The critical piece of hardware that makes windsurfing possible is the "universal joint" or "u-joint." The u-joint attaches the sail to the board but allows it to swivel and lean in any direction. This allows the rider to steer without a rudder and is the fundamental difference between windsurfing and normal sailboat sailing.
The first commerically available windsurfers in the 1970s used clunky wood and metal u-joints. More compact and durable u-joints were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, along with lots of different systems for fitting them to the board and mast base. (Joe Windsurfer has a blog post with pictures of the original wood u-joint and various other weird ones.) However, the u-joints themselves were all variations on two themes: 1) a bendy rubber "hourglass" or 2) a three-axis "mechanical" joint. By the 2000s, "Chinook" and a couple of other brands had more-or-less standardized u-joint and coupling systems, which made it easier to mix and match gear. The rubber hourglass u-joints were the most common type and seemed to work for 5-10 years before cracking and failing.
If the evolution had stopped there we'd be good, but someone had to come up with a "better" "tendon" design that has now mostly replaced the rubber hourglass joints. The tendon is a narrow, rubber-like cylinder that bolts into cups on both sides of the joint. The idea is that you can unbolt and replace the tendon easily without having to replace the longer-lasting parts of the u-joint. The problem is that you have to replace the tendons A LOT. Even the "good" ones don't last as long as the old rubber hourglass joints, and the quality of the replacement tendons on the market seemed to go way down shortly after everyone switched to using tendons. They can fail before showing any obvious signs of wear, even when they're brand new.
I discovered a new low level of tendon performance today when installing a brand-new one (Ruiqas brand, ordered from Amazon - should have gotten one from my local Fort Myers windsurfing shop instead). I was a little suspicious of how the tendon had both bolt-holes in the same direction rather than orthogonal like the Chinook brand tendons. I was more annoyed when realized the ends of the tendon were too long to get the holes in the tendon to match up with the holes in the cups, no matter how hard I tried to jam the parts together. I looked up on the Internet that if that happens you have to cut off material from each end of the tendon using an X-Acto knife until it fits, which I did. It went together, but it seemed way less flexible than the original tendon joint. It snapped when I was positioning the board for a beach start, before I even sailed at all. GRRR. I could see a few little air bubble cavities inside the tendon where it broke through, but I think the real defect wasn't the air bubbles but simply that it was a lousy rubber/plastic formulation that lacked the flexibility and strength to do its job.
I still had one functional u-joint in the van, so the day wasn't a total bust. The wind had gotten too light to use the shortboard that I originally tried on, but I got a good session on my foil board with a 6.8 sail.
Hydrofoil windsurfing is great. I'm still using the "Slingshot Infinity 76" hydrofoil that I got in 2019 and first blogged about here. The only difference is that I mount it to a different board now; a Fanatic Skysup. (Boom mount video of me riding the skysup in 2021 here.)
Today's session was at Bonita Beach access #10, which is finally starting to get back to normal after being leveled by Hurricane Ian in 2022 and messed up again by Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024. In just the last couple of weeks the county added some dune plantings, which I have learned from my colleagues at FGCU are VERY effective at gathering windblown sand and reducing beach erosion during storms.
It seems like some plants have also recruited to the dune on their own, like the railroad vine, Ipomoea pes-caprae.
When I arrived at the beach it was quite breezy but I wasn't sure it would be enough to use a 6.8 sail on my shortboard. I went with a 4.7 sail on the foilboard. (The rule of thumb is you use about 2/3 the size of sail for hydrofoil windsurfing as you would use for normal windsurfing.) When you're powered on the foil it's easy to go way upwind and downwind, so that's what I did, making these nice tracks. I crashed a couple times but didn't lose my sunglasses, and I saw a sea turtle, so I'm calling it a win.
I read on the Internet that you’re having a hard time. I
believe it because I have been alive since 1979 and even my “successful” life
has had lots of internal woe, scrawled across the pages of diaries
intermittently kept since high school. Life
is hard in the ways it has always been hard, such as the struggles of family
dynamics, school, work, forming friendships, finding romance, finding a deeper
meaning, coping with physical and mental illness, and facing inevitable aging
and death. However, life is also hard in uniquely modern ways, such as the
constant flood of misery, temptation, judgement, and deception delivered
through billionaire-owned social media networks to your very addictive mobile
computing devices.
Life is hard for women, too. You may not want to hear this,
or may not believe it, but it’s even harder for women than it is for you. This
is because women face all the timeless and modern hardships listed above, plus additional,
serious dangers and hardships from living in still-male-dominated societies. That
monologue about women’s plight in the Barbie movie nailed it.
This post isn’t meant to be a debate of who has it harder,
and I’m not trying to make you feel worse than you already feel about your male
struggles. It’s just important to remember that women are struggling, too, and its often because of us.
In your defense, there ARE some specific, extra struggles
associated with being male. I’m not talking about the risk of testicle injuries
(although that is a thing). I’m talking about social and emotional struggles. I
want to identify some of those struggles and address how we deal with them. How
we deal with them has implications not only for our personal happiness but for whether
we affect society positively or negatively. Some specific hazards and hardships
of the male circumstance include:
1.A ridiculous excess of sexual and romantic
desire. The male libido hits like a meteor at puberty and burns for decades. It
supplies a lot of anxious motivation and not a lot of satisfaction. The desire
for romantic love is another burning meteor, though that one at least has a
chance of finding a stable orbit. Developing positive, romantic and sexual relationship(s)
in real life IS worth working towards, after attending to the even more
important things like a roof over your head and a supportive network of friends
and family. However, if you’re trying to sculpt your real life to meet 100% of
your testicles’ ridiculous desires you’re in great danger of becoming a
selfish, awful, tragic person. Chasing too hard after impossible desires can
really hurt you, and others. For example, people who leverage money and power and/or
deviously manipulate others to meet their desires can end up as monsters like
Epstein and Weinstein. In addition to those infamous abusers of power, there
are legions of lower-profile predators and creeps who have hurt women, and legions of sad dudes who have hurt themselves by wasting all their money on porn, how-to-be-a-player
courses, strip clubs, prostitutes, etc. Don’t let yourself or your bros become those
guys. It’s part of the human condition that there will always be a large portion
of your desires that just can’t be met, realistically, ethically, or
financially. Some combination of acceptance, imagination, and laughing at
yourself will get you through.
2.The sense of entitlement and deficit of responsibility
that come from living in a patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a social system
where men hold primary power, dominating roles in political leadership, moral
authority, social privilege, and control of property. There are different
degrees of patriarchy, but the USA is still strongly patriarchal according to
every economic and social thing we can measure. Males get a lot of perks and
privileges that women don’t get. For example, expectations for responsibility are
MUCH lower for boys and men than they are for girls and women. Cartoon
characters illustrate this well. We think boys like Bart Simpson, teenagers
like Beavis and Butthead, and men like Homer Simpson are endearingly hilarious
in their bad behavior, while their female counterparts Lisa Simpson, Daria
Morgendorfer, and Marge Simpson have to be responsible all the time.
Rarely
having to clean up our own messes, consider others’ needs, or pay the full
price of our transgressions means males in a patriarchy grow up without
developing the full responsibility and moral skillsets that all humans should
have. Or we’re slow to develop them. We think we’re special good boys and nice
guys when actually we’re morally stunted jerks who can’t deal with real life
and who put a huge burden on others. We have this immature fantasy that at some point we'll slay a dragon and be adored and in the meantime we can't stoop to do our own laundry or vacuum the floor. That’s the bad edge of the patriarchy
sword. Here’s a personal example: I grew up thinking of myself as a super
special nice guy who could do no wrong, and I persisted in that view even when
I was being selfish and ridiculous in early relationships. This doomed me to
hard lessons and delayed social/emotional maturity, and of course it was hard
on whoever I was dating.
3.The toxic competitiveness dynamic. Guys
experience weird pressures and expectations from living in societies that
over-inflate the importance of male “greatness” and hierarchical position. You’re
supposed to be a big hero, or a big stud; the brightest peacock in the flock. Someone
is always trying to make you feel bad and insecure for not being man enough,
and they’re selling you muscle growth powder, penis enlargers, get-rich-quick schemes,
etc. They say it’s not enough just to be a good person and good team player. The
message is that 99% of men are worthless, ugly, too-poor, and too-short and
wimpy, and you’re going to be miserable and loveless unless you can dominate
all the competition and become some kind of warlord pimp Adonis. Now it’s true
that there is some disparity in the amount of attention paid to flashy versus
average guys, and some women have terrible, superficial tastes in men, just as most
men have terrible, superficial tastes in women. It’s also true that there is
some real unfairness in terms of the genetic cards we’re dealt, which I
addressed in the 2010 post “Ugliness, Fairness, and Happiness.” But the world is not
nearly the all-or-nothing, winners-dominate-losers kind of world that the
manosphere influencers say it is. The “nice guys finish last” thing is not true. There are many ways that a not-so-flashy guy can find his niche in the
world through cooperation, kindness, consistency, etc. You can flavor your niceness with a little pizazz without going to the extremes of being a macho jerk. The natural way to do it is to lean into the things you're good at and see where they lead. I got a lot of mileage out of windsurfing and science as a bachelor, and those are things I liked doing anyways. Compared with the warlord
pimp Adonis, who will be hated by most people and likely deposed quickly by the
next aspiring warlord pimp Adonis, a humble good guy will develop a stable network
of people around him who actually appreciate him and will help and support him
as he has helped and supported them. Another reward of developing your goodness
rather than striving for greatness (a.k.a. clout), is that it makes a better
world for EVERYONE, not just you.
Conclusion: The unfairness of the world is real, but the manosphere’s
advice for how you should deal with that unfairness is terrible. Their advice
is like, “You have to seize power for yourself by becoming a dominant, aggressive,
alpha male. Showing any empathy or kindness towards others will just make you a
loser.” Every man competing to be an alpha male, and ignoring essential-to-the-fabric-of-society things like cooperation and niceness, is a recipe for both personal and civilizational disaster. In fact I think idolizing and enabling alpha male types has contributed a lot to the dysfunctional, right-wing, authoritarian oligarchy we have today. For all but a very few well-positioned billionaires
and political elites, the optimal strategy for the self is actually to be LESS selfish;
to create a fair, egalitarian society through cooperation, niceness, and
holding abusers and exploiters to account. Working TOGETHER we can ALL get ahead.
It's interesting, though not surprising, to see Venezuelan and Iranian expatriates cheering the US' capture/killing of their autocratic leaders Maduro and Khamenei, respectively. Should we be cheering, too? Should we be like, "Even though we hate Trump for many other reasons, we can't complain about him beating up other bad guys"? Here's what I think:
It's clear now that the US military has the physical capability to kill or depose the heads of state of these poorer countries, but it's not clear that we have the ability (or even the intention) to set them up with new governance that isn't just as bad, or even worse. Like, are Venezuela and Iran about to become wonderful, free, safe democratic places that their expatriates will be delighted to return to? I'm not holding my breath. In Venezuela the annointed leader post-Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, seems to come from within the same oppressive regime as Maduro, with the only difference being that she's friendlier to US-aligned oil oligarchs than Maduro was. In Iran the defeat of the regime may eventually allow the installation of leaders more pliant to US, Israeli, and Saudi oil oligarch interests... but that seems a far cry from actual democracy that would empower and improve conditions for Iranian people. Plus, that's like the best case scenario for Iran, and worst case scenarios involve chaos of warlords, terrorism, mass civilian deaths by bombings and starvation (like Gaza x 100), etc.
So my current, over-simplified take is that this new batch of wars is bullshit that will benefit a few sociopathic oligarchs while not improving, or even further degrading, the living conditions of millions of people. We need to get our own democracy functioning again in the US so we can have reasoned debate and careful consideration of these things instead of just having a free for all for our dumb dictator oligarchs to "experiment" with trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives.
One thing that might help us with better decision making about wars involving foreign dictators and such would be to consider these general principles:
1. Don't BE a dictator. Obviously very few people are ever in the position to consider the "should I become a dictator or not?" moral question, but if any nascent dictators are reading this blog, yeah, don't do it, bro.
2. Don't support dictators or aspiring dictators in your own country. This means being ACTIVE in nurturing democracy and protecting it from the forces that can undo it, such as runaway corruption and wealth inquality.
3. Don't support dictators in other countries financially, militarily, or otherwise.
4. Don't depose a dictator if you're just going to replace him with another dictator or leave an anarchic mess that's as bad or worse than the dictatorship was.
One of the best things about a good, working democracy is that it protects normal citizens from being exploited by the rich and powerful. I'm delighted to see Norway's "Consumer Council" trying to protect folks from the insidious exploitation of consumers known as "enshittification." The Norwegian Consumer Council hilariously explains the enshittification phenomenon in this video:
Here in the US we're less protected from enshittificators because the ruling regime of oligarchs is largely made up of enshittificators and has done its best to dismantle opposing elements of the government like our Consumer Financial Protections Bureau. Therefore, fighting enshittification in the US is more of a grass roots resistance thing, where we have to eek out whatever small victories we can. I'm proud to have finally squirmed free of quintessential enshittificator Photobucket but there are a lot of other enshittificators at large that continue to have an undue influence on my life. For example, whenever I play a YouTube video for my marine ecology class its surrounded and interrupted by a vignette of dumb ads. I pledge to redouble my efforts to fight enshittification however I can.
Every semester I take my Florida Gulf Coast University Marine Ecology class to the Florida Keys Marine Laboratory for a few days to snorkel and learn about South Florida marine species and habitats. This year we went earlier than usual, but we lucked out with a stretch of warm weather between cold fronts. For the second part of the trip, shark and ray expert Dr. Pilar Blanco joined us, scoping out the venue for future research and teaching trips. That seemed to improve our luck at seeing sharks and rays, including this pair of Nurse Sharks (Ginglymostoma cirratum) snuggling under a ledge at Alligator Reef.
Pollution has a clear definition. It's anything that humans put into the environment that causes harm. Harms that can get something classified as pollution include:
1) Harm to plants or animals. 2) Harm to human health. 3) Hindrance of human activities - for example, making water unsafe to swim or fish in. 4) Reducing "ecosystem functionality" - making nature less able to do the important things it does, like processing waste and providing fresh water, food, oxygen.
A complication that confuses people is that many pollutants are also naturally-occurring substances, which only become harmful when humans put them into the environment at unnaturally high levels or in contexts where they are inappropriate. These are called "Quantitative Pollutants" and include things like nutrients, ozone, and carbon dioxide. My favorite example of a quantitative pollutant is pure fresh water - if you dump too much fresh water into an estuary all at once it can cause harm by killing the saltwater-dependent organisms.
The less-confusing type of pollutants are "Qualitative Pollutants" - substances that NEVER occur naturally, like plastics and synthetic chemicals. Their identity as pollutants is independent of context. For example, there's no normal, healthy level of plastic in the environment.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a quantitative pollutant. It's occurs naturally as a minor but important component of Earth's atmosphere. Minor because it makes up less than 0.05% of atmospheric gas composition, but important because it's essential in photosynthesis and other cycles of life, it strongly affects ocean chemistry and acidity, and it strongly affects the insulative properties of the atmosphere (and therefore weather and climate). Over the long history of earth there have been natural ups and downs in CO2, which have had huge consequences for climate and life. Even the relatively minor oscillations in CO2 from 0.018% - 0.030% over the last 800,000 years have affected our repeated cycling into and out of glacial periods. (You can see the CO2 record of both the recent and distant past at https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).
Given how sensitive vital climate and ecosystem processes are to atmospheric CO2 levels, it's alarming that recent human activities (deforestation and fossil fuel burning) have increased the CO2 concentration from 0.028% (the stable average of the last 12,000 years) to 0.043%; way higher than any level seen in over a million years. And the increase has been sudden, mainly happening since the industrial revolution around 1850. Does the man-made increase in CO2 constitute pollution? I.e., does it cause any of the harms described at the beginning of this post? Yes. Here are some of the harms it causes:
1. Harm to plants and animals- Increasing CO2 alters photosynthetic processes in ways that favor some plants, disfavor others, and alter plant nutrition, messing up natural systems as well as crop production. Some of these effects were reviewed in a recent, high-profile review in the scientific journal Stress Biology - https://doi.org/10.1007/s44154-025-00217-w Plants and animals are also harmed by CO2 effects on ocean chemistry. CO2 reacts with water to form carbonic acid (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3), which increases the acidity of the ocean and impairs the ability of organisms like coral, plankton, and oysters to make shells and skeletons and carry out their normal life processes. Finally, the global warming caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 has a multitude of harms to species, from simply making it too hot for them to survive, to changing rainfall or other aspects of climate that organisms depend on. Clearly CO2 meets the "harm to plants and animals" criterion for being pollution.
2. Harm to human health- CO2 at high concentrations has direct negative effects on humans. At 0.1% concentration it starts to impair cognitive function, and at 4% concentration it can knock you unconscious. Right now those direct harms to human health are more of an indoor concern, like if you're in a poorly ventilated space with a lot of people exhaling or machinery running. But if we keep putting CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate we have been, the outdoor concentrations could also get to 0.1% cognitive impairment level in just 100 years or so. The more immediate human health impacts of CO2 pollution are the indirect health impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on humans. Like, we're more likely to experience starvation, malnutrition etc. as climate change and ocean acidification distrupt crop production, fisheries, etc. Just because an effect is indirect doesn't mean it's not strong and real.
3. Hindrance of human activities- Too hot to go outside, no snow to ski on, no fish to catch, etc. You get the picture.
4. Reducing ecosystem functionality- Excess CO2 definitely impairs ecosystem functions, as evidenced by a mountain of all sorts of different scientific studies of climate change, ocean acidification, and plant physiology disruption. Here is just one of many papers reviewing these studies- https://doi.org/10.3390/environments10040066
This is a figure from an introductory oceanography textbook that illustrates some of the harmful impacts of CO2 pollution the marine environment, specifically. It really is a huge cascade of harms.
For the reasons I've reviewed here, the identity of CO2 as a pollutant has long been recognized by the science and environmental management community. Of course, powerful polluters spend billions of dollars buying politicians and trying to downplay the CO2 pollution problem and resist CO2 pollution regulations. The US Environmental Protection Agency moved in the right direction in 2009 when it officially recognized that CO2 and other greenhouse gases were harmful to human health and welfare. Unfortunately the current US regime is highly corrupt and beholden to the fossil fuel industry and other CO2 polluters, and catering to those special interests they have repealed the 2009 decision. This is very foolish and irresponsible and will harm both nature and human life if it goes through, so various groups are launching legal challenges to the decision. It's not a done deal yet, and strong activism could stop it. I encourage you blog readers to learn about and support efforts to fight back. This might be a good place to start- https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/environmental-groups-vow-stop-trump-s-epa-revoking-endangerment-finding
1. Nathan Benderson Park is a unique and impressive venue for competitive rowing and paddling. I'd been there to compete in "Sup 'n Run" races in 2016 and 2017 and to cheer Robert Norman's 24 hour SUP distance record attempt. I was nostalgic to see the place again.
2. The Mote SEA aquarium wasn't built yet when I did those sup things, but I'd seen the crazy building under construction from the freeway, so I was curious what it was like inside. Here are some pictures-
3. The seagrass science aspect of the meeting was even more interesting (to me) than the public aquarium. I brought my grad student along so she could absorb the latest info on how to characterize genetic diversity and stress-adaptations within seagrass plants. The hope is to use that knowledge to improve seagrass conservation and restoration success. Of course the other, even-more-important part of successful seagrass conservation and restoration is reducing the man-made environmental stressors that have been killing seagrass: nutrient pollution, climate change, coastal hardening and dredge/fill operations, etc. So let's not forget about that.
My recent "fast" from FaceBook has given me the free time and head space to finally do something I should have done a long time ago- Download and rehost all my old blog photos that were formerly hosted on Photobucket. Photobucket is an awful, exploitative, F-rated by the Better Business Bureau company that has horribly mistreated its customers for decades and deserves to go out of business + probably have its executives fined and imprisoned. Even now that I've cancelled the autopayment on my account, I've been so wronged by them for years that I half expect them to still charge me next month somehow. I'll watch my bank account carefully to make sure I don't get robbed again.
On a better note, going through my old blog posts from 2007 - 2017 has been a personally poignant experience, forcing me to reflect on the ups and downs of my adult life so far. Sometimes I cringe at the things I did or said in the past, or my general tone: judgemental, sophomoric, bragging and humble-bragging, etc. I have alternately tried on wise-old-man and cool-young-dude voices with neither being quite genuine. But overall I feel good about my process and progress as a human being. I'm proud of hacking it fairly well as a marine biologist, husband, and amateur watersports athelete, and I'm proud of maintaining a pretty good moral posture in a politically fraught and environmentally threatened world starved for love and goodness. In addition to the stuff suitable for blogging there have been some behind-the-scenes challenges and sad chapters that I think have weathered me helpfully. There is a long and rough road ahead but I'll keep walking it (and blogging it) as well as I can.
PS- If you want to get a little "catch up" on the parts of the journey that are most interesting to you, the links on the sidebar to search the blog by different keywords and time periods could be useful.
Last night and tonight will be among the coldest nights in SW Florida since Rhonda and I moved here in 2012. I don't think it's actually going to freeze, but it will get down to like 1 or 2 degrees Celsius, which is very cold for here. As usual the news and local authorities are making a big deal about cold-stunned green iguanas (Iguana iguana) falling out of trees. This year they're encouraging citizens to round up the cold-stunned ones and deliver them to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for an opportunistic mass murder event.
I will not be participating in that. Green iguanas may be non-native, but they're peaceful, lazy vegetarians that seem to be very low on the harm scale compared to other invasives. I don't see how removing them from urban areas, which are already super invaded by HUMANS and all the non-native plants and animals we surround ourselves with, makes those areas any more natural. Maybe I'm biased because I had a cute iguana named Spike when I was a kid in Washington State, and whenever I see a feral iguana here it makes me think of him.
Today walking around a local park (I won't say which one) I came across this very chilly and sluggish young iguana doing her best to warm up on a south-facing mound of dirt. I'm hoping she makes it through the night and evades the do-gooders who would bag her off to iguana Auschwitz.
The Florida Manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) is a subspecies of the West Indian Manatee. The other subspecies is the Antillean Manatee, Trichechus manatus manatus. The distinction is that only the Florida Manatee has to deal with cold water in winter. It does so by migrating inland to "warm water refugia" like freshwater springs. The Florida Manatee is also a little bigger than the Antillean Manatee, which might be another cold adaptation. Development in Florida has destroyed or cut off access to a lot of the natural warm water refugia, but at the same time we have inadvertently created some unnaturally warm areas (like powerplant outflows) that the manatees can use instead. One of those is Manatee Park in Fort Myers, which is on an offshoot of the Caloosahatchee Estuary warmed by effluent from a gas powerplant. It's a popular tourist destination in winter when the manatees are there. I got to go there on Thursday to give a talk about aquatic plant restoration to a nice group of staff and volunteers. We are trying to restore freshwater plants in the low salinity part of the Caloosahatchee so the manatees can eat those near the powerplant and not have to swim a long way through cold water and boat traffic to get to the seagrass beds near the coast. The freshwater plants were THICK in the 1980s and 1990s but some devastating saltwater intrusion events killed almost all of them. We're trying to manage the river flow better to avoid that, but it's hard because there are a lot of competing demands for the water. Rising sea level and other factors aren't helping. But we're doing our best. Anyway, seeing all those adorable potatos basking in the warm river reminded me what it's all about.
The other Florida winter thing I wanted to write about is windsurfing. I got a great session today in strong Northwest winds associated with what's supposed to be an exceptionally cold cold front. The air was about 14 Celsius on the beach at Wiggins Pass State Park, which would barely qualify as cold in Virginia or Massachusetts, so it wasn't too bad. I wore a 3 mm scuba wetsuit with a hooded neoprene vest underneath for some extra warmth, and that was perfect. Sometimes I peeled the hood back, but after a dousing or in chilly, peppering rain I would put it back on. The wind was just starting when I got to the beach and the waves hadn't built much yet. It was perfect for the 5.7 sail and 106 liter exocet cross.
Later the wind increased significantly and I switched to 4.7 and my smallest board (83 liters). The waves were bigger by then and I got some fun little rides.
There were a few nice kiteboarders there who I chatted with in the parking lot. Good times. :)
Sometime in the mid 1980s, in Red Square at The Evergreen State College, I took my first terrified pedal on a bike with no training wheels. I think my dad held the seat at first, and then let go once I got going. Some crying and mild injuries were involved and it took some more time before I decided I liked biking. So, same story as learning to windsurf. Once I was big enough my parents bought me a mountain bike with gear shifters and hand brakes, and I made good use of it for play and early transportation independence. For example, when I did sailing day camp I would ride 2.3 km to the nearest bus stop (at Evergreen), lock up the bike, then ride the bus to the marina downtown. There was also a phase where I was riding it to high school (7 km), riding it to work at McDonalds (7.7 km), or riding it to the gym to lift weights (8.8 km). Those "long" rides had an element of self-paced athletic challenge that was confidence-building for me as someone who remained deathly afraid of school sports and other competitive stuff.
I'm not sure how it happened (maybe suggested by parents?), but in 1997 my Seattle friend Josh and I signed up for the 330 km (very long) "Seattle to Portland" bicycle ride. Racers do it in one day but normal riders do it in two, staying overnight in a gymasium or fairgrounds or something near the halfway point. The STP required some preparation because neither Josh nor I had ever ridden close to that distance previously. I prepped by getting some less-knobby tires for the mountain bike, putting little toe-baskets on the pedals, and finding some spandex shorts with paddling in the "seat" area. I did some longish rides around Olympia leading up to the race and figured I'd be fine. I was so confident I didn't even wear the padded shorts the first day (mistake). By the end of the second day I had identifed SEVEN different types of excruciating malady affecting my butt and private areas. I don't remember all seven now, but some were chafing, bruising, and blocked circulation. My legs were also so tired I could barely walk up stairs. So even though it was a neat to have done, the extreme butt-torture aspect of it effectively turned off any nascent interest in long distance bike riding / racing. Once I recovered I got back to using the bike for commuting and stuff, but never signed up for another long ride or race.
Anyway, there were no major changes to my bike situation for the next 29 years. The one I used for commuting in college was a mountain bike. I don't think I had a bike in grad school or in my postdoc jobs after that. Shortly after I moved to Florida in 2012 I got a silver Schwinn at Walmart that suited me well. I'm not sure what you'd call it- maybe a city-bike or a touring bike? It had 29 inch tires with fairly smooth tread, and it seemed efficient. The original handlebars curved back towards the seat which put you in an upright posture like the wicked witch of the west. I didn't like that but I traded to the straight handlebars of my wife's mountain bike so we both got the kind of handlebars and riding posture we like. I didn't use it regularly until 2022 when we moved close enough to FGCU that I could easily bike to work every day. A couple years of daily use and outdoor storage (I put a tarp over it but it still gets wet) degraded it to the point where each time I took it for a tune-up they lectured me that it would be cheaper to just get a new one. It's not my style to get rid of things that still work, but when I learned that my windsurfing buddy Max is a bike afficionado / refurbished bike dealer I got curious about what he might have for me.
For all my encyclopedic knowledge of wind and paddleboards equipment, I really don't know shit about bicycles. I wasn't even sure what kind of bicycle I would want if I could have any kind. But I'll admit to being a little road-bike-curious from seeing all the fit retiree road bikers zooming along Florida's straight, flat roads; often zooming past me even when I felt like I was riding fairly fast on my Walmart Schwinn. I also watched that Netflix series about the Tour de France and related to it because of its similarities to SUP racing (drafting, etc.). And even going WAY back to when I was a kid, I was curious about those ram's horns handlebars on my dad's ancient road bike in the garage that I never saw anyone ride. So when Max said he had various road bike variations I could try and maybe buy, I rode over there as fast as my Schwinn would take me.
Max and his wife Marissa are new parents, so an even-more-interesting-than-bicycles thing at their place was checking out their very cute baby and getting the rundown on all his precocious achievements, dietary experimentation, allergen exposure regime, etc. The first time I saw the baby (during a windsurfing session at the quarry lake Max lives on), he was very new and behaving like a bread loaf in a bread box. However, this time he was crawling around, pulling the dog's tail, making and imitating facial expressions, and generally indicating rapid progression towards being a delightful handful for his parents.
At some point we moved to the garage / bicycle laboratory and checked out Max' impressive hoard of bikes and parts. He had one "beater" bike that was sort of a road bike but with straight handlebars and simpler gearing, so I tried that first to build confidence. I didn't immediately crash, so it was on to the real road bike that Max had in mind for me.
This is the bike:
It seemed super fancy and high-performance, with carbon fiber components and clever aerodynamic and shock-absorbing details of frame, seat post, etc. Would I be able to ride it, though? The narrow, low handlebars and very leaned-forward posture were an awkward adjustment, but I tentatively rolled down the avenue. Even with hands on top of the handlebars I was way more aerodynamically positioned than on my old bike, and with hands on the dropped down part of the bars I felt extremely speed-crouched like a downhill skier. I don't know which aspects of a road bike are most important for making it faster than a normal bike, but the ducked posture and narrow/hard tires obviously contribute. The scariest road bike adjustment, where I felt most at risk of crashing, was switching hands between the upper and lower handle bar positions. Getting more confident with my weight distribution and balance is making that easier, though. The racey seat was uncomfortable at first, but slightly adjusting the height and angle helped a lot. Max and Marissa talked about humans' "sit bones" and the importance of getting them lined up with the supportive parts of the seat. I'm not sure I have the personal anatomical awareness to detect when I'm seated right, but I'll work on it.
At the end of the testing and tuning rides in Max's neighborhood I left my Schwinn with Max and rode home with what was now MY road bike. I tracked the ride with my GPS watch so I can start getting an idea of how fast the bike goes with different levels of effort. I got home a few minutes faster than I got to Max' house, but I was also riding harder and didn't hit the traffic lights and stuff the same so it's not a fair comparison. Maybe I'll do some more testing over the weekend. In the meantime I'm riding the bike to work and getting more tuned to it.
One of the most inspiring among these is Martin Luther King Day, established by a bipartisan bill in 1986 to honor slain civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). MLK was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia and murdered on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. We celebrate MLK day on the third Monday of every January.
The main reasons I think MLK day is so inspiring are:
1. Because of Martin Luther King’s amazing leadership of a huge and successful movement to gain civil rights for black Americans and end (legal) racial segregation. King also worked tirelessly against the oppression of the poor by the rich (e.g., he supported organized labor, tenants’ rights, etc.) and he was a global peace activist who opposed the Vietnam War. He wasn’t perfect (nobody is), but in all our history he is unquestioningly among the Americans who have done the most to help other people and improve society, joining a legacy also full of the great abolitionists and suffragists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
2. Because our embrace of Martin Luther King’s legacy shows that we are capable of recognizing and rejecting the evils of our past and becoming a better, more egalitarian society. MLK was a Baptist minister, and for all my skepticism of religion I am still incredibly moved by the spiritual aspect of his humility and self-sacrifice. At the broader scale, our nation’s struggling transformation from enslavers and oppressors to protectors of freedom for all is our truest enactment of this ideal of spiritual change and betterment.
Of course, our nation’s transformation is incomplete, tenuous, and imperiled. WE MUST NOT FALL BACK INTO THE EVILS THAT KING HELPED US OVERCOME. We are at dire risk of doing just that now because of the fascist regime that has risen to power here.
The regime’s rise owes to the awkward but dangerously successful political marriage of blue-collar white people and the ultra-wealthy elite. This awkward marriage was the “southern strategy” that Nixon’s republicans began in MLK’s time and which lead to Reagan and eventually to the Tea Party and Trump. Trump’s MAGA regime is now the apotheosis of the southern strategy; enthroning a gold-draped billionaire while deploying armies of poor goons to terrorize perceived enemies. The only philosophical tenet uniting the extremely wealthy and the aggrieved poor is the horrible idea that some people have a right to dominate others. This is the polar opposite of the loving, egalitarian society that MLK dreamed of. MLK’s dream is the clear vision we need to fight the fascist corruption taking hold. (And that is why modern propagandists perennially seek to co-opt, distort, and denigrate King’s legacy. Watch out for them.)
3. There’s a third one and it’s a tough one for me. It’s King’s courageous practice of non-violent resistance, refusing to meet hate with hate. He said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” To win freedom for oppressed black people in America he had to touch a spark of love and sympathy in the hearts of largely indifferent white people. While his movement eschewed the strength of arms it grew in the power of moral righteousness enough to finally turn the tide of public opinion. Maybe that is not always possible, but it was so, so beautiful and I want that more than anything for America again today.
One marshmallow now or two marshmallows later? Delaying gratification to achieve a greater good for oneself or the world is a fundamental challenge of adulting, if not THE fundamental challenge of adulting. Convincing myself that something hard is worth it, then really FEELING that it's worth it, is not easy.
With that said, I'm taking a more serious than usual approach to New Year's resolutions this year. My overall goal is to establish a more functional, integrated approach to work, wellness, and righting the wrongs of the world. More handling, less hand wringing, if you will.
Hopefully posting about this doesn't jinx my attempts, but SO FAR things are going well. My specific resolutions / actions have been:
1. Make better use of at-the-desk time at work to ensure progress on long-term goals like publishing papers. Towards this end I have dusted off the "JamesWorkLog.xlsx" spreadsheet that Rhonda inspired me to make back in 2023. (It's based on the one she uses to track her writing work.) I can't share the whole thing because parts of it are too embarrassing or profane, but below is a screenshot of part of last week, which went well.
Something that's making this both easier and more important is that my boss reduced my teaching load by one class for this semester only. So this is my chance to get ahead and I don't want to blow it.
2. A parallel resolution is to avoid getting sucked into unproductive doom-scrolling. I.e., I can get the gist of our planetary plight and ghastly descent into fascism over morning coffee at home and a few hallway and cafeteria conversations at work. I don't need to constantly traumatize myself to the point of losing focus during the day or losing sleep at night. I want to be informed enough to do my part for citizen resistance while maintaining the ecologist / professor work activities that (I believe) are also a force for good in the world.
The other motivation for doom-scrolling less is to withhold attention and advertising revenue from the big tech "broligarchs" like Mark Zuckerberg who have chosen to financially support the fascist Trump regime. I still have a lot of room for improvement in this area since, for instance, this blog is hosted by Google, and their billionaire CEO Sundar Pichai is one of the creepy oligarchs who donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration party as an obvious tithe for the king.
Specific actions that I have taken so far for digital wellness and ethics are:
a) I uninstalled the FaceBook app from my phone.
b) I forbade myself from checking news or social media at work, with the exception of I still let myself scroll bluesky on my phone at lunch. This has been hard but I have kept it up so far and it has already helped me, I think. The temptation to doom-scroll hits hardest when my concentration is needed to complete a difficult or anxiety-inducing task, but when I resist the temptation I keep both the time and the mental mojo I need for the task.
c) I'm trying to do a "FaceBook fast" for a while (from a few days ago until groundhog day) to see how that goes and if it's something I could do more permanently. There are both pros and cons to that. Like, I reach more people when I post something on FaceBook than when I just post it on this blog and bluesky. But the more read it is on FaceBook the more money it makes for evil Meta corp, abettors of fascism.
d) I removed the ad banners from this blog (today). In 15 years they earned me a total of about $200, and (if I did my math right) over the same time period they earned evil Google corp, abettors of fascism on par with Meta, about $94. Now my blog shall burden Google's servers while giving them nothing in return. NOTHING! On a deeper level it seems like it's always the case that the nearly powerless masses must make great collective sacrifices to finally disempower their greedy masters. Taking down my ads is not a great sacrifice, but it's like, a warm-up for exercising that principle.
e) I decided to make reading my personal emails a thing again, after about a year of basically never checking the account because I was only barely able to keep up with my work email account. To the extent that I eschew FaceBook I will be more dependent on the old-Internet mode of using email to keep up with family, friends, and if anybody ever comments on my blog. <waits patiently>
f) When I am looking at news or bluesky I'm trying prioritize thoughtful newsletters and blog posts and stuff over the general clickbait articles. Like reading blog posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson and economist Robert Reich.
Something I haven't done YET, but is on my list to do, is extricate myself from super-evil, F-rated by the Better Business Bureau company "Photobucket," which has been extorting me for $6.99/month for years for hosting my old blog images, heavily watermarked. It was a free service when I started using it in conjunction with my blog in the early 2000s, but then they basically destroyed my blog and held my precious memories for ransom with their black-mirror-like policy change in 2017, earning them the F-rating.
3. The final resolution thing is "wellness," which I've partially addressed with the above-discussion of how I'm trying to avoiding mojo-stealing doom-scrolling. For physical wellness I'm already in an OK place of getting a bit of daily exercise by biking to work, always taking the stairs at work, paddleboarding or windsurfing whenever I can, and jogging when I can't find time for any other type of exercise. The change for 2026 is just to be a little more pragmatic and less uptight about exercising (like, just choose an activity and do it instead stressing so much over what where and when), and to add the gym at work as another "when I can't make time to get on the water" option.
As 2026 begins, many Americans, including me, are reflecting on our deeply troubling political, cultural, economic, and environmental dysfunction. I know this because of all the hot-takes and hand-wringing about it I see and hear on the Internet and in real life. My contribution today will be a hot take on the hot takes; a meta-hot-take, if you will. Here's what I've seen:
Today's hot takes usually fall somewhere on a three-pointed triangle of who is to blame for the Trumpian nightmare. The extreme perspectives forming the points of the triangle are:
1. "It's all the fault of uneducated, middle-America MAGA types, based on their deplorable racism, sexism, religious zealotry, xenophobia, low IQ, etc. They can't be cured or converted so the best solution is to overpower, ignore, or disenfranchise them."
2. "It's all liberal democrats' fault for being elitist snobs obsessed with political correctness and woke ideology. We've forgotten the common working man, especially the uneducated white Christian working man, forcing him to align with Trump as a last, desperate means to preserve his dignity and economic prospects." Sometimes this take ends with the suggestion that democrats drop their support of women, diversity, education, LGBTQIA+, etc. and elevate blue collar white dudes to the center of everything.
3. "It's all the fault of billionaires and mega-corporations usurping the nation's treasure and warping politics and media to their selfish ends. They cynically fuel right vs. left culture wars to divert attention from their ongoing heist of the world, all while viciously exploiting their employees, consumers, and young sex-trafficking victims."
Not all hot takes go fully into the extreme of one of the points. For example, Chris Hedges' 2016 essay https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-are-all-deplorables/, which is still relevant, did a lot of self-critical #2 but didn't excuse the bigotry of #1, and suggested a focus on the economic side of #3 as a way to move forward.
For my part I think there are bits of truth in 1 and 2, but 3 is the truest. Unfortunately, it seems like we're usually duking it out between 1 and 2 while not giving point 3 proper consideration. I.e., we're giving crooked billionaires a pass that they don't deserve, while playing into their hands by fighting each other on the media platforms they control.
Here are two quick thoughts on how left-leaning people like me can avoid that playing-into-the-billionaires-hands thing.
1. DO reject racism and other bigotry, but don't be too snobby against people who didn't go to college or whatever, because when it comes down to it we're all basically working-class people who need to cooperate to resist being exploited by the the ultra wealthy. One of billionaires' tricks is to portray working class liberals as the elites, hiding the fact that billionaires are the actual elites. We shouldn't make it any easier for them to portray us that way.
2. Make sure our liberal political offerings are actually GOOD for working people, and not corrupted by corporate BS. As an example, it's hard to argue strongly in support of corporate-mangled policies like the Affordable Care Act because they're so compromised by giveaways to wealthy interests. The republican offerings are all corporate giveaways, too, but we need to offer something that's clearly not that.
I'm a marine biology professor at Florida Gulf Coast University. My professional page is here, my personal blog is here, and my no-longer-maintained science blog is here.
