Shortly before leaving for Tenerife, I managed to take both my bike and my unicycle out of action. This was quite unusual for me, as I'm quite careful with my bike. Firstly a car rolled over my unicycle wheel (which taco'd the rim, but everything else was fine) then I hit a drain on my bike and managed to crack my frame (it was an old bike, but it did surprise me that the frame went rather than the wheel). Since I've been back I've been trying to sort out both problems, firstly by buying a second-hand road bike (I haven't actually taken a picture yet, but this is almost exactly what it looks like. The only major difference is the clip pedals.)

The next job was to fix my unicycle wheel, using a new rim and spokes. It took me about an hour and a half, and it's still not quite true, as I don't have the proper stand to fine tune it.



First I had to string up the spokes on either side, alternating sides after each set to keep the wheel roughly true.















This is more or less what I was looking for, but the spokes were still very loose, so I needed to tighten them all up a few turns.


















It seems the best way to do all of the adjusting up to now is to rest the wheel on your lap, as the weight of the hub is in your favour.








The wheel still had some uneven parts, so I then attached it to the forks to do some lateral and vertical truing.



It's still not perfect, so I'll take it to a mechanic's tomorrow before it's ready to ride. I'll probably buy a truing stand at some point so I can finish the job myself next time.

Labels: bike mechanics, bikes

Apparently the film 'the Linguists' has just had its first screening in Washington DC. As a linguistics student myself, I've always felt vaguely guilty about not being especially concerned about language death (or at least relative to other concerns in the world). The loss to a culture's richness and to linguistic study are one thing; but I would consider fluency in a major language (along with inevitable reduction in local languages) generally to be a good thing, even if this means some language death. I really don't see how insisting on language purity is going to help many indigenous people, it seems to be often just a romantic ideal by the west. Of course, in many cases language death is a cause of a sort of cultural imperialism, and a language is very important in the identity of a people, but I'm still not going to see this in anything like the same way as the death of an animal species, for example.

Labels: films, language death, linguistics, linguists