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Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

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Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#301
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also ride motorcycles, but the bicycle I can ride int the lobby and take up the lift to the office - it's quicker door-to-door (over 8km) than the motorcycle, which I sometimes get to park close by but if I don't come in early I end up parking a few blocks away (or _gasp_ paying for parking). I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I thi…

Your cheater-bike-build sounds pretty interesting. Did you describe the build-process in detail somewhere? Or would you care to write it up?

It was a pretty complex and sophisticated process.

First you need to get borderline drunk and start browsing AliExpress late one night, then forget all about it by morning. A few months later a bike wheel with a hub motor and controller unexpectedly show up by courier at work. This reminds you why you bought that lipo battery months back thats way too big for any of your quadcopters. Then you spend an hour or two the next Saturday afternoon bolting the wheel and ziptieing the wiring and controller onto the $50 eBay mountain bike you bought a few years back when you decided it was "time to get fit" - which had been sitting in the garage ever since after having been ridden only once or twice. You then notice the battery is an _almost_perfect fit into the drink holder, and you can make it into a perfect fit but putting the battery into a stubby holder! Win! A bit of work with the soldering iron having robbed connectors and heatshrink from the quadcopter parts bin, and it's ready to go. You then hop onto the bike and cruise up all the nearby hills grinning like a loon and laughing out loud.

Im pretty sure that covers all the important steps. If you need me to check my notes about exactly what you should be drinking to get the right sort of AliExpress ordering buzz going, let me know - it was _probably_ bourbon ;-)

Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also ride motorcycles, but the bicycle I can ride int the lobby and take up the lift to the office - it's quicker door-to-door (over 8km) than the motorcycle, which I sometimes get to park close by but if I don't come in early I end up parking a few blocks away (or _gasp_ paying for parking). I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I thi…

> And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers... Not in the UK, you can't. Drunk in charge of a vehicle, no matter that the vehicle is just a bicycle.

Yeah - technically it's true here as well. Practically, short of mowing down a pedestrian in front of a cop (or some other spectacularly provocative bad behaviour), the odds of getting breath tested while riding a bicycle are close enough to zero to make no difference. (Having said that, I once worked with a guy who lost his driving license after getting caught while riding a horse home from the pub - he was the kind of angry mouthy guy who was gonna end up like that somehow anyway, I suspect he worked quite vigorously at getting the cop worked up and angry enough to bother doing it...)

Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting about the gyroscopic effects myth, as it is one I strongly believe! Is there some documentation of the bike or some analysis of this I can read?

It's not a myth that gyroscopic effects contribute to stabilization, but rather that it explains the stabilization fully. It's usually phrased as "scientists still don't understand how bikes work [in terms of their stability]", which is pretty amazing if you think about it.

Actually, since about 5 years ago bicycle stability is pretty well understood: http://bicycle.tudelft.nl/stablebicycle/

Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#304
post #64

Just take the bike out of the race entirely. Declare a year in advance that the bike will be XYZ model Q so people can train on them, and the race maintains custody of all race bikes, spares, etc. It's already a money-competition to see who can buy the best super-bike. Yes, you have to have a minimum weight, but that just means that you can take a superbike and spend the extra weight applying aerodynamic fairings whe…

Technology is an integral part of cycling, just as it is in motorsport. There are some one-design motorsport racing classes, but they are far from the most popular. Fans like to see innovation, we like to coo over the beautiful new machinery on display. Some of the greatest moments in cycling are directly related to technical progress, most obviously the Obree/Boardman battle for the hour record. On one side a profes…

> Technology is an integral part of cycling

Cheating is an integral part of cycling

Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#305
Seems a simple answer to me - require every rider to have 3 - 5 uniquely identifiable bikes.

Require that all rider's bikes - irrespective of position, etc. be kept by the race organiser at the end of the day. Randomly select bikes for testing with x-ray/millimeter rays, electromagnetic sensors, and even destructive testing.

An extended "post race parc fermé" if you will...

Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#306
post #273
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when they are chasing the hour record. Ondrej Sosenka ran 3.2 kg wheels in his 2005 hour record precisely for the flywheel effect.

Every tiny acceleration derived from a pedal stroke has to be transferred from bike to rider by hands and back. It's not "work" in the physical sense if you look at the bike as your frame of reference, but it requires biological effort nonetheless. As long as you don't need to brake, more storage in the wheels is better. This effect would be strongest in a climb, but there you certainly only want heavy wheels if you…

No matter how heavy you made the bike wheels, any kinetic energy stored in them would be used up in the first few meters of a steep hill on any road course. Then you have to drag those heavy weights up the hill. So no, more storage in the wheels isn't better (outside of a totally flat track).

Re: Thermal camera footage allegedly shows pro cyclists using motors

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that don't write software but use software say the same thing about operating systems. "Why are there even more than one? It is absurd!"

Wow is this really what your sample is like? Most people I know implicitly understand the concept of consumer choice and don't have any trouble applying that to OSes. IPhone vs android probably played a big hand in that, but even before that, there was a good solid chunk that understood that Mac was an alternative to Windows (before OS X really blew up)

My guess is that you rarely spend time with people outside of tech without tipping them.
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