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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
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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.
Funny thing that...you drop it off a building and it wouldn't go this fast. You need downforce and traction. Dude's got balls of Depleted Uranium.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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.
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
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.
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 )
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.