By Cory Doctorow at 11:47 am Wednesday, May 23
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This badass chopper was (apparently) hand-built by Emile, a Frenchman whose Citroen car broke down in the middle of the northwestern African desert, and who built himself a motorcycle out of the parts, without any tools. Here's the Imgur gallery, and an accompanying Reddit thread. There's a Hack-A-Day has a rough translation from Chameaudacier's site:
While traveling through the desert somewhere in north west Africa in his Citroen 2CV , [Emile] is stopped, and told not to go any further due to some military conflicts in the area. Not wanting to actually listen to this advice, he decides to loop around, through the desert, to circumvent this roadblock.
After a while of treading off the beaten path, [Emile] manages to snap a swing arm on his vehicle, leaving him stranded. He decided that the best course of action was to disassemble his vehicle and construct a motorcycle from the parts. This feat would be impressive on its own, but remember, he’s still in the desert and un-prepared. If we’re reading this correctly, he managed to drill holes by bending metal and sawing at it, then un-bending it to be flat again.
It takes him twelve days to construct this thing. There are more pictures on the site, you simply have to go look at it. Feel free to translate the labels and post them in the comments.
MOTO page 2 - CHAMEAU D'ACIER - Emile LERAY
(via Neatorama)
(Images: Daniel Denis, 2CV Magazine)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:38 pm Monday, May 21
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The Village presents a video design fiction (?) for "Parking Douche," an app that lets you photograph the number plates of crappily parked cars in your neighborhood (in Russia) and submit them to a database. The app then buys hyper-geo-targeted ads that block the text on the websites being read by people in the same neighbourhood as the badly parked cars. The ads can't be dismissed until you share them on social media. Basically: if you park like a dick, then everyone who lives or works nearby will not be able to read the Web until they've seen and shared a picture of your dickishness.
Parking Douche
(via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Monday, May 21
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This is the ultimate in aspirational automotive paintjobs, surely. It's more unsourced net.stuff -- anyone know where it originated?
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Sunday, May 13
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Another Vintage Ads gem for Mother's Day: this bit of corporate futurism from the energy sector.
Mother's Day
By Cory Doctorow at 5:56 am Saturday, Apr 28
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Sarah Goodyear relates the events that gave rise to the concept of "jaywalking," and describes what American life was like before the assumption that roads were primarily for cars became the norm, and when the streets were "vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses."
It wasn’t always like this. Browse through New York Times accounts of pedestrians dying after being struck by automobiles prior to 1930, and you’ll see that in nearly every case, the driver is charged with something like “technical manslaughter.” And it wasn’t just New York. Across the country, drivers were held criminally responsible when they killed or injured people with their vehicles...
“If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,” says Norton. “That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.”
Streets back then were vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses. When the automobile first showed up, Norton says, it was seen as an intruder and a menace. Editorial cartoons regularly depicted the Grim Reaper behind the wheel. That image persisted well into the 1920s...
The industry lobbied to change the law, promoting the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of "jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.
The current configuration of the American street, and the rules that govern it, are not the result of some inevitable organic process. "It’s more like a brawl," says Norton. "Where the strongest brawler wins."
The Invention of Jaywalking
(via Making Light)
(Image: Jaywalking, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from acidxedz's photostream)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:19 pm Friday, Apr 13
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Long before there was a "tiger in your tank," Ethyl wanted to assure you that this delightful simian would speed your jalopy along.
Knock! Knock! Who's there?
By Cory Doctorow at 12:21 pm Thursday, Apr 5
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Kaiser21 and child show off this flaming tailfined auto-stroller at the 2010 June 5 Monthly Muscle Car Show in Plano, TX. Papa Kaiser notes, "This little stroller won first place in the Open Car class. It has air-ride, lights under the car, and even fire out of the tailpipes!"
Brady Cash Custom Cadillac Baby Stroller (via DVICE)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:18 am Tuesday, Mar 13
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A press-release from MIT Press describes ReThinking a Lot, a fascinating-sounding book by MIT landscape architecture and urban design prof Eran Ben-Joseph. Ben-Joseph is obsessed with the odd role that parking and parking lots play in our urban landscapes, and ReThinking a Lot looks at the weird world of American parking, where the available non-residential parking spots cover a landmass the size of Puerto Rico, often sitting on prime real-estate in the middle of cities. Ben-Joseph asks 'Have you seen a great parking lot lately?' and recounts a few not-terrible examples of the species, and sets out some general principles for better parking.
In some places, to be sure, this problem has lessened, particularly with the urban revival in many cities during the last couple of decades. “You look at aerial photography of the downtowns of U.S. cities in the 1950s and 1960s, you’ll be amazed at how many surface parking lots there were,” Ben-Joseph says.
But the parking lot problem is also a suburban issue, not just an urban one. Many huge suburban parking lots are built to accommodate a maximum capacity of cars that is only rarely needed. The largest mall near you probably has a parking lot that only approaches capacity during the holiday season; football stadiums have massive parking lots that may only be used 10 times per year.
Apart from everything else, these parking lots can create multiple environmental problems: More asphalt creates more heat, and leads to faster water runoff — which means plants might not have the chance to extract pollutants from water, as they often do in creeks and streams.
Moreover, the economics of parking lot construction means that surface parking lots, where the whole lot is on ground level, occupy a large footprint because they are relatively cheap to build — four times less expensive than parking garages and six to eight times less expensive than underground parking lots.
ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking
By Cory Doctorow at 6:41 pm Wednesday, Feb 29
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RM Auction is selling off a lot of Lalique hood ornaments ("mascots") collected by Ele Chesney. They're as lovely a collection of deco beasties as you'll find anywhere.
In 1925, André Citroën’s company was a primary sponsor and exhibitor for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. The motoring magnate rented the Eiffel Tower and had thousands of lights artfully attached to the structure. At night, the double chevron emblem and name “Citroen” was an extraordinary sight seen by millions of people in “The City of Lights.” Knowing he would be displaying his company’s Citroën 5CV, Citroën commissioned Lalique to create a glass mascot that could be mounted on the radiator of the car. Citroen wanted the mascot to feature five prancing horses. Thus was born Lalique’s fifth mascot, “Cinq Chevaux.”
The success of the Citroën mascot exposed his unique talent to an entirely new audience. During the next seven years, Lalique created a total of 27 mascots, symbolizing energy, speed and motion; religion; individuality and form of nature; and human sensuality and sexuality—each expressing the grace and details of human and animal forms.
The other mascots needed to complete this photographic collection include Sirène (small mermaid) and Naïade (large mermaid). Both were originally offered as paperweights in 1920 and had base sizes equaling those of other mascots. Longchamps (#1152B: horse head – single mane, a variation of longchamps #1152A: horse head – double mane) crowns the collection totaling 30 pieces. These comprise the 1932 Lalique catalogue.
The Lalique Mascot Collection of Ele Chesney
(via How to Be a Retronaut)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:55 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Here's the 1958 Ford brochure, in super-widescreen, showing all the models in a mural of tailspin desiderata.
It's also available on Flickr at a whopping 2380 px wide, suitable for framing.
1958 Fords
By Cory Doctorow at 12:51 pm Thursday, Feb 9
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Writing in PC Pro, Stewart Mitchell describes a partnership between GPS vendor TomTom and Fair Pay insurance, an auto insurer, to offer discounts to people whose GPS devices report low incidences of sudden stops and unsafe turns. I rather like this idea, the idea that your device could offer testimony on your behalf, but a lot depends on how it is implemented.
On the one hand, TomTom could generate trustworthy readings by completely locking its device so that users can't inspect or modify their operations, which would open up the possibility that your device was recording and transmitting information about your location and movements without your knowledge or permission. On the other hand, TomTom could produce a stats-gathering app whose workings were publicly disclosed, but which used a TPM-style module to verify that it hadn't been modified for the purposes of gathering and signing information that you can pass on to the insurer.
This would give TomTom owners the choice of booting their device into a known, publicly verifiable state that respected their privacy, but also produced statistics that third parties could trust. It would also give TomTom owners the choice of booting into alternative environments that did different things.
"We've dispensed with generalisations and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front," said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance.
“If you think of your insurance as your car's MPG - the better you drive, the longer your fuel will last. Good drivers get more for their money and in that sense they will pay ultimately less."
Drivers on the scheme will be given a TomTom PRO 3100 as part of the package, and the device will include Active Driver Feedback and LIVE Services to warn drivers when they were cornering too sharply or braking too hard.
The TomTom will also have a LINK tracking unit fitted in their vehicles, allowing driver behaviour and habits to be monitored.
TomTom tech to set driver insurance premiums
(via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:44 am Monday, Jan 16
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Here's a brief article from a June 2011 number of the NYT by Damien Cave detailing the bizarre improvised tanks used by Mexican drug gangs:
Over the weekend, Mexican authorities found two more of these makeshift road warriors in Tamaulipas, the same northern border state where the first armored vehicle appeared in April after a battle between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas gang. In the latest case, the Mexican Defense Department said, the armored trucks were found in a metalworking shop in Camargo, which also held at least two other partly modified monsters and 23 additional trucks.
The completed versions were bigger than what has been found before. Built on three-axle truck beds, they had room for 20 armed men, one official said. They were covered with inch-thick steel, which could withstand 50-caliber fire, and each had been equipped with insulation.
Monster Trucks on the Road, From Gangs in Mexico
(via Neatorama)
(Image: a cropped thumbnail from an AP/Sedena image)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:43 am Tuesday, Jan 10
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Here's newsreel footage of a good-natured, improbably tall automotive inspector from America's past. I'd trust him to look over my jalopy!
Tall guy inspects the top of cars in the factory
(Thanks, frycook!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:22 am Saturday, Jan 7
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Writing in the LA Magazine, Dave Gardetta visits the thinking of the world's top parking theorists, who believe that parking causes people to go insane: "I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain. How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking."
The whole feature is fascinating, tracing the grim history of urban parking, where neighborhoods were blighted and jobs and businesses destroyed in the rush to add places for cars; up to recent political wrangles over parking in southern California's car-centric metro areas.
Shoup can often be found dallying around parking meters and brings a camera to photograph illegally parked cars. Not long ago you could have spotted Shoup clicking on the corner of Pico and Fairfax, where the city had quadrupled its meter rates. (“Rates had gone too high there—sometimes there wasn’t a car on the street.”) In Westwood Village Shoup once rode the Raleigh back and forth for weeks tailing cars. He discovered that the average driver had to circle the block two and a half times before locating an open metered space. Westwood became a model for Shoup; the “cruising” he observed there occurs wherever drivers seek out inexpensive metered space to avoid pricier garages and lots. (A similar study in Manhattan in 1995 revealed that New Yorkers spent 11 minutes on average searching for a space.) In a year’s time in Westwood, space hunting by drivers consumed an extra 47,000 gallons of gas. It stalled traffic, increased accidents, and required 950,000 extra vehicle miles, about four trips to the moon and back...
So Cole, an untested mayor, decided to commit career suicide—he would be the first to install meters. And not just anywhere but in the city’s seediest business district, its skid row, a stroll for prostitutes that would soon be renamed Old Pasadena. Cole had chosen the area to install parking meters because it was ideal for conducting his own experiment: He wanted to attract merchants to the area, where the rent on the decaying buildings was low and the potential for foot traffic was high. Could meter revenue clean and repair Old Pasadena, then help police its streets? “There was, putting it politely, tremendous opposition,” says Cole. Shop owners barely hanging on told Cole he was crazy. In a large meeting with merchants, Cole said something that swayed them: Rather than fill city coffers, meter collections would go back to businesses in the form of new alleyways, sidewalk improvement, more trees, and police. “The moment I said that, one of my staff members kicked me under the table,” says Cole.
Between the Lines
(via Kottke)
(Image: Parking Madness At Lintas Plaza, Kota Kinabalu, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from thienzieyung's photostream)
If you ever find yourself writing a historical novel about someone who goes joyriding in the Disneyland Monorail, I have a hell of a reference for you: the 1966 Disneyland Monorail Operator Guide.
