Have you missed me? Trick question; I know you've missed me. Frankly, the main reason I haven't been writing is laziness. I make no bones about it. The second reason is that I got hit by a car in April and broke four bones in my hand, and the third is that I had a... Continue Reading →
In the last year, I have made ten trips that required air travel. I have flown something like 100,000 miles and spent roughly the entirety of my adult life in layovers. If I had kids, I would have forgotten what they looked like. I am registered to vote in The Sky because I spend more... Continue Reading →
On January 5, 2011, I wrote the following: “Designer” is a dangerous term, because it usually means some crazy person with ridiculous ideas who then makes CAD drawings or actual mock-ups of his crazy ideas and yet, for some goddamn reason, I appear to be the only person to notice that said idea is crazy.... Continue Reading →
The idea of solar roadways has been around for a while, and I haven't said anything about it because I thought it was self-evident how stupid it was. I was wrong. The Indiegogo page raised $2.2 million and recently, prototypes have been built, to much applause from the environmentally-minded. So now, instead of just being a... Continue Reading →
Ever been to the website Elite Daily? If you haven't, don't bother. Home of such journalistic masterpieces as "Zayn Malik Isn't Worried About Leaving One Direction Because His Fiance Is Hot As F*ck" and "Man Given 18 Months To Live Says Cannabis Oil Cured His Cancer," it's a long-running stream of feel-good drivel that's generally... Continue Reading →
I'll keep this one short. A company named Innowattech (innovation + watt + tech. Get it?) wants to put piezoelectric pads under railways to harvest electric energy from passing trains. Trains roll over the pad, the pads compress, electricity happens, and eco-conscious morons the world over collectively cream their pants because we've MAGICALLY GOTTEN ENERGY... Continue Reading →
So in our last post that was titled like this, we visited some douche who thinks that he can get energy out of cars by making them worse. That was a bad idea. This idea is quite a lot worse. Here's the headline: Again, a preposterously bold claim. The idea is that this train would travel... Continue Reading →
Eventually, there will come a day when people stop listening to "designers" with no background in physics who propose physics-based things. Until then, the word "designer" will continue to mean "dude with AutoCAD/Photoshop skills, a wild hair up his ass, and no connection to the actual world that real people live in." Now when you're... Continue Reading →
If you're like me, you've always hated that our transportation systems like bikes and buses and cars all operate on an existing infrastructure, rather than one that would require a huge amount of money and disruptive construction projects to reinvent. Right? I mean, riding your bike on roads that are already there? What's up with... Continue Reading →
Let's talk about coffee. You've had it. You've spilled it. What's the worst that could happen? Stuff gets wet, and you have less coffee. No biggie. But what if you spill it on your keyboard? Still, not the end of the world. You might lose your keyboard, or even your whole computer. Couple grand down... Continue Reading →
I have written about concept cars twice before. First up was GM, whose car concepts sucked in a kind of general way, but weren't really inherently impossible. Then there was the list of concept cars on Walyou, which were picked solely (as far as I can tell) because the person who wrote the article is eleven... Continue Reading →
So China, since they have tons of money (and all of our money too), has decided that they want to go to the moon. With people. In order to do that, they need to find a place to land on the moon, and rather than map it with super high-powered telescopes like we did, they... Continue Reading →
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and have we got a treat for you. I'm going to set this up in my usual disconnected fashion, so deal with it. After this, I promise not to talk about cars for a while. This is a Panavia Tornado. It has two engines producing over 17,000 pounds of thrust... Continue Reading →
French people are crazy, right? Right.So when I heard that some French engineers had designed a pedal-powered submarine, I had to check that shit out. Here it is.The pros of such a device are as follows:you can tell people you have a submarine. That's all.The cons are that if you show them your submarine, they... Continue Reading →
Two years later would come the worst motorsport disaster ever, when 86 people lost their lives and 120 more were injured. Eleven years after that, a disgruntled Henry Ford II decided that he'd had enough of Ferrari's victories and thrashed them four years running with the legendary GT40. And 27 years after that, Ayrton Senna... Continue Reading →
