633 mpg ride on Scientific American podcast

PODCAST!
my bit starts halfway through

Admittedly, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this bike ride, but none has made me quite so proud as the recent podcast I did for Scientific American. I used to read SciAm growing up and always had real difficulty wrapping my head around the topics they covered with ease. What an honor to be on their website.

Last November, when an article about the ride appeared in Bicycling, I got an email from SciAm's own Steve Mirsky, who invited me to their offices to record a podcast. Well, it wound up happening in early March, and finally appeared on their website on the 14th.


Here is a link to the actual podcast (my bit starts about halfway through).

Here is a link to the website, the podcast in question is from March 14th.

Ode to going for it.

I've just seen two acts that make me question the typical "courageous" things I normally hear about people doing. These two gentlemen rolled the dice in the grandest style- There is nothing PC or watered-down about either of these two things. Don't sit back and relax- figure out what adventure you've been dancing around, and go take a chance.

The first is an article about the co-founder of DC-Shoes somehow working up the guts to FLOOR a souped-up scooby at a jump Evil Kneivel himself might have some reservations about. He's got a vapor-trail!



The second bit of news is slightly more somber- It is a clip of a young German gentleman who went balls-to-the-wall on the back of a German TGV. Nothing screams GAMETIME like suction-cupping yourself to the back of one of these demons. Sadly, our hero died a year later of leukemia. Happily, he lived the dream, if only until his 22nd year.




I found it on Jalopnik, where commenter Spence captured the feel quite well-

Seriously, this made me cry. No kidding. I'm sitting at my desk at the t-shirt factory wiping tears from my eyes.

What I don't think you get Kracer is that most human beings don't ever deal with the reality of their limited humanity. We trudge to work and put in our time and refuse to think about the fact that death comes in the blink of an eye. Sometimes people under a death sentence are able to face up to their fears in a way most of us don't ever. They can't pretend that the elephant is in the room any longer, so they say "fuck it" to the calculated risk that passes as wisdom in this life. They do the things that they want to do with the tiny piece of time they have. This is how we should all live our lives. Yeah, it's a tragedy when time is cut short, but it's a far greater tragedy when time is wasted on the pettiness of life. This video made me want to quit my job and walk away from my lease and do all the crazy things I want to do with my life. I may not be courageous enough to do it, but damn, don't blame this fool for doing it.

Indeed, being a fool may be the only sane reaction to the meaningless random momentary spark of existence we call life.

The smart competition

If the November 11th release of the 2007 smart fortwo didn't have you totally lusting after one of the little runabouts, perhaps seeing such a small car at least piqued your curiousity: less than nine feet long, the fortwo gets a green 50 mpg (plus or minus) without any hybrid or diesel trickery, and must be the most parkable car on the road (perfect for anybody who visits cities). Though even the brawneist fortwo spits out a decidedly lowercase 84 horsepower (although it does weight less than half as much as a VW Golf), small is definitely cool, and it doesn't have to be city-shaped.

Even sportscar manufacturers have learned from the minute smart- let's take a look at what they are testing behind closed doors:

Ferrari has cooked up a short-wheelebase enzo: ideal for their tight Fiorano test track:


Gordon Murray's long-awaited city car shares nearly everything except its wheelbase with his famed 90's F1:


The european market C6 Corvette has a smaller footprint than the stateside version, and has been received with much more enthusiasm as a result.



Quite remarkably, even classic-car enthusiasts have jumped on the microcar bandwagon. This gentleman skillfully chopped a ridiculous amount of metal out of his El Camino, and made it much more parkable (and economical) as a result. On second thought, maybe he should have saved up for a 2007 smart instead.

Microcars: Megafun!

Sure, you might look at these cars and think "that looks like an escape-pod for a Hummer," but in big cities, microcars are the most engaging and enjoyable cars around. Computer-aided engineering means they are safer than you'd think, too!

To the right is the Brabus Smart Roadster Coupe I drove for a weekend while working for Autocar in 2004. I covered 500 miles in three days, on an epic adventure from London to Sherborne and back. I had already thought the regular roadster was a gem, and the full-Brabus treatment only made it more appealing--the wastegate whooshed and banged during shifts, and I couldn't stop looking at the chunky bodykit. It wasn't just me either, girls and guys of all ages loved the thing! I can't wait until they bring cars like this to the US.

Take a look at the videos and you'll agree - good things comes in small packages.

1. Top Gear pits the original Mini Cooper against a modern competitor from Fiat to find out who is better at making a racecourse out of the city.




2. A Smartzuki goes insane! Flop a motorcycle engine into the trunk and stand back! I shudder to think how fast the original motorcycle was. For comparision, this Smart has significantly less than 200 bhp. That is probably less than your car.

Bicycling covered the ride

Check this out- The 633 MPG ride was covered by Bicycling magazine (Nov. 2006), and it wound up on their website as well. Click here to be taken to the article--they did a great job capturing the spirit of the ride.

In other news, I've just seen Contested Streets, an absolutely fascinating documentary about street usage. It was so compelling that I decided to review it for a local newspaper to spread the word, but then I learned that they will let you do it yourself! On the website, there is a place where you can sign up to host a public or private screening at your own house or workplace. Get a free DVD and have a party with your friends? Sounds like a deal to me.

Shop smart, shop S-Mart. YA GOT THAT?!

Here's a pic I took a few weeks ago of a Smart car in a parade. They (well, the rest of them) are coming to the US in 2008.

as my dad said, "The old lady standing by the smart is holding on to her stuff for dear life, in case it gets dithered out of her arms...!"

tRSSsssssst in meeeeee

If you get your news online, you've gotta check out RSS feeds (wikipedia). They allow you to gather news from all over the internet and read it in one place. I've made a feed for this site, so if you use Yahoo! News, Google Homepage, or any of the other RSS-enabled readers in the graphic, you can now pour The Gallon straight into your regular news page.

Click the to add this page to your RSS reader, or to learn more about what RSS can do for you. I don't know how I lived without it.

Me? I use Google Homepage (click on the "Personalize Home" link in the upper right corner of google.com while you are logged into GMail). I clicked on "add more to this page" , then searched for "The Gallon Race" and clicked "Add it Now."

Now my Google Homepage looks like this:


Swift

Fixing things

You know, when I am trying to eat something disgusting, I just think of the Mayflower, and how on that boat, at a certain time, anything made out of food was a delicacy. Then the bbq ribs I dropped on the hair-covered mat at the foot of the refridgerator in the garage taste delicious.

Same type of deal goes for fixing things. When something breaks, I imagine I'm a kid in India and that thing is all I've got. If you gave an impovershed kid a perfect cell phone with a broken charger and a bike with broken gears, he'd already be pedalling his way up a dusty path on his new bike sad that nobody he knows has got a phone to call.

The other day, that Indian kid (me) got a water-damaged and 8-year-old watch that even Dicken would agree had no life about it. It was dead. I immediately took it apart and looked inside. There were indeed traces of water in there--it was dirty and kind of greasy, no condition for the inside of a watch.

I pried the movement away from the case and took a look. As I looked closer, I saw that there were actually individual parts to the movement, and that the battery cage had fingers which held the 3 main parts (the display / microchip, the microchip housing, and the plastic battery house *note, in the pics the display / microchip is never removed from the microchip housing*) together. I pried the cage off and the movevment fell apart. Oh, and a teeny tiny spring sprang. Oops.

I looked very closely at the microchip, and saw that there was greenish foamy corrosion between some of the contacts. I took the display off the microchip and saw the same thing at the corner of one of the connections. I held the movement with my left hand and gingerly removed the corrions with a knife in my right.

After putting the movement back together, (sans itty bitty spring) and popping in a new battery, it came to life.

Good news, except the backlight didn't work, and the water sealing issue hadn't been solved. I looked at a "change your Baby-G battery" tutorial online, and saw that the watch was missing a rubber O-ring. I called Casio and ordered the part (For $0.50 + $1.13 shipping!). It took two weeks to come.



I opened the package and got back to work.

There was still the problem of the escaped spring, and so I took the movement completely apart and started looking as closely as I could at all the contacts to see if they looked worn in anyway (aka they used to have a spring against them).


Finally I saw it! What a relief. The spring went through a seriously small hole and provided an electrical connection between the metal battery cage and the back of the microchip. This, I thought, must provide power to the backlight. I put the spring in the tiny hole and snapped the movement back together.



It worked!!!


Now I was getting really excited. I gave the inside of the case a thorough cleaning with Q-tips, which put tiny cotton fibers everywhere, so I had to spend a couple of minutes using tweezers to extricate them. I finally used a layer of lightly-Windexed paper towel over the edge of a knife to get rid of all the gunk.

Then I put the new o-ring in its place, cranked down on the caseback, and gave it a water test (in this picture you can see the other spring *from two pictures above* poking through the rubber movement backing).



And... The finished product:



I can't decide whether or not I'm surprised that it works, but I do know that I'm the proudest kid in India.

RIDER Project 2006: cell2Cell2CELL

Michele Gambetta knows that Ryder trucks bring back memories of Timothy McVeigh and the 1993 WTC bombings, but this guerilla puts a new spin on the old white box—she uses her truck to do culture and positive idea drive-bys in ‘hoods like Harlem and Bedstuy (you can see "Ryder" through the tapestry attached to the truck). After noticing that conventional museums fail to reach those who aren’t actively seeking exposure to art, she devised the RIDER Project—a rolling gallery that showcases 40 pieces of art and is housed in a truck. The circular artworks are inspired by Dada, and are a response to the recent world-turmoil of genocides and war.



The result is startlingly effective: a giant plastic garden on top of the truck grabs your attention, warm light draws you off the dark street, and after exploring a few of the pieces, Kafresssss!, you’ve been culture-fied.



Here's a walkup of the exhibit That's a severed arm attached to the spinning wheel at the end. it was inspired by a breakup.

Great Googley-moogely

Calling everyone who has ever been jealous of computer drawing software, but always thought it was too difficult--there's a new kid in town:

Just got done spending my day's downtime playing around in Google Sketchup. What an AMAZING program. Amazing in that it is so unlike any drawing program I've ever used--creating a rough sketch of what you want has never been so easy. In AutoCAD, ProE, or Solidworks, creating what I drew today would take hours and be incredibly frustrating. Google sketchup is barely frustrating at all (computers will always be a little bit of a pain.

The coolest bit? The tutorial--it's a monkey-see monkey-do setup, where you are "sharing" the workspace with the tutor. Take a look (keep in mind that when you click the tabs or do an exercise, the whole view shifts smoothly from one vantage point to the next. SO COOL and
useful. All tutorials will be like this in the future).



I get the feeling that it is difficult to draw something perfectly accurately (read: CAD/CAM type stuff) but if you're just screwing around, and want to see what your apartment would look like with a humongous dining room table, this is your program!

This is what I sketched up while at work (couldn't figure out how to move that wheel).



I also learned that if you double click in Google maps, it zooms in. Double right click and it zooms out. Neat-o

Interested? Go to sKETCHUP.google.com today! You'll be amazed at how quickly you pick it up.

Huge news! NYC's master bike plan

Today is very exciting for NYC cyclists. New York City today announced a new three-year plan to "complete the backbone of the City's planned bicycle network," promising to introduce bicycle safety programs and to install 200 miles of new on-street striped bike lanes, car-free bike paths, and signed routes.

The DOT also released the results of a study (see link above) that examined citywide cycling deaths and injuries in the past ten years. Ninety-seven percent of the 225 riders killed weren't wearing crash-helmets, so the City plans to supply bikers with free lids as well.

There is even more good news- the Parks & Recreation department announced plans to create mountain bike trails in Staten Island and Queens.
Of course, you might say it is too late- Similar plans have been in the works for years and hundreds of cyclists have since died. But big cities can take a long time to get moving, but I'm certainly glad NYC finally is.

One potentially important note is that the plan calls for cyclists to follow traffic laws (see below). I'm ashamed to say I'd rather have the right to run traffic lights than a ton of bike lanes.

Increase enforcement of laws against motorists who park or drive in a bicycle lane, and enforce traffic control obedience among motorists and bicyclists.

Lucy and Paul got married!

My sister got married this weekend--her husband is perfect for her! Here are some stereo pairs of the wedding weekend. Relax your eyes so they are pointing parallel (pretend you are drunk), and "push" the left and right sets of images together. Once they align, (so there are "3" images) the "middle" image will look 3D. Click on the thumbnail for full size.