Link Banana

Like, real jetpacks. (Although technically, it’s not a jetpack.)

On Tuesday, an inventor from New Zealand unveiled what he calls “the world’s first practical jetpack” at the EAA AirVenture, the gigantic annual air show here. The inventor, Glenn Martin, 48, who has spent 27 years developing the devices, said he hoped to begin selling them next year for $100,000 apiece.

(via Boing Boing)

UPDATE (7/30/08); Via BBGadgets, Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) makes a good point:

The bugbear with this type of vehicle isn’t getting airborne, it’s stability. He says that it can go to 8k feet for 1/2 hour. That’s theoretically. I see a device going 1 foot off the ground with 2 big guys guiding it. In fact, I’ve seen not a single untethered pic.

I’d love it to be true, but I see too many warning flags. Sounds like a money raising stunt. Every time one of these companies is about to run out of money, they hold a “demonstration” and make a prediction that they’ll be selling them within some short period of time. I doubt it. Moller’s been predicting that people will be flying to work in 10 years, for the last 40 years.

This idea, like all great ones, seems like something a seven-year-old dreamed up:

Dietrich Stein, of the Ruhr-University of Bochum, wants to free up the roads by diverting the Ruhr’s freight underground. If his plan succeeds, the road network at the surface will be duplicated by a system of tubes below, inhabited by small vehicles that steer themselves automatically from factories to shops or even to individual homes.

I linked to a part of Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns project a few weeks ago, without recognizing it as such. Neatorama has compiled some valuable links to his work, and pointed out the awesome video in the title link. Their summary:

In 2005, Aaron Koblin took all of the air traffic over United States data, as seen by the FAA, and visualized it in a beautiful animation. Aaron’s work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the “Celestial Mechanics” project (eye candy!) by Scott Hesels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA.

I finally got around to reading Jennifer Gonnerman’s story about working on the New York subway tracks. This bit surprised me, though maybe it shouldn’t have:

There have been at least 230 employee fatalities since 1946. In the last decade alone, ten subway workers have been killed. Thomas DeStefano and Samuel McPhaul were electrocuted by the third rail. The A train slammed into Christopher Bonaparte; a 3 train killed Joy Antony while he was testing a signal light north of 96th Street; an E train came around a curve and plowed into Kurien Baby, who was trying to put a warning light in a tunnel near Canal Street. In 2004, Harold Dozier was retrieving flags that had been set up to warn motormen about workers on the tracks when the B train slammed into him.

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist makes the interesting point that if diesel powered cars really do take off in America, we’ll all end up with much too much petrol (gasoline).

It doesn’t help that the catalytic crackers used by oil refineries in America are optimised to produce as much petrol as possible—typically about 50% of every barrel. Diesel accounts for only 15% of the rest, with the balance used to produce heating oil, jet fuel, heavy fuel, liquid petroleum gas, asphalt and other products.

Refineries in Europe and elsewhere tend to use hydrocrackers that produce 25% petrol and 25% diesel. They would like to produce more diesel than they currently do, but that would mean producing even more petrol than they need. At present, they export their surplus to America.

So, if America switched to diesel cars in a big way, the Europeans would be even more awash in unwanted petrol than they are today, and might have to dump it elsewhere or even idle some refinery capacity. Either way, the global price of diesel would soar still further.

I do wonder what, if any, place biodeisel deserves in such an analysis.

Calvin Trillian does some reporting on Kolkata’s (Calcutta’s) person-powered rickshaws, and the government’s never-ceasing efforts to abolish them.

While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw wallahs come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.

(via Passport)

It’s also probably worth noting that Robert Kaplan takes a similar (but slightly bleaker and more coherent) tour through Kolkatta in The Atlantic.