I began to liberate the Cachet from its packing materials. (Not an excited child, mind you; more like a really depressed child who suspects his alcoholic parents may have given him a single used sneaker again this year.)
…
The Fixed Gear Apocalypse is upon us…

At this point, I can be a snob and claim that, through my meticulous carings of my own bicycle collection and each tiny bolt and cable on it, this is a piece of crap bike, fit for nobody who appreciates bicycles. And I could complain that Walmart undercutting everyone on bike price is the sign of the capitalism bike-apocalypse. But I’d be completely wrong.

I’ve been apprehensive for years to commute regularly on a bike for fears of theft or, perhaps worse, public piecing apart. If you look on Craigslist these days, $100 will get you a pretty horrific piece of old rusting, steel mangledness. I’ve resorted to bike sharing like Bixi, but that just doesn’t do the trick.

Maybe this is the future. $99 generic bikes. Add some customization just to set yours apart. And then, just imagine, the government kicking in a subsidy. Eventually, this bike could drop to $79 retail. Have the government pop in a $40 per bike subsidy (that’s pretty nominal, no?). And then nobody will have an excuse not to get a $39 commuter that you’re not afraid to lose.

Is this the future? Well, as soon as I can get down the US (oh yeah there’s that, this is not available in Canada yet), you’ll see me cruising to the pool training, organic grocery store, and yoga class on this just-good-enough bike.

MSP Films’ Attack of La Niña:

Teton Gravity Research’s One For the Road:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp2ZYWaOaX4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH9-O_frjbw

“Danny, stay on your bike! … How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?”

About his modified H1, he says, “Think about it. A 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and will do zero to 60 in five seconds!”

The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered–the poor man’s version of a Goodwin conversion–he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions.

He’s refitting cars for Neil Young and Arnold:

And word’s getting out. In the corner of his office sits Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, which Goodwin is converting to biodiesel; soon, Neil Young will be shipping him a 1960 Lincoln Continental to transform into a biodiesel–electric hybrid.

Basically he’s advocating step 1) more diesel 2) diesel electric 3) hybrid burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane. “You can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil–pretty much anything but water.”

He joined the Pimp My Ride crew for a special Earth Day episode, where they converted a 1965 Impala into a diesel beast. Watch it here (Canadian link).

These days, it seems his focus is on converting H1s and H2s into monstrously fast and reasonably emitting trucks. Maybe it’s not the future we idealize of quick yet nearly zero emissions vehicles, but perhaps the catalyst for popularizing vehicles with lower emissions is fast and hot. Compare to the upcoming and gorgeous Tesla Model S — I think they nailed the design, and that probably sells better than any eco angle.

Inside The Olympic Dream from cameron sylvester on Vimeo.

They were met by some pretty ridiculous comments. Such is the Internet.

Here is the comment I had to make there:

It’s truly UNFORTUNATE to see this much MISUNDERSTANDING in the comment thread here and on the original article. People are doubting whether this company has any promise, whether it’s anything unique and if someone else could do it, and even if Mircea and Cristian are lying about receiving offers from successful, established companies. COME ON!

Who cares? What matters is that they’re doing something that has raised investments from legitimate, accredited investors in Canada (and from the US, but that’s secondary here) and that they have or will create jobs in Canada. As a bonus, if you just look it up, they’re actually getting favorable press, they raised investment from some rock star investors that have extremely high standards for tech companies, and they are proclaiming proudly that they’re a product of the growing Vancouver startup scene.

Instead of criticizing Mircea and Cristian’s company, we should use them as an example of what the Canadian government should accept. The US Startup Visa effort (startupvisa.com), for a great example, is trying to mend their current legislation to allow entrepreneurs into the US based on two critical accomplishments — raise a certain amount of investment from accredited investors (understandably lower these days with the dramatically lowered cost of starting a company) and create a certain number of jobs with a specific timeframe — and if you fail, you lose the visa. Easy. Simple. No extensive trickery or bureaucracy.

Let the process be quantitatively, merit based — not based on emotion. Canada should be so lucky to have entrepreneurs building legitimate companies and jobs in our country, and so unlucky to have people relentlessly and ignorantly criticize them.

Dr. Carl Sagan, who originally requested that the picture be taken, famously reflected on its meaning. These words are particularly worth contemplating:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Earth appears as a tiny dot the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKwjTK8WgY4

But they’ve goofed again. 3G on this first version of the device supports 900, 1700, and 2100 MHz. That’s great for a whopping 34.5 million mobile users, ie. 9% of the North American market.

In the USA, two networks support any of the bands, which is the 1700MHz AWS band. T-Mobile has 33.8M subscribers, and Cincinnati Bell Wireless has 571k. Out of a total of 292M, that’s 12% of the market.

In Canada, only the upstart carriers support AWS: WIND has 100k, Moblicity 50k, and Videotron 50k (and I’m being generous here for the undisclosed statistics). Out of a total of 23.4M, that’s 0.9%.

In Mexico, where there are 74M subscribers, nobody has 900, 1700, or 2100 (please comment below if I’m wrong here).

NINE PERCENT. BLAH. At least going 850MHz (like the iPhone or second release of the Nexus One) would serve today 114.8 million in USA and Canada alone (36%).

Does Google hate AT&T? How does T-Mobile get US “exclusivity”? Of course you can still make phone calls on other GSM networks, but you’ll only get slow EDGE (aka 2.75G) for data. This sounds like a dumb move by me. I’ll just sit and twiddle my thumbs (ie. mash my iPhone typos) a bit longer.

Approximate subscribers number for late 2010:
FYI In USA: AT&T 92.8M, Verizon 93.2M, Sprint 49M
In Canada: Bell Mobility 6.8M, Rogers 8.4M, Telus 6.8M
In Mexico: Telcel 57M

From our previous post, iPhone, Nexus One 3G Frequencies: