Posted on 09/29/2014 3:40:37 AM PDT by Olog-hai
The National Science Foundation (NSF) spent $300,000 studying how humans interact with bicycles, the latest example of what a House committee chairman calls waste in the agency.
The premise for the project, which was conducted between October 2009 and June 2013, was that bicycle dynamics are poorly understood, and researchers set out to come up with new designs to encourage more Americans to bike to lower their carbon footprint. [ ]
To fulfill this goal, the researchers built two bicycles and rode them on treadmills.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
>>And why would they study a rider RIGIDLY attached to a bicycle? I know of nobody that rides that way. The attachment between a bike and a rider is fluid and multi-tiered, so their study model is crap.
Anyone who takes riding seriously knows that rigid attachment is essential to efficiency. A good seat, ergonomic handlebars, perfectly fitting frame, and feet locked to the pedals is a very rigid attachment. Watch a good rider and you see no wasted motion with legs that push down and pull up on the pedals to use both sets of muscles to power the bike.
"THE HOMER"
Bike licenses—only to generate revenue. Their goal is to have us pay to do anything but breathe, and they’ll have a plan for that, too—eventually.
I can still hear deVito’s voice—”Eighty-seven thousand dollars!?” Har!
You are trying to say that ALL of the battery operated wheelchairs we paid for out of medicare/medicaid (which ended up a huge scam to the handicap) didn’t solve this?....brings to mind the study of the underarm odor of the Aborigenies we did years ago.
Yep - since he was 5 and first learned to ride a bike.
The grant-money takers are often just one step away from crony capitalists. Their inane, irrelevant, dopey studies are usually completely worthless except as a mechanism for the taxpayers’ money being funneled to them. It is yet another variation of eating at the trough. These “researchers” are one with the many other criminals sucking off the government teat. Ask them, though, and their are doing important “research”. I call BS.
I gotta brag...
My three yr old son, just last night, was confidently riding a two wheeler pedal bicycle with no training wheels!
The secret?
http://www.striderbikes.com/
ping to #3...... hysterical!!
that was awesome! Thanks for sharing. :)
Thank you - I’m so proud of him!! :)
Very cool!!
They have that plan, it is called Obamacare.
I quit laughing when the Mayor of Pittsburgh permanently shut down the outbound lane of a busy thoroughfare into Downtown in order to convert it to bicycle lanes.
Bicycle riding hipsters are apparently a huge part of his voter base.
“Engineers could even come up with a paradigm-shifting new bicycle design.”
But then, who could afford such a new & improved bike without a government subsidy...
...oh, nevermind.
And those bicycles are already made by a lot of small companies. Bikes for the 350+ pounders, bikes for people with back problems, bikes for people who can’t use their legs, bikes for people with balance issues, etc., etc.
LOL
The late John Campbell, former editor of ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION, once wrote that as a physics undergraduate he had been given the problem of solving the differential equations of a bicycle going around a turn. His comment was that he could solve them quicker on a bicycle than he could with pencil and paper.
Did he get government money to build his own bicycle to do so?
And the NSF isn’t, really.
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