The Most Ingenious DIY Bike I've Ever Seen

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Microbent CLWB Recumbent, by Fred Fincher, USA

The Most Ingenious DIY Bike I've Ever Seen
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
February 10, 2011

Lately I've been surfing the web for DIY bike designs.

I have a 26" diamond frame urban commuter that I would like to convert into a LWB mid racer recumbent, along the lines of the Easy Racers Javelin or Rans X-stream 26.

But as I surfed the web, I stumbled across the above compact long wheelbase (CLWB) recumbent, converted from a diamond frame child's bike.

It has relatively little to do with my own DIY conversion requirements. But it is perhaps the most ingenious DIY conversion I've ever seen, and therefore useful as a source of inspiration.

What makes this particular DIY conversion so ingenious?

1. This DIY conversion makes full use of the existing bike design. Rather than laboriously fabricate new parts in a machine shop, it makes full use of every part already on the bike.

2. The crank assembly, for example, is merely a section of EMT, welded to the head tube. It extends forward along the axis of the top tube, just far enough to accommodate the rider's legs.

3. The seat bottom rests directly on the top tube, and is the exact same length as the top tube. The seat back begins exactly where the top tube and seat tube meet. The seat back supporting struts attach to the existing rear luggage rack attachment points. The seat back, seat stays, and seat back supporting struts form a perfect triangle. 

4. The USS (under seat steering) solution is perhaps the most ingenious feature of all. The builder simply welded two pieces of EMT onto the front fork, creating handlebars for direct steering. Because the DIY conversion uses a child's bike that is short in overall length, the handlebars fall directly below the rider's hands. This eliminates the need for any complex steering mechanism. No muss, no fuss. 

5. The DIY conversion requires only a single donor bike. No need to accumulate two or even more donor bikes before beginning the conversion process. Everything on the single donor bike is used. Nothing is wasted.

6. Because the DIY conversion uses a child's bike, the completed bike is low to the ground. This makes it safe in the event of a spill. The rider sits a mere foot or so above the ground.

Minimalist Fluorescent Luminaires

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Minimalist Fluorescent Luminaires

Several T8 fluorescent tube lighting ideas found on the Internet that could be incorporated into an industrial chic interior.

These would obviously require remote ballasts. Treated properly however, the ballasts could be turned into visual assets.


Waldeman Architectural Tubular Luminaire
http://www.waldmannlighting.com/f.14/architectural-tubular-luminaires.aspx


Bare Fluorescent Tube with Tube Socket



Dan Flavin Minimalist Light Installation





Plastolux Polycarbonate Stick Light
http://plastolux.com/modern-stick-light.html


 
DIY Fluorescent Floor Lamps
http://www.instructables.com/id/NEON-FLOOR-LAMP/

Andrew Sullivan reaffirms the value of independent blogging.

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After years of selling his traffic-pulling work to corporate enterprises — first The Atlantic and then The Daily Beast — announcing that he's going independent again, he acknowledges what really matters about blogging:

When I first stumbled into blogging over 12 years ago, it was for two reasons: curiosity and freedom. I was curious about the potential for writing in this new medium; and for the first time, I felt total freedom as a writer. On my little blog, I was beholden to no one but my readers. I had no editor to please, no advertiser to woo, no publisher to work for, no colleagues to manage....

For the first time in human history, a writer - or group of writers and editors - can instantly reach readers - even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet - with no intermediary at all.

And they can reach back....

Is he going independent again to reconnect with these essentials? It's really more about the endless, frustrating search for a workable business model. I guess he wasn't getting enough from big media, in relation to what he gave. And yet, what is the alternative? Making even less? The new experiment is to make his blog into a subscription site. No ads. Sullivan reminds readers of the old adage: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product being sold." He wants us to pay $19.99 a year. I don't know what his traffic is, but if my readers did that, I'd make $700,000 a year. He has many more readers, but also 7 employees to pay. He's not going to get all his existing readers to fork over $20, and putting up a wall will affect his traffic. But what does traffic matter if you're not selling the "product" of readers' eyes to advertisers? It matters in the way stated above, reaffirming the essentials of blogging.

Hence the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews ... just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.

But of course, the new temptation is whatever is needed to keep that subscription money flowing in. And no one has ever figured out what that is. And there's an escape for tight-fisted readers: You don't actually have to pay $20. You can pay whatever you want. Sullivan argues that you should want the writers you read to make money. They deserve to be paid for their work, and they work hard. I agree. And I must say that I like the mechanism he's using: TinyPass.

The point of doing this as simply and as purely as possible is precisely to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow. We believe in a bottom-up Internet, which allows a thousand flowers to bloom, rather than a corporate-dominated web where the promise of a free space becomes co-opted by large and powerful institutions and intrusive advertising algorithms. We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality.

Even though I think Sullivan wants to grow his project into big media, I would love to see this model work. I especially like the way it's set up:

Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a "Read on" button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You'll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter - so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won't. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter. We've tried to maximize what's freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside.

That's really well thought out. I have no idea if he'll make enough to sustain a 7-person staff, but I wish him luck.

And I wonder if Althouse should set up a TinyPass business model like that too. What if I cleared out all the advertising and switched to a system like that?

Paul Krugman is "feeling so despondent."

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Why? "Because of the way Obama negotiated" the fiscal cliff deal.

He gave every indication of being more or less desperate to cut a deal before the year ended....

He did? Funny, Rush Limbaugh kept saying Obama wanted to go over the cliff. It was his preference. The idea was to get rid of the hated Bush tax cuts and the cliff was there as a device to make it possible to blame the GOP. Back to Krugman:

The only thing that might save this situation is the fact that Obama has to be aware just how much is now riding on his willingness to finally stand up for his side; if he doesn’t, nobody will ever trust him again, and he will go down in history as the wimp who threw it all away.

The wimp?! Hey, remember when they were calling Romney a wimp?



That was back in July. Was Romney "just too insecure to be President"? Meade and I were just talking this morning about exactly that. There were 2 crucial points when Romney failed to stand his ground. He crumpled under intimidation. One was when the 47% video leaked out. Romney went beta, instead of doubling down, getting hardcore. The other was during the second debate, when he was going big on Benghazi, and Obama and Candy Crowley performed their check-the-transcript routine, and Romney deflated into oh, am I wrong?

So, anyway... is Obama just too insecure to be President?

"40 years ago, abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v. Wade..."

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"They've been losing ever since," says the new cover of Time Magazine:



You need a subscription to read the article, but here's a shorter post by the author, Kate Pickert:

The pro-life cause has been winning the abortion war, in part, because it has pursued an organized and well-executed strategy. But public opinion is also increasingly on their side. Thanks to prenatal ultrasound and advanced neonatology, Americans now understand what a fetus looks like and that babies born as early as 24 weeks can now survive....

The prochoice establishment has also been hampered by a generational divide within the cause. Young abortion rights activists today complain that the leaders of feminist organizations, who were in their 20s and 30s when Roe was decided, aren’t eager to pass the torch to a new generation whose activism is more nimble and Internet-based.

In what form are these metaphorical torches passed? When and where do elder leaders step down and cede power to youngsters? If their activism is so "nimble," why can't they grab the power they want? Or is this a special "feminist" theory that the older women ought to get out of the way? Back in the day, expecting older women to get out of the way was regarded as an anti-feminist notion. Well, too bad I don't have a Time subscription or I'd investigate the details of these young activists and their whiny ways.

Wisconsin state senator Glenn Grothman caught up in a flap about Kwanzaa.

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CNN's Ashleigh Banfield and Roland Martin pile on.

Here's Grothman's press release — PDF. I had to wonder why a state senator was attacking a holiday that some people like to celebrate. What business is it of his? He talks about the origins of the holiday (which I haven't independently researched) and asserts that it's not a "real holiday." But so what? It's usually just not a very good idea to make pronouncements about the truth or falsity of other people's religions. He ends the press release with the statement: "Be on the lookout if  a K-12 or college teacher tries to tell your children or grandchildren it's a real holiday."

Okay, is something going on in public schools? Are they celebrating Kwanzaa? That would obviously be wrong — a violation of the Establishment Clause. But Grothman seems to be merely saying that teachers might be teaching about Kwanzaa in perhaps a social studies lesson about the various holidays that are celebrated. I suppose we should be alert to whether teachers are feeding schoolkids inaccurate lessons, but the characterization of Kwanzaa as a holiday isn't an egregiously incorrect fact.

We could go deeply into the subject of what makes a holiday a real holiday and debate about whether Kwanzaa is in or out. It depends on how you define holiday. Or we could debate about what constitutes a sound social studies lesson. We don't want kids to hear that white people celebrate Christmas and black people celebrate Kwanzaa or that Africans arriving in the New World brought a Kwanzaa tradition with them.

Grothman ought to give us the specifics about defective lessons in schools and aim the criticism right there. Don't just tell us to be on the lookout for teachers who might dare to refer to Kwanzaa as a holiday.

"They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."

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I decided to pluck something from Chapter 1 for today's entry in the "Great Gatsby" project. I randomly selected the sentence that appears above. You must believe me that it is indeed random, and yet someone had just emailed me to say he liked the Gatsby project and:

When I was a Harvard Freshman in 58-59, I took the required freshman English class and the instructor was an expert on Gatsby....

At one point while we were reading Gatsby for the class, he remarked "Have you noticed that whenever you see Daisy in the novel, she is wearing white?"

Now, how can my correspondent believe that I randomly picked a sentence with 2 women in white? But, on my purest honor, I did. We're focusing on sentences, so I don't know or care whether Daisy was one of the 2 women. I won't presume, though I will presume that the 2 entities known as "They" are women, given that they are wearing dresses. We must bring our knowledge of what is possible and what is probable to the enterprise of reading, even as we bear down on an isolated sentence. One or both of "them" might be a transvestite male (or a nonhuman), but I'm going to presume 2 women (or girls).

The "they" is perplexing in another, more disturbing way, because it reappears halfway through in "as if they had just been blown back." We're given a simile that asks us to picture the women, in their white dresses, flying around the house at some earlier moment. They — the women — look like they just landed, as their dresses are "rippling and fluttering" from a recent "short flight." But to say "their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back" is to create ambiguity, the possibility that the "they" was "their dresses," and we might feel called upon to picture the dresses, by themselves, flying around the house before getting blown back onto the 2 erstwhile naked women. The flying-around-the-house image is fantastical, so we can't tap our our knowledge of what is possible and what is probable, and yet, somehow we know it was the women in their dresses who seem as if they'd just flown around the house and gotten blown back in.

I think the problem of 2 possible antecedents for the second "they" is a writing error, and this Gatsby project is premised on the greatness of the sentences. I hate to be the one to have to say a good editing eye would have seen that ambiguity, but the greatness of the sentence-writing doesn't require a complete absence of error, and the logic of the sentence precludes the dresses flying around the house on their own because we can't picture the dresses getting back on the women without losing the "rippling and fluttering" action caused by the flight and landing. So enough of that. Stop picturing naked women waiting while their dresses fly around the house.

It was the women, so magical and light, like birds or butterflies, that flew around the house. They could fly, but they didn't fly far, only around the house which they got blown back into. These women don't have much ambition or power on their own. They are housebound, even though they can fly. They do an orbit of the house and then a breeze sweeps them back in. But here they are, so pretty in their fluttery white dresses. And of course, they only look as if they'd taken that charmingly domestic flight. The truth is they are sitting together in the house, and they haven't been going anywhere. But there is a breeze, a breeze that might blow a butterfly into the house, and it ripples their flimsy dresses.