Electric bicycles are nothing new- I’m sure we’ve had something like it even a hundred years ago. Our most recent foray into electrically assisted, two-wheeled transport has been anything but exciting. I first laid eyes on a modern electric bicycle back in 1998 at the Barret-Jackson car show. While it was a great idea, it was about as exciting to me as sleeping pills – and I am a bicycling enthusiast, so that’s really saying a lot. I mean, I get excited about conventional bicycles.
This M55 bicycle is here to beat boring, battery-buffed bicycles by means of pure awesome. Being awesome, they are naturally seeing a limited run of 250 units this year. Only the awesomest of the awesome will get a chance to own one of these bad boy bicycles.
Check out this crazy video they made for their crazy bicycle:
Check out this awesome mechanical elephant. It looks like something straight out of a video game! It was made using reclaimed wood and steel. I think reclaimed is kind of a funny word, I mean, did they lose it, and then pick it up at the lost & found? Also, it’s a vehicle, and it’s clearly recreational (or is it a work vehicle?)… can you get an rv insurance quote on that thing? I’m guessing that as long as it stays in the park, it is covered by the park’s insurance.
Dubbed the “Great Elephant”, this 12 meters high and 8 meters wide mechanical elephant uses 45 tons of reclaimed wood and steel for its construction. This robo elephant is capable of taking up to 49 passengers on a 45-minute joy ride.
Judging by how slowly this thing moves in the video, they probably went a mile in those 45 minutes. Oh joy!
It’s a common trivia fact that the first space shuttle had a computer with 64 kilobytes of memory. My oh my, how far we have come. I don’t think there’s a product today that has such a small RAM cache. With the state of computing today, I wonder if our astronauts have IT guys in space, or if that’s just part of their training now? Perhaps they use www.consonus.com . You know, we’ve got a whole lot of satellites in orbit right now- I don’t know how many, but the number is surprisingly high- in the hundreds or thousands… and each one is a computer. Are they simply maintenance-free? Remotely operated? Who takes care of computers in orbit? And how?
That pun hurt me as much as it hurt you, sorry! This bathtub was constructed using a giant crystal that was found in the Amazon rain forest. This super-luxurious bathing bowl is but a chunk of a larger, ten ton stone that was flown in from the Amazon.
This rock-solid sauna went on sale for a bit under $900,000. After taxes and delivery, that makes this a million dollar bathroom fixture.
They say that when you remodel, you get the most return on investment from your kitchen and bathroom. Maybe that’s why this unique piece sold for so much?
There’s another, smaller piece of the same ten ton stone that has been turned into- you guessed it- a bathtub. This smaller one is selling for a mere $800,000. I think I’m in the wrong business.
Solar activity is on the rise, say NASA scientists. This is the same solar activity I spoke about earlier. With this type of solar storm system the economic impact could overshadow the crisis of Hurricane Katrina twenty times over- and this with our economy already in serious trouble. Stocks are tumbling by the 100’s daily; the stock market in crisis Europe causing chaos all around the world as people scramble to save what little is left of their investments from going the way of the Dodo bird. In addition to the economic slump that we have already been dealing with for three years or more we are now seeing the Gulf of Mexico again ravaged by disaster as BP spills millions of gallons of oil. Couple all these with the ongoing earthquakes and tsunami activity and you have one nasty situation. Now we throw into the seething soup a communications disaster unlike anything that the 21st century has yet to experience. All nature of technological disturbances is to be expected from cell activity to 911 failures.
What this means for the normal person is that things are about to get a lot worse. With technological disruptions on the horizon, jobs and our state of economic affairs are to be further threatened. As if things we not bad enough already. The entire planet will feel the wrath of this solar storm. We can only hope to mitigate damages by continuing research on storm activity on and surrounding our star. Is it too late to help this time? Researches and experts alike agree that if we start preparing for it now, that maybe it is not. We can only hope that they are right. We will we will not have to further suffer due to lack of communication to the ordinary person by government authority. Or any authority for that matter.
On another note entirely, though modestly related, that with the retirement of the shuttle program the fitness equipment industry will also be suffering a loss. All make and model of equipment are bolted into those shuttles to prevent atrophy of muscle tissue while they are in a weightless state for long periods of time.
Well, hears to hearing the news sooner rather than later, and hopes that we can curb some of the damage that may be caused by the newest threat to our fragile economic state.
With no more missions to the Hubble Telescope planned and the shuttle program being retired I am left wondering how we will continue to receive these amazing images if we are no longer able to service the cameras. Now with the retirement of the shuttle programs leads me to wonder; are we really leaving outer space travel to civilians? I know that personal ‘trips’ to space are in the near future; or so says the designers and engineers at the “Spaceport America”. The Spaceport is located just outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, which incidentally is where my parents live and roughly 250 miles from my home.
I think that it would have been very humorous had Virgin Galactic had petitioned Roswell as the home of the Spaceport, but alas, they found a good cheap chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. According to reports (news, radio, etc) it seems that these personal journeys into the orbit surrounding earth cost roughly $100k and last merely a matter of hours. Now, if we are willing to shoot normal people into space for profit; why is it that we are no longer sending trained professionals into space to work on the equipment we use for taking and understand this beautiful and stunning universe we are surrounded by?
I wonder if this will hamper our ability to study life on other planets and other planetary research; and does this mean no missions to mars or other planets even within our own galaxy? Will we ever find that life form, in whatever form, that we have desperately been looking to find for the last few decades?
I think that alien life might be good for the world as we know it. I hope that perhaps extraterrestrial life is not worried about acne creams and fat burners. I want to believe that they have moved beyond vanity and superficiality. With our luck as human beings, they will probably be just like us, only smarter. Smart enough to build a ship strong and fast enough to make the journey to Earth. I hope that they are not as destructive as we seem to be. Blowing ourselves up, pouring oil into our oceans- sadly, this is life on Earth. Maybe the Aliens know better than to bother.
I’ve wanted to take up glass blowing for a long time. It’s one of those things that I don’t think you can do at home, so I’ve never actually done it or seen anyone do it… heck, I’ve yet to meet anyone who has done it. It would seem that I’m more likely to invent an anti wrinkle cream than make stuff out of glass.
It’s probably just as well, since I think I’d burn myself.
What a strange concept to build a comedy skit around! At first, I just thought this was about a super nerdy annoying dude, but I was wrong on all accounts (he’s still super nerdy and annoying, so maybe I wasn’t that far off). I love how the Circuit City guy is portrayed as being so laid back and mellow. I could totally see him at his next job, giving someone a life insurance quote . Coolest. Insurance Agent. Ever.
Personally, I don’t like Best Buy or Circuit City. I think they’re both overpriced. Fry’s electronics gets all my electronics retailer props these days. Also- why isn’t there an electronics store where both of the words in the name of the store start with the letter ‘A’ ? Maybe because it would be too hard to come up with the name? Like, say “Amazing Accessories” ? Maybe there was a store that matched this format and it went out of business?
As the Hubble telescope hits the ripe old age of twenty, it just keeps on giving, bringing us images of the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away. Thank you, Hubble telescope, for allowing us to peer into the vastness of space to see where stars are born.
Visit the Hubble telescope site to see this image in much larger proportions.
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