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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #250: Autonomous Navigation
05.21.14
One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.
It's a bike ride.
Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.
It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
We'll endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight).
On the fifth year of this bike ride, you might expect:
- more inconvenient passageways
- more full moon picnics
- perhaps more "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- certainly more amateurish enthusiasm
- disorientation
- reorientation
- pool halls
- bowling alleys
- dance parties
- karaoke
- imaginary histories
- scavenging for fun and sustenance
- more geocaching
- more oblique strategies
- more Oulipian constraints
- traffic median tea parties
Furthermore:
- A medium pace (maybe not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- We're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light.
- Maybe some distance;maybe some hills
- Victory donuts!
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This week:
Autonomous Navigation
It is our 250th ride, and thus an occasion to do something special. But this presents a difficulty, since for the
Passage, every ride is already something special. We're always going places where we've never gone, riding
streets we've never ridden, and if we were to do the same thing this week, then it would be just like any other
week, would it not? Obviously, the way to make a ride truly special is to do the thing we never do, which is go
where we always go.
But how can we be sure that we are really following the most worn paths? What if, in our fallible human way, we
accidentally go somewhere new? Worry not, because our scientists have at last perfected the self-leading
bicycle ride, in which the route is generated entirely by an algorithm. In this era of the quantified self, we no
longer have to deal with the messy tasks of optimizing our movements manually. Instead we will place our data in
the sure, steady hands of the machine, which will analyze the most common paths of all previous 249 Passage
rides and tell us exactly how to move. Welcome to the future! It is like the past, only more so.
25±3 miles this week, all pretty flat.
Talk, talk, talk...
Check out our web site!
(and our tumblr!)
(and join the mailing list!)
The hacienda must be built.
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Ridazz Roulette!
Midnight Ridazz(tm), Ridazz(tm) and Skull(tm) Reproduction without written permission prohibited.