Thursday 23 September 2010

machines have begun ruling the planet

I was one of the few luddites who saw that every new machine was not only a brilliant idea, but a great way to put a person on the unemployment line. Pretty soon everything will make itself and so we'll have nothing left to do except scrounge around in supermarket dumpsters for food.

this was found on Alternet

[originally on Archein, by Joe Costello]

We Just Went Through 200 Years of Radical Economic Upheaval -- The Next Economic Era Offers Us a Chance to Control It
Proposing a 'design economy' -- the more we participate in it and share it, the better we all live and the more sustainable and stable it can become.

I. In contemporary economic discussion, the idea of the Industrial Revolution is frequently presented as something bland, neutral and inevitable. Instead of conveying a sense of historical turmoil, disruption and the overthrowing of established cultural, political and economic institutions dating back millenia, we simply throw off the term, “Industrial Revolution” with little regard that it represented a fundamental reordering of human life. In many ways this is understandable, as the Industrial Revolution triumphed, becoming industrial rule, industrial economy, industrial bureaucracy, and industrial life -- the industrial status quo. In large swaths of the world, industrial economy is so dominant, it leaves the sense the world has always been that way and only a fool could imagine it being any different. Most amazingly, this has all been accomplished in less than two centuries -- an historical blink of the eye.

Today, we confront an era of equal historical change. Further understandings of the natural world and resulting new technologies are beginning to impact industrial society to a degree as fantastic as industrial knowledge and technology transformed agrarian society. While agrarian civilization lasted over 10,000 years, the reign of industrial society has been relatively brief; nonetheless, it is being usurped. This transformation is rapidly intruding on our lives, yet still not quite recognized beyond a general trepidation that things don't seem to quite work like they did before. The great collective social anxiety of the Industrial era, never satiated, now confronts a new transition for which the tools, skills, thinking and institutions are little developed, if they exist at all.

Maybe the most essential understanding we can have in such a time is the simple recognition of change. The Industrial era, for many reasons, is transitory. It is inherently unstable, and incapable of truly meeting the challenges and problems it created. For in the end, industrialism tries conforming or forcefully overwhelming life's great diversity into a few narrow homogenous environments, which are unhealthy and unsustainable for both the individual and the system as a whole.

The Industrial era's greatest strength, an uncompromising faith in technology, is also one of its greatest weaknesses. The simplistic adoption of any given technology, without an understanding or systemic feedback mechanisms to track its impact on society, is the ethos of a child, an immature civic morality. To paraphrase the technology thinker Marshall McLuhan, first we shape technology, then technology shapes us. We still grasp to understand how technology shapes us, yet we rapidly transform from industrial technologies to a new era, for lack of a better term, of information technologies.

-Cosine67~~

Sunday 30 May 2010

Architectural curiosities from Bristol

I don't know what this was at one time, but the black part is a bowl with a pipe leading below, to...

the river down below. Is this the first public urinal in modern Bristol, 'erected' in 1816?
A landmark? to piss in?

[1970s throw-away architecture. the old courthouse, and new skateboard park]
[St. John's conduit. A lot of fuss about fresh water. We'll be doing that again if global warming continues]
[sundial on the side of a church. It was not keeping time, beyond a shadow]

-Cosine67~~

Thursday 6 May 2010

travel disasters mean we're too mobile

[pic - the ash cloud]

Two related things:
snow blizzards in December/January
the six days of flight moratorium in April

I was caught by the first one. My flight was delayed by 3 days, and one overnight stay in an airport.
Here's what I discovered:

every morning, there are 8 flights from this airport to Paris. Is it possible that 2500 people want to go from N.Italy to Paris? Or are the airlines trying to push out their competitors by losing money in the short term?
I've got news for them. Banks will give them and their competitors far more than enough money to choke on. That kind of tactic will take years to declare a few winners. In the meantime, the environment pays the price.

more
soon
-Cosine67 ~~

Wednesday 5 May 2010

Track day at Thruxton

You could choose from one of these formula cars, or some slow Ferraris, Porsches and so on. As I discovered, the race cars had rev limiters set at 4500 rpm. Still, it's a big track and I got in lots of miles.
If you pay a bit extra, they'll hook up a camera to your car and you get a nice DVD of your ...trip through the shrubs.
These are the training 'wheels'. The Cayman! by Porsche. Fine cars, even if they're not racecars, per se.
Here's the pitlane, below and some of the machinery arrayed.


-Cosine67 ~~
coming soon - Tiff threads the Needel in a BMW

Thursday 18 February 2010

update: ridiculously expensive cars

A fool is born every minute. The rich ones will buy these cars:
[Zenvo]
[Tramontana, of Spain]
[SSC]
[Aston Martin]
Info from Yahoo/AP
Soon to be seen at the Geneva Motor Show next month (4 March 2010),
some of the world’s most incredible, most costly production cars:

1 - Zenvo ST1: £2m

top speed: 232mph
Two million pound price tag for this 'one of 15' Danish sizzler. Mad.

2 - Koenigsegg Trevita: £1.5m

3 - Bugatti Veyron: £1.3m

4 - Aston Martin One-77: £1.2m

top speed: 205mph

Approximately 60 have been sold, but before the 77 production run is complete Aston has apparently raised the price from £1m to £1.2m.

5 - Pagani Zonda Cinque Roadster: £1.2m

top speed: 217mph
Pagani's beautifully crafted Zonda Cinque Roadster is a gorgeous thing, but then so it should be at over £1.2m.

6 - Ferrari 599XX: £1.2m

196mph

This Ferrari is so special you can't drive it on the road, though it features all of the company's technical knowhow.

7 - Lamborghini Reventón Roadster: £1m

top speed: 205mph

Tiny number production run for this big money Lamborghini Roadster.

8 - Maybach Landaulet: £800,000

top speed: 155mph (limited) chickensh*t

Maybach range topper costs silly money and makes you look ridiculous - money really can't buy taste.

9 - SSC Ultimate Aero: £400,000

top speed: 257mph (the King- what a way to die)
The world's fastest production car is relatively inexpensive in this company and relatively unknown.

10 - Tramontana R-Edition: £360,000

top speed: 202 mph

Weird, wonderful and very expensive. One for those wanting something completely different.

------- end of story

See my previous story about the stupidity of top speed, dick-wagging.

It's amazing how the production of these cars is expanding. A new company comes out every couple of months. The recession has no effect on this market. That's because the rich already have all the money. These boutique manufacturers are trying to separate the rich from some of their money.

-Cosine67 ~~~
checkitout: on yahoo/AP

Saturday 6 February 2010

Autosport old F1 and F5000 stuff

These are being run by a historic racing club






coming soon

Wednesday 20 January 2010

Autosport Show at Birmingham's NEC

Close to heaven. The innards of the Radical SR. That's a motorbike engine. Check any Youtube video. It's the most fun you can have for less than 100K pounds (with your clothes on...on a racetrack). Much less.
I used to have a race car with a bike engine.
The music of 11 000+ RPM, just behind your helmet.
Magic!
Here's one at Cadwell Park:



The new Noble. And Purty too.
The flippin' Merc, from LeMans

An old IMSA Ferrari from the US, 1980s
Ferrari Dino for sale at the Coys auction. They say it's real.
I sh*t you not. The sign stuck on the car says so. Of course, I wouldn't put adhesive tape on a multi-million dollar famous racecar.

A 60s Ferrari sports racer. I think I saw it at Silverstone last summer
Top speed racer, or a loudspeaker on wheels
from the large fat silhouette car, of the Euro Late Model series
to a tiny circle track single seater, with a bike engine
compare it to the pants on the left.
-Cosine67~~~

Tuesday 19 January 2010

London Motorsport Show at Brands Hatch

This is what I call a motorsport show. Do it at a race track, friends. You might just get to go for a hell-raising drive. The show goes on over a weekend, every November.
This car (below) is the one I took a passenger ride in. I'll try to upload the MP3 of it, because its raucous and noisy, but here a pic (got a prob with video upload) of the car in the pits.


JP2 sports racer, used by the racing school at Brands, with a 3.5 litre V6 running on natural gas.

There were other cars you could pay to ride in, like BMW coupes, and an MR2 and some others you go out in, if you could blag your way into it. I was about to go out in a Porsche 968, one of my favourites, driven by a driver named Demetriou, who's making a name for himself in club racing (he was mentioned in Autosport, I think) but then the period ended, and I had to get out.
SOON
Anyway, I had already ridden in the best car that was freely available. So, I didn't try anything else.

It was one of the fastest cars of the day, but seemed slower than the Radical sports racers. Watch turn one (below). (Recordings are showing other folks, not me.)

Sports racer on-board camera
Try to imagine the dip after turn 1 (Paddock Hill Bend)! Your stomach sinks. You wonder how the car sticks to the track (watch from 4:40). We used the Indy Circuit (the red track at 0:30), which is different after turn 3. The Indy doesn't give you much time to think.
(watch the slow-mo instructions from 1:37).
full tilt- brake-turn-full gas downhill/uphill-brake-turn-gas downhill-brake-turn left, etc.
not to mention the gear changes.
3 turns in about 15 seconds.

I drove a Renault Megane Sport (like the one below) at Brands, a couple of years ago, to do my ARDS test. Check race videos to see how people take the first right turn, before going into the dip. I scared my tester by driving so far to the left, in the braking zone, that I had part of the left tire off the asphalt (in mid-air essentially). Remember, the cars over here have the tiller on the right, or ass-backwards, by my estimation.
The tester said "maybe you should find a left-hand drive car". This video shows the Renault going through Turn 2 (Druids) down the next hill to Turn 3 (Graham Hill).
SOON
-Cosine67~~~

you can't save the world one Prius at a time



This is how screwed up our world has become: Seasick Steve, the once vagabond and popular solo musician, was on Top Gear to try out a cheap Korean car on their race track. That's what Top Gear does, folks (it's Jay Leno's favourite show). Anyway, SS said he had a 1951 Chevy station wagon, I think, after having about a hundred old jalopies he'd run into the ground. When he was asked if he'd replace the Chevy, he said something (at 3:45) like:

"When the manufacture of a Prius creates less pollution than it does to run my Chevy for its whole life, then, I'll buy a Prius."

The making of the wonderful new hybrid cars is, itself, hyper-wasteful.

Look at every different thing that goes into a car and you realise that every new car requires the sourcing of a supply of about 1000 individual parts. It's a logistical nightmare, even before you consider the cost of testing, designing, development and transportation.

I'd probably recommend a catalytic car, but he's not the first guy to say this, so it must be true. So, as the rappers say 'don't believe the hype'. Consume less.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Exhaust, that is. Keep your car in good working order, and keep some spare parts handy.

Politicians love wrecking old cars, because everybody thinks THAT will save the environment. It's a failure, though, if the previous owner has to buy a new car to replace the classic he had to surrender. Get it?

That's also handy because I think that classic cars should be kept, if they're attractive. It's just a function of time, money and space. There will always be museums and rich boys with their toys. But, until recently, keeping a classic car was something that many workers could also do.

I used to think that the owners of 20-year old shit-box cars were nuts, but now, not only do I think they're wise, but I believe I might just join them.

I'm also against all those cars that are like a house on wheels. They've got video, A/C, reclining seats, fart-catchers, etc. In contrast, I've become a fan of barebones cars, the kind that small garagistes make in the UK. The Ariel Atom springs to mind. It doesn't even have doors, or a roof, for that matter. Best bugs-in-your-teeth gonzo driving from a street-legal car.




Also, check the Fifth Gear story (can't find video) where Presenter X was given a 200-quid Proton 1.5 with an MOT and parts falling off. He felt liberated because he didn't have to hyperventilate every time he thought about his car being scratched (his real car is a fine Beemer). That particular bucket-of-bolts Proton cost less to buy than a replacement tire for his BMW (270 quid).

So, the idea is the car was made to work for us*. If you spend 25 thousand on a new car, every 5 years let's say, and your income is 25 thou, before or after taxes, you're working one whole year in every five, for your car. Once I realised that, I made sure I would never do it myself. Others are taking out loans to pay for their car. It's nuts! Pay cash, if you've got it.

-Cosine67 ~~~

* what few realise is that the desire to have mod cons, like a car, is what took many people off the farm and made them go to the city to earn cold hard cash.... only for them to end up spending it....on stuff they don't need.