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New Motorcycle World Speed Record, 367.382 mph
An anonymous reader, apparently a member of the BUB racing team, wrote to let us know that on Thursday, their crew set the new ultimate motorcycle world speed record at 367.382 mph with the BUB Seven Streamliner at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Seven is powered by a 3 Liter, turbocharged, 16-valve V4 engine that produces a claimed 500 hp and 400 lb-ft of torque at 8500 rpm. The pilot, Chris Carr, hit 380 mph during the run.
367.38200 mph = 591.244017 km/h
I don't even have a license. Anecdotally, it seems that techies drive less than other people, unless of course they live in someplace like silicon valley. But I'd bet there's less interest in cars and motorcycles among computer geeks than, say, mechanical engineers. Anyone what to chime in with their preferences/opinions?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What they don't mention in the article is that they strapped the driver dow nto the motorcycle and dropped them both from a really tall building...
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Apparently, the controls were taken from an F-4 fighter jet. But if you look at some of the pictures underneath the shell it looks slightly more motorcycle-like.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
To quote the Oxford English Dictionary, which isn't always definitive but I think in this case captures the common meaning well enough, a motorcycle is:
The vehicle linked does not at all "resemble a bicycle", at least as commonly defined (enclosed two-wheel vehicles are not usually considered "bicycles").
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What the article doesn't tell you is that the motorbike was running Linux and the driver was thinking about the best car analogy while he was driving.
signature is pants
I need a car analogy before I can understand this.
As a biker with a long graying beard, lemme point out that whatever that thing on the picture is, it damn sure ain't a motorcycle.
My wife says it's boring because it wasn't done by three guys in Hamtramck who bolted a V8 onto a Harley and made a fairing out of oil drums.
I find it interesting because it is about engineering. "IndyCars", on the other hand, are boring. All the cars are identical so it's just about the drivers. Who cares about the drivers?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If the /record/ speed is 367.382mph, but during the run the driver reached 380mph, I could imagine he must have been very uncomfortable smashed against the windshield of his "motorcycle".
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I found this part particularly inspiring:
"The shape of 'Seven' is based on that of a Coho Salmon. While watching TV Denis noticed the fluid dynamics of the salmon through water. Knowing that water is more dense than air- Denis figured the shape would work very well at Bonneville. Wind Tunnel testing of Seven at the A2WT proved 'Seven' to have the lowest CoD of any streamliner- 0.09. "
There's nothing more beautiful than taking the best designs from nature and applying them to our own.
zosxavius photography
This all boils down to how you define geek.
I'm an automotive mechanic. My friends and family would also consider me to be a big geek. I fix their computers (yes yes, cars too), I build my own (computers, I haven't built a car from scratch... yet!). I love gadgets and hacking stuff together, and I have an abnormal interest in technology related politics (my girlfriend calls me paranoid). So to the general public, i'm a geek.
Among the Slashdot crowd, I don't have quite the same geek credentials. I don't use any flavour of Linux (besides the occasional liveCD like Backtrack) because my PC is a gaming rig first and foremost. I'm not a sys admin or a programmer. The last thing I "programmed" was fifteen years ago and written in BASIC. I don't run a website, and the extent of my HTML knowledge is frames and tables. I hate math and I don't get off on exciting new prime numbers or subatomic particles. Oh, and i've only played D&D like, twice. It was fun but time consuming. Am I still a geek?
My personal opinion is that geek has moved far beyond the 1980's definition of pocket protectors, glasses, and a calculator. Geeks come in all flavours now, from classical computing and math geeks all the way into sports and automotive geeks. The microprocessor really has changed the way we see the modern world, in virtually every way. A geek is now anyone who shares both a passion for a subject and the thirst for related knowledge, no matter what that subject may be.
The geek shall inherit the Earth. :)
IMO the first linked article was not very interesting. To get to the interesting stuff, you have to go to the second linked article, then click through to the links from there. The pictures of how they fabricated the engine block are really cool. I was surprised there wasn't more info about the tires. My understanding was that tires were the main limiting factor in land speed records -- or maybe that's only for cars. Tires tend to fly apart when rotated that fast. I would assume that at these speeds they get incredible gyroscopic stability, so I guess you don't have to worry about tipping over. They have to run the course in both directions without messing with the engine, which apparently is quite a challenge. I wasn't clear on what's involved in turning around to come back. The bike has both brakes and parachutes. Does the driver actually brake and do a steered u-turn at low speed, or do they use parachutes, then pick the thing back up and turn it around by hand?
Find free books.
When doing a LSR run at Bonneville you have something like a half hour between runs. They let you refuel and check the vehicle over between runs for safety reasons. If you have a problem and can't make it back to the starting line on time you're toast. You one-way run doesn't count for anything.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
They'll probably turn it by hand, most land speed vehicles have a tiny, tiny amount of steering angle to keep a sudden twitch on the driver's part from turning into a two mile long barrel roll.
Well, spec series are about the driver's skill, which is pretty much what sports are about - the skill of the players.
However, it's much more fun to go out, get a cheap Miata, or if FWD is more your thing, a cheap Civic or Golf or something, and autocross it, than to sit around watching a spec series, IMO. Then, it's about honing your own skill, not watching others. (But, you can learn techniques from watching how they handle situations, so watching them can still be educational.)
Of course, the American Le Mans Series is ridiculously fun as a spectator series. Multiple classes of cars of varying power outputs, weights, visibility, handling, and (often) driver experience all out on the track at once, and the drivers and cars are surprisingly accessible. Oh, and it's about as far from a spec series as it gets - you can easily have a big heavy (ok, 900 kg/1980 lb, but still) V12 diesel car and a light (825 kg/1820 lb) 4-cylinder turbocharged gas car fighting for the lead of the entire race, the whole way, meanwhile weaving their way through traffic caused by big slow production-based cars.
My personal opinion is that geek has moved far beyond the 1980's definition of pocket protectors, glasses, and a calculator. Geeks come in all flavours now, from classical computing and math geeks all the way into sports and automotive geeks.
My personal opinion is that geek still means carnival folk who bite the heads off chickens. "Nerd" or "boffin" are my preferred terms for people who are excited or obsessive about technical things. "Geek" has too many connotations of falsity, they remind me of the web-bubble MBA types who wouldn't like being called nerds, and think that "geek" has cooler connotations. But there's nothing cool about biting the heads off chickens.
... and then they built the supercollider.
> I held that opinion for quite a while, but later came to amend it. I find it
> even more boring when it's like the Formula One races were for several years,
> with Nissan coming in 1st and 2nd every time because they came up with a
> particularly effective turbocharger.
That isn't even about drivers. It's about money. Useful stuff, but who wants to watch it?
Of course, now that they have taken to deliberately crashing cars maybe it will become interesting again, in a morbid, hockey-like way.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
are you subject to road laws if your vehicle doesn't touch the road?
Probably not, but you don't really want to explain to the FAA why you were (a) below minimum altitude and (b) above maximum speed (250 kt below 10k feet), (c) in an uncertificated aircraft (d) without a pilot's license. The Feds tend not to have a sense of humor about such things.
(And oh yeah: (e) ??? (f) profit! )
-- Alastair
Yeah, as long as there's nothing in front of you for miles and miles, going fast is not scary at all.
After all, I am strangely colored.
When you go that fast, there's no point in being scared of much.
I think Jeremy Clarkson put it well when he wrote the following about the Bugatti Veyron at top speed:
( From: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article596580.ece )
Just FYI, Nissan never was in F1.
A drag coefficient of 0.08 is amazingly awesome. For example, it's equal third place in the wikipedia concept car drag coefficient list (first is 0.07). And the frontal area is next to nothing, so the CD*A figure is going to be excellent too. Put a 100cc engine in it with appropriately tall gearing and it would most likely get better than 0.5 litres per 100km. Consider that the PAC-II has a Cd of 0.075 and gets 0.017l/100km equivalent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
And players of any sport, unless they are personal friends, are boring.
Clearly you aren't acquainted with any sport that involves girls dressed in very little clothing then.
You are taking advice from Jeremy Clarkson ?
He is the one who thinks that going backwards through Pearly Gates is a good way to die. And his friend Hammond nearly succeeded . OK, he was about to get in upside down through the gates, not backwards, but still.
Clarkson: "If you go through the pearly gates backwards in a fireball, that's a cool way to die!" Hammond: "I love that vision of just blasting through the gates, backwards, in a flaming Swedish supercar! 'Yes! I'm here! Where are the women?'"
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
False. The density of air does not change with speed. What you may be trying to refer to is called the Reynolds number, a dimensionless quantity that relates fluid velocity with viscosity and characteristic length-scale. This is what allows the Mythbusters to make their own wind tunnel using water for the "Tail-gate Up or Down" episode. By setting the velocity of the water to compensate for the increased viscosity compared to air, they can get pretty close to simulating highway speeds for their model truck (characteristic length scales having been taken into consideration as well).
The only thing that would be pretty dense at those speeds would be this anonymous coward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number
887321 = 337*2633
Scary, your head a splode.
He is the one who thinks that going backwards through Pearly Gates is a good way to die.
Sounds like a pretty good way to die to me. I mean, compared to dying in a hospital unable to wipe your own arse or recognise your wife with a tube up your dick and a pint of morphine in your bloodstream, just for example.
I like how Bryan Harley referred to the rider as the "pilot".
http://seven-streamliner.com/
Given this "motorcycle' has an enclosed cockpit and resembles a missile on two wheels, I'd say "pilot" is a more accurate description than "rider".
Hey, you ride a missile, you don't pilot one. Didn't you ever see Dr. Strangelove?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]