Rob Ainsley visits Eddington the new bike-friendly ‘village’cience nerds know
Science nerds to know Eddington: the 20th century British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, whose 1919 eclipse observations confirmed Einstein’s relativity theories, and who once calculated all the protons in the universe.
Strava nerds also know Eddington. A keen cyclist, he devised a measure of cumulative long distance, now called the Eddington Number. He just referred to it as ‘n’ – nothing to do with ‘n+1’, famously the ideal number of bikes to own where n is the number you currently have.
Your Eddington Number is the maximum n such that on n days in your life, you cycled at least n miles. (Strava won’t calculate n, but apps such as VeloViewer will.) Looking over my touring stats, for instance, there are hundreds of days when I did over 40 miles, and a handful when I did over 100 – but the max across both, my Eddington Number, is 66: on 66 days I did at least 66 miles. Eddington reached 84; hardcore audax cyclists might eventually top 140; Amanda Coker, who recently rode 100,000 miles in a record-breaking 423 days, did 235 days of over 235 miles in that period.
Denne historien er fra March 2018-utgaven av Cycling Plus.
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Denne historien er fra March 2018-utgaven av Cycling Plus.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Air Apparent - Pollution hasn't gone away. It's still there in every lungful, even if we can't see it in the air or on the news. But there are reasons to breathe easier, thanks to pioneering projects using cycling 'citizen scientists'. Rob Ainsley took part in one...
The toxic effects of pollution have been known about for years. 'Just two things of which you must beware: Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!' sang 1960s satirist Tom Lehrer.Over recent decades, though, pollution has dropped down our list of things to worry about, thanks to ominously capitalised concerns such as Climate Change, AI, Global Conflict, Species Collapse, etc. That doesn't, unfortunately, mean the problem has expired. Air quality often exceeds safe limits, with far-reaching and crippling effects on our health.
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