animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation

My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as "weak" and "sickly" and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.

The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn't get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.

What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations?

Actually quite a lot. The pace of evolutionary change is a function of the amount of variation present in a population and the intensity of selection (i.e. the death rate). There was one study done of the variation of bone dimensions present in modern populations of chimpanzees that suggests that the transition from chimpanzee-style locomotion to full bipedality (at least the variant of bipedality observed in Ardipithecus (~5 million years ago) could have happened on the scale of a few thousand years.

This is not to say that it did happen that fast, just that it could have given a strong enough intensity of selection. There is a weird tendency in paleoanthropology for researchers to propose something that might have happened and it becomes accepted by the general public as something that did happen.

My parents are/were 90. I started telling them they've been alive for more than a third of the history of the United States. They loved hearing that shit.

I’m always riding on the flats or the drops

I always did the same on my road bike (a Cannondale Cadd-8, not nearly as antique as your bike here). Last year I gave up and mounted straight handlebars. I like the steering leverage better and if I want to tuck I have aerobars mounted for that.

I love old bikes, but I think the only thing about your bike I wouldn't like is the downtube shifters. I haven't used them since my old Raleigh in the '80s, but I remember struggling with them and having to devote a lot of my attention to them while riding.

I bought a Trek 4200 in 2006, basically my first bike (as an adult, anyway). All yellow, and after experiencing my first numb penis episode, I bought this very long, thin, red, split Italian racing bike seat and put it on, so it was a very distinctive-looking bike (it even had tribars which aren't often mounted on mountain bikes). After a ride one day I left it on my front porch and forgot it was there and it was eventually stolen. I didn't even realize it until a week later when I was getting ready for a ride and couldn't find my bike anywhere. I was pissed but I immediately went out and bought the exact same bike in gray (which I still have and it has over 70,000 miles on it).

A few months after it was stolen, I was sitting in my house one day and got the strange urge to go out on my front porch, something I basically never did. While I was standing there, a pickup truck drove down my street, and mounted upright in the back was my original yellow bike, complete with the long red seat. There's no way it was a different yellow Trek 4200 with a long red seat and tribars. I was too surprised to do anything and it drove by and was gone. Probably wasn't the person that stole it, anyway; more likely they bought it from a pawn shop or craigslist. Just a really fucking strange experience.

The 4200 is/was a great bike. Not top of the line by any imagination, but durable and reliable as fuck. I'm glad I still have one of them, at least.

I read The Fountainhead in college and thought it was great. Then I recovered from the flu and thought "what the hell was that shit?"

millenial grey

There's nothing in the construction world that I hate more than the fake gray wood interlocking vinyl floor planks that are in every house now. I guess they're supposed to be the color of wood on old barns or fences, but I've never seen real wood of that color on a floor anywhere. I bought my house a couple of years ago and it had that type of fake flooring in the living room. I deliberately left it uncovered during the renovations, assuming that it would be trashed which would force me to replace it with something I actually like -- no such luck, that stuff is actually pretty indestructable, unfortunately.

My beef with modern home architecture (the stuff in the US, mainly) is not that it's different or modern, but that it's so fucking fake in its fundamental elements. Vinyl siding stamped to look like old-fashioned wood siding but obviously isn't because of the vertical seams and the bumps; double-paned vinyl windows with glazing dividers emulating old-fashioned casement windows that don't even look three-dimensional; shutters that obviously can't close; panel doors made from one block of essentially cardboard etc. etc.

I live in the Philadelphia area and a lot of the row houses here dating to a century or more ago have absolutely beautiful brickwork, incredibly creative and interesting stuff, often on houses that these days barely sell for $100K. It would be completely impossible to duplicate this kind of thing today even with a construction budget of millions. The craftsmen who can do that kind of work are nonexistent now -- today you're lucky to find somebody who can lay bricks in a straight line.

I have this absurd fantasy about being paid for my commuting time.

Too many stripper recalls lately.

I used to work as a contractor at the Comcast Center in Philadelphia. One day my boss (at my contracting company) came by and said we were going to a meeting with Time Warner Cable execs. I reached for my coat but he stopped me; we rode the elevator up to the 16th floor where Time Warner Cable had a suite of offices ... in the Comcast Center. A year or two later they announced plans for a merger of the two companies, which was somehow and mystifyingly stopped by the FCC. Like, they'd already merged essentially.