I won’t spoil it for you, but just watch as she not only demonstrates that the guy’s just plain wrong about the content of the show but also the inconsistency within the guy’s religion. Of all the problems in Pakistan that twit decides to complain about he picks an actress appearing on a TV show as a huge sin.

Islam has bigger issues than an Actress going on TV

But hey, these types pop up all over the world (including Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali from Australia), divinely inspired by the Qu’ran’s unenlightened views on women unfortunately.

It really speaks volumes when I posted this up on facebook a little while back that someone made the comment that “You do realise she’d be killed within a month right….”. I certainly hope not and hope that she inspires the wider community to examine and question the filthy moral lessons people like this cleric put out there.

Do you see the similarities?

(image from here)

I think he even looks like Mr Squiggle don’t you think? Bit of blue rinse and a crazy tall hat..

Who the hell is Mr Squiggle?

Mr Squiggle was a character on a television show who had a pencil for a nose and would drop in from outer space in a rickety rocket to complete squiggles that kids sent in. On the odd occasion he’d do a double squiggle and change his mind (“Changed my mind! Changed my mind Miss Jane!”). To this day I wonder what kind of crazy genius you have to be to come up with not one but two drawings from some squiggles.. Surely a miracle from the man from the moon I say!

Mr Squiggle.. Man from the moon.

He had some (generally grumpy) cohorts: Gus the grumpy snail with a flowerpot for a shell, or was it a house..? Or a TV..?
Blackboard who coined the “Oh huuurrryy UP!” and “Hmph.. Double hmph”.

Bill the steamshovel would pop in puffing away.

Bill the Steam Shovel.

Squiggle and Ms Jane would swap merry banter with blackboard holding up the bits of paper. His rocket was also impatient, though didn’t talk.

Here’s some other random snippets of shows from over the years out there on the intertubes (or youtubes as it may be):

The old intro:

One I remember more:

Hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane kids. RIP Mr Norman Hetherington, I’m sure it would be hard to find a person who grew up in Australia in the last 50 years that doesn’t know about Mr Squiggle.

shinya kimura @ chabott engineering from Henrik Hansen on Vimeo.

If anyone wants to buy one of his bikes for me.. Well, I’d be a happy chappy they look pretty unique.

And some other wisdom (lot shorter) on motivation from the movie “Office Space”:

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.

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.

It’s somewhere between annoying and insulting to hear people start on the age old “oh, be careful they’re dangerous” followed by some enlightened piece of incredibly obvious advice relating to an accident they heard talk of. I’ve actively sought out many bike crash videos over the years with the intent of learning from other people’s mistakes. Just like sports coaches watch other teams play: there’s value to be gained from watching others.

This article (with video) shows the sort of deadly behaviour on a motorbike that result in such a high accident rate amongst motorcyclists.

The video
Here’s the video, it shows the speeding and crash (note: it’s not particularly gory, but you know from the article the outcome):

Sure most people might zip around a little bit, open up the throttle on the freeway a bit, but are by and large, sensible enough to listen to the training they received. This video I think really gives you a bit of an idea of what motorcyclists have to look out for on their own:

On some rides I’ve come across pretty much all of the hazards in that video. The hugely variable part is what other drivers and riders might do. That’s why I watch videos of other motorcyclists getting into trouble to add their situation to my road knowledge. Just to be clear: I’m much happier when I see the rider get up and walk around at the end though, even the twits doing wheelies in singlets and no helmets: because maybe, just maybe they’ve learnt a lesson.

Anyhow: on to this video..

Analysis of this crash – causes

CAMERA or “THE YOUTUBE EFFECT”: I think the camera on was probably one of the first mistakes made in this unfortunate ride.

First time I stuck a camera to the side of my bike in the French alps I began to ride, well, like a moronic show-off. Not pulling wheelies and knee down on corners type moron, but riding faster than I had been minutes earlier and somewhat distracted. As it turned out the included batteries last all of 2 minutes in the cold (why even bother including them??!!) so all my fantastic cornering and exciting riding had been missed, instead showing the rather more tame view up the road while I put my gloves, earplugs and helmet on and cutting out just as I got through the second corner. Served me right. I did get some decent touring footage in the end, but without the urgency and stupidity on the road.

Don’t believe this is a cause: Youtube is littered with video of people showing off for the camera. That’s the prime reason I don’t have any desire to pull wheelies on my bike because the majority of wheelie videos seem to be about crashes.

SPEED: The speeds involved are somewhere beyond ridiculous.

It later emerged Bowden was clocked at a top speed of 156mph, but his speedometer had reached speeds of 170mph, Truro Crown Court heard

That’s around 260 km/hour for the civilised metric world.
In more interesting forms:

• about the landing speed of a 747 jumbo jet
• double any speed limit on a freeway in Europe (Autobahns excepted of course). To look at it in relative terms: were you travelling on the freeway at the speed limit and this guy ran up the back of you: he’d hit with the same impact as if you just veered off the freeway into a brick wall.
• 71 metres per second or 233 feet per second
• A football or soccer field every one and a bit seconds
• fast enough to cross the Sydney harbour bridge in 16 seconds, the Golden Gate bridge in 38 seconds or Tower Bridge in a smidge over 3 seconds (those are including approaches)

In short: a ridiculous speed by any measure. Motorcycles do speed well, but don’t stop or steer so well (we can’t really brake hard and turn at the same time like a car with ABS and four fat tyres can).

LACK OF BUFFER ZONE: People don’t watch out for motorcycles. They can be on their phone, drunk, stupid or just bad drivers. That’s why you need a buffer zone to give you room to make up for their lack of awareness of where you are on the road.

The UK has a long running series of ads about “think bike” while I was there, here’s one that shows why you need a buffer zone:

Hasn’t changed too much really:

Australia does it a different way (we reserve our nasty ads for smoking and HIV/AIDS ads):

PEER PRESSURE: The guy in front probably didn’t want to be the slow guy, the one that crashed overtook and had to continue upping the speed. Thing is that perhaps neither of them wanted to be speeding that day but they might have thought they had to to not be slowing the other one down.

• Front guy: “man this is a bit fast, but he’s still on my tail, better give it a bit more throttle”
• Back guy: “jesus he’s off quick.. Don’t want to lose him, better give it a bit more throttle”
• Front guy: “he’s still there, better go faster..!”

You can see how that just keeps spiralling up until someone comes unstuck.

HIGH TO LOW SPEED PERCEPTION LAG: Best term I can come up with to describe it. So when you go from high to low speeds your brain stays in high speed mode for a while.

The rider that crashed did a bit of a hasty zip around his friend (who had been leading). Maybe he was still in “high speed mode” and misjudged the braking of his friend a bit. I had that happen after a long freeway blast in Europe, took the exit and thought I’d slowed down enough. Got up to the sharp exit corner and a glance at the speedo/gear indicator showed I was still going too fast and in 3rd gear, even though it felt like I had (the human brain is amazingly good at adjusting). Luckily I had a good line, cornering braking/downshifting habits and time to contemplate a safe run off area, but it was a good lesson in not trusting your perception of speed. He probably had a bit of a scare and extra adrenalin probably contributed to the later mistake (high as a kite: gunning it harder).

Analysis of the crash – stuff that usually matters but didn’t here

ROAD SURFACE: As anyone who has ridden in the UK will tell you: those stripey bike overtaking sections of the road are a shitty shitty surface to depend on. For one they’re always littered with rocks, glass, bits of truck tyre. For another: they’re where the two sides of laid tar join (poorly).  That’s without the fact that the painted surface is not great for grip on top of that. But for this case the quality of the road surface made no difference but it should have been another reason to slow down.

GEAR: This guy was wearing decent gear, but at those speeds and in that mess of cars on both sides of the road it wouldn’t matter what you wore.

TARGET FIXATION: This guy was throttle fixated, not target fixated. He probably didn’t even notice the car until the very last minute, so it wasn’t like he had a chance to lay eyes on it long enough to steer towards it. So I don’t think that was the issue.

Analysis of the crash – How the rider could have avoided it

Less speed and ensuring proper buffer zone are where I’d put my money on avoiding this outcome.
Maintaining buffer zones is the primary reason some riders are safe and others are not safe. I keep a buffer zone pushing out ahead and to the sides of me. 3 seconds is the goal (or more if possible or at speed). It’s a habit I continue when I get in a car which is a nice thing.

Easiest way is to have a habit of picking a stationary spot that the vehicle in front passes (e.g. reflector pole, mark on the road etc) and count back until it passes your front wheel. Three thousand, two thousand, one thousand.. check. If you cut yourself off talking then that’s probably the point you’d impact. Roll off the throttle a bit and drop back or else (check blind spots), indicate and change lanes to give yourself more room. If someone’s doing something stupid start braking and/or cover the brakes to reduce your reaction time.

You’ve generally got a bit of time to think on the bike and nothing else to focus on except improving your riding craft, so any boring time: just practice spacing.

The guy in the video had no buffer zone in front or to the side (the downside of filtering through gaps with oncoming vehicles), he’d be lucky if he had 1 second between the car in front doing something stupid (as they do) and hitting it. It takes probably that long to start braking (reaction time). That and 160km/h (100 miles per hour) impact velocity meant with any sort of buffer zone he’d be hard pressed to keep it together while yanking on the brakes.. Accelerating through that sort of congestion coming up is an easily avoidable issue with a bit of scanning up the road and less urgency to get up to top speed ASAP to show off to your mate with the video camera.

Anyhow, my condolences to the family/friends left behind and I hope it makes some people think a bit and focus on good riding habits.

Bit of a longer, but most comprehensive coverage of the videos/slides here. In ten minutes you’ll know what happened.

A power point slide show with stick figures gives another explanation here:
http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

Nice clean, quick description of what’s going on.

The bounce of money (short intro by a news reader.. stick with it), so more of an “end result” type coverage rather than examining how we got here:

Oh and this one is worth mentioning:

How the unemployment statistics are worked out.

Might as well put something silly at the end:

Oh and here’s another one:

and a cutesy cartoon one explaining the “science”:

More science:

Scary thing is that there are a tonne of serious ones from the coal industry making grandiose claims about technology that simply does not exist.

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.

Nathan’s motorbike lessons – Gear

Feel free to rate, comment etc. I shot this one day on the road on my most recent tour of Europe and Morocco. See my youtube video and text/picture post on the first bit of that tour.
Nathan

This is the video version of my earlier trip report: UK to Lisboa, Portugal and gives the visuals to the route I took and the joys of a puncture the night of departure, proving once again that Murphy’s law can find you anywhere, although I was obviously riding too fast for Murphy and his rocket sled disasters.

As it is my first attempt to coddle my range of videos I took along the way into some semblance of a structured, interesting journey (rather than a bunch of shakey, bumpy disjoint image soup) it took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to effectively use the tools and how not to “over cook” the result. I think it is like powerpoint in a lot of ways: sure, you could use the equivalent of the powerpoint typewriter transition every time you transition a video, but you’re a twit if you do.

I would also have liked to put a bit of music on the track, but am researching how best to source that stuff:  MusicLoops is one I found,  there are a few tunes on there I like, but really: they’re just slightly different copies of the “real” tunes by the artists I like. So you have to wonder what a heavy handed approach like say youtube has recently started doing (Youtube removes audio from copyrighted videos).

Anyhow, feedback welcome,
Enjoy, Nathan