Numbers

You gotta occupy your mind with something during the hours on the
road. Here are a couple of random thought-streams having to do with
numbers:

(1) Outside of Ordway CO (or was it Eads? who cares?) there were miles
and miles and miles of empty railroad cars just sitting on the tracks
-- no engines or anything, just the cars. One stretch of parked RR
cars went on for 11 miles, with only a couple of breaks for roads to
cross, and a good part of that 11-mile stretch was a double track,
with cars parked on both tracks. And there were several other somewhat
shorter stretches. Let's say there were 25 miles of parked RR cars; I
think that's a conservative estimate. Two different estimation methods
led to the same conclusion as to the number of cars per mile: about
60. Which means 1,500 cars in all, just sitting there. I learned later
that the cars -- and they were all the same type of car -- were
designed to transport automobiles, and they'd been sitting where they
were for about 18 months. This struck me as (a) a huge waste of
resources; (b) a horrible blight on the landscape for the poor people
whose houses faced the tracks; and maybe (c) a very concrete indicator
of the ill health of the US auto industry.

(2) In "normal" riding circumstances, on a reasonably flat and smooth
road, it takes me somewhere between 250 and 300 complete (360 degrees)
pedal strokes to go a mile. Let's say 250 -- that's a nice easy number
to work with. So, if I ride 4,000 miles, that's one million pedal
strokes to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific

(Sent from my iPhone)