About

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

8 Responses to About

  1. Steve Tobias says:

    Dear Successors of Sheldon,

    Subject: Languages

    You guys probably know something about bicycles, but not about languages. It’s real cute to have multi-lingual versions of the website, but sorry, it just doesn’t do to run it all through Google Translator. Looking at the Spanish site for example, it’s full of errors that make much of it not only useless or unintelligible, but also misleading. For example, in the article about single speed, the word “bike” is translated by the Spanish nickname for “motorcycle” (Sometimes, that’s what “bike” means, right?). Google Translate can’t translate. It can save a translator time by creating a First Draft for a translation, that requires a LOT of editing If you want to make the languages useful, you must have enough language geeks in your readership to figure out how to crowd-source the huge job of editing the translations.

    Steve

    • John says:

      “You guys probably know something about bicycles, but not about languages.” Hey, that’s a nice friendly way to begin a comment. Allow me to respond appropriately.

      Malheureusement, monsieur, nous ne parlons pas toutes les langues du monde!

      Leider sprechen wir nicht alle Sprachen.

      Que lástima, no hablamos todas lenguas.

      How unfortunate, we don’t speak every language.

      We get rather good feedback about our writing about bicycling, thank you, in English. We read and review translations (and write the comments above without embarrassing ourselves too much) in French, German and Spanish, and translate from those languages into English. We do invite crowdsourcing, as you can read on our translations page. That is how we host or link to translations of some of our articles into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Belorussian (so far — more articles and more languages to come).

      Google Translate is the best we can do, otherwise. Sorry about that. And I know what you mean about Google Translate, having had to clean up Google translations from Danish — which is close enough to German that I can work my way around the roughness. I also recall its translating the name of baseball player Miguel Tejado as “tiled Miguel.” LOL.

      If you would like to help improve the situation, feel free to translate one or more of our articles yourself. You write well enough in English. May I assume that you are bilingual and can write as well in another language? Or that you are an expert in crowdsourcing and can farm work out? If so, have at it.

  2. sam says:

    I know today isn’t Sheldon’s birthday, but it feels like it should be.
    http://www.anothercyclingforum.com/index.php?topic=52945

  3. Mathieu van Rijswick says:

    Hi John,
    I found an item on rolling resistance on the Sheldon Brown pages written by Jobst Brandt. The graph appears to be a plot from his numerical data made by you. I was wondering about the unit in which the RR is expressed, gmf, hence a force. In the literature the rolling resistance is mostly expressed as a dimensionless coefficient Cr, the ratio between the resistance force and the normal force, or as the power required to move a wheel or bike with a specified load at a certain speed in absence of gravity and aerodynamic resistance. It is not obvious to me how to interpret a resistance (force) when the load is not specified?

  4. Fred says:

    Hi John, I have a question about sprockets for shimano nexus 4-speed and availability of compatible ones, like alfine, since I need a 26-7teeth one. Currently I’ve upgraded from 21t to 24t. Does it exist or can anybody produce one? It should exist on the market I think. Regards

    • John says:

      The 4-speed uses the same 3-lug sprockets as most Sturmey-Archer, SRAM and Shimano hubs, however I don’t think that sizes above 24T are made. It is possible to modify a cassette sprocket to work but you might just use a smaller chainwheel instead. Be aware of the limitations of the hub. It is not made for very heavy loads climbing steep hills.

  5. Andy says:

    Thank you for maintaining and continuing to provide such a treasure trove of bicycle information. I’ve only just found this blog, and it appears I have many years of posts to catch up on!

Leave a Reply to sam Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.