Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been thinking about quitting Facebook for years. Who hasn’t? When I started thinking about it, it was because the site was so addictive, and I was wasting so much time there. But could I walk away from all those fun interactions with my friends? Plus, it would surely get better and more fun over time, right?

Of course, it has only gotten worse. Meaningful interactions with friends have plummeted, and they’ve been replaced with ads, political rantings, carefully crafted self-promotion, and an ever rising sea of what can only be described as utter bullshit.

Still, through it all, there have been a few people on FB I genuinely want to hear from, so I’ve stuck with the platform.

But I think what has finally convinced me to pull the plug is that the dopamine hit of the red Facebook alert has mutated into a pulse of dread. The chance that red notification indicates that someone has commented on my post, or written me personally has basically dropped to near zero. Instead, the majority of Facebook notifications are for some action Facebook itself wants me to take (pay to get more likes on your page!), or an event I’ll never go to, or just the boring, content-free, pointless, “like.” — one of several Facebook innovations vying for the title of Facebooks Worst Contribution to Society.

The platform is also just positively dreary, and getting more so every day. I mean, you want to have a threaded conversation? You want to format a post? You want to control and filter your news feed? At this point, I think we can all see that none of things — elements that are the basic tools of people who actually want to communicate — are ever coming. I marvel at how so many talented people working in concert can produce such an utterly loathsome final product. I even wonder if Facebook itself is an experiment in determining how much degradation users will absorb before they abandon a platform and its powerful network effects. A lot, it turns out!

As it happens, I won’t actually be quitting Facebook. I curate a few pages there for professional or business reasons, and, as far as I can tell, I must do so through my linked personal account. But I have already curtailed posting on FB, and I will be checking in less, too.

I still want to hear from you! If you want to get a hold of me, and know my real identity, I encourage you to contact me using Plain Old Email, or send me an SMS or Google Chat. If you contact me on FB, it might be awhile before you hear back. For those that don’t know me personally, you can reach me right here on this blog.

Speaking of Tools of Our Tools. You may be wondering whether I will attempt to revive this blog. I don’t know. I started blogging with a desire to foster good-faith, minimally interested (though, hopefully interesting!) discussions on topics about which I care. The past few years have witnessed nothing but a withering, ceaseless assault on the kind of honest discussion I enjoy, making this blog ever more quixotic.

On the other hand, maybe rather than helping save the world, blogging is just about saving my own sanity.

What would you recommend?

Many of the people who commit atrocities want notoriety. Either they’re trying to spread their message of hate, or they just want to be a household name.

Let’s not give them what they want.

I’ve adapted the code from another popular browser extension, so that it completely blacks out the name of many infamous murders from the websites you visit.

It’s simple and effective. I took the list of people to block — all racially and religiously motivated murders — from this Wikipedia page.

Chrome Extension here:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/black-out-hate/mamlgmbodnjnfpcgipikejpihmaaeogf

Firefox Extension here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/black-out-hate/

Code here:
https://github.com/djacobow/blackouthate

The Setup

Last year I designed and built a fun little electronic trinket that I shared with friends and family. A lot of people told me that I should try selling it. I didn’t think I could make a lot of money this way, but I thought it might be fun and a good learning experience to dip my toe into entrepeneurship, so I decided, sure why not?

The first batch of trinkets I had assembled by hand, but this batch I would pay to have assembled. This means a fair bit of work, finding an assembly house, cleaning up the design, refining the bill of materials, and interacting repeatedly with the assembler to answer their questions and make requested changes to the design.

Fast forward a few months and a couple of thousand dollars, and I was the proud owner of a couple of boxes of shiny trinkets. Well … almost. I needed to do some final assembly, program the microcontrollers, and test the devices. I also needed to bag them and add labels that point to my website. Oh, did I mention? I needed to build a website, too.

In total, I probably have spent dozens of late-night hours on this, but it was kinda, sort entertaining. Finally, I was ready to send these pups over to Amazon and let the magic happen, right?

Are we having fun yet?

Well, no. My plan all along was to send a big box of these to Amazon and sell them there, with them taking their cut and doing all the shipping.

So I logged into Amazon “Seller Central” and started creating my account. They asked for so much personal information that I repeatedly had to stop myself and check the site certificate to see if I was being fished. They wanted:

• SSN
• copy of driver’s license or passport
• bank account number
• copy of bank or credit card statements

Nervously, I uploaded all that junk, and waited for the nice login prompt telling me that I could start to create my listings.

Roadblock

Instead, I got a short message saying that my documents were not in order, and my identity could not be validated. Please go back and fix it. Actually, I’ll reproduce the contents of this message here because it is totally generic:

Thinking that was odd, I logged in again, and uploaded different scans of the same documents.

Rejected. Same message.

A different bank statement?

Rejected.

Passport instead of driver’s license? Credit card statement?

Rejected.

How about photos instead of scans? Scans instead of photos? With flash, without? Color, black and white, color photos of black and white documents?

Rejected, rejected, rejected.

At this point, I have wasted three days and literally provided them with my credit card statement, bank statement, California driver’s license, and US passport. All rejected with the same terse response.

What’s funny is that there is literally nothing left for me to do. There is only one me. I have one name, one SSN, one address. I have already given them all the documents I have. I mean, I literally cannot establish my identity better than I have already done.

Amazon provides absolutely no option for redress. No email. No phone number. No help chat. Nothing.

Wait, you say: why not go on the support forums and complain? Because the support forums are only accessible by people who have passed this step.

So, I guess I won’t be selling on Amazon.

The whole episode has been infuriating, to say the least and I am just astounded by a system that provides absolutely no opportunity for escalation. (I’ve been told by that my best hope at this point is that I can get people upset on social media.)

I’ve been an Amazon customer for almost as long as they’ve been in business, and I’ve easily spent tens of thousands of dollars there over the years. It had always been a great company to work with — as a customer, but as a partner, or in this case, potential partner, I’ve never witness such abject contempt for the user.

I think it’s telling when some companies treat vendors badly. It’s sort of the corporate version of “kissing-up and punching down.” Of course, Wal-Mart is famous for it. Apple has also been rather conspicuously developer hostile (and why there are no Safari extensions from ToolsOfOurTools). I did not know about Amazon. Now I do.

And I have to say, the bad taste left in my mouth after this episode will cause me to rethink doing any business at Amazon.

Plenty of people have written about the fact that in a world of companies selling IOT hardware, there is little or no incentive for them to maintain the software running on that hardware. Those people are right. But not only is there little incentive, keeping an IOT device current is actually fiendishly difficult — as I was reminded this past weekend.

Background

I have an IOT alarm clock I built myself, back in 2011. It was based around a Raspberry Pi Model 1B, running Raspbian Wheezy. The software I wrote to imeplement the clock is simple, consisting of three major components:

1. An interface to the Google Calendar API, so it knows when I want to get up
2. An interface to an LCD Display so I can see the time and see when it plans to wake me next.
3. An interface to GPIO to drive a solenoid, which rings a physical chime. I wasn’t going for a wimpy electronic beeping; I wanted some Zen-level physical dinging.

Now, when I created this clock about seven years ago, my go-to language for this sort of thing was Perl. You can quibble with that choice, but Perl was my Swiss army knife at the time, and it also solved certain problems that other languages didn’t. For one, Perl has a fantastic no-no

nsense library for wrapping C code: Inline. You can basically “inline” C function right in your Perl, and it “just works.” This was really important for talking to the chip GPIO for the dinger and for the LCD, which were supported only in C — at the time.

One drawback of using Perl is that Google has never supported it for accessing their APIs. That is, Perl can generate an HTTP transaction just as well as the next language, but Google also provides nice wrapper code for a list of languages which they’ve made it pretty clear will never, ever include Perl. But someone else had written a similar wrapper for Perl, so I grabbed that and got things up and running. Over the years, that has turned out to be a pain as Google has revamped their Calendar API twice in that time, and my clock just broke each time. Fixing it as a pain, but I did it just to keep the project running.

Let’s get current!

So, on Friday, after thinking about all the exploits floating around and the fact that I was running a full-fledged OS on a clock on my home network, I decided I should really update all the software on the clock. Raspbian had moved from Debian 7 (Wheezy) to Debian 8 (Jessie) to Debian 9 (Stretch) in the intervening years, so the first step was to update the OS. Twice.

This went poorly. The update process was excruciatingly slow on this single-core processor, taking hours, and occasionally stopping entirely to ask me a question (“you want to overwrite this file?”). I managed to get the first update done, but the second update died entirely when the SD card holding everything filled up after the installer decided it needed to create a huge swapfile.

So I got a new SD card and installed Stretch on that cleanly. It was also pretty quick, and if you do a network install, you won’t need to do any package updates immediately after. (Microsoft could learn a lesson from that.) After the OS came up, I copied over my software and tried to get it running. No dice.

You won’t be surprised to hear that some things had changed:

• The Perl libraries for Google had changed quite a bit over the years, so installing the new ones generated a bunch of errors. Overall, the main pain in this was that some of these libraries can be found in the Raspbian package manager, and some need to be installed from cpan. I prefer OS repository packages when available because they update along with the OS. Everything I install from cpan is just a snapshot that may may need to be installed after the next OS update, and worse, experience shows that the installation process can sometimes go from simple to epic if some underlying untracked dependency changes. But when you install from cpan, it installs dependency from cpan, even if the dependencies can be found in the OS repos. This basically sucks.

  Anyway, the changes in the Perl libraries were mostly for the better, to make the Perl API better map to the way Google worked, but still, it required digging into my old Perl code and looking at the Google docs.

• The LCD interface is in two parts. A C-based daemon from a package called lcdproc, and my client code in Perl that talks to the daemon. For the new OS I needed to rebuild that daemon from source. Luckily, lcdproc had not advanced in 7 years, so I could just rebuild the old code.  This was particularly lucky because I had made a big patch to the hardware driver to talk to my particular i2c expander that drover the LCD controller. I’m glad I did not have to figure out how to apply that patch to some completely new, changed version.
• Raspbian Stretch switched from System V init to systemd, so my startup stuff, which was init based needed to be changed to systemd unit files. This was not too painful, and I actually like systemd for daemons, but it took a little while to create the files, set permissions, fix my mistakes, yadda.

  Overall, this whole project was not really that complicated in retrospect, but taking more or less an entire weekend day, it sure felt like a never-ending series of missteps and annoyances.

Getting Really Current

I should probably rewrite the clock in Python.

• Python now has a mature library for talking to Raspberry Pi GPIO. It’s clean and simple.
• Python has always had better Google integration, courtesy of Google. It would a pleasure to switch to this.
• I had already written Python bindings to talk to the LCD daemon. I don’t remember doing that, but apparently this is not the first time I’ve considered doing a Python rewrite.

But there are two roadblocks. First, technically, being a clock, this code is time-sensitive, and so the Perl version has multiple threads. There is basically a thread that increments every second and various worker threads. The modern Pythonic way to accomplish the same thing (without threads — which Python has never done well and never will) is to use asyncio. Not to get into the details too deep, but I have some issues with asyncio. It’s complicated and it requires an all-or-nothing approach. Your whole program, even the non async parts need to be asyncio-ified, because they will otherwise block the parts that are.

Second, I just don’t want to. Writing code that does the same thing as other code is no fun.

Alas

Anyway, today my alarm clock works exactly as it did in 2011, but it is running on a current version of Perl with current libraries on a current OS. It only took me the better part of my weekend. 🙁

Whose going to do this for the IOT power outlet or window shade controller you bought at Fry’s?

Are you familiar with Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies? These are currencies not supported by any government, which can be traded anonymously and somewhat frictionlessly. They are gaining traction among people who want to make illegal transaction, who want to avoid taxes, and who just want freedom. And now, increasingly they are being used not as a currency for trade, but as an investment. As a result, people are working hard to make more Bitcoin, which is a complex mathematical operation called mining. Some organizations have set up huge computer farms employing custom hardware to do nothing more than mine bitcoin.

And now, reports are surfacing that various websites are embedding javascript in their files that surreptitiously mine bitcoin on your computer while you read their site. When I first heard of this, I was rather upset. After all, big, evil website people are using a facility in my browser to run code on my computer that doesn’t benefit me in any way! They are stealing my cpu, making my computer sluggish, and costing me real money in wasted power. On a cell phone, they’re even draining my battery? How dare they?

[ Also, from a pure engineering standpoint, when there are people out there using special-purpose computer chips to mine Bitcoin, can it possibly make sense to try to do the same using Javascript on my cellphone? The answer is yes, if you’re not they one paying for the phone or the electricity. ]

Anway, after some time, I calmed down and realized that this isn’t so bad, and it could even be … good?

You see, one cannot look at something we don’t like in a vacuum. It must be compared to real alternatives. We hear over and over from the advertising industry that websites need to make money. (not this one — ed.) That’s what pays for the content, the computers, and the personnel. Ads make the “free” Internet as we know it possible.

But ads suck. They are ugly and intrusive. They involves a third party — the advertiser in every page I visit. There’s me, there’s the website, and then there’s this guy over in the corner who wants to sell me viagra. Because the money is coming from the advertiser, he gets a say in the content of the site. Furthermore, he gets to know that I visited the site, and can start to collect all kinds of information on my browsing history, eventually creating a dossier on my personal habits that he will use to target me for the rest of my life. And finally, he gets to suck up my cpu cycles and my limited screen real estate in order to serve me his ads. It’s maddening!

I don’t like it, have never liked it, and would much prefer a subscription supported Internet. But that’s never going to happen, so I’m told.

So how is letting people mine bitcoin better?

• no screen real-estate
• no data collection
• no third party

Sure, they’re sucking up my CPU and battery just as the advertisers, but probably no worse, and perhaps that’s a fair price to pay.

Now, there are some problems with this approach that would have to be dealt with. First, I’m not sure Bitcoin mining is really a productive use of CPU cycles, and Bitcoin may itself be just a flash in the pan. So perhaps the world will consider other, better ways to monetize my cpu cycles, maybe selling them to someone like AWS or Google, which will then remarket them for normal productive purposes. Second, I think for such a system to be fair, the user’s need to know what is going on. There should be a way to know what a site is “costing” you. And finally, we need an easy and straightforward way for users to say “no”, and then, of course, the website would be perfectly in their rights to say “no” to serving up content. Turning off Javascript entirely is not a great solution, as Javascript is just too embedded in modern web to give up.

So, here’s a business idea for you. Create a company that offers websites to host the company’s javascript on their sites in return for payment. No data is collected, but CPU cycles are consumed if the user allows it, and the site owner is informed if they do not. The syndicate in turn remarkets the CPU cycles as a service to customers, something lightweight and context-free, like Amazon Lambda.

Electricity started out with small local generators, even “home” generators, then increasingly centralized for a long time, and today, there is a big push for “distributed” generation, which is basically decentralized power generation, but maintaining a connection to the power grid.

Computing started out small on home computers and has become increasingly centralized in big data centers. Will the next step to reverse that pattern?

The business model for smart devices in the home is shaping up to be simple and bad: cheap hardware and no service contracts. That sounds great for consumers — after all, why should I pay $100 for a smart power outlet made of a $0.40 microcontroller and a $1 relay, and why should I have to pay a monthly fee to switch it — but it is going to have serious negative ramifications.

Let me start by saying that many bits have already been spilled about basic IoT security:

• making sure that messages sent to and from your device back to the manufacturer cannot be faked or intercepted
• making sure that your IoT device is not hacked remotely, turning it into someone else’s IoT device
• making sure that your data, when it is at rest in the vendor’s systems is not stolen and misused

As things stand, none of that is going to happen satisfactorily, primarily because of incompatible incentives. When you sell a device for the raw cost of its hardware, with minimal markups and no opportunity for ongoing revenue, you also have no incentive for ongoing security work. Or any kind of work for that matter. If you bought the device on the “razor + blade” model, where the device was cheap, but important revenue was based on your continued use of the product, things might be different.

Worse than that, however, in order to find new revenue streams (immediately, or at potential future streams), vendors have strong incentives to collect all the data they can from the device. You do not know — even when the devices are operating as designed — exactly what they are doing. They are in essence little listening bugs willingly planted all over your home, and you do not know what kind of information they are exfiltrating, nor do you know who is ultimately receiving that information.

I think there is a solution to this problem, if people want it, and it requires two basic parts to work properly:

1.

We need a business model for smart devices that puts strong incentives in place for vendors to continue to support their products. This will never happen with the cheapie Fry’s Electronics special IoT Doohickey of the Week. Instead, we probably need a real engagement with sticks (liability) and carrots (enhanced revenue) that are driven by ongoing contractual engagement. That is, money should continue to flow.

2.

We need a standardized protocol for IoT that provides for a gateway at the home, and encrypted data on both sides of the gateway, but with the gateway owner having access to the encryption keys on the inner side of the gateway. The standardized protocol would have fields for the vendor name and hosts, as well as a human readable json-style payload — and a rule that nothing can be double-encrypted in the payload, keeping it from the eyes of the user.

Under such an arrangement, users, or their gateways acting as proxies for them, could monitor what is coming and going. You could program your gateway, for example, to block unnecessary information from http messages sent by your device.

Of course, the vendors, seeing the blocked information might decide not to provide their service, and that’s their right, but at least everyone would know the score.

Will this happen? Well, I think vendors with the long view of things would probably see #1 as appealing. Users will not, perhaps. But that is because users are not fully aware of the consequences of inviting someone else to monitor their activities. Perhaps people will think differently after a few sensational misuses of their data.

Vendors will fight #2 mightily. Of course, they could ignore it completely, with the potential antidote that a large number of users who insist on it becoming excluded from their total available market. With a critical mass of people using gateways that implement #2, I think we could tip things, but it right now it seems a long shot.

I am quite pessimistic about all this. I don’t think we’ll see #1 or #2 unless something spectacularly bad happens first.

For the record, I do use a few IoT devices in my home. There are two flavors: those I built myself and those I bought. For the self-built, they exist entirely within my network and do not interact with any external server. I obviously know what they do. For those I bought, they they exist on a DMZ style network up with no access to my home network at all (at least if my router is working as intended). This mitigates the worry of pwned devices accessing my computer and files, but does not stop them from sending whatever they collect back to the mothership.

IEEE Spectrum (what, you don’t get it delivered?) recently published a short article about the relationship between STEM and STS.

STEM, as most of us know, is Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics. Pundits the world over like to remind us how important it is that we graduate as many STEM folks as possible. (That notion is wrong, by the way. We should encourage people who like STEM to pursue STEM.)

STS is less commonly known. That’s “Science and Technology in Society,” and the name describes well enough. STS people study science itself: its processes, people, culture, and outcomes.

I believe I am one of a relatively small cohort of people who are both STEM-y and somewhat STS-y. The former, I get from my engineering degree and my natural proclivity to figure out how things work and to make my own working things. The latter I get from my policy training, which included an introduction to some of the basic concepts in that field. (My wife, an STS scholar herself is also a big factor!)

But I think the seeds of my STS-orientation came much earlier in life, when I was still an undergraduate in engineering school. My engineering program, at the University of Virginia, required all undergraduates to write a thesis, and that thesis had to address important STS concepts like engineering ethics. It was not just the thesis, either. My BSEE required several classes at SEAS’s own engineering humanities program, with required books, such as To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (Petroski),  The Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Normal Accidents (Perrow), The Civilized Engineer (Florman) and, of course, Frankenstein (Shelly). At the time we wondered, why, at a world-class university, would the school of engineering host its own humanities classes? Now I can see that there was something truly cutting-edge about it. (It’s not like we were barred from taking classes outside the engineering school.)

Perhaps because I was indoctrinated at a young age, or because the concepts are right, I firmly believe that an engineer who works without considering the consequences of his creativity is at risk of creating less valuable things than he might. We can all easily conjure a list of the “blockbuster bad ideas” of the 20th century (mustard gas, nuclear weapons, etc). But even when the engineering output is an unalloyed good, with a bit of STS consideration, it is entirely possibly that something even better could have been created. Also, I just find it kind of bizarre that STEM folks might be discouraged from thinking about what there work means. I guess its part of the myth of the objectivity of science that there is no meaning to think about. That’s wrong about science, and it should be prima facie obviously incorrect about engineering, which is by definition, a process directed by human desires.

But this kind of more holistic thinking isn’t particularly common, and as a result, places like Silicon Valley seem to be pretty bad at considering consequences. When you’re racing to create something, who has time to stop and think about its implications, much less let those implications determine the course of development? One simple example: hundreds of years of history led to the universally accepted notion that the integrity of a sealed letter should be maintained by all couriers involved in its delivery. When email came along, no such consideration was made. Why? How would the Internet as a means of communications have evolved if privacy were a consideration from the get go? Could the Internet have been “better?” (Yes, duh.)

Anyway, the IEEE article seems to conclude that most of the barriers to getting STEM folks to take on STS thinking are due to the culture of STEM. Though there is truth to that, it’s not the whole story, by far. For example, STS, philosphy, and policy folks have their own jargon and shibboleths, and it’s not easy for someone not trained in the game to participate. Furthermore, even when you do have something to add, I have found the policy crowd rather hostile to direct participation from STEM folks. One reason is that STEM folks are very analytical, and want to talk about all sides of an issue. On the other hand, policy people, at least non-academic “practicing” policy people are usually focused on a predetermined desired outcome, and the whishy-washiness of the engineers is not very welcome or useful to their campaign. It doesn’t help that engineers often expect carefully curated analysis to “speak for itself.” It doesn’t. I can also attest, again, from firsthand experience, that analysis is not highly prized in policy circles. Analysis comes with strings attached: subtlety, complexity, and confounding factors that are of no help when you are trying to persuade.

It’s also important to remember that most engineers work for someone else. They make their living realizing others’ goals. As such, their leeway to affect the direction of their work is limited and to engage in too much STS thinking is to risk their livelihoods.

And finally, in our toxically overspecialized world, it’s just punishing to be a “boundary spanner.” There are no rewards, and it’s a lot of work. If you have the skills, it is very difficult to find employment that will draw meaningfully on both reservoirs of knowledge. This, perhaps, has been the biggest frustration of my career, as I have bounced between these worlds repeatedly, missing one while in the other.

Finally, a parting shot: If you want to bring STS concepts to the fore, you need to bring them to the people with power. Those are not the heads-down STEM practitioners, those are the C-suite masters of the universe. Let’s see some STS thinking more deeply integrated into the curricula at top business schools. Not just an ethics class to check a requisite box, but something more integrated that leads students to think holistically about their companies’ activities and products rather than, say, applying some post-hoc greenwashing or CSR.

I was slowly cranking my way of Claremont Avenue the other day on my trusty Bianchi when I started wondering why I was so slow. Well, that was easy. I’m pretty heavy and I’m somewhat out of shape. But which is more important, which would have a bigger impact if improved?

First, I used a website like this one to determine the average grade over a certain familiar portion of the route. In this case, it was 13.3%. I also have a speedometer on my bike that tells that I average about 5 mph over that stretch. Finally, I weigh about 100 kg, and my bike is another 10 kg.

So, given that the energy to raise a mass up h height is m*g*h, the power to raise a mass at r rate is m*g*r.

Result:

claremont_power: 317.67222 (watts)

That is, that’s how much power it takes to lift my mass up a hill at that rate. Note the trig to change my speed up the hill to a vertical speed. There are losses in pedaling a bike, and on the tires on the road, etc, but this is a good estimate of the overall order of how much power I can comfortably sustain. Let’s call it 300W.

Now, another thing I’ve noticed while riding is that on flat ground, I can maintain about 17 mph. In that case, I’m not adding power to climb a hill at all, all of my power is overcoming road friction and drag.

It happens that power going to aerodynamic drag goes by the cube of the velocity. (There is more going on here than wind drag, but, eh, it probably dominates at higher speeds…) So, if we assume that on level ground I’m capable of the same ~300W that I do while climbing, I can calculate the constant in:

P = c * v^3

This is a simplification of the more general equation linked above, assuming constant air density, yadda. For 17 mph and 317 W, I get about 0.72376 kg / m. kg/m is a strange dimension, but it it what it is.

So then, I wondered, how fast should I be able to go with a given power budget while climbing different grades?

I created this equation which combines the power to climb and the power to overcome drag

P = c v^3 + m g v sin(theta)

where P  is power, c  is the drag power constant calculated above, m  is mass, g  is the acceleration of gravity, and theta is the angle of the hill. (The angle is the arctangent of the grade, by the way.) Oh, and v  is my speed.

It turns out that my brain doesn’t perform the way it once did and I can’t solve that cubic equation on my own, so I resorted to a Python-based solver which is part of the sympy package.

This function gets the job done:

Note this equation has three solutions, two of which are complex. Only interested in the “real” solution.

Now, this is finally where the fun starts. Want to know how fast I can climb different grades, or how actual athletes who can summon more power than me can get up?

Like I said, I can make about 300W, but I saw a youtube video of a dude who could make about 1kW, at least for long enough to make toast.

Then I was wonder, would losing weight help much? It does. Interestingly, it helps on the middle grades. On the highest grades, I’m nearly stopped, and the numbers get small. On flat grades, drag (a function of my shape, not my size) dominates. But in the middle, yeah, there’s an effect.

So there you have it. If I lost 10 kg and could increase my power output by 15% I could go from about 5 mph on Claremont to about 6 mph.

Actually, that’s depressing.