Dude Really Shouldn’t Start Every Bike Ride By Huffing Paint
Other than that, he did pretty well.
(Thanks to Gerard of American Digest for helping keep BSBFB rolling)
How The Russians Achieve Their CAFE Standards
It’s all about the weight. I’m told the back half gets even better mileage. These cars should have their own carpool lane — you know, during their commute to Chernobyl to harvest glo-sticks from regular trees, or their avant-garde experiments in vodka infusion, or whatever these fine, upstanding lads do for a living.
(Thanks to Honorary Borderline Russian Charles Schneider for sending that one along)
World’s Record Loop De Loop
We, as a species, have entirely lost the ability to simply point a camera at anything to capture what’s going on. If it’s not half-out-of-frame jump cuts and little bits of visual dross stitched haphazardly, accompanied by a dimwit screaming the whole time, we’re entirely unable to be entertained or edified.
We can, however, loop de loop the hell out of the third rock from the sun.
I Just Flew In From Holland, And Boy Are My Arms Tired
That’s an ornithopter. An ornithopter is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings like a bird. This one’s human-powered, which is very unusual. When men first started to sniff around flying machines, many naturally looked to nature to design the apparatus to get off the ground. You’ve all seen black and white FAIL video of the ill-starred crosses between the Red Baron and Icarus flapping their wood and canvas wings until the engine shook them to pieces or the ground put an exclamation point on how hard it is to fly.
Human-powered flight is deuced difficult. Most attempts at it aren’t ornithopters; they’re just lightweight bicycles with big wings and a driver with big legs. They don’t get very far. The dirty secret of all this stuff is that human powered anything is woefully inefficient. A human being consumes a lot of energy to produce very little power. Nature has no opinion about whether you shovel coals into a furnace or hams into your face. Energy costs, big, and a human is a lousy dray horse.
But humans have minds. They invented all the stuff that made it possible for that feeble carcass, which is probably less feeble than most, to fly like a bird for a minute. Human beings are wonderful. We do what we put our minds to, eventually, generally. Shame we devote 90 percent of our mental horsepower to judging karaoke contests on teevee.
(Thanks to everyone’s favorite bird-brain in Seattle, Van der Leun, for sending that one along)