In reply to this comment by cybrbeast:
Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?

>> ^cybrbeast:
Why did the technology die with him? Surely more could be built?


One person with extraordinary vision, coupled with technological know-how, engineering brilliance and the ability to get his hands dirty and plain-and-simple build what he imagines is a rare thing.

In the case of the Britten bike, this is a partial list of what made his bike special:

1) Partial girder-link front suspension with adjustable anti-dive properties.
-fork-type suspensions compress under braking and extend during acceleration, changing the geometry and handling characteristics of the machine quite drastically during the different driving modes. Britten's suspension design allowed him to control pretty much all variables of suspension geometry under changing load, making the bike behave however the rider wished.
- The rear suspension, while perhaps not as revolutionary, was a beautiful piece. It was essentially a carbon-fibre banana swing-arm with a linkage to the adjustable shock/spring assembly. If you look at the bike you'll see that there's no spring/shock assembly near the rear suspension, rather note the spring/shock assembly directly behind the front wheel- this is for the rear suspension! The front shock assembly is hidden in the front suspension linkage and cowling.

2) The engine itself was a stressed-member.
-While certainly not unheard of, Britten took the concept to an extreme, essentially eliminating the frame from the motorcycle. The front and rear suspensions essentially bolted directly to the engine, thus saving many kilos over contemporary designs. Take a look at any current MotoGP or Superbike- most use the engine as a partial stressed-member, but they all have frame members linking the engine, steering heads and seat-assemblies. Britten really only had a vestigial sub-frame for the rider's seat.

3) Well-controlled aerodynamics and fully-ducted cooling system
-Britten paid close attention to airflow over, around and through his bike. Look how cleanly the rider's body tucks into the bodywork. He paid close attention to details, notice how clean the entire assembly is- no exposed wiring, nothing dangling into the airflow, that incredibly sleek rear swing-arm and rear tire hugger. This keeps the airflow smooth and un-disturbed. Motorcycles aren't terribly aerodynamic machines in the first place, but a wise man once said God is in the details.
-The engine itself is a water cooled design, but where's the radiator? It's in a fully-sealed duct directly beneath the rider's seat. High-pressure air is inlet from the front of the bike, through the radiator and is exhausted into the low pressure area beneath the rider and above/ahead of the rear wheel. Greater cooling equals higher power potential.

4) The motor
- 999cc 60 degree V-Twin, belt-driven DOHC design, twin injectors per cylinder, sophisticated electronic ignition, hand-made carbon fibre velocity stacks, wet sump. The motor was designed to breathe hard, pumping out torque and horsepower (166 hp @ 11800 rpm- not sure about the torque figures), and run cool and reliably under racing conditions. Nothing here that any other manufacturer couldn't have figured out on their own, but Britten had the insight and the will to make the best motor in the world at the time. The 60 degree configuration was, I assume chosen for packaging reasons. Normally this configuration would have bad primary balance characteristics, but Britten engineered his to such tight tolerances that the engine ran smoothly right up to redline (12500 rpm) without using a balance shaft.
I'll also point out here that Britten wasn't above using someone else's part if it was better than he could make himself- the gearbox was from a Suzuki superbike, and the cylinder liners and voltage regulator (both of which failed at the Daytona race in '92- the latter costing Britten the win) were from Ducati.

5) Carbon Fibre
- While Carbon Fibre had been around for 2 decades or so at this point, nobody had used it so extensively. Britten used the material for bodywork, wheels, engine parts, suspension girders and the rear swing-arm. There is still no other bike, not even the current Ducati Desmosedici MotoGP bike, that uses so much of this exotic material. The stuff then, as it is now, was hugely expensive and challenging to engineer for different applications. Britten made everything himself, in his garage, figuring it out as he went. This kept the total weight of the bike to a hugely impressive 138 kg.

Keep in mind that he did all of the above in 1991 and 1992, with the help of several neighbors and one part-time machinist, in his backyard shed! He made the bodywork by hand, using a wire frame and hot melt glue, crafting the wind-cheating shape and cooling ducting purely by eye. He cast the aluminum engine parts himself, heat-treating them in his wife's pottery kiln, and cooling the heat-treated parts with water from his swimming pool!

Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki... any one of these manufactures could today reproduce and expand on what Britten accomplished almost single-handedly. None of them will- there's too much at stake for them. It's far safer to stick with the tried-and-true, making small evolutionary changes over the years. A true visionary achiever (to coin a term) like Britten comes along only every once in a great while.

I suppose that this is what was really lost when John Britten died... vision, engineering acuity, hands-on knowledge, and pure will. Touched with a little craziness.

If I assume you're even vestigially a liberal (or progressive if you prefer), you find most of what Obama says to be moderate policy proposals draped in liberal-sounding rhetoric about why it's necessary.

If you're like me, you're mad as hell that he's still trying to work with Republicans at all to get legislation passed.

You're also mad as hell that Obama is apparently beholden not to the 50th most liberal member of his caucus, but the 60th "most" liberal member of the Senate, who was a Republican when he was sworn in.

Now, you can look at that situation, and place the entire blame at Obama's feet...or you can direct it at the people who're really standing in the way (i.e. Republicans, and more than a few sellouts in the Democratic caucus in Congress).

I have yet to see anything that really indicates to me that Obama's moderateness is anything like the limiting factor in getting a progressive agenda pushed, unless you're talking about prosecution of the Bush administration for war crimes.

So, when Arianna Huffington uses her platform to apply leftward pressure on Obama to try to get him to be more FDR and less Bill Clinton, she's going to use language like "Obama is just a tool of big business."

But I think a lefty who reads her articles, and comes away declaring Obama progressive enemy #1 is making a mistake.

Look at the things Elizabeth Warren is saying about the Obama regulatory reforms he's proposing (as well as this diarist).

I love the little vestigial "legs" it still has.

Let me see if I've gleaned the correct message from this video.

God hates Hawaiians! Right?

What I've always wondered about Genesis is if Adam and Eve were created to be perfect, and in Eden they had all the food they ever needed, that having to have been fruits and vegetables, killing was a big no no, why would man have teeth for piercing flesh? And why would we have vestigial organs, like the appendix?

Thanks Krupo, that Wikipedia link certainly has opened my eyes. For those of you who were too lazy to read the article before upvoting his comment, here's a quote:

"Two questions naturally arise: (1) is there actually a wage gap disparity and, if so, where? The answer is no. Now Tits or GTFO.(2) why and how has it arisen or maintained itself? I already told you, the answer is no. *slap* I ONLY DO THIS BECAUSE I LOVE YOU *slap*. Over time, two points of view have availed themselves: one that credits the difference to questions of personal choice, and another that ties the disparity to continuing or vestigial bias or discrimination."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_women#Gender_Wage_Equity_in_the_United_States

>> ^lucky760:
Looks like a typical "Hey look how stupid I am" video, until it's followed up with a shot of him in the hospital about to go in for brain surgery.

Brain surgery? Sounds to me like the brain is a vestigial organ on that specimen anyway.

1. The human appendix is a useless vestigial organ. Vestigial organs and junk DNA are great evidence against "intelligent design".
2. Humanity did not stop evolving. It is still evolving, like every other species. Most people are born with a few mutations that were not present in either parent (this has been verified by DNA sequencing). Many of these mutations cause no change in phenotype because they affect junk DNA.
3. Dog breeding. There is DNA and archaeological evidence that all species of domesticated dogs (from chihuauas to Lassie) and grey wolves have a recent common ancestor. Actual experiments have been done in which a few decades of of selective breeding led lead to large changes.


In reply to this comment by arsenault185:
>> ^budzos:
Such an ignorant dumb fuck. The horror is that most people think the way this guy does. They see no difference between the big bang, abiogenesis, evolution, etc. because anything that goes "against god" is all part of the same crackpot theory to them.


Ignorant dumb fuck? Well, since he was able to mention 3 separate theories, then i would have to say hes not ignorant. Dumb? meh. He couldn't formulate a sentence to save his life. Fuck? yeah hes a fuck for giving creationists a bad name.

There is plenty of scientific fact to prove God and plenty to disprove and support evolution, life seeding, or other methods.

The biggest one that comes into my head is, if evolution were true, than large series of small mutations would have had to take place over millions of years. Well, in recorded history, there have been very few if any, mutations that led to a positive change in the biological make up of an organism. However, there have been more than enough mutations to argue against evolution. Heres a video that shows such mutations. Granted some of these may have been caused my chemicals and shit, affecting the fetal development, but things like this also occur in nature.
Now humans have evidently peaked in what we are capable of "evolving" to despite what Heroes and X-Men have to say. Because after thousands and thousands of years of recorded history, there seem to be no further evolutions, besides from rare genetic abnormalities, which are good for nothing more than conversation starters.

So if evolution is real, in the sense that man is "the retarded offspring of 5 monkeys having butt-sex with a fish-squirrel," then why did we stop evolving? Evolutionists say that evolution took place over millions of years. But man has only been around for a fraction of that. That means that the "missing link" isn'/t that far behind us, and was more than likely around for a long time as well. Another hole to the evolution theory is the "missing link" itself. Its not like there were only one or two of these man-apes. There had to be thousands of them in order to generate a populace capable of surviving the thousands of years it took to evolve into humans. So why is it we cant find them? What the hell is this about?

I could go on forever. You wont catch me berating others for their beliefs, even thought they might differ from mine. So to call some one an "Ignorant dumb fuck" for not agreeing with you, doesn't exactly help your argument.

I love this one:

25. Mormon Jesus
Charges: Least plausible Jesus.

and this one:

14. Glenn Beck
Crimes: If Fox News isn't quite asinine enough for you, just click on over to Headline News, where the CNN brand is eagerly defiling its vestigial credibility by giving an hour a day to the dumbest dumbfuck in dumbfuckistan, Glenn Beck.

DUMBFUCKISTAN- My new favorite word, I am totally going to use that from now on!

@ jdlongmire: "Common descent driven by natural selection is a ..." model, which fits to the vast amount of data collected, and is predictive of new data as they are being acquired.

These data are in the genetic similarities between related species, in the fossil record showing diverging species, in the whale's vestigial legs and pelvis (and 5 finger bones), etc.,etc.,... to ignore these curious relationships and the predictive value of the theory of evolution by natural selection without providing evidence for a more accurate and useful model is... well, ridiculous.

It only takes one aberrant data set to shake evolution by natural selection down. Any scientist or layman who can get this data set and explain how it defies evolution by natural selection will be famous.

ajkido> the odds are good that the person you describe, although certainly not african-american, is also not culturally "black" either. America has created the conditions for the development of an indigenous culture that has only the barest vestigial ties to its geographical provenance. Depending on where that kid's family moved to in the USA, who their neighbors are and how they integrated or assimilated or didn't into their new home, would determine whether "black" is a culturally valid or reductive but descriptive designation.

I'm not sticking up for the use of any other epithets, but as a white person it's not my place to direct black people in its use. It's my place to tell other white people to fuck off with it and that's about it.

By a "historical interpretation of genesis" I mean an assertion that Genesis more or less represents history, perhaps imperfectly, as opposed to the idea that Genesis is a creation myth with little or no historical accuracy.

The sources cited by your wikipedia link are:
1.) An unsourced (dead link) vague generalization by an archbishop, which doesn't amount to an assertion that a non-historical interpretation of Genesis was ever common or tolerated before the 1700s.

2.) Several other articles with cherry picked quotes of early church figures supporting various historical interpretations of Genesis. Many of them just quarreled with the meanings of "day" and "light", e.g., "A day of the lord is 1000 years".

That's unconvincing. If the author of Genesis meant a thousand years instead of "the evening and the morning of the x-th day", he should have written a thousand years. And he'd still be very wrong. Christians who believed that Genesis was non-historic were a very small minority until the 1700s

Here's a list of people who've been burned at the stake (or threatened) for contradicting a historical interpretation of Genesis:

"In 1749, the distinguished French scholar Comte de Buffon proposed that the 6 days of creation may have been 6 long epochs of time and that the Earth's surface had been shaped and reshaped by processes still going on. The Church took great exception to this and threatened Buffon to recant and publicly accept the Old Testament age of 6000 years. No doubt remembering the fate of Galileo (who lived most of his life under house arrest for proposing the Earth went around the Sun,) and Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for proposing the same theory and adding that he believed there was life elsewhere in the universe, Buffon complied." - http://starryskies.com/Artshtml/dln/6-97/earth.age.html

"In Les époques de la nature (1778) Buffon discussed the origins of the solar system, speculating that the planets had been created by comets colliding with the sun (see Passing star hypothesis). He also suggested that the age of the earth was much greater than the 4,004 years b.c. proclaimed by Archbishop James Ussher of the church. Based on the cooling rate of iron, he calculated that the age of the earth was 75,000 years. For this he was condemned by the Catholic Church in France and his books were burned. Buffon also denied that Noah's flood ever occurred and observed that some animals retain parts that are vestigial and no longer useful, suggesting that they have evolved rather than having been spontaneously generated. [3]" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon

"A French scholar, Bernard Palissy who lived from 1510-1589 believed the Earth was much older based on his observations that rain, wind, and tides were the cause for much of the present-day appearance of the Earth. He wrote that, these forces could not work over such a short period of time to produce the changes. He was burned at the stake in 1589. A bad time for scientific inquiry. " - http://www.astronomical.org/astbook/age.htm

"Another was Thomas Burnet, a member of the English clergy, who lived from 1635-1715. He had written a book around 1681 supporting the idea of a worldwide flood, but in 1692, he wrote another book in which he questioned the existence of Adam and Eve, and that ended his career."

Giordano Bruno: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Before the 1500s, almost no one, perhaps no one, understood enough to have any good reason to say that the earth was older than 6,000 to 12,000 years, and most Christians accepted Genesis as a historical account by default. Christians back then believed in Adam and Eve because their alternative was that Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic "original sin" by a non-existent individual. Modern genetic evidence proves that we are not the inbred descendants of only two homo sapiens.

I ought to fix that wikipedia article.

Apparently the voice comes from the tongue. I guess vocal chords are vestigial organs, then?