Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

ABOUT 2 million people are considering ditching their fixed-line home phones, as Australians move closer to becoming one of the world’s first wireless economies.

I don’t think I even know any of my friend’s home numbers because they all have mobiles. 100% of them have a mobile phone that is generally going to be in their pocket or handbag versus a home phone that will most likely ring out. Going off the statistics there are more phones than people:

There are 105 mobiles for every 100 people, making Australia one of the most saturated markets in the world behind South Korea, with 114 mobile phones for every 100 people.

This is the inverse of the older generations (say the retirees):

An ACMA study last year found the decline of fixed lines has been led by younger consumers. About 91 per cent of retirees said their main form of communication was the fixed-line phone, while 70 per cent of 18-to-31 year-olds consider mobile phones as their main form of communication.

Death to fixed lines I say! Until we discover we’re giving ourselves brain cancer or something.

TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment and Design. TED talks, in case you haven’t heard me rave about them (or watched one in a previous post) are short talks given by people on interesting ideas. Their motto is “Ideas worth spreading”.  TEDTalks came from TED conferences (I’d love to attend one one day) where a bunch of people get together to share ideas.

Here’s a quick handful that give you an idea of some of the incredible things that people present at TED talks. About the only ones I think fairly consistently suck are the song and poetry ones. Haven’t yet found a good one of either of those categories.

Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs
Captivating, engaging talk about how dirty jobs get a bad image.

Gever Tully teaches life lessons through Tinkering
Kids doing what they used to do before helicopter parenting and the death of fun.

Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid filled eye glasses
Amazing idea on self optometry for the masses.

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail
Nature is an incredible thing with surprising lessons for Engineers coming out about why the gecko needs a tail.

Jane Poynter: Life in Biosphere 2
I remember watching the Biosphere 2 people heading into the structure. Interesting to hear how things played out.

Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging
Aging need not be inevitable. Reasons why we should strive to beat aging. I first came across this idea under the banner “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)“.

Jay Walker on the world’s English mania
English really is the international language. Scarily so!

Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
Unashamed geekery: making cool stuff with the wiimote.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
Statistics done right!

Ed Ulbrich: How Benjamin Button got his face
Interesting technology used to age Brad Pitt.

Those crazy Japanese and their wacky inventions!

But wait, there’s more! I always try and value add on my posts so here’s the result of a bit of research. Let’s see what other countries have done with respect to the rather niche field of strapping a jet to two wheels.

1920s German rocket bicycles
Digging back into history those clever boffins in Germany were also sticking rockets on bicycles 1920s and 30s.

The trench coat must be a safety outfit for this rocket bike test

It had a bit of a rough landing for the rider when he got to 55 miles per hour (90 km/h for the civilised metric world). But he survived.

Bicycle racing doesn't get much crazier than this!

Make your own?

Seems like there are lots of people who have made rocket bikes.

This page talks of a collection of rocket bikes (and other rocket powered things).

This thing looks like you’re sitting on the saturn booster (from auto anything blog)

Stand well clear while starting up..

Random rocket craziness

Not bicycle related, but hey..

Although my current job is a little lacking on presentations, I’ve ended up over the years with a bit of an appreciation for presentations (that’s why TED talks are pretty interesting to see various styles).

I liked his presentation for the part with the paper plane as a “prop” then a very real world way of comparing the energy output of different sized kite wings. Lots of good linking with analogies. Not the world’s best speaker (I still rate Bill Clinton for impeccable noise word free delivery), but the end effectiveness of the talk is the sum of the parts.

I’ve talked previously about China possibly solving global warming. It’d be fitting if they did this in part with one of their inventions: the kite.

Reminds me of those far too keen types who do “bootcamp” sessions in the parks at lunch times. At least it’s able to take a bit of abuse (the pushing while bouncing) though the girl didn’t look game to give it a solid old shove in case it took a swing at her and started the human-robot war.
Although that war may have started a while ago (Robert Williams and Kenji Urada were the first two human casualties to robots).
Watch this space..

MotoCzysz E1pc - Electric just got sexy!

Their petrol burning version is pretty sexy also:

The petrol burning cousin the C1

I mean there’s so much good stuff about this thing it’s hard to know where to start:

• aesthetics are beautiful (see here for the full sized glory)
• it’s electric
• it has easily swapped out battery packs
• it’s beautiful from any angle I’ve found a picture of

Dash of the MotoCzysz E1pc, is that an iPhone for the console?

Technicals

Bit hard to find out much, but here’s what I’ve found or guessing on:

• lightweight carbon fibre and aluminium construction to free as much weight for batteries as possible
• 125kg of “hot swap” lithium ion battery packs (according to ecofriend and ashphaltandrubber). There are 10 (6 visible, 4 hidden under the faring).
• Three electric motors for drive
• Suspension adjustment is different (MotoCzysz fork/suspension assembly has some magic from their C1 bike)
• crank appears to go through the pivot point to the right side for final drive to the rear sprocket (see picture below and see whether you agree with me)

The swingarm, but pay attention to the pivot point - some magic for drive transmission to the other side of the bike?

• I think the chain goes something like:

My guess as to how they have the 3 motors rigged

• This appears to be the “frame” of the bike:

The frame I presume. Certainly a bit different.

• No gears (pretty standard for electric vehicles)
• 0 to 120mph (193km/h) in less than 11seconds (this was an “easy” test with less than 100% capacity)
• probably has some storage capacity in the “fuel” tank

History and Early Concept Pictures

The earlier pictures are a bit different, but pretty close really:

Early sketch

Earlier concept shot

There’s a video of the MotoCzysz E1pc to show it’s not just fluff.

The story so far.. (an introduction to “normal” motorcycle brakes)

For car or scooter riders (which sometimes only have one brake lever) here’s how proper motorcycle brakes work. Motorcycle brakes are operated by two levers: one on the right hand for the front brake, right foot for the back brake.

Motorcycle brakes explained

The right hand/front brake is just like bicycle brakes if you’re from Australia, UK, South africa, NZ. but the opposite to bicycles in Europe, USA. Ask me how I know they’re different and I’ll show you the scar on my arm from trying to ride a mountain bike with a USA setup.

It’s easy to remember: all brake levers are on the right, all gear stuff (clutch lever and gear pedal) are on the left. Brain is hopefully in the middle coordinating things.

What’s good and bad about motorbike brakes?

Before I tell you about the pros/cons of having front and back brake separate I need to tell you about motorcycling’s dirty little secret: we can’t really properly use our brakes while cornering. This is because, just like cars, most braking is done with the front wheel(s) and because it will either stand the bike upright in a hurry or else slip out from under you: you can’t use your front brake while going around corners. Yep, that’s right: 60-90%  of the braking power of a motorcycle is completely unusable whenever they’re going around a corner. Keep that in mind when you next have to yank on your car brakes while hammering around a corner at speed.

So the advantage to separating out the front brake from the rear brake is that you can apply the rear brake without having to use the front brake. How is that useful? Well another name for the rear brake is the “steering brake”, that should give some hints. If we have to brake while going around a corner a bit of rear braking is possible. Too much though and you’re stuffed, but a bit is certainly possible. For slow speed maneuvering the back brake is quite handy for giving you more control by using it to hold the engine back and thus having more “drive” available for the wheels at slower speeds.

Generally speaking: the way you most effectively use motorcycle brakes is to apply the front and back together smoothly avoiding skidding. If you try to use just the back you’ll find it locks and/or takes a long time to stop (when you finally do you’ll smell burning rubber that you’ve left for the last 50 metres or so).  If you just use the front: it’s likely you could brake better by having the back brake involved to “bed the bike down a bit” and spread the gripping effort across two wheels rather than just one (which is safer if you hit a patch of oil/gravel/sand etc with one wheel).

In terms of technology motorcycles (because of lack of electronic systems) have some areas where we have far superior brakes to cars (motorcycle brake pads/calipers are pretty high tech), but that isn’t enough.

The big issue with having control over both brakes is that it takes a lot more skill to coordinate the balance between front and back to get effective braking.

So what’s the problem with riders and current brakes?

Everyone tends to think they’re Valentino “prancing motorcycle superstar monkey” Rossi or Casey “pretty fast for that drug related last name” Stoner and can brake perfectly. They can’t, not even close. The deaths from motorcycling statistics show this.

Riders are also often caught out because their stopping distance is inferior to cars (who have 4 big fat grippy tyres and anti-lock braking that they can apply at any time without too much stress versus two skinny coin sized contact points).

We motorcyclists ride machines that can drag off a jet, but we get out-braked by anything from rusty decades old VW beatles to milk trucks.

Motorcycle riders also tend to be complete and utter Luddites when it comes to new technologies. Some examples over the decades:

• proper suspension – “Oh we’ll lose all feel of the road”,
• disc brakes -  “I like drum brakes because they are much simpler”,
• steering dampers – “but it’ll screw up the steering”
• hydraulic brakes – “what if they spring a leak?”, “I won’t be able to feel the brakes”,
• electronic fuel injection – “but I understand carburettor design” etc etc.

The complaints against ABS on sports bikes today:

• It’s heavier (so is a wheelchair lift on your car or that 15 kilos of beer belly you’re carrying. Really, a few extra kilos on 180 kilos of bike are worth it for safety, just like leathers weighing 10-15kg versus shorts and t shirt weighing few hundred grams)
• it’s expensive (so is intensive care but wait: didn’t you just spend 500bucks on wavy brake discs, 200 bucks on pimped out shorty levers and a 150 dollar tail tidy?)
• I want more control (sorry Mr Rossi or Mr Stoner, I didn’t know you read my blog..)
• I know how to brake effectively (statistically you most likely don’t, if you’re claiming you do then that’s a worry to start with)

Of course if you want to buy a new bike from a company that continually shuns any real technological advances: go buy a Harley.

Keep in mind the same people that poo hoo ABS (despite all evidence of improving braking performance) are the ones who will recommend spending thousands of dollars on uprated suspension to dive less during braking, different brake pads and braded brake lines to reduce fade and so on. Or spend several thousand dollars making the bike more noisy and more polluting by changing the exhaust just to get a few more horsepower. So go figure.

What is Honda’s “Combined ABS”?

In a (long run-on) sentence:

When you hit the brakes hard the electronic magic in the bike uses a bit of both front and back brakes (the “combined” bit) to achieve maximum stable braking while preventing the wheels from skidding (that’s the “anti-lock braking” bit) which it works out via sensors on the wheels.

Here’s the satisfaction results and stopping distances from Honda on earlier attempts at ABS/Combined ABS.

So it’s the combination of ABS with combined braking tweaked to be as non-intrusive for sports bikes as possible. Combined braking is found in scooters all over the place, ABS is in any new car/van and has been available as an option on touring/enduro bikes for decades.

In a picture it is this:

Honda Combined ABS diagram. (Image courtesy of Honda's info)

In video it’s this:

And some more video resources explaining more:

Talking about the test launch where they put down sand to test it.

Having ridden in sand: yanking on the brakes is not something you’d do, so that must have taken some balls to trust the technology. If I wasn’t in love with the triumph daytona 675 I’d probably buy one. If I can test ride one I might consider swapping because you never know what might run out into the road and need you to drop anchor in an emergency.

Conclusions

I love that Honda has taken the lead on this at long last.

I think it has been long overdue on sports bikes and have been a bit annoyed that such an option isn’t available because of the typical macho bullshit attitudes that drive much of motorcycling (particularly in sports bikes). So I’m making a bet that within 5 years Suzuki, yamaha and hopefully triumph will all be offering ABS of some sort on their sports bikes and hopefully across all of the range. BMW already offer it on their “almost sports bikes” I believe.

Weight, expense and “lack of control” are the arguments used since the year dot against anything new in motorcycling. Helmets for example are too expensive, weigh too much, impede rider vision, feedback and control: but they’re safer. I think this technology is in the same realm and probably adds about as much expense and weight as a helmet.

Too many lives are lost while we play pissing up a wall contests over how we can out perform technology and make excuse after excuse as to why it should stay forbidden or for touring bikes only. By all means put a switch on it that goes from “extra safety mode” (on) to “dickhead hero mode” (off) and see how we go.