New Lampshade Outside

New Lampshade Outside. The dangly bit is a vestigial hangover from the previous technology. And what else would I do with it?

Not-broken light of the same type at the front.

Broken glass and replacement led bulbs

The lamp bracket fixed up a bit and a new globe installed

Broken glass to new recycling dumpster.

At night, no flash on camera.

At night with flash on camera

Daytime

Daytime

Pic and caption from "Adhocism"

A blurb from The Age about Elon Musk and electric cars. Are electric cars fully evolved?  Maybe not if they are still being driven by people!

Hi

A few weeks ago I looked up when I was tinkering around at the side of the house and noticed a lamp guard was broken.  We happen to have the same lamp out the front of the house, god knows when they were put there.

How or when or why the side lamp broke, I don't know. But it needed fixing, or at least replacing, so I broke out one of my "tribo spirals" which had been residing on a shelf doing nothing. (The part for the spiral can be downloaded as an stl file here) And there was a dangley bit on the original lamp and I decided to put that back on the new lampshade for these reasons:
* What else was I going to do with it? It was good for absolutely nothing else in the universe that I can think of.
* It is sort of a design in-joke. :  "(Inventions show) amusing visual and verbal hangovers from the initial inception" is a quote from the wonderful design book Adhocism by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver." Of course this applies more to early bicycles and early petrol cars and current electric cars and current recumbent bikes and velomobiles which were and are in states of evolution and have quite complicated functional jobs.  Lampshades don't do complicated jobs and can be mucked around with a bit in an arty sort of way.

The broken glass bit went to the new glass recycling bin at the Roseneath St. depot, and I replaced the old incandescent globe with an (I think) more energy efficient light emitting diode model. And I think it looks ok. I will continue this ramble later with a bit more about recumbent bikes and what they could be.

(Continued October 10)

So what could a recumbent bike be and what visual and verbal hangovers are left on recumbents? How could the hangovers be removed to make them a better class of transport bike?  Some inspiration came from reading a recent review of a Dell Laptop Computer which complies with the  Intel Project Athena specification.

This spec was built around the capabilities of new Intel processors which enable a range of benefits if the rest of the laptop computer hardware is up to scratch. These specs include 9 hour battery run time and "waking from sleep in under a second and be ready to browse the web in under two seconds, download emails and grab social media updates in the background even while the lid is closed, and have the same sort of responsiveness on battery that they have when plugged into the wall. The laptop display must support both touch and pen input with narrow bezels. Under the hood, the laptop must have at least 8GB of RAM and 256GB of speedy NVMe solid state storage and the latest Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity with the option for mobile connectivity" etcetera.

So what we have is a central body (Intel) defining a spec which helps manufacturers (like Dell) make great machines. It is a mutual benefit society, the central body gaining reputation because spec-compliant products become better machines enhancing their reputation, and the manufacturers gain from having better, and presumably more profitable and popular machines.

What might "the spec" for recumbents be?

Well the first thing I would say might be that "certified" (or whatever) transport recumbents could have less than 20 litres of covered aerodynamic storage space. Safety bicycles tend to have no racking for luggage storage unless they are high end touring bikes. Even with the racking, users must then buy panniers. And even with panniers the aerodynamics are not that great!

A second spec might be to have less than 1m total of wind-exposed control cable inners and outers.  This can be achieved with a bit of attention to design, and on an aero bike, little things like this count.

A third spec could be wheel disks for all wheels, something that would again reduce wind resistance.

Regards  Steve Nurse