The Professional Advertising Regulatory Authority (ARPP) of France has banned the airing of a television commercial for VanMoof electric bikes. From a statement by VanMoof (Via Core77):
According to the ARPP, certain shots of the car's reflections "discredit the automobile sector [...] while creating a climate of anxiety." It is notable that the ARPP rejected what would have been one of the first bike ads on French TV, despite recently pledging to reinforce the sustainability aspects of their policies.
The [banning] decision comes at a time when the French car industry is in trouble, with sales plummeting due to COVID-19 and widespread economic decline on the horizon. In a bid to support the sector – responsible for almost a third of the country's greenhouse gas emissions – the government recently introduced a recovery plan worth €8 billion.
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In 2018, Taipei resident Chen San-yuan, 72, had attached 15 smartphones to his bicycle so he could play numerous games of Pokemon Go at once. Dubbed the "Pokémon Go grandpa,” he has upped his game with a new total of 64 mobile phones in his array. Gotta catch 'em all, I guess.
The phrase 危險行為請勿模仿 in the caption translates as: "Do not imitate dangerous behavior."
(via The Verge)
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This is the AmazonBasics Folding Bike Lock. It's $28. Don't buy it.
"Because this can be opened so quickly with low-skill attacks, it should go without saying that I see this as a product to avoid," says the LockPickingLawyer.
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In 1976, esteemed SoCal punk filmmaker David Markey, around 13-years-old at the time, captured this rad 8mm film footage of the skateboard, surf, and dirt bike scene in Santa Monica. Markey writes:
The dawning of the Dogtown era; Road Rider 4's, Bennett Trucks, Logan Earth Ski's, 2 colored Vans. Shot at Bay Street, Kenter Elementary, McKinley Elementary, Harvard Street, and the former vacant lots of Santa Monica. Skaters include Paul Hoffman and Paul Cullen.
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The Q outfitted a bicycle with invisible wheels. It's a simple idea (while probably tricky to get right) with a rather wonderful effect.
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Maker icon and Boing Boing friend, Mister Jalopy, is one of my all-time favorite outside-the-box thinkers. David Letterman used to be fond of saying: "He (or she) ain't hooked up right." He always meant it as a compliment -- someone who marched to their own drummer, someone unvarnished, someone who didn't succumb to habituated thinking. Mister Jalopy ain't hooked up right.
In this Instagram video, he announces that his store, Coco's Variety, LA's most idiosyncratic bike shop, will remain open where so many other stores are closing. They are going old-timey and setting up a counter in the entrance to the store. Customers will approach the counter, request what they want, and the staff will bring purchases to them. They will also still work on your bike (if you're willing to have it washed in disinfectant first).
It will be interesting to see what other retailers do creatively to remain open. This is an inspiring start.
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Coco’s is trying to keep the doors open to keep the wheels turning. Unprecedented times in which cycling becomes more important, not less so.
A post shared by Coco's Variety (@cocosvariety) on Mar 16, 2020 at 12:51pm PDT
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In 2015, Amsterdam-based e-bike company VanMoof started shipping to the United States but found that a disproportionate number of them were damaged during shipping. So they started putting the bikes in fake flatscreen TV boxes. From VanMoof:
That small tweak had an outsized impact. Overnight our shipping damages dropped by 70-80%. We sell 80% of our bicycles online, which means we still print TVs on our boxes. More than 60,000 of them have now been shipped directly to our riders worldwide.
Now other bike companies do it too:
View this post on Instagram Strength through progress - hundreds of MATE. ready and packed every week! ? #matebike
A post shared by MATE.BIKE (@mate.bike) on Apr 1, 2017 at 1:57pm PDT
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Elly Blue has kickstarted a series of successful feminist bicycle science fiction anthologies; her latest is Dragon Bike: Fantastical feminist bicycle stories, for which she is seeking $6,000 ($10 gets you an ebook, $13 gets you a printed book, $15 gets you a book and a poster).
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There's scientific truth to the saying that you never forget how to ride a bike. Even if you can't remember phone numbers, birthdays, or where the hell you parked your car, it's likely that even if you haven't been on a bicycle in decades, you can climb on and ride away just fine. Why? Neuropsychologist Boris Suchan of Germany's Ruhr University Bochum lays it out as best we know in Scientific American:
As it turns out, different types of memories are stored in distinct regions of our brains. Long-term memory is divided into two types: declarative and procedural.
There are two types of declarative memory: Recollections of experiences such as the day we started school and our first kiss are called episodic memory. This type of recall is our interpretation of an episode or event that occurred. Factual knowledge, on the other hand, such as the capital of France, is part of semantic memory. These two types of declarative memory content have one thing in common—you are aware of the knowledge and can communicate the memories to others.
Skills such as playing an instrument or riding a bicycle are, however, anchored in a separate system, called procedural memory. As its name implies, this type of memory is responsible for performance...
According to one idea, in the regions where movement patterns are anchored fewer new nerve cells may be formed in adults. Without this neurogenesis, or continuous remodeling in those regions, it’s less likely for those memories to get erased.
"Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike? Read the rest
In this video from Cariacica, Brazil, bus drivers sit on stationary bikes as a bus whizzes past. Why? To give the drivers a visceral sense of what it feels like when a 30,000 pound metal behemoth flies by less than two meters from your exposed body. The goal is to educate the drivers on why they should respect the mandatory 1.5 meter gap.
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YouTuber The Q spent 200 hours crafting a rideable bicycle out of wood, the glue that holds it together, and a handful of metal pieces like washers.
Why? I don't know, but it's pretty cool.
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CeramicSpeed makes bikes that use a drive shaft instead of a chain. Shane Miller got a close look at Eurobike 2018. Read the rest
Self-driving cars have a hard time predicting bicycle movement, and workarounds that require cyclists to buy transmitters are running into resistance from some. Read the rest
Collectors Weekly's feature on "headbages" tells the story of the 1000+ badge collection of bike-mechanic-turned-evolutionary-biologist Jeffrey Conner, who published a book on the subject, featuring an alphabetic index of photos from his collection.
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Win? Nah, it's more fun just to keep playing.
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The city of Hangzhou, China has more than 86,000 public bicycles. Unfortunately, when many people are done using them, they don't put them in the designated docking center but just drop them wherever. According to Wired, "police have rounded up 23,000 bikes so far this year and hauled them to 16 corrals around the city" like the one seen above. And that's not even the whole lot of 'em. Read the rest
