3/17/14

Space

From this:
Driven in part by riders’ demands for a greater sense of comfort and safety on the road, new apps and gadgets are promising to do for the bicycle what air bags and satellite navigation did for the family car. What used to be a simple, healthful mode of transport is fast becoming a tech festival on wheels.
Among the gadgets listed are a really loud horn, laser that "makes" bike lanes, an inflatable helmet and a lock that unlocks by smartphone. Neat.

Remember the Space Race? Maybe you read a book about it or saw a Tom Hanks movie about it once. Maybe you were there, racing the Russians to space or maybe you just played Lunar Lander on an old Apple II. Anyway, Those guys had to figure out a way to get a rocket to the moon, a way to keep astronauts alive on the lunar surface, and a way to launch them back to earth safely. To to this NASA had to solve a million problems and also invent TANG because solving extraordinarily complicated space travel problems leaves you parched and you need a refreshing orange powdered drink after a long day of hypothesizing, testing, developing, building, re-testing, and honing all in the name of solving a previously unreconciled cascading set of immensely complicated problems on the cutting edge of the available technology with the end goal of achieving something that had never been done before.

Bike safety isn't like that. It's kinda already been figured out and already implemented. Like in those places where people do a lot of biking already and they do it safely and it's not a big deal. And they manage to crack the problem of bike safety without lasers and smartphones. So, maybe we should just do that too. It's not a question of Space, it's a question of space. People have already solved the problem. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's just embrace another Cold War tradition and steal it.

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