There was a birthday in the family last night. We celebrated by scrubbing in our new race tires on the mountain roads above the city. Here's to many more.

I caught this wandering around in my house.

Turns out, it's a new invasive species from the mediterranean called Zoropsis spinimana, and the California Academy of Sciences is tracking its spread across the San Francisco Bay Area. I sent these pictures to a real actual scientist and they confirmed it! Cool, eh?

Also, I still have it. It's under a glass bowl on the counter in my kitchen. Want it?

from	Ubick, Darrell 

to	Rus

cc	Wanted Spider 

date	Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 11:37 AM

subject	RE: possible zoropsis spinimana?

mailed-by	calacademy.org

Many thanks for your email and information.  Yes, we 

are still keeping track of the Zoropsis spider, and much 

appreciate your input.  The images are great; clearly a 

Zoropsis male (a juvenile one mould from maturity, as 

can be seen by the swollen palpi).

 

With best regards,

 

Darrell Ubick

Department of Entomology

California Academy of Sciences

55 Music Concourse Dr.

Golden Gate Park

San Francisco  CA  94118 USA

What matters

• Dry grip: how much overall grip do you want when you brake and turn?
• Wet grip: how much do you drive in the rain, and how severe is the rain?
• Snow+ice grip: do you drive to ski resorts, or does it snow where you live?
• Road noise: do you drive a luxury car? Would you like it to stay luxurious?
• Cost: how much are you willing to spend per year on your car for tires?
• Stiffness: is it more important to have a precise, crisp feeling when you turn into a corner? Or to have a soft, smooth ride?

What does not matter

• Treadwear rating: There's no standard for how this number is assigned, so don't bother comparing it. Toyo actually makes a tire with a treadwear rating of "0" in protest of the system.
• Traction rating: Same deal.
• Lifetime mileage: Same deal.
• Speed rating: This is not going to matter for any normal passenger car tire.
• Tread pattern: Unless you're a tire engineer, you really can't glean anything useful about the tire's performance from looking at a picture of it. Most of what makes a tire grip is the rubber compound, not the tread design.
• Season designation: There are a couple of rough classes (competition, summer, all season, winter) but beyond that, it's mostly not right to assume that a "Max Performance" summer tire is better than an "Ultra Performance" summer tire. Just ignore that stuff.
• Run-flats: Run-flats are expensive, loud, and have compromised performance. They only do their marketing-gimmick job for certain types of damage. The rest of the time, they leave you stranded just like a normal tire. It's not worth it.
• Looks: Tires are black and round, and the most important thing they do for you is felt, not seen. Big wheels, low-profile tires, fancy tread patterns--- none of these things affect the performance or lifetime of your tires.

Tradeoffs

• Cost tradeoffs: Generally speaking, the more characteristics you try to maximize, the more the tire will cost.
• Performance tradeoffs: Good grip on dry, wet, and snow are each accomplished very differently. Most tires are bad at all 3. Some tires are good at 1 type of grip, and a few tires are good at 2 types. No tire performs very well under all three kinds of conditions. If you desperately need excellent dry performance and excellent snow performance, you probably need to buy a second set of wheels.
• Noise tradeoffs: Most high performance tires have lots of road noise.
• Performance vs. life: Good dry grip comes from high friction, like an eraser wearing away on paper. So good performance means the tires wear away faster, and also usually worse gas mileage.
• Cost vs. performance: High mileage tires last longer because they're made of a hard, low friction compound, like a metal cylinder rolling down the road. So low friction means poor performance--- less braking ability and less turning ability.
• Comparing on cost: When comparing a grippy performance tire that's twice as expensive and likely to wear out twice as fast as a cheap all-season, remember: it's not really twice as expensive, it's four times as expensive per year--- twice the cost and half the life.
• Savings vs. safety: Performance tires are safer tires, because they shorten your emergency stopping distance, allow you to steer around obstacles, and hold onto the road around unexpected corners. Economy tires are less able to help you avoid a car accident.

Step 1. Pick your poison

All-season tires

• Falken Ziex 512: A good, cheap, all-around tire, quiet on the road, and significantly better grip than typical all-seasons. Also has a slightly stiffer sidewall, which will make the car feel more crisp. If you can find these for cheap, they're pretty good.
• Yokohama Avid
• Goodyear Eagle
• Bridgestone Potenza

Summer + wet tires

• Dunlop Direzza Z1 Sport Star Spec: National-championship winning summer tires, with good wet performance reviews from a recent Car & Driver article. I've heard complaints of road noise, but great tire otherwise.
• Goodyear Eagle F1 GS-D3: Good dry grip once they get a couple thousand miles on them, and flawless wet traction. Soft sidewall, so they won't feel sharp and precise, but the grip is good once you get used to it. They definitely get loud once they're older.
• Hankook Ventus V12 Evo: Almost as nice as the R-S3s, but much safer in the wet, with a firm, precise sidewall. Pretty loud.
• BF Goodrich g-Force T/A KDW: The wet-grip version of BF Goodrich's summer tire. Softer sidewall, but good grip in wet and dry.
• Yokohama ES100: A cheaper tire, fits on smaller wheels like Hondas. Decent grip in the wet and dry, although with a very squishy sidewall. Quieter than the ones above, I've heard.

Summer tires

• Hankook Ventus R-S3: A great summer tire.
• Falken Azenis RT-615: A fun tire, worth getting if you get a good price. They're only mildly dangerous in the rain until they get bald. Then they're really, really dangerous.
• Kumho Ecsta XS

Winter tires

• General Tire Altimax Arctic: I used these last season and they were really great, and not too expensive. Dry grip is good enough that you can use them year-round, although they certainly won't be "fun".

Competition tires

• Toyo Proxes RA-1: An old stand-by medium-performance race tire. Excellent wet grip at full tread, too! (They become terrible in the wet once they're bald, though. But the dry grip continues to improve.)
• Nitto NT-01: Great for light cars! Pretty sticky, long-lasting for a competition tire.
• Toyo Proxes R888: I've not tried these, but they're the successor to the RA-1.
• Michelin Pilot Sport Cup: The stock tire for the Porsche GT3 and a few other high-end toys.

Step 2. Get your specs

Size fudging

Sizes and 4WD / AWD

Step 3. Go shopping

• Tire Rack: Big selection, will ship directly to a tire shop near you. Even if you don't buy your tires from them, it's a good site for research.
• America's Tire: A retailer with decent inventory and prices. Popular in the west, midwest, and some east coast states.
• Sears: Their online site is kind of terrible, but they do carry a number of brands and have competitive prices with included installation. Tire centers are nation-wide.
• Bigwheels.net: Rarely have the best prices, and are local to the bay area. But they have a really good fitment filter if you need to ... be creative with tire sizes.

About cost

• Bigger sizes cost more. If you have 18" wheels, expect to pay as much as twice what you'd have paid if you'd had 16" wheels. Something to consider when you're buying your next car. (Also, larger wheels don't really increase performance, so you're mainly paying for the cosmetic look of a large wheel.)
• Wider costs more. 255mm sport tires can cost as much as twice what 195mm passenger tires cost.
• Lower profile costs more. A 245/40/17 usually costs more than a 245/50/17, because it has a thin little side wall that all the kids love.
• Look for clearance sales. Tirerack (see below) sometimes sells nice tires for cheap because they're clearing out for the next model year. These tires aren't any worse, and they're often as much as half price. I always get them if I can.
• Avoid over-hyped tires. Once the racing community demands a particular tire, it starts getting expensive. So unless you are buying to win a race, compare prices carefully and avoid an over-hyped tire. (Falkens, for example, have recently been getting more expensive so I no longer recommend them unless they're on clearance. I liked them because they were cheap, not because they were so good that it was worth having them at any cost.)

Researching online

1. Go to Tire Rack
2. Choose your car's year, make, model, and trim level. Your car may have shipped that year with several tire choices, so you should pick the one that matches the size already on the car (see above.)
3. Click "View all tires this size".
4. Change the "sort by" to "Price"
5. On the left bar, click "Deselect All" in the "Performance categories" except the one you picked from above. (e.g. Winter, Summer, Competition, or All-Season.)
6. If you wanted summer tires, also deselect "Competition".
7. In the "Brands" category, uncheck the brands I don't recommend (see above).
8. Pick a tire.
9. Read its reviews. If you're concerned about road noise, the reviews are the best place to read about noise problems.
10. Buy tires.

Step 4. Buy

Tire warrantees

Drop shipping

Installation

Buying just two tires

Step 5. Drive

Let the glue dry

Check the air pressure

Check the balance

Check your speedometer

Break in period

Re-check lug torque

I was recently at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and took some pictures with a decent camera, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Here they are.

Now that it's confirmed that the Airbender movie is a stinker, you'll listen to me when I say, please don't go see it.

Instead, watch the original animated series, it's better than you think. Here's my pitch:

First, about humor. While the show is not intended to be non-stop laughs, yes it's for kids, so there is humor, and you'll have to tolerate that 50% of it is silly fart jokes that are beneath you. Conceded. But there are some genuinely funny-for-grownups moments in most of the episodes. Only a little below a typical Pixar movie in jokes.

Next, there are the characters. Yes, they spend some of their time moralizing about the value of friendship and teamwork and blah blah blah. Conceded. But the characters are genuinely likable, interesting, and have depth and growth that makes you want to keep watching. (Especially General Iroh and Toph--- SO AWESOME.)

The art is also excellent: yes it's a cartoon, but the directors make intriguing, cinematic choices for the sets, scenes, shots, angle, and lighting that are superior not only to most TV, but to lots of movies too. Top shelf.

Lastly, the martial art is impressively authentic. The characters have magical powers (Fire-bending, Earth-bending, Air-bending, etc) which are choreographed on real Kung Fu styles--- water-bending is Tai Chi, fire-bending is Northern Shaolin, etc. And the fight scenes are very creative: each battle is full of interesting new moves and innovative tactics, and no two are alike. It is as fresh and interesting as Dragon Ball Z is rote and tedious. Every fight in every episode is a pleasure to watch.

The show is best in season 2, but you'll want to watch seasons 1 and 3 to see how it starts and how it ends (respectively). The whole show is only 3 seasons, with a climactic and satisfying ending, so it won't leave you hanging.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it! (And don't see the live action movie. It's awful and it will spoil the real show, which is actually good.)

In retrospect, I dimly remember talking about Tab cola while drunk at a bar, or maybe a restaurant. But I don't remember where it was or who it was, and I certainly don't remember ordering a case of Tab Cola. But I did, and here it is.

Do you want some? It was expensive.

You know those people who annoy you because they grind their own coffee beans, or roast their own coffee beans? You know how that seems pretentious? Well, my friends, I am taking it to the next level:

I am growing my own coffee beans.

(Yes, I have grow lights now, which are used to cultivate a plant that produces a chemical that I am dependent upon. What of it.)

This is the last photo I will ever take with my Nikon D50's 18-55mm kit lens. This photo is of the reason why I will never use it again:

And this is the first photo I have ever taken with my beautiful new 18-200mm zoom lens. It is a photo of my old lens, which was perfectly good, but not as good as this new one:

Rest in peace, kit lens. You were good, but I can't always stand close enough to birds and animals to make you useful.

I went to Kaua'i, Hawai'i. I took some pictures. Here they are.

My boss, who is AWESOME, got us a VIP tour of NASA's Houston facility, including their pool training lab, their mockup collection, and even the moon rocks. Check it out! Sometimes it's cool to have your boss be an astronaut.