wake blake

So this shouldn't be that shocking, but it is: "the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in America." Now everything is "built from scratch" at one point, so if there's another car-free neighborhood in America (here's looking at you Macinack Island), not sure how well this claim would hold up. But who cares?  Sure it may be a clever ploy on the part of the developers to avoid putting in parking and jam more units into a site, but I don't think so. It looks like they're actually going for car-free. On purpose. So they baked a whole bunch of alternatives into their offering. This is something I've been thinking about. The small town we live in is ripe for infill with a bunch of tiny homes (or singlewides, park models or destination trailers) but they're against zoning (issue number one) and all of the car parking would be ugly (issue number two.) Lately I've been wond

Well geez, I wanted to write about ebikes, but I'm not quite ready to write about the ebike we just got, so I went scrolling through screenshots to see what I need to get rid of on my phone, and wound up here, with the screenshot above. What are we looking at? The top row of pictures were shown to people. Then the people were put into an fMRI, which scanned their brains as they thought about the image they were shown. Then that data was given to an AI, which produced the bottom row of pictures. You think of a teddy bear, tech reads your thoughts and makes an image of a teddy bear. Yes, I guess today we're starting off with the cutting edge of tech: brain to computer direct interfaces. Here's another one, that doesn't require an MRI machine. This is a working prototype from an MIT student. I forget the details, but the basic gyst is it listens to your thoughts, as I wrote in the caption. Then I think it transmits data via audio vibrati

Ok, we're going to stay away from ebikes again in this one, to the best of my ability. Which isn't great, considering we got our first ebike last week.  At top is a fun idea, a way to turn train tracks into, um, not quite micromobility. Or personal mobility. But something nicely in between train and car.  The MonoCab uses gyros to stabilize on one track, so two cars can pass each other. The idea is to run robotaxi-ish shared ride vehicles on existing train tracks.  This would be pretty neat to see where we live. We have train tracks running through town that basically connect to the nearest large city. Currently, we have two viable options for getting back and forth to that city. There's a bus that runs twice a day, or you drive. The drive involves an hour on a two way road. It's a pretty drive, but also pretty scary, especially at night or in the snow. An on-call train-cab might be just the ticket! If it feels like life i