Not necessarily. The costly part of recycling is separating materials.
If this has cardboard with a waterproof coating or plastic skin (as it appears) or is glued to other components like the rubber tires then it could be very expensive to process. And at the end you are left with almost worthless cardboard.
An aluminium or steel bike is recycled in exactly the same way as a car - and we have got very good at that process - and at the end you have valuable scrap aluminium.
This bike is most likely (some large percentage) glue. It is basically a fiberglass and epoxy design only using cardboard. Recycling THIS thing is going to be a real bitch. I think it should be built, but it isn't an _answer_ to anything other than human curiosity.
I'm completely with you, but take it a bit further. Steel bike frames are basically perfect until they're useless. That is, if you don't let them rust, then they are literally as good as new until you fall over hard enough to crack or buckle them. Properly maintained, a quality steel frame could easily last 50 years.
A real eco solution would be to make cheap and simple 'supermarket bikes'
At the moment the $75 bikes in Walmart are terrible - but mostly because they try and copy $750 bikes with 24gears and full suspension.
If you wanted a green solution make very simple, single gear, hub brakes, steel frame bikes in the same factory for $50 and make millions of them.
There is a city bike rental scheme here, but like all the other rental/free bike schemes around the world - it uses some 'novel' bike design which somehow end up costing $1000 each! And so either require credit cards and security or they only distribute 10 of them around the city.
I didn't check it out much, but at the local sporting goods store in Seattle (Big-5) I saw a single speed with 700c rims, steel frame for about $110 I think maybe more maybe less.
If the crappy bike manufacturers of the world aren't making simple steel utilitarian bikes, they should be. I'd buy one and I already have 2 bikes.
Steel frame, steel handlebars (for safety), sealed bottom bracket, 5 speed rear derailleur and friction disc brakes. 25-30 lbs is fine. Doesn't need any aluminum except for the rims and the chainring.
I'd buy that - except I live in a city with 1:4 hills!
Here even the outdoor gear coop charges >$900 for a single speed and says it's ideal for "urban life' - which tells you everything about the market for them.
> I'd buy that - except I live in a city with 1:4 hills!
sitkack and I live in Seattle, where our downtown area has hills up to 19% incline, and other areas near downtown (considered bike-friendly areas) have up to 26%.
When speaking of tree-derived products, is recyclability a green feature?
Trees fix CO2, so having an excuse to grow more trees, sucking CO2 from the atmosphere, and depositing it in the form of bikes, may be a benefit.
It likely comes down to the amount of energy used in the manufacture. I don't actually know, but intuitively I'd guess that steel manufacture (or aluminum on lighter bikes) uses a lot more energy to manufacture.
"it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness."
That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the underlying kernel be open source.
"Existence of some viable open source models doesn’t change the reality for the vast majority of developers. We don’t have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We don’t have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make some more.
"The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn’t sit well with those goals."
The article seemed to be saying that since android is based on a FOSS kernel, and FOSS is a cancer (in Balmer's famous words) then people will pirate Android apps. Of course iOS is based on an essentially public domain BSD kernel where you are free to copy it all you want.
But you could read it to say, the Google app store is more open than Apple's restricted/approved walled garden and this allows more pirate apps. The article isn't very clearly written.
Of course the open access also avoids the many stories we get on here about - my original app was arbitrarily removed by someone at Apple because they thought it was the copy of another app - and I can't talk to anyone about it.
Can you imagine dumping 100lb of earth into a chinese one and tipping it out at the top of a hole - to build a canal or railway?
They are fundementally different concepts. A european wheelbarrow is an earth moving tool - essentially a bucket on wheels. A chinese wheelbarrow is a man powered cart. It's like claiming a sack trolley is better than a pallet truck because it can go down stairs
That is exactly correct. It makes no sense to conflate the two and disregard the purposes of each. In the case of the chinese wheelbarrow it is not clear that it was so superior to the european cart. A person simply can't move the same amount of material as easily as a pack animal. The chinese cart is thus tremendously labor intensive. One person must move a load that could be done by 1/4 of a pack animal on a wheeled cart.
Additionally, the one other advantage of being able to use the wheelbarrow on narrow paths instead of roads is not something that would normally matter. Roads can move people and goods much more effectively and faster than narrow paths.
The article alludes to this by referring to the collapse of the road network and the subsequent development of the wheelbarrow. Of course, if they had roads, they may never had adopted to the wheelbarrow in the first place.
What the author describes as inventiveness is really necessity borne of weakness. Only if human labor is relatively cheap would such an invention ever be considered. China fit these conditions perfectly, however. The dramatic rise in population over the course of the first millenium in China made such efficiency concerns moot. Labor intensive rice agriculture also needed large groups of people anyway.
I think your analysis is somewhat off - at the same time in western Europe, people weren't using carts, they were carrying everything by hand. So it's not wheelbarrow vs. cart, it's wheelbarrow vs. nothing.
Also, narrow tracks would be much easier to build than roads which need carts. Again, it's narrow paths vs. nothing, rather than narrow paths vs. wide paved roads.
For the requirements - a heavy but symmetric load over narrow roads - it's a pretty good solution. At least until you have to stop!
Interestingly, trading inherent stability and rigidity for more control effort to give you a lighter more manouverable design is something we have only just "reinvented" with some fighter aircraft (and the Segway ;-)
In spite of having active/computer control systems fro 30years we still do seem to stick to the 19C railway engineering mentality of - build it big/strong/stable/rigid/heavy
Depends on how far you have to move the cut to use it as fill. A few hundred meters probably isn't an issue. At a couple of kilometers transport becomes more of an issue than unloading.
For road building, transporting materials such as paving stones over long distances is an important consideration because roads are useful in places where local materials may not be suitable for quality construction. One might speculate that the Chinese wheel barrow's design helped bootstrap a network of roadways suitable for it's use.
Of course the upside of the collapse of Europe's road network may have been that it allowed localized development of the political structures upon which modern liberal states were developed.
One person holds the cart, the other fills it. Two of you dump it out where it's supposed to go. As long as your cart can carry > 2-3x the load, it should be more efficient (or you can load it with buckets).
They are a bit heavy handed on "thou shalt not" - but if you use them as guide - and really think if breaking a rule is worth it in a specific case - they are good conservative practice.
Conservative can also mean use #define, macros and casts rather than those new fangled templates ;-)
IIRC the guidelines are a reasonable compromise between recommending new 'safe' but relatively unfamiliar and tricky constructs - and sensible advice to avoid #define and macros.
There are often other constraints in real time and safety critical systems - like avoiding allocations and exceptions. But these docs aren't specific avionics rules, there is an awful lot of code in a project like this that never gets onboard the airframe.
At the time she was flying on the Shuttle, the USAF was involved in the overall project and it was being used to lift military payloads into orbit, including some classified ones. The USAF stopped using the Shuttle after the Challenger accident.
The design of the fan blades of the Rolls Royce jet engines on an A380 are a closely guarded secret and yet we allow people to fly on it without a security clearance - even people from Seattle, even Boeing employees (although they do have to sit outside!)
One of the real problems with the Shuttle is/was the cold war paranoia of Nasa. I worked on Hubble and 20years afterwards I still (as a Brit citizen) wasn't allowed inside JPL for an anniversary celebration
Possibly quite a bit. Astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 had to make various repairs to different subsystems, so I would not be surprised if later Astronauts received fairly detailed information about how the entire system worked as part of their training, 'just in case'. At which point, you really don't want to have to worry about which pieces of information are safe and which are classified, or who is allowed to talk to who about what. Much easier and safer to just ensure you can give away as much info as possible to everyone involved.
Java is great - right upto the point where it isn't/
Do a similar example where you want to replace the values in situ and find that Java is making a copy of the entire array every time. At that point you are stuck, there is no way out. C may be difficult but it lets you do anything you want.
note: yes Java may have a flag that says do int array in place, in this case - but you know what I mean.
As a physicist this always annoyed me about about maths lectures.
You spend half of your physics degree learning certain classes of integrals when in practice everyone you really need to solve is done numerically.
Yet you get half a class on numerical methods it you're lucky
An aluminium or steel bike is recycled in exactly the same way as a car - and we have got very good at that process - and at the end you have valuable scrap aluminium.