A thought process:

1. I like cookies.
2. I love free cookies.
3. Gee, it would sure be nice if cookies were always free, don't you think?
4. The government should compel, by force of law, bakeries to give cookies away for free!!

At what point do you think the thought process crossed the line? If you like cookies, I bet you agree with #2 and #3, so why not agree with #4? Why not compel bakeries to give cookies away?

By their very definition, laws and regulations compel people to act a certain way, whether they like it or not. It removes their right to do as they please. This is often a good thing; I'm glad that society removed your right to take my car whenever you feel like it, for example. But as the cookie example shows, forcing someone else to do something that benefits you is not always what a good and just society calls for. We show restraint and consideration in where we invoke government power unto others, as at the same time we expect restraint and consideration in government's intrusion into our own lives (especially if we make the occasional batch of cookies ourselves).

So, when contemplating laws and regulations (and taxes, for that matter), where society will use force to compel behavior, it's not enough to ask “Do I like this idea?”, or “Would it be good if everyone did this?” or “Will more people benefit than be harmed?”.

No, you must also ask “Is this sufficiently compelling to force it upon people who don't share my opinion?”

So that brings me to the subject of net neutrality, and the many discussions of it I've seen.

First let me say that this blog post is not an argument for or against net neutrality. However, this blog post is an argument against discussions that don't consider whether it's compelling enough to require under threat of force.

Take, for example, the occasionally-funny comic “The Oatmeal”, and his article on net neutrality, where he talks about all the bad things internet service providers could and would do if left unregulated. He gets a bit melodramatic, but his points are completely valid.

It's as if he's talking about what would happen if restaurants could set their own prices for food. He'd make the valid point that since some dishes would cost more than others, you'd be faced with the unpleasant task of considering price when making your selection, instead of just being able to choose based upon your current mood. Or, he'd correctly point out, every dish in a particular restaurant might be priced too high for you to afford, so you'd be effectively barred from eating there! This would be really unpleasant! The answer, he would then point out obviously, is to require restaurants to set all meals to a single government-mandated price. There, problem solved!

Why isn't there a law requiring this? The vast majority of humans would benefit from this... only the restaurants (which are not even people!) would have their rights taken away. That seems to be a small price to pay for such widespread benefit, no? No. That's not how a just society works. The idea that all food is priced equally might be nice on the surface, but not enough to compel people to do it if they don't want.

The restaurant business is very different from the ISP business, so the analogy goes only so far; I'm not attempting to equate the restaurant business with that of ISPs, but merely using it as an exaggerated example to illustrate the salient point that any discussion of a law/regulation/tax should include the recognition that it's the application of force by the government to restrict others. The end result might be exactly what society needs, but it shouldn't be done without recognizing that it's being done.

(The previous paragraph was clarified a bit in response to the first few comments)

So, when discussing the use of force to require internet service providers to run their business in a particular way, please also discuss whether it's good and right for society to use force in that way.

Maybe that discussion will end up with “yes” for any number of reasons, or “no”, but at this point I've never seen the discussion actually happen.

Even Seth Godin, who has long been a bastion of common-sense insight in a sea of misdirection, in his comments on net neutrality looks only at how some individuals might be hurt if net neutrality is lost, completely failing to consider how society might be hurt if it uses its force without due consideration.

I went on short photo walks yesterday afternoon and this morning, at a cluster of temples near my place. It was quit pretty. I'd never been to the small Eisho-in Temple, and went yesterday on the recommendation of Tal (seen on this post) and found it to be exquisite at the height of fall colors.

I went back this morning with Damien, and we had the place all to ourselves.

I'll write more about it all later, but for today just a few representative from both days' ramblings. (You can see the paths I walked on Strava, here and here.)

My walks also visited the Konkaikomyou-ji Temple (金戒光明寺), of which the temple above is a sub part, and the next large temple to the north, the Shinnyodo Temple (真如堂本坊).

You might remember the scene above, with the “no cars” granite post, from this shot four years ago.

In the fuzzy background of the shot above, you might be able to notice that there are three people, one person taking the photo of a couple. It turns out that I knew the photographer. Small world.

Continued here...

I had quite the photogenic day on Monday, with a local outing in the morning to see a nearby temple's fall foliage, then a ride into the mountains to see by bicycle some of the places seen during the weekend's “First Taste of Kyoto’s Fall-Foliage Season, 2017 Edition” post.

Today's post is about the bicycle ride (view at Strava).

The photo that opens this post is the entrance path to the Koetsu-ji Temple (光悦寺), which I pass on the edge of town just before entering the mountains and making the climb toward Kyomi Pass. We first saw it on my blog three weeks ago, in all green, here. Indeed, as I speculated there, it's spectacular dressed in fall colors, but also as expected, it was crowded.

I took the photo above expecting it to simply illustrate “crowded”, but I really like its vibe, so I made desktop-background versions.

A lady kindly took my photo for me.

On the way down I came across Yasukawa-san, who had invited me on the trip to Norikura last year. We had a nice chat for a bit.

My post “Cycling to Kyoto’s Ochiba Shrine Amid the Fall Colors” two years ago is similar to today's, but has a better photo of the bridge, here.

I wonder how long ago the bridge was in use. It now leads to nowhere (the road just stops), because, I assume, the construction for the current modern roads completely changed the landscape in the area.

The main thing I wanted to do on this ride was make the short climb up to the Soren-ji Temple, which until now I'd visited only by car.

I made a segment on Strava for it, but 50 of the 52 registered rides are incorrectly attributed to this segment due to bad GPS data. In looking at them, most were recorded with Strava's iPhone app, and the pattern of wonky GPS is really consistent. I'm guessing that they all suffered the insidious iOS snap-to-road “Feature” long enough for the iPhone to think they were on this steep climb, until realizing that they couldn't be and yanking them back to the flat road they were actually zipping by on.

As it is, I think at the moment only the two slowest recorded rides are actually riding this 400m @ 11% climb. Mine is the faster of the slowest, so I've got the moral “KOM”, at least until a real cyclist shows up. 🙂

From the data above it's clear that it's not common among cyclists, but it's so lovely up there.

The leaf-covered steps were a bit nicer a couple of years ago, as seen in the post about my first visit to this temple, “A Few Pretty Pictures from Kyoto’s Middle-of-Nowhere Sourenji Temple”. Some photos of this stairway also appeared on “Kyoto’s Souren-ji Temple at f/1.2”.

After the temple the road descends sharply, then dead ends as far as cars are concerned, but there's a path that a bicycle can take...

Then I went down to the village to poke around its paths and alleys.

Then I headed north for a bit....

I'm not squared up with the gate and the building in the shot above because the lady seen in the prior photo was camped where I wanted to be, standing in front of her tripod seemingly doing some light browsing on her phone, completely ignoring her camera, the shrine, and folks waiting for her to move. After a while, I finally gingerly asked whether she was standing in that particular spot for a particular reason, and she replied in English “I don't speak Japanese”. So I repeated my question in English, and she said that no, she wasn't there for a particular reason, and went back to her phone.

This was fairly jarring. It was clear that she wasn't trying to be mean or troublesome, but that she simply didn't consider that she might be bothering others. One could guess from her accent where she was from, and roll your eyes and think “yeah, those people tend to be pretty rude”, but I try so hard not to do that. Each person is individual.

I finally ask whether she'd be so kind as to move just a bit over, at which point it finally dawned on her, and she moved slightly out of the way. Japanese folks looking on smiled in appreciation of my efforts.

And as inconsiderate as she was, she willingly agreed to snap a photo for me when I asked...

I then spent a few minutes digging among the leaves looking for part of my polarizing filter... I had dropped it while taking this photo and the clickspring that holds the glass in had apparently sprung out and away. I hoped I might find it, but didn't. One of the Japanese photographers even helped digging through the leaves for a while. Very kind.

Then I headed back home...

I didn't make the detour to see the maple this time. I'd done so two years ago (blogged here) and came away with a flat and missing bolts on my cleats.

However, I did take the next detour...

It was a lovely road that went for about a kilometer, at a mild average of 5%. It ended at a graveyard.

I made a Strava segment for this ride as well, as there wasn't already one.

The path continued past the cemetery. Normally I'd not take this kind of path on my road bike, but it was mostly grass over dirt, so it was quite easy riding except for the occasional rock or log...

At this point I was about a minute's walk from the Himuro Shrine that I posed about seven years ago, but I couldn't get to it. It's just as well, because I wanted to return to take pictures of the road I'd just ridden.

The tree that had fallen across the path had been really quite tall... here it is looking down its length...

I returned to the main road and continued up and over Kyomi Pass.

As I was flying down from Kyomi Pass toward Kyoto, I passed Henry Foster making his way up. I'd ridden with Henry on one of my first rides years ago. I did a quick U-Turn and killed myself to catch up to him to say “hi”, and to snap a blurry photo...

Then I continued down again. About 10 years ago, a section of twisty mountain road was replaced by a wide, modern road with sweeping turns, and until now I'd never taken the old section of road on a bike, so I thought I'd give it a go today.

By the time I came by the temple seen in the first photo of this article, it was almost 5pm and few people were around, so I could get a nicer photo:

I would have liked to have taken the photo from a lower vantage point, but another photographer's head was immediately below my camera as I took the shot.

The signs on either side of the entrance are tastefully done, though the one on the right doesn't seem to be very effective. 🙂

I was careful, of course, to be considerate of all, though at that hour there was almost no one around.

I went out for a short photo jaunt with Damien, Paul, and Adrian yesterday to check out some of the fall color in the mountains of northwest Kyoto.

First we went through the rural Kumagahata area that was hard hit by a typhoon last month...

The road surface is back to normal; compare to this typical scene just after the typhoon.

I ride my bicycle on this road often (it's part of the Kyoto Heart Loop, for example) but had never noticed this weird bit of brick construction. At first I thought it might be the leftover foundation of some long-gone building, but then noticed the plaque embedded within:

I was left grasping at straws to understand this. The characters are much more easily understood in this photograph than it was at the time, but even then I correctly identified the bigger characters as “隧道” written right-to-left, the old way to write “tunnel”. I'd seen it only once before, as described here. But there was no evidence of a tunnel nor that there ever might have been... it was odd, and I was left questioning whether I was mixing up my kanji.

However, searching the web for 「十三石山隧道」 brings up all kinds of stuff, including this very helpful post that describes a system that brings water from the river starting at a point farther up the river (here), along a twisty but gently-sloping path that ends up about 1.3km due south to this point just above a hydroelectric power plant built in 1908. By this point the road has descended about 50m (160') of elevation, but the water has not, so now at the power plant it can plummet down to drive the turbines.

The non-“tunnel” words on the plaque, “十三石山”, apparently refers to the nearby mountain just to the west.

I find this old stuff to be really fascinating.

As we continued deeper into the mountains, we stopped from time to time to enjoy the fall colors...

I'd been meaning to check this place out; the big circular stone is hard to miss when flying by on a bicycle.

The temple building itself was all closed up, but the adjacent cemetery was photogenic in some lovely light...

Nearby back on the main street was a wall with lots going on...

With so much going on, I though that I should be able to do something with it, but in the end it's the photo above that I like the best.

We eventually made our way to the Shimyouin Temple (志明院), deep in the mountains to the north....

I first wrote about this temple six years ago in “Kyoto’s Shimyouin Temple: Exceedingly Remote, Bashful, and Serene”, and I took this hard-edged black and white photo of Paul there, but for the most part this place doesn't appear on my blog much because photography isn't allowed at most of it. One used to be allowed to bring a camera or a lunch box, but people were just too rude, so about 40 years ago they stopped letting people bring anything (including cameras) in.

We then moved on to the famous Ochiba Shirne (“Fallen-leaf Shrine”) that has been on my blog many times...

It's not quite at it's peak “yellow carpet” level yet, as it was when this shrine first appeared on my blog seven years ago in “Carpet of Yellow at the Iwato Ochiba Shrine, Deep in the Mountains of North-West Kyoto”, but it's still lovely.

In a single-frame re-enactment of this wigglegram from five years ago.

The hedge near the entrance is apparently made of various different plants that have different colors during this season, as seen here, so you get a lovely mix of colors...

We then moved over to the Soren-ji Temple (宗蓮寺), which was fantastic when we visited it five years ago, as seen in “A Few Pretty Pictures from Kyoto’s Middle-of-Nowhere Sourenji Temple” and “Kyoto’s Souren-ji Temple at f/1.2”.

This time it wasn't quite as good, perhaps because we were a bit early, but the little park nearby was wonderful.

The road up to the temple is narrow and steep (400m with an average grade of 11%). I've never ridden it, but I will soon. I made a Strava segment for it.

It was a nice start to the season.

In Japanese, bicycling a full loop around Lake Biwa, Japan's largest lake, is called 「ビワ1」(“Biwa 1”), and depending on the route you take, is about 180~200km (112~124mi). It's a concept and phrase well known among cyclists, and even promoted by the Shiga Prefectural government, and that of various cities around the lake.

It's a lovely ride to do on a long summer day, with lots to see and enjoy, as I present in the story about the first time I did it 2½ years ago, in “Bicycle Ride Around Japan’s Largest Lake” (and its Part 2).

Part of what makes it interesting is the discovery and the newness, so it's a bit boring to do again. Still, half a year later, I did it in fast, not-sightseeing mode, in this 200km (125mi) ride.

So, having done it a couple of times and looking to up my does, my thoughts went to 「ビワ2」, two loops. During the zippy attempt, the actual loop itself (that is, excluding to and from the lake) took 6h 10m, so I thought I shouldn't have too much trouble doing two of them in one day. I thought I'd give it a try on my 50th birthday, but I ended up visiting my folks in Ohio then, so it remained an unfulfilled goal.

So, I finally did it this past Wednesday, completing 408km (254 mi) in 18½ overall hours:

I intended to wake at 3am, but couldn't sleep so I got up at 2am and spent the extra time stretching the quads and hamstrings in a lazy way. Finally I set out from my house in Kyoto at 4:10am, to meet the two others I would ride with, Ionut (seen on this post), and Hatano-san (seen on this one).

Ionut's day got off to a bad start with a puncture on the way to the meeting point, so he was a bit late to arrive. We eventually got going and climbed over the short mountain between Kyoto and the city of Otsu, to a tiny traffic circle near the lake that would be our start, middle, and end.

We did a loop around the little grass-filled traffic circle seen in the background at the start and end of each loop, to “lock in” the loop and make the full loop unambiguous. And then we were off as a paceline at a brisk pace.

A “paceline” is when you ride with others single file, taking turns at the head of the line, and other times drafting immediately behind the others, to save energy. When you're at the front, you take group responsibility for watching for hazards, as those behind you can't see the road or side hazards because you're in the way, and when you're behind others with your wheels separated by just inches, you pay hyper attention to the movement and signals from the person in front, lest they swerve or slow down and you don't react appropriately.

Most everything with the paceline went smoothly, except for one adrenaline-pumping event early on when it was still pitch dark on a middle-of-nowhere stretch of road. Hatano-san was leading the paceline, and I pulled out of it to move forward to take my turn at the front, and in the process came across a very dark hump of roadkill in the middle of the very dark (but otherwise pristine) road. It's the kind of road hazard that one could easily go over or avoid, so the danger was in the surprise. I bobbled, but thankfully did not pay the price for my inattention. I did not make that kind of mistake again.

We took even turns early on, but as the day progressed, Ionut took longer and longer turns at the front. He's by far the strongest, and wanted to train for a long endurance race he has coming up, so except for a small part of me with pride, I was happy to let him pull. All in all, he pulled for probably 80% of the day.

Because I spent my mental energy on riding safely (and on worrying about the total distance, and about fretting at how long it was to the next milestone, and worrying about what body part was in pain at the moment), I didn't pay much attention to the scenery, but the sunrise was gorgeous, with deep rich oranges and blues painted with a warm, rich gradient.

I'm thankful that Ionut had the energy (both physically and electronically) to take a few photos. To allow my iPhone to record the whole ride, I turned off all its antennas except for GPS (turned off WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular), put it into low-power mode, and touched it as little as possible. After 19 hours, the battery was still at 47%, so I guess I didn't need to be so severe.

But I'm glad I had it and could record my whole ride. I brought four different devices to record the ride with, and two had troubles. The iPhone worked perfectly, but my Garmin Edge 820 wouldn't even turn on. I've been having all kinds of problems with it lately, but thought I had them taken care of until the morning of the ride when it seemed to turn on but the screen didn't display anything. I brought it with me in the hopes that it'd record everything, but it was just dead weight, and it recorded nothing all day.

Then there's the Polar M460 that I bought as a backup when the Garmin started acting up. This piece-of-shit cycling computer is worth a whole blog post of ridicule on its own. It's horrible. I had to stop early in the ride to de-register my heart-rate sensor because it kept popping up “HR sensor battery low” messages, sometimes multiple times per second, even though the HR sensor battery was new and full. The message would stay there until I pressed a button, after which another one would come anywhere from after a few minutes, to instantly. It took a while with it's ridiculous input system to clear the HR sensor from the unit, and the resulting silence was angelic, but it seems to have decided to drop all sensor data from that point, even though it displayed it (e.g. power data) to me during the ride. These are just a few of the many problems I encounter with this unit. I sent a note to Polar, and they still haven't even responded.

I also had an old Garmin eTrex 20, which recorded everything fine.

In even considering to attempt this ride, I questioned whether I had the strength and endurance to complete it. A year ago I would not have given it a second thought, but this year has not been kind to my fitness, and I'm not even close to my peak. But as it turned out, I felt strong on the flats, which is most of the route.

Mentally, I didn't feel so strong, and the ride ended up being much tougher mentally than physically. Milestones along the route were so slow to come, and it was taxing to keep wondering “When on earth will we get to the spot?”.

I'd borrowed some clip-on aerobars from a friend, which allow me to rest my elbows on the handlebar and relax in a fairly aerodynamic posture, as seen in the next photo, while maintaining good power and cadence.

I really liked them, feeling natural the first time I tried them the day before. These particular ones were a bit short for me, so I did have to put some thought into a position that didn't hurt my elbows and wrists.

Perhaps six hours in, an hour before we were done with the first loop, I lamented that we wouldn't make it to the grassy traffic circle to finish the first loop by noon. Ionut said that we'd not go all the way down there, but instead cut off about 40km (25mi) of the bottom of the lake by cutting across the Great Biwa Bridge. This had been his plan all along in order to help ensure we finished at a reasonable hour, but I had clearly not understood it.

I was surprised at my reaction. I'd spent the last three or four hours worried that I'd not have the fortitude to continue, that I'd give up after the first loop, but in hearing that 40km would be cut off, I immediately told them to go ahead as they liked, but I'd continue to finish the loop. It was meaningless to me to cut off the end of the first loop (and cut off the start of the second loop, for that matter), as that would give us zero loops for the day, and I came into it planning to do two full loops if possible, but at a minimum one full loop.

We talked about the timing and how late we'd likely get home, and in the end we continued as a group to finish the full loop.

In the end, the first loop took 7:13:35, more than an hour longer than it took me last time I'd tried alone. Because we went slower, and were working as a team, I had ample physical energy, so it was with less dread than I expected that we started the second loop.

Hitano-san had been having increasing pain in his knee, so he decided to bow out at this point. It's lucky that we had continued to finish the whole loop, because had we not, then by the time he felt the need to abandon, he'd have been much farther from home.

Ionut and I continued on.

27km (16mi) into the second loop, we stopped at a cycling statue recently installed near the lakeshore.

The plaque says “Lake Biwa”, and the somewhat presumptuous “Cyclist Hallowed Ground”.

It's a nice statue, and a nice place to pause. (It'd be nice if there were some services nearby, such as toilet or water, but I guess the lake can serve for both 😉 ).

I took the three photos above in July, on my first visit to see the new statue, on this ride.

This area seems to have been hit hard by the typhoon a week or so prior, looking to have been totally covered in mud and sand, though some had already been cleared away. Many trees had toppled.

After leaving the statue, the next milestone for me is a change of roads in the city of Hikone. My feeling was that it would come “after a short while”, but it took an eternity. I've now measured it at 38.5km (24mi), and the disconnect in my mind made it the longest hour and forty minutes of the day, as I kept wondering “When in hell will we get to Hikone?”.

It was also perhaps one of the slowest sections, as our moving average between the statue and where we changed roads in Hikone was only 27.5kph (17mph).

It was nice to make a 90° turn at the intersection in downtown Hikone, because we'd been on the same road for hours, since the southernmost part of the loop where we crossed the Seta River that the lake drains via. Changing roads makes you feel like you're making progress.

Half an hour after this shot, my distance for the day passed my previously-longest ride, the 293km (182mi) “Coffee Round Trip to Amanohashidate”. That ride was much more difficult than this one, though, because it had a lot more mountains, and a lot more wind. Riding around Lake Biwa can often see strong headwinds all the way around, but we got quite lucky on this trip, and there was not much wind one way or the other for most of the day.

After that was a section that I was really not looking forward to, a 2km (1.2 mi) hill that surprised me during the first loop. Most of the route is pretty flat, and I'd not done that particular section of road on previous Biwa loops, but our route used that road this time both because it's the most direct way, and anyway, the other options are closed due to landslides.

The hill, 2km at 6%, isn't normally a big deal, but I had no idea it existed, and it just kept going up and up in long straightaways separated by bends, with me hoping each bend was the end only to find out that another long straightaway awaited. It was a bit tough, mentally.

I was really not looking forward to that grind again, but in the end I was happy to finish it only about a minute slower the second time (7:19 vs. 6:10).

There was a full moon helping to light our way, and helping, I thought, to light the shrine gate, so I thought the iPhone camera would be able to do better. Alas.

The first ride I ever did that exceeded 100km was to this place, 2½ years ago, as seen in “Pleasant 105km Bike Ride From Kyoto, Along Lake Biwa, to Takashima’s Shirohige Shrine”, but I'd visited here long before. Almost nine years ago, I used it as the subject for the photos in the camera-technology writeup “Overexposure and Underexposure, and the Compensation Thereof”.

I felt great during the last couple of hours because I knew we were closing in on the finish. On the other hand, Ionut (who still continued to pull most of the time) started feeling discomfort in one of his knees. That's never fun.

Throughout the 18.5-hour ride, most everything hurt at one time or another. I had periods where one knee would start to hurt, and I'd stress about how bad it might become, but after an hour or two of stress I would eventually notice that it didn't hurt anymore, and feel relieved. Half a day later, it (or the other knee) might start hurting again, for a couple of hours.

The biggest pain was with my neck. When you're riding in an aero position, your body is as horizontal with the road as possible, so in order to see where you're going you have to really bend your neck in a way that's uncomfortable for long periods.

The second loop took an hour longer than the first (8:05:52). We had stopped and relaxed more, and had more stretches were we laid off the gas.

By this point I'd ridden 368.7km (229mi), and with about 11km to get home, I was looking at a total of about 380km, a distance so tantalizingly close to “400” that I just had to go for it. At first Ionut joined me for an extra excursion to give the additional distance, but his knee was really bothering him, so he played it smart and eventually headed home.

I rode south to do a “2.1km Criterium” segment out in the countryside among rice fields. It was pitch dark except for the almost-full moon, so I didn't go all out, but I went faster than just light cruising. (I had flashing lights both front and rear, but they are to be seen, not to see.) After such a long day, I was happy to maintain a decent speed — 32kph (20mph) — for its duration.

Then I headed home by not quite the most direct route, to increase my chances of cresting 400km before arriving home.

To get back to Kyoto, I had to climb over a small mountain, and wow, this is where I came to a grinding halt. I just had no power for climbing. My best time on the last bit of the climb is 92 seconds, but this time it took 3:57. It probably would have been faster to walk. But when I did get to the top, I checked my distance and saw that it had just crested 400km, so I was thrilled.

I'd left home at about 4:10am, and returned at about 10:40pm. Strava says the elapsed time was 18:29:02.

With modern GPS track recorders, there's often a lot of slop and uncertainty with how it determines your location at each moment during the trip, and so a lot of variety in how the connect-the-dots distance adds up. I often record my rides with multiple devices, and see multi-kilometer differences even on short 50km rides, so I expected the three tracks I recorded on this long ride would show a huge discrepancy. I was shocked to see that the three lengths agreed to within 200m! I guess the lack of valleys on the route helped GPS reception. I used the shortest of the three to upload, resulting in 408.0km (253.5mi).

I felt remarkably good, and the next day was fine, other than my neck, which hurt, and a few tender spots on the derriere. For the former, I went for a massage at Ken-chan's. I rode again a few days later (this ride) and felt fine, even setting a PR on a short steep climb.

It's sort of stupid to ride for 400km only to arrive where you started, especially when your pace disallows you to drink in the lovely views, but since I can't ride really fast, I'll take my satisfaction where I can, and I'm so very pleased to have a 400+km ride under my belt.

It took only a few days for me to start thinking 「ビワ３」.