Wilhemina Magazine

I’ve never seen anyone ride a bicycle before.

I am predisposed to believe that a bicycle is a less efficient way to transport oneself than walking or running. Convince me that it is in fact more efficient.

A bike weighs 20 pounds. It seems logical to posit that necessarily more energy is used to transport a person plus a bike than a person alone. Assuming I have the same knowledge of basic physics you do do you think you would be able to convince me without a demonstration? If our positions were reversed, would you be convinced by your own arguments?

Do you find this exercise difficult? If so, you don’t really understand why biking is more efficient than walking. Rather, you’ve just been walking around in a world seeing that biking is easier than walking and have accepted it as fact because, really, who has the time? You probably think that it is obvious!

It is not obvious though. The answer to “who has the time” is “researchers”. Particularly in business, we study things that you think are obvious but you don’t understand the mechanism behind. You’ll notice in this case that no one’s life will change tomorrow if we understand why a bike is more efficient. Bikes won’t run faster. No more people will be convinced that bikes are efficient than there were before. All that will be gained is that a select set of people will understand why. Someday that might matter, but for many researchers, that isn’t needed for them to feel happy about their work.

In a prior post, I said that I wanted to research something blog-able. I said “If Business Pundit wouldn’t blog about the results of my research, I shouldn’t waste time on it.” Maybe that was wrong.

Addendum: I am actually interested in hearing you explanations.

Alt Tv/Fleet FM Breakfast News
National scandal – another baby beaten
A second Rotorua child - a 12-week-old baby - is in the Starship with suspicious head injuries. Last week, 3-year-old Nia Glassie was flown to the children’s hospital in Auckland with serious head and abdominal injuries, allegedly caused by months of abuse, which included being put in a tumble dryer. We have a deep problem in this violent country with abuse towards children, there is an underclass who have not shared in the middle class consumer dreams of property speculation, plasma TVs and cosmetic surgery, their reality is far removed from the neighbourhoods that media people live in and so are never reflected or examined until a helpless child is killed, and when that happens a dark anger swamps talkback stations with talk of ‘them’ and ‘their problem’ and even in the most tasteless moments a joke between red-necked host and red-necked caller on how Sue Bradfords bill was supposed to ban this (quo giggling from talkback host). The reality is that we don’t want to hear the answers and that we refuse to ask the right questions – we refuse to think of what life must be like in these abandoned and broken neighbourhoods, we write it all off with ‘I’m poor, and I don’t beat my kids (much)’, as if that explains and writes off any serious examination of the environment that is producing this abuse, and to even merely question anything other than ‘they should get the bash in prison’ risks getting you labeled politically correct, and while we squabble babies get beaten because we refuse in our anger to look at the root cause. We are not adult enough in this country to have an adult discussion on this issue.

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