So here's the text of the statute,

Bicycle riding on the Rainbow Harbor Esplanade is prohibited in excess of three (3) miles per hour between the hours of ten o'clock (10:00) a.m. and ten o'clock (10:00) p.m., except City employees in the performance of their duties.

Sounds like both he and the office where wrong on different sides of the bylaw. The Officer was wrong to say they couldn't ride there. The biker though was 'almost' certainly riding at more than 3 miles per hour, which IS prohibited.

Your video, Insane Driver Can't Pass Bicycles And Goes Mental, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Your video, Bicycle & Bus Near Miss, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

And that, my friends, is why, if there's no bicycle lane, it's legal and the right thing to do to ride in the MIDDLE of the first lane so assholes don't do exactly this and kill you.
What a dick. I hope a complaint was made that goes on his employment record.

When I lived there, I daily took the bus through that very intersection you can see how short the interval is between each 3A bus (the yellow and red one) - but when I moved further out (Søborg) I started riding a bicycle instead.

Nice idea, although LEDs have an extremely low power draw. Not sure if the gravity plus gearing would generate enough watts for the Pi.

USB is 5 volts at usually under 1 amp (.5 amps for USB 2 and .9 for USB 3). So I think that suggests about a 2.5-5 watt draw for USB, although I could be wrong -- long time since I took any EE classes. With very quick googling, I'm not getting a concrete number on the wattage of the (single?) LED in the Gravity Light, but one result suggested in the milliWatt range (60-80mW). Same post says that a cheap hand crank generates about 1 watt with vigorous cranking that will wear out your arm/hand quickly.

So, I'm thinking that 2.5-5 watts would require a much more heavy-duty and less portable gravity-fed system. Very much doable (bicycle pedaling can generate 50 watts fairly easily), but probably only with more bulk than what can power LED lighting.

I need that for my bicycle.

That helmet probably saved him from serious injury, but it was stupid of him to get back on and keep riding with the same helmet. You're not supposed to use a bicycle helmet after a crash. They're made of a collapseable foam that only works once. If he crashed again, it wouldn't protect him.

A generation or two ago I doubt that poor Guatemalans could get fat, regardless of culture, because they simply didn't have access to the surplus energy required. This surplus energy shows up in nitrate fertilizers used for agriculture, powered tools of all sorts, and manufactured goods, like used bicycles.

It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.

A bicycle may seem a simple and primitive device, but just try to build a bicycle chain in your home workshop and you will see that making safety bicycles is possible only in a modern industrial state. It's not surprising that the development of the safety bicycle only barely preceded that of the automobile and the airplane.

The bicimaquina raw material is discarded bicycles from richer people -- nothing wrong with that, it's good, frugal engineering. But it should be borne in mind when plotting the future that hardly used bicycles are not a renewable resource, and require energy and infrastructure to produce.

Bicycling does give one a good appreciation of the value of energy. For example, 125 Watts is a respectable output for a touring cyclist; keep that up for 8 solid hours, and you have one kilowatt-hour. One kW-hr is a day at hard labor. A typical household in the developed world uses the equivalent of the labor of three or four hard-laboring slaves every day.

Of course, those slaves aren't the most efficient. You'll notice that the machines shown all use a direct mechanical drive. They could generate electricity, but that would cost -- multiply a few 90% efficiencies together and pretty soon you're getting nothing done by leg power.

Bicycle drive does allow good power production from human beings, and multi-geared bicycles are adaptable to people of differing strength. Not as much fun as flipping a switch, but easier than turning a crank.

It's plain that cheap fossil fuels won't last forever, indeed they may not last for much longer, and probably will never be available to much of the world at the same level as we currently enjoy in the US or Australia. Will we find ourselves scouring garages and cellars for disused bicycles?

This is so cool! But the music makes it feel soooo much like ice-skating... turned off and put some Queen "Bicycle Race" on or "Fat Bottom Girls"

Some of the found object art works seem a bit "I could have done that"ish, but then there's this one by Pablo Picasso:

http://www.pablopicasso.org/bull-head.jsp

I look at that perfect bicycle seat bull's head and know that it took Pablo Picasso's eye to see it.

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

Those minimum speed laws are only on highways and freeways in most places, not congested city streets.
As was mentioned above, riding on the sidewalk IS illegal in most places.
Sorry, but that is the law, and it's the law for a reason. You should never be held up for more than a block. If it's still too inconvenient, you could petition your local government to create bike lanes to fix the issue. Until then, the roads must be shared with all vehicles allowed to use it. (Where I live, people actually ride bicycles on the freeway!)

I like the little oscillating thingy-ma-bob that's visible in the head on shot. It makes it look like the driver is pedaling the car like a bicycle.

edit: Oh, it's the license plate. Serves me right for not watching in full screen.

I bet you're remembering the clip of Richard Feynman explaining that function here on the sift?
http://videosift.com/video/How-a-Train-Stays-on-a-Track-not-as-simple-as-you-thought

I remember being fascinated by that. I don't think it has anything to do with this function in bicycles, but on the other hand I had no idea that was how trains stayed centered over the tracks either...