Author Archives: Joe Wein

About Joe Wein

Software developer and anti-spam activist

Tepco drowning in radioactive water

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A recent leak of 300 tons of highly radioactive water at Fukushima No. 1 has highlighted the long term problems that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) is facing in its struggle to manage the crisis at the wrecked nuclear power station (see Japan Times, 2013-08-21). One massive steel tank had been leaking as much as 10 tons of water a day for a month before the leak was noticed. The water level in the tank dropped by 3 m before anyone noticed. It is not clear yet how the water is escaping.

The water in the tank has been used for cooling the melted reactor cores. Consequently it is highly radioactive from strontium, cesium and tritium. At a distance of 50 cm, as much as 100 millisieverts per hour (mSv/h) were measured. That means a nuclear worker there would absorb as much radiation in one hour as is legally permitted over a total of 5 years.

You might think that with a witches’ brew like that on its hands, Tepco would take every possible precaution to prevent leaks and to monitor fluid levels. Tepco uses both welded steel tanks and temporary tanks for storing contaminated water at Fukushima No. 1. Welded tanks are supposed to be stronger and more leak proof, whereas temporary tanks can be bolted together quickly from sheet metal and plastic. About one third of the over 1000 tanks at Fukushima No. 1 are temporary tanks, including the one that recently leaked. Tanks of this type have been used at the site since December 2011 and they are supposed to last five years before needing repair or replacement. So far 4 of these tanks have leaked, yet Tepco is planning to install even more temporary tanks for storing water. I guess they must be cheaper.

I am curious why the leaks were not detected sooner. Are there no monitoring devices installed that can automatically report water levels?

Tepco is planning to treat the water in the tanks with its ALPS filtering system, which can remove radioactive cesium and strontium from the water, but not tritium. It was meant to start operating this month, but after problems it is now expected to not resume operation until December.

Even after treatment, Tepco will have a water problem. Any water pumped from the turbine halls that has been in contact with the reactor basements has elevated levels of radioactive tritium. No chemical removal system exists for tritium, as it’s an isotope of hydrogen, one of the two elements that make up water. Tepco can not simply evaporate water from those tanks to reduce volume and concentrate contaminants into a smaller volume, as the tritium would be released with water vapour and come down as rain again elsewhere. So what is it going to do? Release it into the atmosphere slowly? Dilute it with sea water? Or store hundreds of thousands of tons of water for hundreds of years? Neither alternative seems very appealing.

Google does an “Apple Maps” to its own Maps

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Last night Google proved to me that you don’t have to be Apple to shoot yourself in the foot with a major Maps application release.

Naturally, online maps are a big feature on mobile devices, which is why it’s important to get them right.

Not too long ago Apple ended up with egg on their faces when they introduced their own Maps application to replace Google Maps. Google has just done the same. They rolled out a completely new Maps app starting from the middle of July and yesterday it landed on my Android phone. I was just preparing for a 280 km bicycle trip and had mapped out the route to follow, which I usually use Google Maps for. Imagine my surprise when I found that following an externally mapped route file was no longer supported on the latest Google Maps app: It doesn’t support the “My Maps” feature any more. With “My Maps” you can map a route using a number of third party products and highlight key locations, such as restaurants or shops on the map and assign a name to this. Google Maps then marks these points of interest with asterisks and highlights the route with a coloured line that you can follow easily. Simple but powerful. Well, that’s how it used to be before the “upgrade”.

This is what they say on their official blog:

Finally, My Maps functionality is not supported in this release but will return to future versions of the app.

Sounds to me like they were keen to release a new version of the product, even thought it wasn’t ready yet — just like Apple. Interestingly enough, the iOS version of Google Maps didn’t have the “My Maps” feature either. So what Google has done is to dumb down its flagship product to the level of the inferior version it ships on its competitor’s operating system!

Another annoying omission was the ability to display a scale bar (ruler) illustrating distances on the map, at whatever zoom level. This option has gone. It was quite useful to be able to estimate distances on the map. Without it, I simply don’t have a clue about distances unless I’m totally familiar with the area, in which case I presumably wouldn’t be using Google Maps in the first place.

My temporary fix was to uninstall Google Maps, reverting back to the factory installed version of Google Maps. This gets Google Maps working again, but it’s not sticky. After uninstalling it, the “upgrade” (i.e. downgrade) was back again the following day. Therefore it is important to disable automatic updates in the Google Play settings. Once you do that you will have to manually confirm all updates for apps other than Maps (and you need to avoid confirming Maps updates, which will still be offered).

Other problems that caused user complaints:

  • No more offline maps – the new version only supports map viewing with a mobile data or WiFi connection
  • Removal of +/- (zoom buttons) – zooming in and out now takes two fingers
  • Fewer and less relevant local search results
  • No more green/red/yellow lines along roads to indicate congestion levels
  • Removal of Google Latitude (which I never used)

UPDATE (2013-08-16): Version 7.1.0 appears to have brought back the scale bar. However, I won’t be installing it until My Maps also comes back.

Pump and Dump spam: Building Turbines Inc, Imogo Technologies Inc

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Here are recent examples of “pump and dump” stock spams.

Avoid stocks advertised via spam at all costs. Whoever is behind the spam campaign is trying to offload stocks they already own onto unsuspecting buyers. Once the spam campaign stops, prices of and demand for these stocks will collapse and whoever bought them will have to pretty much write off any money they spent on these stocks.

Imogo Technologies, Inc. (IMTC):

Imogo Technologies, Inc. (IM_TC) .14 Cent market value could make you a
millionaire. This hidden cloud computing business Might Be The Largest
Worry To Microsoft’s Windows Platform. The profits you can make is most
certainly astonishing!!! Act on this unique ticker in advance of when Wall
Street Pushes the ticker price significantly higher!

Building Turbines Inc.(BLDW):

US Company Signs Deal to Make Roof Wind Turbines for 90K Sq-Ft
Depot. BUILDING TURBINES INC (PINKSHEETS: B L_D_W) Focuses on
the Design and Manufacture of Patented Roof Top Wind Turbines.

Long Term Target: 0.95
Per share price: $.038
Trade Date: Mon, August 5th, 2013
Tick: B L_D_W
Company: Building Turbines Corp.

Environment Friendly Energy Business Set To Lift Off Next Week.

American Corporation Agrees Agreement to Construct Rooftop Wind Turbines for
90,000 Square Foot Stockroom. Building Turbines, Corp (PINKS: B_LDW) Works on
the Study and Manufacture of Patented Rooftop Wind Turbines.

Trading Date: Aug, 5th
5-Day Target: .60
Company Name: Building Turbines Corp.
Closed yesterday: 0.038
Sym: B_LDW

Renewable Power Business Equipped To Rise When Market Opens!!!

Texas Corporation Cuts Agreement to Construct Rooftop Wind
Turbines for 90 Thousand Sq-Ft Warehouse. BUILDING TURBINES CORP
(PINKS: B L D W) Focuses on the Design and Manufacture of
Copyrighted Rooftop Wind Turbines.

Target Price: 0.20
It is now: .038
Trade Date: Aug 5th
Ticker: B L D W
Company Name: BUILDING TURBINES INC.

Environment Friendly Power Company Equipped To Jump When Market
Opens!!!

2013-08-20 – Monarchy resources (MONK) Pump & Dump spam:

Important Info: The MON K is on the fire. MON K is on a 1st day of
promo and its showing a largest volume on today! Brokers named it a
choice of the summer. And you need to learn why… MONARCHY RESOURCES
is a latest star in financing in mining. The strategy is big. This may
honestly be a $1.15 stock super quick. The promo will follow for three
months and the stock price will explode monthly. Begin profiting
dollars with MON K. Get your $29’000 shares on Aug 20th below 0.43!

and

Earn fast $25’000 immediately! Hello, ready to earn $25’000 by next Friday?
You can make even more if you buy this premium stock on Monday. The stock
symbol is: M_O_N K. Its Monarchy Resources. It sells below 37 cents,
but it could settle $1’80 promptly! Purchase shares of M_O_N K on Aug, 19th
under 37 cents and double your investment! It would be dope to profit
$25’000 by Friday. And its very easy to get. On August 19th order 4’000
shares of M_O_N K and pocket over $25’000 by Friday.

Search engine registration spam

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Some spammers try to scare domain registrants with bogus “notifications” such as the following:

Expiration Notice

Order #: 111769336
Order Date: Jun 29, 2013
Bill To: [My Name]
[My details from the WHOIS record of my domain]

PROCESS PAYMENT NOW

Domain Name
[MY.DOMAIN.NAME]

Registration
Jun 29, 2013 – Jun 29, 2014

Price
$75.00

Term
1 Year

Domain: [MY.DOMAIN.NAME]

To: [My Name]

Don’t miss out on this offer which includes search engine submission for [MY.DOMAIN.NAME] for 12 months. There is no obligation to pay for this order unless you complete your payment by Jul 14, 2013. Our services provide submission and search engine ranking for domain owners. This offer for submission services is not required to renew your domain registration.

Failure to complete your search engine registration by Jul 14, 2013 may result in the cancellation of this order (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Process Payment For
[MY.DOMAIN.NAME]
UNSUBSCRIBE INSTRUCTIONS

You have received this message because you elected to receive special notifications and offers. If you no longer wish to receive our special notices, please unsubscribe here, or mail us a written request to the attention of: Customer Contact Manager, PO Box 4668 New York, NY 10163. Please allow up to four weeks for the complete unsubscribe process to take place. NOTE: If you have multiple accounts with us, you must opt out for each one individually in order to fully stop receiving these notifications. This message is CAN-SPAM compliant.

Please do not reply to this email, as we are not able to respond to messages sent to this address.

Needless to say I never asked for this message and harvesting registrant details from WHOIS records for spamming purposes is a violation of ICANN terms.

It is easy to confuse this spam email with a domain registration expiry notice from a registrar, which it isn’t. You can safely delete this and similar messages. Do not hand your credit card details to spammers!

Here are some of the domains used by the spammers who run this scam:

ordertracking136456.com
ordertracking476475.com
ordertracking686342.com
securetrans12113.com
securetrans78922.com
securetrans92175.com
trksecure247546.com
trksecure972456.com
auibcu.com

The domains are hosted on IP address 220.164.140.243 in China.

The “search engine registration” they’re selling is pointless and no such registration is needed. Google isn’t going to forget about my domain just because I’m not going to send these crooks $75 essentially just for spamming me. If either your domain already shows up in Google and other search results or Googlebot or other crawlers are crawling it or there are existing links to it from other websites then you’re already in business.

A “search engine registration” will not protect your domain from accidental expiry, which is what registrants should be concerned about. If your domain is important, please check its expiry date with the registrar via a WHOIS lookup. If your registrar (like mine) offers an auto-renewal service for domain registrations, enable auto-renewal and check that the credit card expiry date is sufficiently far into the future. Otherwise mark a date a few weeks before the expiry date in your calendar so you won’t forget.

The myth of the deadly marathon run

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Every couple of months I seem to see another article in a major newspaper about how exercise can be a killer if it is a bit more than a moderate amount. The most recent example: “Over 40? Rethink your next triathlon” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2013-06-24).

About a year ago a study in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings made some waves and its lead author, James O’Keefe now keeps getting quoted with warnings to avoid doing more than half an hour of exercise per day. No doubt such warnings will comfort a lot of couch potatoes, who do no exercise at all and who will feel confirmed in their reluctance to go out and move their bodies, lest it might kill them. No doubt his study will be good for O’Keefe’s career, as it makes him the man to go to for a quote for this type of article.

The myth of the deadly Marathon run is as old as the first Marathon run itself. The Marathon distance of 42 km / 26 miles commemorates a messenger called Pheidippides who supposedly delivered the news of the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon over that distance to Athens, only to die immediately afterwards. A closer reading of the historical sources however reveals it to be a myth, created from a mashup of several other events, neither of them involving the death of a runner. Herodotos, in his history of the Persian wars, only mentioned Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta (a distance several times longer than from Marathon to Athens) to request help against the Persians. No mention was made of a run from Marathon to Athens after the battle or a death from running. After the victory at Marathon, the Greek army rapidly marched to Athens to ward off a sea invasion, but this was no run. Only some 500 years after the battle, the modern version of the story was cobbled together:

The first known written account of a run from Marathon to Athens occurs in the works of the Greek writer Plutarch (46–120), in his essay On the Glory of Athens. Plutarch attributes the run to a herald called either Thersippus or Eukles. Lucian, a century later, credits one “Philippides.” It seems likely that in the 500 years between Herodotus’s time and Plutarch’s, the story of Pheidippides had become muddled with that of the Battle of Marathon (particularly the story of the Athenian forces making the march from Marathon to Athens in order to intercept the Persian ships headed there), and some fanciful writer had invented the story of the run from Marathon to Athens.
(Wikipedia article: Pheidippides)

The modern narrative of death by running doesn’t quite match the facts either. While it’s true that the risk of death from a heart attack is higher during a run than while resting, people who regularly exercise have lower mortality than people who don’t.

As a marathon-running friend of mine explains, being a trained runner has the effect of lowering his resting heart rate. Even if his heart beats faster during a marathon, his average year round pulse will be lower, so his heart will wear out less quickly overall.

While the greatest difference in mortality is found between people who don’t exercise at all and people who exercise moderately, even as people exercise more, the negative effects of exercise do not begin to outweigh the positive effects.

There was an interesting reply in Runner’s World (2012-11-28) to O’Keefe’s claims about excessive training, by which he means anything exceeding 30-60 minutes. In the above article he again advises people to run no more than 30 km a week (which would be no more than about 30 minutes a day averaged over a week). One of the major studies quoted by O’Keefe’s study actually found no levelling off of benefits. His advice is based on a misreading of the available data: People who exercised 120 minutes a day actually had even lower mortality than people exercising one hour a day.

Wen and colleagues reply that yes, they do have data — and it doesn’t show what O’Keefe et al. hope:

By 120 min [per day], the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was around 0·55 [which is better than it was for 60 min per day], with even better hazard ratios for cardiovascular diseases… The adverse effects of strenuous exercise for incremental efforts for more than an hour a day did not seem to outweigh the benefits. We were not able to identify an upper limit of physical activity, either moderate or vigorous, above which more harm than good will occur in terms of long-term life expectancy benefits.

This exchange took place before the recent spate of review articles about the dangers of too much exercise was published. And yet the study is still being cited as evidence that doing more than an hour a day of exercise is bad for you. As a subsequent letter to the journal from Michael Bubb of the University of Florida put it, “The interpretation of the data provided in the review by O’Keefe et al is misleading, particularly given the response of the authors of the original data.”

In the end, articles that discourage exercise that is proven to reduce mortality will end up costing lives.

RegClean Pro scareware scam

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While looking for some information on how to get from Vienna airport to the city centre, the second link that came up looked like it might provide information on train connections, using domain schnellbahn-wien.at. However, when I clicked on it, the page that opened flashed a warning that my PC was about to crash. I immediately suspected a scam. The only link from there took me to a site (systweak.com) trying to sell me a scareware product called “RegClean Pro”. At no point did it show me the promised train information.

If I viewed the Google hit using the “Translate” function of Google, the promised travel information did come up, suggesting the server was feeding different contents to Google than it does to ordinary site visitors, which violates Google’s terms and conditions. I reported it as Google spam.

Beware of any malware warnings or registry problem warnings that pop up on random websites – these are all likely to be scams.

Acer One D260 system restore

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The hard disk in my wife’s Acer One D260 netbook got damaged. A new hard disk is about a quarter the price of a new netbook, so I wanted to install a new drive. Like with most PCs these days there aren’t any Windows install DVDs included.

The netbook came with Windows 7 Starter, which we needed to somehow install on the new hard disk. Fortunately, the damaged hard disk was still limping along enough to use the Acer eRecovery system to create two Recovery DVDs. These should allow restoring the initial system state to a hard disk in the machine, wiping all the data on the drive.

To replace the hard disk, I had to undo seven clips around the edge of the keyboard, lift off the keyboard and disconnect the keyboard ribbon cable to the motherboard connector. Then I needed to undo 4 screws underneath and push through, to pop out the cover on the bottom of the machine. This opened access to the single memory slot and drive cage.

The 1 GB memory module on the motherboard can be replaced with a 2 GB PC3-8500 1066MHZ DDR3 module available for about $20. This is a wortwhile investment and I already have the module on order.

I replaced the damaged 250 GB WD Scorpio Blue drive with a spare 500 GB drive (available new for about $60-$80). Then I closed the cover and reinstalled the screws and then the keyboard.

With the new drive it was possible to boot off the first Recovery DVD using a USB DVD drive. The eRecovery software copied data from both DVDs to the hard disks and then rebooted. However, that reboot failed because the new drive did not yet have a Windows Master Boot record (MBR) on it. You can install an MBR from within Windows, but not from the bootable eRecovery DVD. So I had a chicken and egg problem.

I overcame this hurdle by booting off a Ubuntu Live DVD (32 bit), installing the ‘lilo’ package and telling it to install the Linux equivalent of Microsoft’s MBR code:

sudo apt-get install lilo
sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

At the next attempt to boot off the hard disk, Windows started installing its components and drivers and launched into its initial configuration, just like the first time we had unboxed the machine more than two years ago. So we are back to a working Winmdows 7 machine!

Thank you, Linux — you saved my day again! 🙂

Too late to revive Flickr?

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Yahoo has just given its Flickr photo sharing service a much needed facelift. I have a Flickr account and used to love the service, but switched to Google’s Picasaweb more than 2 years ago. I loved the Flickr user interface, in fact I much preferred it to Picasaweb, yet I moved on.

Admittedly, Flickr’s 100 MB/month traffic limit was inconvenient, but what really killed it for me was that they limited free accounts to a maximum of 200 uploaded pictures. Not per week or per month, but in total. Facebook has no picture limit at all and Picasaweb has none provided you use the default setting in which it resizes uploads such that the width and height does not exceed 2048 pixels, which is more than enough for anyone with a 1920×1280 or smaller monitor. The greatest user interface was worthless without the ability to upload more pictures. Over the past 12 months alone I uploaded 7.3 GB in 107 sets consisting of 3385 pictures and videos to Picasaweb.

It’s great that Flickr will now offer up to 1 TB of storage for full size images. But how many former users will be prepared to give them another try, now that they have become familiar with Facebook and Google’s competing services? On a positive note though, the new Flickr will force Google to be more careful where it moves with Picasaweb / Google Photo. The Flickr facelift may not make it a winner yet, but any misstep by Google could.

My 300 km Mt Fuji brevet ride (BRM518)

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BRM519 was my third brevet ride with AJ NishiTokyo this year and my fifth brevet overall (including an unofficial shadow ride in January). It makes May the 9th month in a row for me with a Century ride (over 160 km / 100 miles).

I’d been wanting to ride this brevet again since I did it last year (my first brevet ever). I worried about family or business travel that might conflict, or about foul weather on the day, but none of that came to pass.

Like last year I was the only one attempting the brevet on a small wheeled bike, but while I heard a few skeptical comments last year, as people thought I was attempting something very difficult, the comments I got this year were overwhelmingly positive. I got many compliments on the Bike Friday, my folding road bike.

I left home at 19:20 on Saturday, got back around 20:30 on Sunday and slept all of 20 minutes in between. I rode 360 km (224 miles) altogether, since this time I didn’t pack my Bike Friday into the bicycle bag for a train ride to and from Machida (the starting point), but rode from Tokyo-Setagaya to the west side of Mt Fuji and back. That makes it the longest bike ride for me so far.

At the signup I was greeted by David and William, who I had met through my blog post about the Nichitsu ghost town ride last year. This was the 3rd brevet we rode together. The previous weekend they had completed a 100 km hike for charity. Kudos to them!

Garmin troubles

I’d been training for this event for a year and bought a Garmin 500 with heart rate monitor belt in January, but Sod’s law would have it that the battery of the belt ran out just before the event. I had done a last training ride a week earlier and everything had worked fine, but when I rode out to the start on Saturday night, the Garmin did not pick up data from the HR belt. I suspected the HR sensor battery (I had used the belt for 2500 km over 4 months). A CR2032 button cell was 250 yen ($2.50) at the next convenience store, but I also needed a tiny screw driver (the size used for eye glasses and watches) to change it. A mechanic at the Cherubim bike shop (where the brevet signup takes place) helped me out. Thank you!

With the new battery the Garmin started displaying numbers though it also warned me about the presence of multiple heart rate sensors, hardly surprising in the reception area of a brevet!

Another problem was that near the 298 km mark, the Garmin lost satellite reception, with no tunnel or other obstacle to explain it. Also, the route as plotted by Strava has me swerve out into the Pacific once. Though my Garmin charger cable worked beautifully to extend its battery life beyond 16 hours, I’d say the jury is still out on whether the Garmin 500 will cope with brevets beyond 200 km.

Too fast and too slow

Why do I use a Garmin if I ignore its data? The idea with HR data is to always operate at your maximum sustainable rate for the duration of the event. I didn’t do that, far from it.

On brevets you need to maintain a minimum average speed of 15 km/h (by elapsed time, including all breaks) overall for the course and up to each check point (PC). Since most climbs are such that my speed will drop below 15 km/h and I can’t make up the lost time on faster descents because they are too short for that, I need to build up a time buffer on flat sections. The first third or so of the course was mostly flat, so we could go fast. I also worked hard for the first 50 km of the 200 km West Izu and Kintaro brevets, but foolishly pushed even harder during the first 75 km of the 300 km, when I should have slightly dropped my speed to allow for the longer course. On top of that I felt the effects of riding through the night without sleep.

As a result, the 4 hour climb from sea level at Fujikawa to 1,100 m above Lake Motosu was really slow. Most of the time my heart rate wouldn’t move much beyond 120, when it had been in the high 150s/low 160s on the flat sections. This is where I lost a lot of time.

I only recovered via the long descent from the pass to Fujiyoshida and then down to Tsuru. My banana-raisin-outmeal energy bars also helped. I think they perked me up more than any bread or onigiri (rice balls wrapped in sea weed) I bought in the convenience store.

Before the Tsuru check point I had all but written off my chances of completing within the time limit. I had to take a second brief nap by the road side at R139 before Fujiyoshida. The high speed descent from Fujiyoshida to Tsuru is always fun and by the time I got there, my time buffer didn’t look great, but workable.

In the end I was 17 minutes faster than last year and will receive my brevet medal by mail 🙂

Teru teru bozu at work

The Fuji brevet two years ago (2011) got rained out. Though the real hard core riders battled it out in their rain gear, from the pictures it didn’t look like a pleasant experience. The weather report had forecast rain for Sunday right up until the last day, when the outlook changed to something more positive and it worked out OK. At the pre-ride briefing one of the organisers showed us the “teru teru bozu” (anti-rain charm usually made by kids) to ward off rain. Of course I don’t believe in this stuff, but it only started drizzling during the last 30 km before the goal, and only on and off. It was so little, I didn’t even put my smartphone away until I had arrived.

I had discussed my concerns about the weather with my friend Jose and he advised to make sure I’d be warm enough if it rained. I had considered wearing either my GS Astuto bib shorts on top of a long base layer or my dhb winter bib tights and finally opted for the latter. As it happened, the first choice would have been better. I only wore my windbreaker between 04:00 and 06:00 for the early morning descent from Gotemba to the coast. The weather and what to wear is always a guessing game on long rides, especially if you want to minimize how much you carry.

What’s next?

Just like after last year’s 300 km brevet, the AJ NishiTokyo organizers asked me if I was going to give the 400 km brevet in June a try. Also, from next year they will have a 600 km event, for which they will do a trial run in September. My main concern about the longer rides is the effects of lack of sleep. I did much better on that front this year. Short naps work well for me and I probably should have tried one sooner this time. Riding to the brevet start was a decision I only made hours earlier and I still brought along the rinko bag, in case I was too tired after the ride to consider cycling home, but as it happened, I never used it (I could leave it with the staff during the ride). 400 km over 27 hours isn’t that much more than the 360 km over 25 hours that I rode for this event. So I would say, I am definitely up for a 400 km brevet in the future.

No, It’s Not Atlantis!

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I don’t envy headline writers who have to come up with catchy phrases every day to get people to read articles in their publications. So it’s understandable that some of them mentioned Atlantis when reporting about the recent discovery of granite from a sunken portion of an ancient continent off the coast of Brazil. Talk about Atlantis or UFOs or a couple of other mysterious subjects always gets people’s attention. According to legend, Atlantis was an island located beyond the Straits of Gibraltar whose civilization was destroyed in a day when it sank into the sea some 10,000 years ago.

Lest anybody gets confused, that recently discovered sunken land has nothing whatsoever to do with the legend of Atlantis. If the real Atlantis had a highly developed civilization then that place can’t be it if no human being ever saw it above sea level, let alone ever lived there. And we know that no human ever lived there if it sunk nearly 50 million years ago and thus is almost as old as the last dinosaurs. Modern man (Homo sapiens) only evolved about 200,000 years ago, tens of millions of years after the recently discovered piece of land had sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. Whatever real events (if any) may have inspired the legend of Atlantis, they certainly did not occur there.

So what is that piece of former land mass? When the ancient supercontinent of Pangea broke apart and South America separated from Africa, along with India, Madagascar, Antarctica and Australia, not everything from it made it into the present day parts of a jigsaw puzzle that still fit together. Small bits broke off along the fault lines and gradually disappeared into the ocean.

A similar find to the current one was reported in February, from an even older breakup of an ancient continent that left another continental fragment at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.