I’ll keep this brief.

On May 17, I’m riding Reach the Beach, benefitting the American Lung Association. I ride this every year. In 2003 I rode with my brother. Usually Jenny and I ride it together; in 2006 we rode with our friend Kenny. This is my first year riding solo. It’s also my first year shilling for donations.

Most years, I don’t take seriously the fundraising aspect of the event. Usually I just ride. This year I’m hitting you up for money.

How often do I ask you for money? (And by “you” I mean “everyone except my parents.”) That’s right, never.

So CLICK HERE or visit http://rtb.kintera.org/axoplasm and donate online to the American Lung Association.

p.s. Click here.

I spent a portion of my weekend sorting and cleaning some of my old bike tools. Mixed in with which were the bare core of my archaeological field kit. Said discovery occasioned me to reflect on a life I used to have: I used to be an archaeologist.

I left that life behind nine years ago. After seven years of chasing work around the country, I wanted to put myself into a place first, and a job second. That’s when I took up the website-making stuff.

When people learn about this past life, they wonder either or both of two things:

1. Why I ever left it for web design
2. How my archaeological work prepared me conceptually for web design

The answer to the first question is easy: because it’s so much easier to find jobs designing websites. This is not, for me, a matter of income: I could (and did) happily live on my archaeologist salary. No, what makes website design a better career is that no one, ever, has said to me “you’re lucky even to have a job.” I think I heard this phrase, or variations thereof, from nearly all of my archaeology bosses, even the good ones whom I liked and who valued my abilities. The sad fact of having a job title like “archaeologist” is that the supply of people with that title far outstrips the demand.

The answer to the second question is also easy, but most people don’t like to hear it. So I don’t tell them. I think studying anthropology excellently prepared me for heavy-duty brain work, as I’ve written about previously. (Grad school also gave me another headstart on web design, but the reason was historical. I started grad school in 1995 when the web was young and unfettered high-speed Internet access kind of tricky to come by. By virtue of my status as a grad student at the University of Oregon, I had time-share access to Unix web servers, and fast ethernet.) But really, I’d have had (most of) this preparation if I’d have gone straight from my undergraduate degree, through grad school, and into the non-anthropology workforce. It has more to do with the great ability of a liberal education to prepare a person for nothing and everything all at once, provided that person is actually paying attention.

One perceptive person once deduced that archaeology — especially geoarchaeology, which I was pretty good at — conditioned the mind to think four-dimensionally, which was useful lateral training for work with computers. Everyone else sees some connection between the patience or care they imagine archaeologists use in excavation, and web design. I don’t buy that at all, because archaeology really doesn’t require that much patience or attention (just good note-taking), and web design doesn’t require it at all.

No, the real (and very prosaic) answer to “how did your archaeological work prepare you conceptually for web design” is “because it got me working with databases.” That’s really the only connection between what I used to do a decade ago and what I do now.

I often miss archaeology, because it’s a very satisfying job in its daily details. I particularly miss working and living outdoors. The career also provided a good mix of brainwork and hard physical labor, a combination lacking in most other (any other?) jobs. For the sake of reminiscence, I scanned a few old photos of my archaeology self, shaggy hair, beard, sunburn and all.

I have a few pet issues. Some people would call these pet peeves, but pretty much the only pet peeve I have is “beliefs that have not been clearly thought through.” One of my pet issues is an excuse for not bicycling I used to hear quite a bit. (For some reason people offer this less frequently — to me, anyway — as an excuse.) The excuse is something along the lines of “I’d ride my bike more often but I don’t want to expose myself to all those automobile pollutants.”

Which is kind of silly for two reasons:

1. The research doesn’t support it
2. It doesn’t make any damn sense

First, the facts. Most people have a skewed sense of both risk and exposure re: automobile pollutants. My reading (some references below) indicates that:

• "Gas-phase" (i.e. non particulate) pollutants are at least as high inside a car as outside.
• Fresh air controls or air conditioning have no effect on pollutant levels inside a car.
• Levels of particulate pollutants are higher outside cars, but the effect drops dramatically away from a high-traffic road.
• Cars produce the most pollutants when they’re idling or operating under light load — in other words, at rush hour, or in a parking lot.
• The more time you spend in and around cars, especially at rush hour, the greater your exposure.
• Children living within a third of a mile from a major freeway are more likely to develop asthma and other diseases, and have less-developed lungs.
• Airborne pollutants are lower in neighborhoods with higher residential density and mixed land use (exactly the kind encouraged by a city with lots of cyclists.)

Second, let’s think this through. Consider some other source of air pollution. A steel mill, for example. Where would you find more airborne pollutants emitted by a steel mill: near the steel mill, or inside the steel mill? Generally speaking, how would steel mill pollutants vary as a function of distance from the source? As a function of the duration of exposure to the source?

The explicit premise of the automobile pollutant exposure theory of bicycling avoidance is “automobile pollutants are bad.” The implicit premise is “being near running automobiles is bad.” From these premises we can reason that:

• The greater the distance from running automobiles, the better
• The fewer running automobiles you’re near at once, the better
• The less time, in total, that you’re exposed to running automobilies, the better

Given the premises of the automobile pollutant exposure theory of bicycling avoidance, if your lifestyle necessitates spending lots of time in or near cars (that is, driving everywhere), then you're actually maximizing your exposure to automotive pollutants. Moreover, communities that encourage frequent motoring hit you twice: first, because you spend all your time inside a car; and second, because the town has more freeways, more heavy traffic, more large intersections, more parking lots — in other words, more (and more frequent) exposure to automobiles in situations where they produce the most pollutants.

Finally, and this is the emotional appeal, imagine a scene. Imagine riding your bike down a quiet street, or a bike path, a good distance away from a major highway. Imagine taking a deep breath. What does the air smell like? Does it smell like fresh-cut lawns? Pine trees? Dead leaves? Wet pavement? Bacon and eggs from a nearby kitchen? Coffee roasting in the coffee shop? (That’s what my commute smells like.)

REFERENCES:

• International Center for Technology Assessment, “In-Car Air Pollution: The Hidden Threat to Automobile Drivers"
• Measuring Concentrations of Selected Air Pollutants Inside California Vehicles
• Commuter exposures to VOCs in Boston, Massachusetts
• Collection of links on air quality research at the Sprawl and Health website
• Health effects from car exhaust exposure can last a lifetime
• Automotive Exhaust Chemicals: disease causing effects

(Prompted by a post at the Bicycle Transportation Alliance Blog.)

With a kid on the way I’ve been thinking a lot about my own childhood and the way I was raised. In particular, I’m kind of floored at how few freedoms modern children have. I think a large part of the person I am today — fearless, independent, improvisational, and yet careful and relatively cautious — is a direct result of the latitude I enjoyed as a young person.

New York Post columnist Lenore Skenazy recently let her 9-year-old ride the subway home from Bloomingdale’s, a surprisingly newsworthy event. She described it on NPR as being the equivalent of “Nine Year Old Makes Toast”

the following is crossposted as a comment on Lenore’s website, Free Range Kids.

• messenger bag
• minitool
• content management system
• pair of socks
• pocket knife
• wrist watch
• ballpoint pen
• backpack
• rain coat
• text editor

...no matter how many I already own, or how nice it is, and how unsatisfactory I know I’ll find its replacement.