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Buckle Up

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May 232012

Rerouting . . .

Yesterday I mentioned that Google Chrome had overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to become the number one browser in the world. No small feat, considering Chrome hasn’t been around that long. Lest I seem a touch too Googly-eyed over the big, adorable company with the cartoonish logo, affable nerd duo owners, open source feel-good attitude, and pathological need to database absolutely every piece of data on everyone everywhere forever, let me clarify.

Microsoft has always scared me, but they were kind of a known quantity. They wanted your goddamn money. They wanted to own things like “the Internet.” They wanted to own everything worth owning and then sell it to us on a subscription basis while grudgingly giving away the security patches to keep someone else from coming along and stealing all the money they were hoping to eventually get out of us. That’s some nasty shit, but at least it’s clear. Apple basically wants the same thing, only they need you to literally worship them, too, to pay them some sort of tribute, which is just one of many freaky dichotomies in the low-key, anti-freedom, digital hippie commune that is One Infinite Loop.

But Google.

What do they want? To “organize the world’s information”? Maybe. But one thing they clearly want is self-driving cars.

Why is it that no one seems to have a problem with this?

Legislation paving the way for self-driving Google cars is skating through the California Senate right now. According the Business Insider article, California isn’t exactly an outlier here:

It’s not quite as far reaching as the bill passed in Nevada, which approved self-driving cars on its roads. This bill outlines a method to let the California Highway Patrol test these cars. Arizona, Hawaii, Florida and Oklahoma are all in the process of passing similar bills.”

Government in general right now is busy passing bills forbidding the consumption of human embryos and playing Jesus vs. Freedom paddy cake gridlock on our collective dime, and yet, somehow, we’re all in agreement that we need to fast-track Google-powered self-driving cars for public use? Has our obesity thing really gotten that bad?

I like Google products. I do. You have to love the video, too.

But I’ve also had Google Maps navigate me around and around to the same bridge that was out over and over again. One assumes that the blind man in the Google self-driving car video would perhaps have a taco and wait for the bridge to be completed?

“That was just your phone,” is the obvious argument. “The cars are so much more sophisticated.” But wouldn’t you think the 400-billion Android phones out there would be a pretty good test bed for making sure your shit was dialed, I mean, before the cars start hitting the streets? A slightly better beta model, I mean, than a metal car moving down the street with no driver.

Maybe I’m just sensitive because Google navigation has a total blind spot right at the place I’m staying in Portland, meaning it frequently barks orders at me rapid fire while showing me charging through green spaces and people’s homes on the map, when I am, in fact, on the road it keeps begging me to make lefts and rights and u-turns in order to find.

So if I am on the road, and Google doesn’t know it, I think it’s a fair question to ask where, in a situation like that, would the car be driving?

Ghosts in the Machines

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May 182012

Audi’s electric bike is certainly making the rounds at this point, and like any good piece of mysteryware, it’s leaving us with a lot of questions. My “us” of course I mean “me.” Something about this freaky vehicle is staying with me, and I’m having a tough time figuring out why.

Questions I’m left with include:

Is it real? Because it’s hard to say anymore. I just saw the Hulk punch Thor in the head the other week, and it looked pretty realistic, too.
What the hell’s going on with that transmission? Isn’t that an Acros hydraulic shifter and rear derailleur with the super-wide gap between the top part of the cage?
Are those Magura brakes?
Those are different wheels–where did the wheels in this new pseudo-CAD drawing come from?
Is that an inverted fork that actually works? Are there inverted forks that work?
What the hell’s going on with that Herman Miller Aeron Hammock Saddle?
Tufo tubulars?
Is that a tapered IS headset? Is that lower cup bigger than 1.5-inches? Is that a new standard?
Who picked out those low-profile pedals?

I common thread, faint but unmistakable, runs through all of those questions–a sneaking suspicion about the mysterious origins of the bike.

This bike has a lot of German stuff on it.

And also: somebody who’s into bicycles built this thing.

Seriously. The German stuff is a no-brainer. All the German companies always rally when one of them builds something new. But I haven’t seen Porsche spec Tufo tubular mountain tires on their overpriced city bikes. Somebody really went to town on this thing, and it was somebody who knew what’s currently pretty hip.

Look at the head tube on this frame. That is not the head tube an out of touch poindexter would spec.

About the only things that aren’t completely up to date with current uber-high-end bike technology and fashion are the carbon weave and the rear suspension (Audi, I’m available!). Everything else shows a remarkable understanding of what doesn’t suck.

Weird.

I really does make me wonder who came up with the concept and who made this bike happen.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the e-bike coin, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News has been easing into coverage of electric bikes, and there’s an article about China, written by Nicole Formosa, on the BRAIN site currently. It includes some interesting data, like this:

Last year, Giant sold 1.87 million bikes in China, said Kevin Zhu, general manager for domestic marketing in China. That represents a market share of about 6.75 percent . . . . Of the 1.87 million bikes Giant sold in China last year, Zhu said about 30 to 40 percent retailed above 2,000 yuan ($320). Meanwhile, the company sold just 100 bikes for 50,000 yuan ($7,940) or more.”

Here we have a few polar opposite approaches to electric bikes (I’m going to go ahead and assume that Audi will cost more than $320, and probably a good bit more than $8,000). The wild dichotomy between the two approaches isn’t the interesting thing, though. The interesting thing is that we now officially have a new category of vehicles that can support that type of diversity.

That suggests the electric bike–whatever it is–has arrived.

The New Face of Progress

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May 172012

Last Tuesday I predicted we’d eventually see the end of bicycle component standards and interchangeable parts as we know them, and on Wednesday I predicted standards would be replaced with distinct “ecosystems.” After that I rode some bicycles and fell to blathering on about electric bikes.

If all that seemed to be leading up to the announcement of the insane 50mph-top-speed, more-torque-than-a-VW-Jetta, and completely proprietary Audi e-bike, I promise it was completely coincidental.

My powers of prediction are just that uncanny.

If there’s anything on this bike that’s standard or currently available, it’s those German Skyway Tuffwheels, but even the transmission and shifting seems to have been either cooked up by Audi, or developed in partnership with a much smaller company. Yes, every once in a while we see a bike like this flicker around the edges of reality without ever materializing, but one of these days it’s going to happy. Here’s why:

It’s never been easier to design, engineer and mass produce parts. Audi just purchased Ducati; do you think they can’t afford an $1100 MakerBot? Word is, they also know something about designing products and bringing them to market. But that’s not even the best part. These days a tiny, innovative company like Acros can partner with a company like Audi, and see some truly amazing shit get made. It’s starting to make more sense for companies like Audi to take a page from the Silicon Valley playbook, and buy or partner with smaller companies, than it does for them to keep reinforcing the big guys. And that’s because the smaller companies are able to build pretty amazing things.
Why the hell not? Remind me again why a company like Audi needs to spec Shimano or SRAM components to create a new type of vehicle? Audi built this bike as battery research and a PR stunt–i.e. using a fraction of their marketing budget alone.
Times they are a-changin’. This isn’t a mountain bike. It’s some sort of mountain commuting Red Bull wannabe trick bike/social media center (it communicates with your smartphone and Facebook). The entry point for a completely new company isn’t going to be an existing category (like Honda’s faux-entrance into DH racing); it’s going to be a completely new type of bicycle. Nobody knew they needed an iPhone until Apple showed them an iPhone. Apple, Audi–whatever–if somebody creates the bicycle version of the iPhone, consumers will buy it.
The old network is crumbling. Really it is. The argument that no shops would carry something like, and thus it would never get traction in the U.S. market is such a blatant example of asshattery that it’s more sad than amusing. What would it cost Audi to make these and distribute these, never mind a company like GM or Toyota building one? The economy of scale for production and services of one of the world’s top ten car manufacturers is staggering. Using a fraction of their resources, large manufacturers could create a quasi bike industry to support their “mobility vehicles”–let alone do something economical, like buy an existing distributor and simply add their own products to the mix.
The other old network is crumbling, too. If you really think the few truly independent bike shops left in the U.S. would turn up their noses at the idea of selling something consumers want–and they can get easily–then you haven’t tried to put a kid through college lately. For every Trek and Specialized dealer in the U.S., there’s a guy across the street who wants a shot at the title, and some of them are better shops anyway.
Bicycles are spilling into mainstream America like oil from a ruptured pipeline. And in an entirely new way, too. This isn’t just Lance-worship and trends. The skinny jeans crowd has sold their skinny jeans but kept their bikes. Fat people are riding bicycles while smoking–not to get in shape, but to get somewhere, and cities that don’t even want to be cool are having to install bike lanes. American consumers are finally sick of telling the neighbors we fell down the steps again, and that Big Oil really loves us.
That social media thing. No, seriously. How elaborate a distribution channel do you need these days, when you can leave a bag of money on Zuck’s doorstep and reach a few million qualified leads? There is no barrier to reaching consumers these days.
And speaking of Facebook . . . . There are companies who could do this without blinking. Google’s investing in self-driving cars, mobile phone manufacturing and wind farms. Free cash flow at Google in 2011 was just over eleven billion dollars. To offer some perspective, the last time I checked, total sales of the entire U.S. bicycle industry were right at six billion dollars.

Maybe none of this will happen. Maybe bikes will keep on just as they are. From what I can tell, though, the idea that a change is coming seems more realistic than ever.

Easy Rider

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May 152012

The other day I slouched forth from my basement to put on some road miles and check out the rail trail of sorts that starts under the 205 bridge and runs along the Portland side of the Columbia. It was a perfect day here in Portland, the sort of day normally found only in Disney movies involving animated birds and bunny rabbits, which mean the river and shore were packed with people out enjoying the day. Likewise, the bike path was starting to see a lot of traffic.

Before this next part, I need to clarify something about myself: I am not a fast bicycle rider; I am a physical derelict who also happens to be a proud bicycle rider, and the combination of those characteristics is like the third leading cause of Simultaneous Massive Heart Attack and Spontaneous Cranial Explosion Syndrome in North America.

I mention this because I’d taken out The Fast Bike for this ride, and The Fast Bike does not like to get passed. The fast bike was made by Bob Parlee in Massachusetts and could care less about the ineffectual sack of ground beef turning the pedals. It has business to attend to.

So off we go charging into a deafening headwind and picking off wobbly boardwalk types here and there, but basically maintaining an average speed approximately 12kph faster than any doctor would tell you I’m supposed to be going.

And then I see him, a speedy-looking Fred like me in the distance ahead, the rabbit that’s going to keep me buried for another ten minutes or so. Only a few boardwalk cruisers between us.

But do I really want to be doing this? So what if I catch him, but I’m all blown up and pathetic-looking? How bad would that be? And what if I get by and then just hover there like the aerobic muppet I really am? I take a second to remind myself to give an “on the left” before going around the cruisers while I continue to give this some more thought.

It’s then that I notice I haven’t gained any ground yet. I mean on the cruisers. A quick check shows some frantic leg action by Cruiser Woman, following by power coasting, then more frantic leg action. My own cadence has been relentless. It’s pancake flat, but the wind has my legs in “long climb” mode. Temporarily, everything I’ve ever believed is wrong.

I lock onto the blur of the two cruisers in my head and chase like a drooling fool. At some point I notice the woman is wearing flip-flops. I’m in the drops. If a small child in a bathing suit were to step out in front of me, I would forever be cleaning him off my glasses. People play volleyball and barbecue on the broad expanse of beach-like area along the river. I have gained some ground. The flip-flops are blue.

As I close in, it becomes clear that something is wrong. We’ve passed the guy I’d originally set out to catch. There’s a kind of bobbing to the heads of Cruiser Guy and Girl. The wind is so loud that only when I’m within a bike length do I hear the motors–two-stokes at that, chainsaw loud. My bicycle and I have now drawn up alongside bikes with motors, and I feel the way a dog might feel after working for a half hour to corner a tiger, only to realize he’s cornered a tiger.

I get around them by pretending I have a motor and use the image of their slouching bodies and vaguely bored expressions to pull away. I have passed motherfuckers on motorcycles.

And then I think, “There were motorcycles on the bike path.” I still don’t know how I feel about that. At the beginning of the ride I’d had to pass two guys jogging side-by-side and had felt bad for being a faster-moving bicycle, disrupting their conversation, and here were two chainsaws on wheels zipping along on the same path.

I need to get used to it.

According to Make Magazine, this Blackbird is a “super-charged pedal-powered super cruiser.”

Pedal-powered means it has pedals.

It’s cool and everything, and kudos to the guy who fabricated it. It’s a pretty impressive piece of work. Except that it’s not really pedal powered.

According to Makezine.com:

Eleven feet long and 150 lbs, the ‘Blackbird’ is ‘a fully custom made electric recumbent chopper bicycle constructed of off-the-shelf parts from the hardware store’ combined with scrap bike components, along with a commercial motor and battery. As for being super-charged, this bike is driven by a 36V DC motor capable of delivering 50 miles per charge at up to 20 MPH. If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper! An array of cateyes, headlights, a pair of monkeylights, and even a singular spinning strobe light would definitely cause this machine to be confused with a UFO late at night!”

So here they are, the new vehicles in the bike lanes, and I have to admit I’m still processing the significance of that.

On the one hand, that contraption really is pretty cool in a kind of Mad Max, Steampunk sort of way, but something about the “150lbs” part makes the sentence, “If necessary, it can be switched off and instantly becomes a pedal-powered chopper!” seem a little optimistic. Having previously pedaling something that weighed about 150lbs, I can assure you that nothing about the experience warranted an exclamation point at the end of it.

And I guess that’s what bothers me about this motorized bicycle thing. I love motorcycles–grew up riding them–but we’re really starting to have a good thing going here with human-powered ways of getting around cities, and there’s a kind of self-sufficiency that comes with that that I’m not sure you get with a motor. Has the emphasis already swung back to needing to get there that must faster?

Or maybe I’m just still sore about getting roughed up by some people in flip-flops. Tough to say. Even my bike’s still confused.

Ecosystems: Come Get Some

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May 092012

Are there no standards anymore?”
– Phillipe Anselmo

I’ve been thinking some more about yesterday’s post regarding the relentless march of system engineering and the death of compatibility, and a few things have occurred to me. Of the two or three people still reading this blog, I suspect my audience now divides pretty evenly into:

Those intrigued by misadventure and perversely curious to see if I’ve survived each day–and if a blog post would show up anyway, even if I didn’t.
Those inclined to think so much like me that I’m now your daily affirmation. Lookin’ good, guys.

Misadventure has been at a minimum lately, though by “lately” I mean no attempt has been made on my life in the last 48-hours, and for the record I did manage to flat somehow on what’s only a two mile ride into work this morning, so I’m not ready to declare life as official “grand” just yet. But while misadventure takes a much needed holiday, I’d like to focus on that second one, those deeply interesting individuals out there who share my strange views.

Well done.

Given that you probably already think like me, you’ll no doubt be thinking exactly what I’m thinking about proprietary designs. Exactly! It sure worked for Sega when it comes to urinal video games.

Yes, the one time mighty video game console manufacturer who contributed Sonic the Hedgehog to the culture of Western Civilization before failing to keep up with X-boxes and Playstations of the world has found what we’d call a niche, manufacturing urinal-based interactive video games.

Yep. Stop thinking about “standards” for bikes and start thinking instead about “ecosystems,” today’s hip term for “shit that doesn’t work with other shit.” Apple may be the undisputed lords of ecosystem, owning nearly 100% of the hardware, software, and messy “humans” involved in the manufacturing, sale, and use of their products. Liberate your music files from iTunes and you feel like you should have cosmetic surgery and move to Mexico. Jailbreak your iPhone and you probably should.

But not to be outdone, Sega is showing us that which ecosystem you own isn’t important. What’s important is owning one. And check out how awesome the games are.

I can’t even imagine getting tired of that video game. It makes me wish I could piss for hours and hours. You have to hand it to Sega. There’s just something so funny about terrible weather in Japan, and is there nothing anime chauvinism can’t make even more funny?

Listen up, bike companies. Sega teaches us it’s not what you own; it’s just that you own it. Hello 50mm pipe spindle bottom brackets with electromagnetic fields for bearings® and trucker mudflap chick tread pattern tires©!

Pin It

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Apr 062012

I still haven’t decided if posts next week will be brief and inscrutable, or just nonexistent. Either way I’ll be driving across the country, probably recklessly snapping photos of anything even remotely interesting that I pass on the highway. (Actually, I think my mom reads this, so what I’ll actually be doing is signalling, pulling off to the side of the road, making sure my doors are locked, then snapping photos.)

But I’ll probably end up with more photos than text or time in which to wax faux-poetic. Fortunately, my invitation to Pinterest has just been accepted!

I like this new trend of “invite” exclusivity when it comes to new social networks. Google+ and Spotify both worked this well. Sometimes, as in the case with Google+, one finally gains access to the ultra-exclusive party only to find a few guys playing Parcheesi and eating cheese puffs behind all that mysterious inaccessibility. Other times, as is my current situation with Pinterest, one walks into a scene that’s a little scary, and tricky to nail down–like gaining entrance to one of those wealthy-people parties where everyone’s wearing those creepy Venetian beaked bird masks, or visiting Florida.

Today was only my second visit as an actual member, and I’ve begun to actually acclimate and process the experience. As a kind of less-then-helpful guide to those of you still standing outside the club scrunching your cleavage together and throwing come-hithers at the digital bouncer, here’s my unpractical advice for maximizing your first minutes up in the club.

You’d better like stuff wrapped in bacon. Seriously, even if your initial configuration includes no foodies or food-related stuff, you will see things wrapped in bacon.
There are a lot of pants. Pinterest is all about fashion, and if you initially went toward more of a “Chuck Norris” and monster truck flavor with your interests, Pinterest will default to showing you a lot of pants.
These pants are apparently nice.
Only hipster bicycles exist in Pinterest. The bikes you do see are beautiful and artisanal and all, but so far, you don’t see a lot of jack drive DH bikes. Still, it is sort of interesting to see what people who mostly like to look at pants look for in a bicycle.
Anything you can photograph is art. A friend of mine once took one of those little label maker guns–the kind that spit out the little embossed letters–to completely label the gun itself with various descriptions like “sticky labeler,” and “label-o-matic” and that seemed like maybe the contextual heir-apparent to Warhol’s Pop Art, but these days anything photographed is automatically considered pretty profound. Dress on a scarecrow. Linoleum. Discarded doll at a junk yard. Pinterest is the context you need to make photos of your dog dressed as Darth Vader seem profound.
Guys are supposed to like cars. Somewhere in the bowels of Pinterest is an algorithm that parses content into “make-up/hair” and “sports cars.” I’m normally a motorhead, but the most commonly displayed vanity shots of cars on Pinterest all seem to be taken by someone who isn’t sure what a car is. I’m sure this will get way better as I add more people I know, and I’m desperately grateful to my friend Michael for peppering the pins I’m seeing so far with some unique vehicles, but I think I’d rather see more make-up and hairstyles than the default stuff floating around Pinterest in the “cars” category.
Even after dedicating more than half your life to bicycles, searching “bike” on Pinterest will make you wonder if you even like them.

Yes, a personalized concept “Matilda” bike with an “l” seatpost that doesn’t attach to any other part of the frame, but rather floats in photoshopped space is, indeed, an “amazing idea” because, “No one could steal your bike.”

So far, one really positive thing I have found about Pinterest is that it will help you organize the things that matter to you, and, in doing so, teach you a lot about yourself. What I learned about myself so far is that I’m not really that into pictures of things.

Won’t stop me from inflicting as many as possible on you, though. Monday’s first road trip photos should feature photo locales as exotic as Ohio. Time to pack up the car.

Build Your Own Overlord

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Apr 052012

Within three years, any five year-old will be able to design and make a robot like this, designed specifically to rip the heads off Barbie dolls.

I have a confession to make: I am the Google+ user. You knew it had to be somebody, and thought it might even be someone you knew, and turns out, I’m that guy.

In my defense, I don’t use it in anything like a “social” way (that’d be like talking to yourself on the subway). When I see something of interest on the internets, I send it to my own private stream at Google+, like taking a note. It makes me feel hip because I’m using The Cloud.

But it’s mostly just me on there, along with some snake oil salesmen blathering about how to use Google+ for your business, and Google employees like former CEO and current Chief-“Why the Fuck are You Suing/Investigating Us Now, Too?”-Ambassador of Non-evil, Eric Schmidt.

As I do anyone whose posts I can follow, I consider Eric a close personal friend, and today he let me know about something really interesting.

The end of humanity.

More specifically, the really cool capitalistic side of it. Here’s what Eric sent to me:

An amazing project from MIT, Harvard and Penn aims to make print-on-demand robots a reality for the average person by the end of the decade. This is what the future will look like.”

And then this link to MIT’s site. To summarize, MIT is spearheading a project to develop “a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.” Project leader and principal investigator MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Professor Daniela Rus, is quoted as saying, “We believe that it has the potential to transform manufacturing and to democratize access to robots.” According to the MIT article:

Researchers hope to create a platform that would allow an individual to identify a household problem that needs assistance; then head to a local printing store to select a blueprint, from a library of robotic designs; and then customize an easy-to-use robotic device that could solve the problem. Within 24 hours, the robot would be printed, assembled, fully programmed and ready for action.”

Yes, we’ll be able to “print” our own robots, designed to do what we want them to do.

Of course this means we’re all going to die, but, admit it, this is so much cooler than the Matrix movie bullshit way you thought robots would end up killing us all.

Thomson Titanium Handlebar

In less grim manufacturing news, I hope I get to see more of Thomson’s suddenly expanding line of products. Bikerumor.com mentioned these again today, and what appears to be the reality of some new Thomson components is pretty exciting stuff. Like a lot of people searching for bolt on and forget bike parts, I’ve been a fan of Thomson stuff for a whole bunch of years. It’s sort of wonderful beyond words to see them potentially expanding not only their level of technology (dropper seatposts!), but materials (carbon road bar!). And they’re going to try to keep production in house as completely as possible? This might be the first shots in a revolution of genuine high-quality bike parts that don’t look like they came out of the same factory making Gummi Bears and wall clocks for Wal-Mart.

I just hope the insta-bots let me live long enough to see it.

I Believe I Can Fly

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Mar 232012

For as mellow a winter as most places had, Spring seems to be out of the gates strong this year, with April Fool’s day apparently being celebrated far earlier and longer than usual, and almost more glorious madness than a chronicler of such things can manage.

By now you (and nearly five million other people) have to’ve seen the dude who created bird wings that briefly got him airborne.

Except that they didn’t, the whole thing being a really elaborate hoax perpetrated by one Floris Kaayk, an artist in the Netherlands. Apparently Kaayk (which I believe would be the ultimate name for the first automobile bike rack from IKEA) really did intend to inspire people, but also to conduct an “experiment about online media.” Whatever that was, seemed like it worked. Hoax or not, why do I suspect kids in the Netherlands will be flying to school while we’re still taking our kids to school in these?

In the interest of full disclosure, in the past I did alternate picking my daughter up from school on the bike with picking here up in this.

In my weak defense, it was supposed to be the company car for my original bike company, Asylum Cycles (big wheels, get it?), and Tall Dan the Mechanic and I had converted it to run on veggie oil, but what it really ran on was wads of burning cash. Also, the doors rarely closed properly, and trying to accelerate hard to slam the door shut while my daughter teetered precariously six feet above the ground, giggling uncontrollably, definitely made an impression on the other parents at the school. After the Mog, they even gave me extra room when I showed up on the bicycle.

(Owning a ’77 Unimog was maybe the best and worst thing in my life.)

At any rate, it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the true stories from the jokes. Consider Nokia’s patent on vibrating tattoos. Hard to imagine why Nokia’s lost so much market share.

But arguably the most unbelievable of all recent news has to be the return, at age 46, of troubled bike fabricator and world record setter, Graeme Obree and the latest bike he’s created for the attempt.

As is his way, Obree built the bike he’ll use to contest the hour record out of basic bike parts and plenty of stuff he found himself around the house. Yes, in the age of using wind tunnel testing to shape carbon fiber structures for maximum aerodynamics, Obree is coming out of retirement on a Reynolds 653 steel frame he cobbled together with a combination of classic components, stuff he modified with a grinding wheel, and parts he literally whittled himself. You really should go check the full bike out at Cyclingnews.

Between Merckx riding through his entire career with a life threatening heart condition–then shrugging off the news once he found out–to Obree’s well-documented struggles and obsessions, if there seems to be a pattern to my recent ramblings about the true characters of cycling, it’s not an accident. This is mankind at our most self-deluded and absolutely magical, and I’m certainly pulling for Obree again. The thing is, just like our strange friend in the Netherlands didn’t really need to fly to get our collective attention, Obree really doesn’t need to break the record again. He’s already succeeded in creating another incredible story for us, which is really what he’s always done best.

SXSWTF?

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Mar 132012

The bicycle that shifts by reading your thoughts has surfaced again, this time at the South by Southwest “music, film and interactive conference” in Austin, Texas. I’ll admit to not fully understanding what the SXSW “conference” is, exactly, though it appears to be both a showcase for derivative hipster music and an excuse to write off travel expenses for tech nerds whose companies won’t cover travel to Burning Man. In keeping with the theme of information nobody gives a shit about then, I’d like to hereby announce that I no longer care how anybody controls his or her bicycle. Mind controlled bike done as a publicity stunt by Toyota to sell cars, battery operated suspension systems, four D-cells that pump water from a Camelbak directly into your mouth–whatever. I’m all for it.

Yes, it’s 2012 now, and I’ve decided there’s no place left for my usual neo-retro-grouch pose on this subject. Why be a critic? I like conferences. I like music you have to be drinking to enjoy and rooms filled with hotshit tech entrepreneurs who still live at home. Have a new web and iPhone app that lets me swap dryer lint with a person in Ohio? Nice work! Made a film that re-imagines Hitler’s death as the work of time-traveling Icelandic superstar, Bjork, who assassinates Nazis with sound before a grand finale battle scene with the ghost of Wagner? How creative! Do tell me more about your mash-up of dubstep, ’80s metal, and things Mike Patton would say out loud in a Whole Foods. Seriously, who says America’s best days are behind us? If this is what we make now, I’m all for it.

But let’s go all in.

If Toyota’s “embrace the green and figure out how to wedge an iPhone in there somewhere, too” hipster ad campaign helped pay even a small part of the development costs of a new Parlee frame design, then sure, add all the neuro crap you want, as long as we all get to see that new frame. Hell, I’d like to see corporate money going to lots of innovative small bicycle companies. We’re hip now, bicycle people. We can help sell Michelob Ultra. Work it.

Here are just a few of my dream announcements at this year’s SXSW conference:

PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi announces a “potential” new design project in collaboration with “genuine” frame builder Richard Sachs to develop a clear plastic bicycle frame that doubles as a habitat for endangered Beluga Sturgeon eggs, with built-in rear-wheel assist motor powered by “mass hatching.” Sachs, who does not attend the event, issues no comment, but a photo surfaces on Facebook depicting him emptying a can of Mountain Dew into a toilet.
Pabst Brewing Company owner C. Dean Metropoulos debuts a film and YouTube channel about the development of the company’s combination urban bicycle and home brewing system, featuring a bicycle frame crowdsource designed by “everybody in Minneapolis.”
In an attempt to build credibility in the U.S. market and citing “deeply waning interest in Jennifer Lopez,” car manufacturer Fiat announces a joint partnership with Nokia and bamboo bicycle guru Craig Calfee, to create “a stylish and modern take on the classic ‘Fred Flintstone’ human-powered vehicle.” Ashton Kucher is a rumored investor.
In a clear bid to return to his roots, Hollywood director Sam Raimi announces a documentary on the making of frame builder Erik Noren’s Evil Dead track bike, a bike that uses a chainsaw chain and is painted with genuine blood because Noren is, as Raimi announces at the movie premier, “Fucking awesome.”
Long-time sponser of events in which people are barely conscious of what snack foods they actually ingest, Doritos, announces a partnership with FedEx, Taco Bell and online retailer Competitive Cyclist. For a “very modest” additional charge, your Pinarello Dogma 2 with Super Record 11 EPS is now available shipped in its own impact-absorbing, environmentally friendly* and delicious Dorito-based taco shell. (*Legal disclaimer: some Dorito-based products have proven unable to decompose naturally under any circumstances, including human consumption.)

It’s a brave new world of corporate sponsored innovation, art and “interactivity” and I, for one, am ready.

The Bike Electric

Bikes, Gadgets Comments Off

Mar 062012

Apple's Recent Patent Wires Your Bike

I like bicycles, sure, but I’m quite fond of fancy tech bullshit, too. Technology that uses your phone to give everybody in the room a copy of Photoshop, for instance, is cool. Combining technology and bicycles, however, doesn’t seem to agree with me. Maybe I’ve set up too many cycling computers (or, as customers tend to call them, “speedometers”), or maybe I’m just really old now, but I continue to think adding electronics to bicycles is weird.

Obvious exceptions here include bikes with electric motors, lights, and power meters–things that are notoriously challenging to pull off sans electronics, but the most recent push to wire every aspect of our lives–including our bike–strikes me as slightly anti-bike.

Recently looking at the patents Shimano has in the works for taking Di2 and smearing it across every possible function of the bike, including suspension systems, might be what has me going just a little Luddite here, but the recent press about Apple’s “Smart Bike” is what really caught my attention.

In case you haven’t heard, Apple has filed for a patent that essentially wires up your bike, using sensors everywhere and wireless technology to basically record everything, including “speed, distance, time, altitude, elevation, incline, decline, heart rate, power, derailleur setting, cadence, wind speed, path completed, expected future path, heart rate, power, and pace.” Apparently, you could even use voice commands to control the iPhone at the heart of the system. Neato.

Already we’ve seen similar things from Nike, and it’s pretty common to use applications like Strava to track things like training rides and sort through your own data, and I can certainly understand the value of affordable performance tracking equipment for athletes, but beyond that, I’m missing the point. It’s always been the social aspects of these types of systems that puzzle me the most. While I admire anyone’s intense training schedule, I’ll take your word for it, thanks. My desire to know details about other people’s bicycle riding stats falls somewhere below the dietary requirements of zoo-bred lemurs and high fashion. Checking in on someone else’s shared social mileage and elevation gain combines all the joy of seeing photos of what people had for lunch with the pure glee of math. I really like to know people are out riding bikes, but a general sense is all I need to be happy about it. When it comes to detailed stats, my attention wanes. Sorry, but if I wasn’t with you, I just don’t give a shit that you rode your bike. Unless you captured some gnarly video, got hit by an antelope, or both.

My obvious concern, then, is that we let technology do for our bicycles what ubiquitous digital cameras and camcorders have done for our ability to actually see stuff. Once your ride is completely and utterly wired and you’re finally–gloriously–monitoring everything from incline to chamois moisture level to temperature in your Gu packets, will you still remember to enjoy riding your bike? Like taking a picture instead of looking, wiring something that’s inherently fun has the potential to make it a lot less fun.

Maybe once we have the technology to monitor the girl in a t-shirt blowing past your rigged out Starship Enterprise bike on her beat up single-speed and disappearing off into the distance, and convert that event into Siri’s haunting and faltering voice commanding you to “get your fat Fred ass up on the pedals,” I’ll start to understand the appeal.

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