The border between natural history and architectural design deserves far more exploration, beyond the odd science museum diorama. We have been living in buildings for more than 20,000 years, if Mithen’s book is to be believed, but nearly half of that period has seemingly been thrown outside the pale of architectural history.
Who was the Archigram of mammoth bones? … Geoff Manaugh | Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).
Derny (also spelled derney) – “a motorized bicycle for motor-paced track cycling events such as during six-day and Keirin racing) or motor-paced road races. It is driven by a 98cc Zurcher two-stroke engine and by being pedalled through a fixed gear, typically of 70 teeth on the front chainring and 11 on the sprocket on the back wheel [!!]. The combination allows for smooth acceleration and slowing, important when the rider taking pace is centimetres from the pacer’s shielded back wheel. A coupling between the motor and the back wheel ensures the machine will not stop dead if the motor seizes.[…]
The name derny is now applied to all such vehicles, regardless of manufacturer. It is used by the Larousse dictionary as a generic term for a small pacing motorcycle used in cycle races.” *
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Via Ride the Machine.
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Check out the front wheels/forks! The pizza plate chainwheel! Side note – at some point, it becomes easier to go to 2-stage gearing as seen on John Howard’s 152.2 mph bike.
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Via Ride the Machine/Andrew Ritchie.
To those of you who may, justifiably, wonder how this squares with my eschew the hydrocarbons/bike evangelism – I’ll quote Wally Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Seriously – though I love bicycles and am going to try to reduce my fossil fuel consumption, I do not intend to be a scold or to turn my back on gearheadish gnarlyness.
Rewards drive behavior.
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As regular readers know, I’m trying to re-integrate bicycling into my life as an enjoyable, practical transportation option. Given the ongoing nightmare in the Gulf, I’m feeling pretty evangelical about biking, so I thought I’d see if I could encourage locals (or folks from a distance, if they’re up for a big ride) to come to this Sunday’s NHMM meetup via bicycle. I was inspired when I fell across spoke cards while looking at commuter bikes on Flickr – you can see the results of said inspiration above.
The first 8 people to ride to NHMM get a spoke card on the spot – if there are more riders than that, I’ll have more made up and make good on my offer within a week. If there are less than that, anyone from further away than, say, 20 miles can have one if they tell me that they’ve ridden a bike to and from the grocery store this week (6/6) – knowing my own problems with good intentions, it’s gotta be a completed ride.
A shoutout to the good folks at Infinite Imaging who did a bang-up job on printing and lamination.
I’d been wondering a bit about this – the combination of stress, oil/dispersant toxicity and no great place to release the cleaned birds is, to say the least, problematic.
As I mentioned to a friend on the tweets last night, I hate to be pessimistic, but I think what we’re seeing is the death of the Eastern US Gulf Coast as we have known it.
