I just got one of those indoor bike trainers. You know, the kind that props up the rear wheel against a heavy, resistance-providing wheel. The front of the bike rests on the floor, the rear axle is pinned, and there’s no balancing required. I didn’t think of it at first, but that’s not really how […]
On Sunday morning, I was out for a bike ride. On the way home, I took a shortcut from one road to another and had to walk my bike through a small gate. Once through the gate, I saw on the pavement, beside a blue Volvo, a twenty dollar bill and two singles, flattened out. […]
Maybe I’m venturing into tinfoil hat country, here, but I’m pretty sure I once experienced a flyover by a stealth helicopter. I was camping at a lake in central Texas, during the Fall of 2003. Everyone else had gone to bed, but I was unable to sleep and was sitting up by the remains of the campfire, around 2 AM, just listening to the sounds of the forest, when I very clearly heard a distinctly unnatural sound pass across the dark sky overhead. It was very quiet, and very slow (rhythmically), but unmistakably a helicopter: whup whup whup whup whup. It was a clear night, and the speed at which the sound passed overhead meant it had to be flying at low altitude. There were no lights, just the sound, and I had a very eerie mental image of the glowing silhouette of my body, sitting beside the bright star of the cooling campfire, on a thermal imager cruising somewhere through the blackness above.
This is amazing, on Tuesday Roger Ebert will be using his own voice (made from old recordings) while on the Oprah show. After I lost my speaking voice, everybody thought they had this brilliant idea. “Hey! Why don’t you just take your voice from your old shows and put it on a computer?” Sounded good […]
Natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and man-made tragedies like soldiers or civilians losing limbs to explosives drive the need for better prosthetic limbs. Improved treatments are on the horizon in the form of novel foot and ankle prosthesis which behave energetically more like the human body than existing technologies. These powered devices can […]
If you’re not using your bike’s rear drilled brake bridge, you could try BillieGene’s Instructable for a recycled rear mudguard. It mounts to the brake bridge to keep your fixie from flinging mud up your back, which is a must for early springtime biking.
The President is checking out a ShopBot, in our lifetime we’ll have a FabLab in the Whitehouse… not a matter of if, just when :) Unfortunately this photo set from New York magazine’s Daily Intel is called “A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things” – most/all of the photos are of the president […]
