Back on the Bicycle

Today's weather: High = 17 Low=8
Sunny

Interesting day today it is 11/11/11 and the Chinese view this as marriage day. The reasoning is simple, they view this as pairs of 1s so that means two become one. Or is it one become two? Whatever, in response to that many have declared today singles day. Whether you're married or single the fact remains that next year will be last `triple` pair where the day, month, and year are all the same.

To that end, people are declaring 12/12/12 as the end of the world. But I don't think this a very fruitful exercise to predict days of the end of the world as nobody has gotten it right for those who have attempted thus far.

So when 12/12/12 comes to pass one thing for sure is that we'll need to wait 100 years for the next triple which is 01/01/01 in 2101.

Let's talk about something else. Transportation. The details of that last post about subway timings will be "outsourced" to my students as a math project as I've basically thrown in the towel on the Shanghai subway. Forget doing any experiments with time calculations for myself as I've just had extraordinary bad luck with the subway system ever since I gave up my motorcycle to the new rightful German owner two weeks ago.

It's hard to believe but for every single day I've walked into a subway station and watched as a train just left. Granted this can potentially happen 4 times a day as I have to transfer lines, and of course do the return trip home from work.

I've done the math on this and there's about a 40% chance that I miss the first or the 2nd train or both on the way to work or it happens on the way home. Given 10 subway rides (counting both the trip to work and the return trip in the last two weeks) then it can only be a shockingly low 4% chance of missing a train every single day. My atrocious luck showed that it happened.

The final straw was coming home on Friday and line #1 stalled one station before mine. The doors stayed open for 5 minutes and I then got out, hopped an illegal motorcycle taxi right in front of a policeman, and got a ride to the nearest place to buy a bicycle.

Plans to get a transitional scooter or motorbike have fallen through the roof and so a bicycle it is. Once I can recover enough finances next semester I will then upgrade to a Yamaha YBR250.

Until then it will have to be my own two legs