They are eye-wateringly expensive at full price, and as they are OEM on very few bikes you don’t tend to see them cheap online.

Only reason I can think of is worries over customer perceptions that it may take 3 seconds longer to remove the back wheel compared with vertical dropouts.

Hmm, it’s not just a matter of perception, if you are only ever running with gears the slot dropouts are extra hassle for zero benefit.

You are imagining things citizen, everyone knows shimano brakes never go wrong, please report for re-education immediately.

Paying for pirated music?!? The mind boggles…

You can’t transmit information faster than the speed of light, but that doesn’t forbid the expansion of space-time at FTL speeds.

You do not “pay bloody taxes to the BBC” – the licence fee is optional.

It’s not exactly optional though. It’s a fee that is charged for one thing (receiving broadcast TV), but is paid (largely) to only one supplier of broadcast TV. It’s a ridiculous mess that would be more fairly funded by general taxation.

Assuming that the BBC was no more and that the TV licence was scrapped, do you think that Sky would let you watch their channels free of charge?

Strangely enough no, I don’t think they would. I wouldn’t pay for sky either way though, so this is totally irrelevant.

Hmm I believe this sort of thing is more normally referred to as a “charge”.

I think you’ll find it’s a licence, since you are so fond of pedantry.

Hmm you really don’t understand what taxation is, do you.

Yes well done, it’s not literally a tax in a technical sense, just something you are legally obliged to pay if you want to watch TV. Effectively it might as well be a tax though (and a regressive one at that).

What’s actually happening here is that the BBC is too good for it’s competitors

It doesn’t have any competitors, given that it’s funded by taxation.

I used mine for the transwales this year, they are very versatile.

I imagine that is something you don’t have to worry about too often

Meow!

If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right…

A tiger?

AFAIK, “The electrons aren’t “orbiting” as such”. But I think they tell you this to stop you wondering why they don’t fall into the nucleus (because it’s massive and opposite charge).

That’s not the problem, the attractive force towards the centre is exactly what allows things to orbit. The problem is classically the electrons should emit electromagnetic radiation as they are accelerated round the orbit, and hence lose energy and spiral into the nucleus. They are still called orbitals as a hangover of the classical picture.

Actually come to think of it, I don’t see any niche bikes when out riding. Obviously niche bikering is more of an online phenomenon than a real life activity or it wouldn’t be niche
but I’ve not even seen a mong-one ‘in the flesh’ let alone the more exotic brands (and this is coming from a PA rider so I’m not a big-brand snob).

Where do you normally ride? In the peaks I see a fair few 29ers and you can barely move for on-ones…

As I understand it, an atom is made up of a nucleus of neutrons and protons, with a load of electrons orbiting it.

It’s not really. That is a classical view of the atom, which would indeed suggest the electrons would spiral into the middle. Hence quantum physics.

The only fair comparison would be from riders who regularly ride both 26ers and 29ers.

I have 2 26ers and 2 29ers, although they are all set up differently so still not a very fair comparison.

I still VERY rarely see any 29ers though out on my local trails – South Downs and Surrey Hills.

They are just bikes with slightly bigger wheels, it’s easy not to notice them.

With regards to the changes? Couldn’t give a monkeys

Why have you bought them if you have no interest in the films?

Even if you believe in god, you can’t say god created man,

I think you’ll find you can, God laughs at your puny restrictions on what it can or can’t do!

While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be moving away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light (meaning that one cannot be observed from the other). The size of the observable universe could thus be smaller than the entire universe.

It is also possible for a distance to exceed the speed of light times the age of the universe, which means that light from one part of space generated near the beginning of the Universe might still be arriving at distant locations (hence the cosmic microwave background radiation). These details are a frequent source of confusion among amateurs and even professional physicists.[1] Interpretations of the metric expansion of space are an ongoing subject of debate.

From the font of all knowledge, ie wikipedia.

is daft

Like this entire thread then!

with pockets full of keys and multitool?

No worse than falling on jersey pockets, you want to put your stuff in a nice, safe camelbak.

I haven’t seen it yet but surely if it’s not recorded in blu ray then all they can do is clean it up etc??

It was filmed on film, funnily enough. Effectively a much higher resolution than bluray.

Leathery-arsed freaks, that’s who!

Get a singlespeed instead. Lighter, cheaper, more reliable.

If the zip goes just send them back for a warranty replacement. I find they work pretty well, although a pair of proper winter boots would doubtless be better.

If my head was hard enough to take 15 hammer blows without serious injury, I wouldn’t bother wearing a helmet either!

racing isn’t about the trails, it’s about yourself. It’s about personal development and the desire to be the best you can.

That’s no doubt true for some people, but if you want to attract lots more people to races then making the courses fun seems like a very good idea. The brownbacks races are a good example of this, both in terms of the available trails and the way they change the course around to keep it interesting.

The problem is not about ‘Oh the fit boys go too fast’, or ‘The tech sections are too techy or not techy enough’, it’s about the people who ride mountain bikes today; they don’t do racing, they do drive to place, ride/push big bikes slowly up and come down fast then repeat until cake, then drive home.

Is this actually a problem though? I mean clearly people like this aren’t going to be the next generation of top XC riders, but then it seems highly unlikely that they would have been anyway. There are still plenty of people who like racing, I don’t see that the existence of the more recreational riders makes any difference.

That’s odd – mine can be used to trim the mech as it has loads of ‘clicking’ points between the 3 positions which move the mech only a tiny bit. Maybe a newer version?

Yeah, I was surprised, I have an old X7 one with the multiple clicks. It was cheap from Merlin…

Chubby baggy suited clowns, blah blah camelbak blah

What has this got to do with the number of top level XC racers in the UK?

ability to trim front mech with left hand shifter

I got some 9 speed X0’s, but the LH shifter only has 3 positions, so I can’t trim the mech! I was most aggrieved, had to set the mech up properly after all.

Yeah hopefully, I seem to be recovered at last!

Might be worth taking the cranks off to check I’m right…

PF30 is the 1st one you linked to, the pressfit cups.

I tried out some Hope M4s with 203mm rotors at each end and my Formulas stopped me far quicker and in a more controlled manner.

Nice sample size of 1 there! I have tried K24’s on a friends bike, they were terrifyingly poor, yet I have hopes on 3 bikes that all work perfectly well…

Might be air leaking from the +ve to the -ve chamber? Mine are doing much the same thing, going to send them back while they are still under warranty. It’s not a good sign even if they are otherwise working ok.

Unless you like lots of calls to the Hope service department, that is….

Only if you are a ham-fisted incompetent!

Hope brakes are great, but if the oro’s are that much cheaper then fair enough. I have a friend with K24’s that are a nightmare, hard to bleed, squeally, weak and eat pads. Presumably they aren’t all like thet though.

Maths is just a model which attempts to explain the real world

This is the bit I disagree with. As a statement, it is simply incorrect. However, if you replace the word maths with physics, it would be a perfectly good statement.

As a very simple example, you can define all sorts of different geometries, all of which are mutually inconsistent with each other hence at most only one of them representing the real world. They would all be mathematically valid however.

Maths is just a model which attempts to explain the real world

You’ll have to translate this sentence then.

and I would suggest they still are a model of something real.

What are they a model of? Even if you consider the real numbers to be models of “real” things, maths is obviously far more than merely real numbers.