I tried to ride one of the bikes from one Google building to another once and a black security SUV pulled up and started yelling at me. They aren't very good bikes anyway- they are fixies which are kind of useless for rides longer than a block.
The first thing he yelled was "show me your badge." I didn't know I wasn't allowed to ride them if I didn't work there. I was riding on the sidewalk on Shoreline at about 11 PM.
I ride a fixie (Fuji Feather) daily around a city that is reasonably hilly. It was $600 which fills the gap between beater 6-speed mamacharis ($100-$200) and a serious geared bike ($1000+).
It is much nicer to ride than any cheaper bike I have owned and I was happy with the price.
To be fair the problem with the Gbikes is not that they are fixies, but rather that they are super heavy. They work fine for moving around the campus, but you wouldn't want to ride more than a mile in them. I'm pretty sure that's by design.
The Swiss Army used very heavy single speed bikes, and people rode major distances with them. Of course, they were selected for physical fitness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_army_bicycle
Not necessarily by design. If they're ordering fleets of bikes, they want them cheap. Steel bikes are the cheapest around, can take a lot of abuse, and also happen to be the heaviest.
Steel bikes don't have to be heavy but cheap bikes usually are. A good steel bike might weigh 19-20lb (compare with a medium- to high-end carbon fiber bike that is 15-17lb) while the frame is only 3.5-4 lb of that total. The rest of the components make up a lot of the weight and to save weight there you have to spend more.
I believe everyone physically able to should try running 13.1 mph on a treadmill just to get an understanding of just how fast these athletes run for two hours. It is incredible.
13.1 mph is a decent pace on a bike! That's the sort of pace you set for a commute to split minimizing your commute time with arriving at work not completely exhausted and sweaty.
For clarity, that's a 4:34 mile / 2:50 km. ie hauling ass.
The vast vast majority of cross country runners in high school can't maintain that pace for 3.1 miles / 5 km. How a human maintains it for 26.2 I have no idea.
Another perspective: the world record 1 mile time, which is essentially a 4 lap sprint, is 3:43.13. So these athletes run at 81% world record mile pace for 26 miles.
I used to cycle quite a lot around the West London parks and an used to seeing plenty of joggers. A few years ago, around the time of the London Olympics, I saw this woman running. I've never seen anyone run so fast and she just kept going. I crossed her path later on and she was still going. I presume she was a top level marathon runner, it was shockingly fast.
I was running Bushy parkrun[0] one Saturday in 2012 when Mo Farah was on a training run, in the opposite direction to the masses. It was like Road Runner went past, incredible pace. I was also there when Andy Baddeley got the parkrun record, 13:48. It just seems so ... ludicrous and impossible.
I used to sometimes run a mile in the middle of my treadmill run @ 10 mpg. I'm a bigger guy and regularly the machine would shut down because the belt would start to slip or overheat at that pace. I don't think it would even do 13+ mph
Most treadmills max out at 10 mph or so. Maybe 12. I have run a 2:44 marathon and at my best I would have been able to keep up with them for about .5 miles (based on my 800 meter time of 2:10). Very few people can hit that pace without damaging something unless they have seriously trained.
Agree on the incredible part. I have seen elites race in person at the 2008 Olympic trials and it is unreal how smooth and fast they are.
>I believe everyone physically able to should try running 13.1 mph on a treadmill just to get an understanding of just how fast these athletes run for two hours. It is incredible.
A whole bunch of treadmills don't go past 8MPH and even that seems pretty fast to me to run at for an extended period of time.
I can run 10mph for 13 miles, and I’m in my fifties. That’s not to brag, but to point out that an 8 mph speed limit on a treadmill is ridiculously low. Sure, it probably fits the 80% use case, but that’s only about 8 minutes/mile. Not a very useful treadmill, IMO.
But I’ve been on a treadmill less than a half dozen times in my life, so what do the treadmill makers care what I think. :-)
You're in your fifties and you're running a sub 1:19 HM? Color me dubious on that one. Possible, but not likely.
Although you're right that it would be a piss-poor treadmill if it were built to max out at 8 minutes/mile pace or slower. I suspect none are, but I think the fellow reporting it was at heavy weight, so perhaps that affected things.
Just for fun I cranked my treadmill up to 12mph which is the max. Not while I was on it because I know I'd fly off.
Every time I 'run' I think about fast running for a long distance. Then I usually stop my workout and go sit on the couch and think of some things.
Sub 2hr marathon is Stupid Fast.
I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.
The donation to Watsi will provide life-changing surgeries in the near future, and will potentially save hundreds or thousands of lives. You might be able to do more good in the future with a larger sum of money, but if you made this choice, you are condemning the smaller group of people to suffering and death. If you met with the smaller group of people and learned all of their names and faces, you probably wouldn't want to let them die. If you could somehow travel to the future and meet with the larger group of people, you might decide to sacrifice the smaller group in order to save millions of lives instead of hundreds. You could also try to find a balance between the two extremes. I guess this is a variation of the Trolley problem [1].
However, there's a few additional variables that are very important.
1. The price of Bitcoin may fall dramatically, or your business and investments might fail. Now you can't help anyone.
2. By saving the smaller group of people, you will alter the course of history. Some of the people in the larger group might never experience the disease or accident that required medical intervention. Some of them will never even be born.
I think it's better to choose the predictable outcome that is guaranteed to ease suffering, instead of gambling with people's lives.
P.S. I just finished watching the first episode of 11.22.63 [2] a few minutes ago. (It was incredibly good!)
CryEngine is amazing technology and CryTek is a great company. I believe there must be merit to this. Star Citizen is also a very cool project and so I hope they work things out together. I want both companies to be very successful.
This lawsuit won't help them a bit, though. They're struggling because they gained a persistent reputation among gamers that games built with their engine are beautiful but unplayable on any normal hardware. Whenever I hear "CryEngine" I think of the "But will it run Crysis?" joke.
Maybe they should have rebranded it, but in any case they seem to have done something wrong about their business in comparison to, say, Unity.
I don't think they're that great. The engine is great, certainly, but crytek as a game company not so much. They were at their best when Crysis 1 was made, where you could have your own servers and mod things and communities were built. But the second they could get into the Call of Duty userbase, they actually deleted all their mod forums, which included hundreds of thousands of posts and thousands of mods and configs for servers. All to 'make room' for Crysis 2 'modding', which was non-existant because you could not own your own servers, and server sizes were tiny.
With old-world (and modern low-level embedded) programming, the "usefulness" in having source code came more from having comments and non-stripped symbols. Reverse-engineering is still necessary even to get (readable) ASM.
I think Xanadu is great and it will be one of those things that proves itself in the future. Perhaps whatever replaces the web someday will resemble it.
I bet that someday we will move to a distributed web hosted on something like the blockchain, with redundancy and revision history, and that will begin to resemble Xanadu. It reminds me of sort of a "Star Trek" vision of how things should be, but not how things actually are in this disorganized world.
I think that it's sort of like the Dynabook or early AI or VR, in that it's the correct vision of the ideal result of a technology, but was way too ahead of its time and the technology just wasn't ready.
