I don’t do Strava, but just under 5000 km this year and just under 100 km of climbing, about 60% road. Not bad for a first full year back on the bike since 1995, I feel.

3.5 hour road ride in the Peak. I particularly liked the headwind on the 20% gradient

Bit like threads really.

Do you suppose there’s a Corporate Bollocks Forum out there somewhere, which is where these ideas come from?

It could have subforums for ‘Management Speak’; ‘Rubbish Implementation of Great Ideas’; ‘How to Develop a Complete Lack of Understanding of what the Job is Actually Like’…………

I went M&S. Their sizing is a bit ‘Italian’ though so be prepared to size up a bit

Oooooh! You’re on a very slippery slope. That’s pretty much what I said two years ago, and I am now awaiting delivery of my fourth bike, which’ll give me two MTBs and two roadies, and have notched up more than 1000 miles off road and almost 2000 miles on road this year.

You’re dooomed, I tell you, doomed!!!!!

They aren’t necessarily just passive devices. There are a few bits and pieces of information out there in the public domain. Installing radiological and nuclear detection capability was called Project Cyclamen.

On the publication and citation points, it’s a very inexact science. A few random thoughts-

Different disciplines have very different expectations- synthetic chemistry can be: Make crystal, determine crystal structure, publish; rinse and repeat. Ten or a dozen papers from a thesis isn’t uncommon. By contrast, some of my better students have ended up boiling down 3-4 years of work and an entire PhD thesis into a single 20 page journal paper.

Size of research group is an important influence as stated above.

Biological sciences have been known to take the view ‘First author, last author or nowhere’. Other disciplines (e.g. geosciences) don’t seem to care. Computer sciences is all in conference proceedings; they don’t care about journals.

Citation rate is a very flawed metric because it depends strongly on the size of the global research community in that area. None of my most highly cited papers are actually in my main area of work (nuclear security and nuclear safety), though I would argue that area is far more important than the more highly cited sidelines. The problem is that there are very few sad nuclear obsessives out there, so you don’t tick up the citations.

Lots more I could say, but you’d all just get bored

I really like my new Stolen Goat Climb and Conquer jacket info here[/url]

Don’t use an old route. The quicksands and channels shift all the time. It is dangerous. Some of the channels were quite deep when I walked across so your bike would get well soaked in salty water too.

Out for a couple of hours on the roadie on Friday trying to get used to a radically different bike fit. Slogging up Long Hill out of Buxton leaning sideways into the crosswind was going well until the wind dropped for a second…..

Yesterday was a piece of brilliant timing, just ahead of the filthy weather in the afternoon. That was this winter’s first use of the bike as an icebreaker on the 25 m long, hub deep puddles, which led to the unique feeling of freezing water percolating slowly through your socks.

Quick swim round the Goyt valley

La la la la la…………..

Not thinking about it

@reggiegasket I know what you mean about the looks, and on the test ride it rode like a dream. Love at first sight!

reggiegasket- I’ve just cleaned out the bike fund for an Evoke, which is being built up as something of a best bike at the moment. Getting excited about its arrival in a week or two.

Not sure about commuting though, since I don’t think it’ll take guards?

ust taken delivery of a Whyte 629 to use primarily as my winter MTB. Putting 120mm forks and a dropper on it mind, should be good as it’s flippin’ long in the ETT, has a nicely slack HA and very low BB height.

I’m part way through upgrading a Whyte 529 for use as an all weather bike- XT brakes and drivetrain that came off another bike, Hope Wheels and, still to come, a half decent fork.

I really can’t understand why anyone would want multiple hardtails, but whatever floats your boat.

What!!!!!!!! You need at least two- a nice, light, fast one for summer trails and a rough, tough, all weather one you don’t mind crashing for mud, ice and snow. And that’s before you think of different wheel sizes on them.

On the other hand, being a 90% plus mincer, I don’t think I need a full sus bike at all……..

Race Face Ambush here. Great shorts but definitely quite generous sizing

I wore a Vulpine Original Rain Jacket for a wet MTB ride a couple of weeks ago and it worked well. For added MTB-ness I even crashed, whacking it on a rock and rolling into some brambles. It survived fine.

Well, if the standard work week is 37.5 hours, this is an 80% appointment and would pay about £ 12 k a year before tax etc

I appreciate what you say, deviant, but I have two similar hardtails. One is a decent but pretty basic one with alloy frame and wheels; the other is a carbon framed, carbon wheels job which has just had XT 11 speed fitted. The fancy one is probably 4 or 5 x the price of the alloy though the alloy one is definitely enough bike for my standard of riding. I use both on rides from home and the time taken is very similar, but the carbon feels light and quick, whereas the alloy one feels heavy and sluggish. The times say there’s no real difference in performance but there’s a big difference in enjoyment.

Newfield Inn in Seathwaite has a couple of self-catering flats. A bit different from the usual Lake District honeypots

So guess which STW thread I really shouldn’t have let Mrs dpfr see……….

Mine certainly isn’t unwanted. I have just reset my attitude after a couple of heavy work days with a two hour blast on my HT 29er- farm tracks, forest roads, moorland paths, bridleways, autumn mist, deer, cows and calves, Canada geese, nuthatches, skylarks, migrating swallows. All grumps gone. Couldn’t ask for more.

They come through our village on Friday morning, just about when I need to leave to bike down to the physio. I have a feeling I might be shown up big time.

I find anything above 100 feet per mile is pretty tough, and I do a lot fewer than 198 miles in a ride. The Highland Trail 550 works out at just under 100 feet climbing per mile. So the climb per mile in your route is quite a lot, and the number of miles will make it seriously hard.

I’m quite close to writing a big cheque to Enigma for something that would probably be my contribution to the ‘money no object’ thread. The one dealbreaker for me is disc brakes- I wouldn’t dream of anything else. I’ve been riding on the road round the Dark Peak with hydraulic discs since the start of the year and they are just so consistent.

plotaroute.com

So my path down the slippery slope over the last 18 months is-

The ‘Return to biking after a very long time away from it’ entry level mountain bike 0.75%
The ‘I’m really quite enjoying this; I’ll get a much nicer mountain bike’ 3%
The ‘Maybe I should try road riding too’ bike 2.3%

Now I have reached the points of

The ‘I need to upgrade the first mountain bike to make a decent all weather one for winter’ 1.5%

and

The ‘I’m enjoying road riding as well but I remember that lovely titanium roadie I had all those years ago so maybe I should get another one’- somewhere around 5.5%

Plus about 5% more on gear, and bits and pieces

Don’t tell my wife!

Now I have the repaired Solace back, a blat round the Goyt in the (forecast) bright sunshine

White Hart at Bouth is a good pub, but I’d push on to Spark Bridge, where the Royal Oak does very good food. Game pie yum yum!

Or, put another way – you haven’t been trying.

That may actually be the truth.

I believe the active chemical in drain unblocker (diluted) also works

Many drain cleaners contain strong sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) solutions, which would be good at dissolving greasy crap but wouldn’t do much to steel corrosion products and will irretrievably damage aluminium alloys. I’d be cautious about this one, without knowing what drain cleaner and on what it was used.

Tempting as it is, today’s road bike rear derailleur implosion, and fallout damage to wheel and cassette, means there are other calls on my wallet.

I do not know how it happened…….

I have a pair which I can’t quite decide about, but they are on a bike used for rubbish conditions riding so I may be blaming them for all sorts of other things?

I was once shown round a lab in the former East Germany which was a very very sophisticated setup for making radioactively labelled molecules “in former times”. I didn’t understand at the time why they had been making those types of compounds there because it was nothing to do with the other activities on the site and then, a few days later, the penny dropped- that was where they had been developing the PEDs for the state sponsored doping programme.

Didgerman- I think the G-150 is now the G-160. A bit of info here[/url]

There’s also a photo of a very pink bike

Feeling sorry for myself as I try and shift a revolting food poisoning bug

Plotaroute worked it out, shortly before exploding, but it seemed to find some interesting highways and byways, especially if set for a walking route. It came up with 1420 miles, but most of the 28000 feet of climb is in the first 400 miles, so after that, it’s just 1000 miles of cruising.

Well at least I got to test my nice new waterproof jacket yesterday. It lasted almost 2 hours before staring to leak in

I currently have a titanium itch which may just have to be scratched with an Enigma Evoke