Magic Spot Flowing

I was looking at a Netflix flier on M’s floor this morning and remarked “Funny they say that the plans start at 4.99 per month when the 4.99 plan really isn’t all that useful.” Then I thought, well, the 4.99 plan is 1 movie at a time, 2 per month. How often do I really exceed that? Right now I can have two out at a time, but I barely watch one per month on average. I do like having the choice of two movies, but practically speaking I don’t need the plan I have. Except that if I were sick or something, I’d want to be able to watch a lot of movies quickly. But Netflix allows you to change your plan pretty much whenever you want, I think (maybe not more often than once a month, but still). You can get an extra movie for a pro-rated amount of the next-higher plan for the remainder of the month, if you decide you need one.

As I was thinking about this, I made a connection to the complaint made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that the car has limited range (and the EV1, specifically, also had limited space). I tend to be confused people’s attachment to having a car that goes hundreds of miles and stores four people and a bunch of cargo when 90% of the time they go under 30 miles and carry one person and a tiny amount of cargo (a job that could easily be done by a bike, SmartCar, or other small vehicle). But here I am, making the analogous decision with my Netflix account.

I told this to M and he remarked that it’s a principle of system design: do you design for peak load, or average load? And there’s a definite desire to design and select for a system that handles peak load, so that the system never fails, even under peak circumstances. If you have the extra resources, why not design for peak load? It’s a psychological thing. We want the system that never fails, so that we can have just one system, and not have to think about having multiple systems, or cleverly designing the system to reduce peak load. It’s a sensible decision in many ways. It’s just that sometimes the consequences are not desirable.

Can we convince ourselves to accept peak restrictions so that the overall system can be more efficient? If my Netflix choice is any indication, it’s pretty hard.

I’ve been paying some attention to the news coverage of the Tour of California prologue that I volunteered for on Sunday, and I’ve wound up pretty disappointed. If the Merc is going to put Ann Killion in the main section, then they should ask her to give a wider coverage of the event and not just cover the sports aspects (or ask someone else to collaborate). And her article had such a heavy focus on doping that it didn’t even really cover the race at all. So we get a main section article that’s basically about the politics of the sport, and not about the event at all. The Palo Alto Daily News focused on the effect on local businesses, safety, and the cost of the event. The pre-event coverage in both papers, with the exception of one article about the bike parking published about a week before the event, was all about road closures and hassle, and none of the articles bothered to mention that there would be free guarded and valet bike parking for hundreds of bikes, so that you could forget the worries of driving and just show up on your bike. In a city and on a campus where parking is scarce most of the time, and for an event where bicycles and people on them are the main attraction, it’s mystifying that not only the parking, but that whole aspect of the event was practically ignored.

What I enjoyed most about the event and volunteering, since I don’t pay much attention to the racing, was that bikes were a big part of the scene. People rode slowly through the crowds, parked their bikes in the SVBC corrals, leaned their bikes against a tree, held them while they chatted with friends, compared them, looked at gear for them, admired them. I saw everything — folders, beaters, commuters, old-fashioned road bikes, AL-carbon and all-carbon racing bikes. Crazy tire colors, custom paint jobs, interesting handlebars. Bikes with baskets, panniers, and Burleys. Kids road and mountain and just regular kids bikes. People rode in lycra and in jeans, in sandals and in special bike shoes. Every bike was doing the right job for the person riding it. There was a pervasive joyous feeling that comes from getting a lot of people who love doing the same thing together to watch the people at the pinnacle of the shared activity. None of that really came through in the news coverage, especially not the news that hundreds of people rode their bikes to, through, and at the event, like it was just the most normal thing in the world.

Update: My SVBC mail alerted me to the fact that had I read the news on President’s Day, I would have seen a much more positive spin on the Tour, even mentioning our valet bike parking. Go, PADN, for an actual article about the actual event.

I’ve been known to complain about the lack of bike advocacy and neglect of bike commuting by racers, particularly Lance Armstrong, since he’s got such a high profile. But Armstrong is stepping up, opening a bike shop that’ll sell a lot of different kinds of bikes and equipment as well as serve as a bikestation. He’s advocating for more cycling and better cycling conditions in Austin, especially downtown. Very cool!

I’m having one of those “peculiarly wide awake at 5am” times, so I thought I’d do my first 101 post on this blog, for visiting the Museum of the African Diaspora this weekend. It’s a nice place, but I didn’t realize that their current exhibition wasn’t quite current yet, and it’s a very small museum (because it’s new), so I ended up a bit disappointed. The exhibit will be called Africa.com (though their title is AFRICA.dot.COM, but I can’t help reading that as “Africa dot dot dot com”), about communication from prehistoric times to now. I hope to go back for it.

They did have some interesting content, and I liked the fact that they have three different aspects of diaspora that they focus on: the origin and spead of humans out of Africa, the modern diaspora during colonial and slave-holding times, and the current diaspora through emigration. They had some informative videos about food, some focusing on dishes (gumbo, beans and rice), and some on a particular food (peanuts, greens, yams). There was also a lot of information about African-influenced music, including some material about symphonic and choral music that I particularly liked.

We also watched a longer video about Toussaint L’Ouverture, a person who was entirely new to me.

Besides it being small, some of the material shows low production quality, which was probably the most disappointing aspect. Lots of weird superimposed animations. Photoshop effect isn’t quite the right word, but whatever the equivalent for video is. And the longer video had a lot of faux drama at the expense of conveying more information. The real story is dramatic enough; I didn’t really appreciate the faux drama.

They also have a nice museum store. I spent a long time looking at What the World Eats while my mom checked out bracelets. And the photomosaic of the African child that is their logo is reproduced large so that you can see it across the street in its entirety, but you can also see all the photos up close, which was really cool. The museum definitely has potential.