it will tend to tighten in the pedal screw. At least when you pedal forwards, which I think we sort of standardized on.

But on the left side, the spinning motion will tend to unscrew the pedal. So on the left side, the thread is flipped so that it also gets to enjoy this tightening goodness. As a consequence you need to wrench the pedal the opposite direction on the left pedal - it has a links (left) thread, not a right one.

So this is why you don't need to tighten the pedals more than a gentle nudge, despite the forces involved in pedaling.

It also means that left and right pedals are not interchangeable. They are usually marked with L(eft) and R(ight). If you don't pay attention to this, you can easily destroy the thread on a soft aluminium pedal arm.

As for the wrench itself, back in the day, there used to be very little space between the pedal and the pedal arm so people would have special, thin pedal wrenches. Combine that with stuck pedals, and you would be sure to have a sad experience.

But all the cheap pedals I've bought over the past 15 years have had plenty of space for a standard 15 mm wrench/spanner, which I also use for the bolts on the back wheel axle. So no need for special equipment.

Daniel Schmachtenberger and civilization

I recently came across this interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger which I really enjoyed, partly because it concerns something I find myself spending more time thinking about, partly because of the absolutely attractive view of human that he is show casing through his attitude.

There are things in our modern life which we should be proud of, things that have been developed over centuries by us and the people before us. The internet is one example. Another is our governance structures, the refinement of which has prevented much suffering.

But there are also things that are dark. The are things that cause people suffering in new ways. Loss of meaning of life itself, replaced with void or empty consumerism, and loss of even the meaning of work. Corruption of the information that feeds our governance structures. Appraisal of comfort over long-term planning. Self-centered competition over compassion.

Daniel Schmachtenberger has the interesting take that our culture makes a difference to who we are. And even if we find it difficult to control ourselves and our emotions, we can change our culture and our environment.

Consumerism and alienation

Came across this quote, which is really one of the reasons my children are in the Waldorf kindergarten and school system:
“The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment…To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.”

― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

I don't think consumption itself is a problem. The problem is the attitude - if there is no thoughts about production, no consideration at all, then the result is a complete alienation towards the world. It is like existing in a prison, getting everything spoon-fed.

Danish blog

I finally got around to dusting off some notes I have taken over the past year or so and got my Danish blog published. I intend to use it for Danish things that just seem pointless to blog about in English, but it is currently mostly about the local Waldorf/Rudolf Steiner School that my oldest son attends.

What a dumb thing to say

Have you ever witnessed a stranger remark something and thought it to be a dumb thing to say?

I sometimes ponder that kind of sayings years later and realize that I was wrong: I was in fact the dumb one.

I couldn't see why it made sense at the time, either because I was not experienced enough, or because I was stuck in a certain mindset, or just didn't give it enough thought.

The world is beautiful

These days, realizations like these make me incredibly happy - the world suddenly grows more beautiful. 

And it can off-hand remarks, not intended to be deep, but just a reflection of a large sum of experiences.

For instance, one of the adults in the kindergarten my children attend once explained to me that you cannot really change the children in the kindergarten. They are who they are. But you can help them be the best version of themselves.

That really stuck with me. I think it sums up how to approach other people - we should always help them be the best version of themselves. Imagine a world where your partner, colleagues, managers, customers, students, shop assistants, everyone had the aim of helping you be the best version you could be in a given situation.

That's beautiful.

And the ability to see this is truly one of the gifts of growing older. I can understand things I couldn't understand before.

And when I get surprised by people who I believe should think better saying something that does not seem right, I try to spend my brain cycles on why they'd reach that conclusion rather than how wrong they are.

I'm finding that works really well when trying to come to terms with politics. Today I'm more interested in the politician than the party.

Internet culture

I love reading, I guess I am really a curious person. The internet is full of forums with people discussing all sorts of things, in great detail, donating their personal time to illuminate the rest of the world with their arguments and experiences, from a point of view that is hard to reproduce. For instance, I don't know how it's like to be an 18 year old girl. Or an investment banker.

But seeing things from their perspective is valuable. And I have participated myself too. Over the years, I must have written several thousands of posts here and there.

The interesting thing is that for me, replying makes the man-that's-dumb mistake harder. I don't like being wrong, so once I start a reply, somewhere an unconscious part of me starts wondering if I am really right, or whether there could perhaps be meaning somewhere in the words that seem so dumb.

In the end I often end up not clicking the submit button.

In some cases I have gone ahead, only to realize months later, to my great agony, that I was in fact the dumb one.

But when I then go back and look at the discussion thread again, I can see that often, it's not really a case of two people being stupid to each other, but more a resolvable failure of communication.

As I grow older and start condensing hard-earned truths myself, I'm starting to experience it from the other end - people who obviously think what I say is dumb because they do not appreciate the context. It can be really annoying if it's people I care about.

I need to work on my communication.

The reverse situation

In some sense, the reverse situation is much worse. I and everyone else think something sounds profound and correct and smart, only to realize, years later, that it is in fact pretty dumb.

When I do that myself, I'm somewhat happy that I can now see my mistake. But honestly, seeing other people do it makes me depressed.

When five becomes six

Janne woke me up saying she thought now was the time. But she wasn't sure. She had a few false starts, keeping her frem sleeping.

She did sound so as if this was different, though, so I started calling for help. She also called the midwives at the hospital who apparently didn't quite believe she was going to give birth yet.

Just before the help arrives, Lys woke up, so I had to comfort her. When I get up, Janne is weird - apparently she's less and less sure. But the rest of us think it's better if we just go so we arrive at the hospital 15 minutes later where the midwife examines her and concludes that she's ready to give birth as soon as the water breaks. Not long after, our fourth child is born, a son.

He's a bit blue but alright.

Unfortunately, Janne's uterus doesn't contract itself properly, so she looses too much blood, almost 1.5 liter they think, so there's a little emergency until the staff manages to get it to stop, partly by medication, partly by pushing down on her stomach.

They then kept her for a day for observation before releasing her and the child. That's now just about four weeks ago.

We're going to call him Dag - "day" in English.

Emotions and intuition

Not yet done with my layman journey into thought processing and intuition, my model is as follows: Thinking intuitively, you first acquire experience, probably mostly through trial-and-success/error, then let yourself pattern-match the situation at hand against this experience.

Now the funny thing is that, at least for me, when I need to evaluate several options, the way this pattern matching gets communicated up through the system is in many cases through emotions.

What I think is the right path makes me more calm and happy, whereas a path which I for some reason have had a bad experience with or expect to have will make me more anxious. Which actually makes sense. But it can come out in an incoherent way.

Incoherency

For instance, our course teacher at university in software management, an experienced and well-honed practitioner and pragmatic thinker once told us a story about a project which he ended it with a tired expression and the remark: "Just thinking about how to work with that is just almost unbearable."

I think what he meant to say was that going along that path would be long-winded and tedious. But what I actually understood from this was much simpler: his intuition had decided this was the wrong path and sent him a bunch of negative emotions instead of an honest, objective assessment. We didn't get facts, we got a tired expression.

Intuition can be right, and I certainly believe it was in his case, but bad at communication so you may end up with the wrong set of arguments for why. Which is not surprising if intuition is a complicated, haphazard pattern-matching process.

Now if the arguments are ideas, you can use logic to examine them and quickly discard those that are bogus, but it's much harder to work with emotions.

Emotional decision-making

While I believe that intuition is really powerful, much more powerful than logic when it comes to coming up with ideas and making decisions, emotions are certainly not something you want to be in control of decision making.

Emotions tend to make us, well, emotional.

There is a purpose to emotions. Hunger makes us look for food, excitement makes us focus and endure hardship, indifference or lazyness makes us conserve energy, fear makes us careful, affection makes us bond and mate, and hate and anger makes us defend ourselves and punish destructive antisocial behaviour.

But these are primitive mechanisms. You can see a house cat take a liking to the occupants of the house or a dog get angry at someone passing by too close to the territory. A person following only emotions is like an animal.

Emotions are simply not sophisticated enough devices. Following them makes for shortsighted decisions, although, ironically, they may serve a long-term goal - love for instance is certainly necessary for the survival of the human species.

Detachment

So while I'm still a firm believer of the power of intuition, I think it's important to be able to detach from the emotional aspect to get anywhere. So not get emotional, but instead listen to the conclusion and try to figure out if it is guided by experience or if it is simply an artifact of who you are.

This is to me a three-way paradox. Intuition can provide the answers but not explain them, emotions can communicate the answers but at the risk of leading straight into an emotional and uncooperative dead end, logic cannot provide the answers but perhaps offset the emotions and help dig up an explanation from the intuitive depths.

I don't think you can be an effective thinker without emotions, despite emotions being in some sense the antithesis of thinking.

As a side note, I think I should clarify that detaching oneself from an emotion is a tool to use in certain situations. Much of the joy being a human comes from immersing oneself in emotions. It's just that when it comes to making important decisions, it may be better to set aside the immediate joy, or fear for that matter, and look into the future. Even if you hate that person, is it really a good idea to act on it? Or even if you love that person, is it truly best for you to act on it? Maybe your fears are unfounded?