Bicycling miscellanea (links)

A week from today, I'll be on the train to Chicago, off for my wild trains, planes, and bicycling adventure. I'm excited but nervous because there are still a million little fiddly bits to figure out. Where will I sleep in Brussels? What's the route from the Chicago train station to the airport? Will I manage to disassemble and reassemble Froinlavin smoothly? At least I had some time to give Froinlavin a bath yesterday, after doing a more thorough mud-removal job on the Jolly Roger. The business from last weekend was really caked on.

Meanwhile, I've been accumulating bicycling-related links in various browser tabs.

From thewronghands, information about the Foothills Trail near Mt. Rainier. I want to scrutinize this trail further, out of general interest in the region. It's also interesting to think about how to ride a trail that is missing sections.

A friend-of-a-friend is an awesome stats geek who is analyzing the bike count data automatically generated by the bike counters set up around Seattle. This reminds me that when my dad and I rode the tandem across the Fremont Bridge, it did indeed count us as two separate bicyclists, in case this is the kind of thing any of you wonder about.

The Nebraska Bicycling Alliance is still a very young organization, but its leader has been doing a lot of legwork to assess the statewide situation. Here's her report on how things are looking across Nebraska, and what's on the statewide agenda.

If you're a bike person, you might already have heard about this act of civil obedience in San Francisco recently. Man, stop signs are a contentious issue among cyclists. I will confess to blowing through them on many occasions, sometimes to scrottie's consternation. But, for instance, why oh why do some cities insist on turning traffic circles into four-way stops?? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the traffic circle? Anyway, the action by this group of San Franciscans made me chuckle a bit, and I'll be interested to learn how the situation progresses.

Miscellaneous links: cookbook, programming intro, Adjunct humor, fallacies

I was recently re-reminded about this cookbook for eating well on a food stamp budget. I should buy a copy to support the project.

I guess there's a new ggplot2 book in the works, which is great news because the previous one is lagging too far behind the current implementation. It's going to include a chapter on programming with ggplot2, which should be fantastically helpful for beginner-intermediate level users looking to improve the efficiency of their workflow. I can't tell you how many different pieces of my recent analyses could use some work in this department, but unfortunately I can't always make the time and space to improve this meta-aspect of my work. On the flipside, I'm still in agreement with myself that Wickham's tools for R users have helped make R incredibly useful for biostatisticians, both in terms of data visualization and data manipulation. Even with my currently cumbersome scripts, I'm able to whip through carefully customized analyses pretty quickly.

This, from McSweeney's, makes me a little tired: Required Reading Essay Questions Written by a First-Year Adjunct Who Does Not Have the Time or Wherewithal to do the Required Reading. Only funny because it's sadly true.

A friend who has been going through insanely hellacious cancer treatments recently posted a link to information about the Fallacy of Relative Privation. I'm still chewing over the idea, but I'm grateful for the introduction