• dragonfrog (unregistered) in reply to AbbydonKrafts
    denz:
    It seems no-one found out that the human body is already equipped with a heat-transfer system using a liquid medium, pumped (through one-way valves) through flexible tubes, etc.

    I wonder how many of the people commenting roughly to this effect, actually bicycle any meaningful distance, in winter, in a place where winter means it.

    When you ride your bike, you put weight on your hands. This cuts off the circulation significantly; in addition, your hands are more exposed to wind. On a day when you might be comfortable walking with only very thin gloves, your hands on the handlebars will quickly become very cold and numb, even with thick gloves on.

    In fact, there's been a type of gloves recently designed, meant to be worn under snowmobile mitts (those ones with ultrathick insulation, that go most of the way to the elbow, and leave room for light gloves underneath) that replicates the process of blood heating your hands. A fluid moves by capillary action, bringing heat from the armpits and upper arms, down to the hands and fingers.

  • Zylon (unregistered)

    Hey, has anybody pointed out that NASA didn't actually design the space pen yet?

  • akatherder (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    Hey, has anybody pointed out that NASA didn't actually design the space pen yet?

    You may be interested to find that blah blah Russia blah blah Fisher pens blah blah snopes!

  • Mikademus (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Original post by Mikademus:
    Most sane and good developers successfully combine creativity with pragmaticism. Quoting from the Hacker's Dictionary, "Drudgery and Boredom are Evil", while we know that precise, minimal and functional solutions are elegant, we all harbour mad scientists within who loves super-elaborate solutions, not for their practicality but for their self-entertainment value. My wager is that none of the above quoted developers had any intention of building those over-engineered solutions to the silly problem, but nonetheless were gratifyingly stimulated by generating them. 
    I doubt I'd enjoy conversing with the author of today's "WTF" or the party pooper quoted at the end.</div></BLOCKQUOTE>
    Anonymous:
    And I doubt I'd enjoy maintenance programming for your software, although it might prolong the contract somewhat. There's a difference between throwing around complex solutions for a laugh, and programming them for a career, and the article makes it apparent that the developers there do not know the difference.

    I'd argue that a good developer comes up with the solution that is most appropriate for the business requirements, rather than an over-engineered maintenance nightmare.

    You most certainly did misunderstand me. Good developers are creative yet pragmatic. I attempt to find the cleanest, most elegant solution to a problem. When a new approach is necessary I put my creativity to use. If you are a fond of clear and elegant software with much time spent on architectural design you'd enjoy maintaining my code. However, good developers need creative outlets, and the discussion in the article seemed a fine example of that. Had they'd been debating a 42-tiered database abstraction to implement in their next mission-critical build, on the other hand, then you'd had my permission to drag them out to the back yard and shove ants down their johns.

    NancyBoy:
    The people that the hacker's dictionary (jargon dictionary, geek dictionary...) describes do seem to like to waste huge amounts of time and effort on masturbatory exercises like this. I think it's their substitute for being creative, which is next to impossible for them. Most of the time their efforts are confined to regurgitating Simpson's quotes though.

    Now that's a generalisation if I've ever heard one, though it is also a quite moot one: that breed is (unfortunately) a dying one, few Ents walk among us nowadays. The True Hacker, the ideal described in the Hacker's Dictionary, rejoiced in clean, efficient code and maintainability is a common theme. More indicative to their ideal of order is perhaps that mischievous creativity was generally delegated to forums like the Obfuscated C Contest but live code was kept clear and clean. I'd say that todays situation with a multitude of inept developers is a greater problem then was ever any "creative" hacker-developers of yore.

    CAPTCHA: bling - no thanks, not my style, doesn't go with the ninja theme of last captcha

  • Konstantin Savenkov (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Ok, I feel like an idiot. Possibly because I am.

    Secondly, what is putting a sticker on a CD and burning it going to do? Is this for labeling the CD or attempting to burn some design on the bottom or what?

    Well, if you want to make, er, artistic burning on a writeable side of the CD, you can either write a program that will control laser to make artistic burning, or (and it is a way easier) cut your "design" from a piece of adhesive tape, applicate it to the writeable side of the CD, then burn any data that will fill all disk, then remove your application.

    The result of two actions described above is the same. It should be noted, the original problem was "I want to burn some picture on my CD, what should I do?", that was not a discussion of buisness model for such software :-)

  • (cs)

    I frequently ride in the winter. On one bicycle ride, I came home with ice in my water bottle that I hadn't put there.

    Proper gloves are enough for me. My feet and legs do get cold. I believe the physics behind this is that the feet and legs are spinning and have more wind passing over them then my hands.

  • Malfist (unregistered) in reply to eight days a week
    eight days a week:
    snoball:
    I don't like using thick warm gloves because it's much harder to operate shifters and the brake levers. I think the discussion that happened would have been lessened if the original poster had raised this issue.

    Just use a track bike: no shifters and no brake levers!

    This reminds me of a discussion I had once with an engineer. He wanted to design a bike light that could detect an approaching vehicle and adjust the intensity of its brightness accordingly. It would use all sorts of sensors to calculate the distance of the vehicle.

    I told him he should get a reflector.

    You do know they make the thermalite stuff that's really thin but extremly warm, check walmarts sporting goods

  • Gus (unregistered) in reply to sir_flexalot
    sir_flexalot:
    poss:
    Reminds me of the story about the millions that Nasa spent during the Space Race, developing a pen that could write in zero-gravity.

    The Russians just used a pencil.

    Sorry to hammer with posts, but that's a common misconception. Graphite flakes off and gets in the equipment... Russians use something like a grease marker. Still funny though!

    Not to mention graphite burns very very easily in high a high oxygen content environment... so break your pencil in an enriched or 100% oxygen environment and let it float into an electonic circuit or gather a bit of static electricity ... BOOM.

    http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

  • akatherder (unregistered) in reply to Konstantin Savenkov
    Konstantin Savenkov:
    akatherder:
    Ok, I feel like an idiot. Possibly because I am.

    Secondly, what is putting a sticker on a CD and burning it going to do? Is this for labeling the CD or attempting to burn some design on the bottom or what?

    Well, if you want to make, er, artistic burning on a writeable side of the CD, you can either write a program that will control laser to make artistic burning, or (and it is a way easier) cut your "design" from a piece of adhesive tape, applicate it to the writeable side of the CD, then burn any data that will fill all disk, then remove your application.

    The result of two actions described above is the same. It should be noted, the original problem was "I want to burn some picture on my CD, what should I do?", that was not a discussion of buisness model for such software :-)

    Fair enough. When someone asks something that I consider to be difficult and useless, it's only natural to ask them why. You can usually generate an alternative solution or convince them of another approach.

    captcha: burned (how fitting)

  • (cs) in reply to akatherder

    Can the PTBs please fix the board so that I don't have to relogin every single time I comment...? "Remember me" doesn't.

    akatherder:
    First of all I don't understand the assembly line and box thing. If you put the last box on top of the bin after filling it, it would seem the box would be in your way and make it even harder to see when the bin is getting empty.

    I think the idea is that the box is quite big but shallower than the bin, which is mounted quite high - when the box goes into the bin it sits on top of the parts and protrudes from the bin; once the bin is depleted, the level of parts is down to the point where the top of the box can no longer be seen... which means there's room for another boxful of parts in the bin.

    (If this were USEnet I'd attempt some ASCII art to illustrate, but in this wonderful world of easy-to-use graphical software and spiffy proportional fonts... sorry.)

  • KattMan (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Ok, I feel like an idiot. Possibly because I am.

    First of all I don't understand the assembly line and box thing. If you put the last box on top of the bin after filling it, it would seem the box would be in your way and make it even harder to see when the bin is getting empty.

    Secondly, what is putting a sticker on a CD and burning it going to do? Is this for labeling the CD or attempting to burn some design on the bottom or what?

    Someone already answered your cd question well, but the answer to your bin problem I think was lacking.

    The peice you are missing is that this bin was an automated feed that feed the parts from the bottom of the bin. Put fill bin from top, turn empty bin over and place on top of parts. As parts are feed from bottom into the assembly line the level of the parts will drop, eventually hiding the upturned empty bin placed on top of them.

  • Benanov (can't login) (unregistered) in reply to gwenhwyfaer
    gwenhwyfaer:
    I think the idea is that the box is quite big but shallower than the bin, which is mounted quite high - when the box goes into the bin it sits on top of the parts and protrudes from the bin; once the bin is depleted, the level of parts is down to the point where the top of the box can no longer be seen... which means there's room for another boxful of parts in the bin.

    (If this were USEnet I'd attempt some ASCII art to illustrate, but in this wonderful world of easy-to-use graphical software and spiffy proportional fonts... sorry.)

    OP: Think "hopper" where you load from the top and pull from the bottom.

  • (cs)

    Hilarious! Saw something like this happening just yesterday.

    Is it higher education that makes people forget simple solutions?

  • (cs) in reply to dragonfrog
    dragonfrog:
    denz:
    It seems no-one found out that the human body is already equipped with a heat-transfer system using a liquid medium, pumped (through one-way valves) through flexible tubes, etc.

    I wonder how many of the people commenting roughly to this effect, actually bicycle any meaningful distance, in winter, in a place where winter means it.

    I bike year-round. I's how I lost a lot of weight. You may want to look at your seat. It sounds like you should consider a gender-specific seat and adjust it for your physiology. Funnily enough, numb hands are often caused by a poorly adjusted seat.

    I wear motorcycle gloves in the winter. They're waterproof, breathable, warm, and they're designed to be worn with the hand holding something. (For some reason, a lot of bike gloves fit best only when your fingers are straight, like normal gloves.)

    There are another reasons to wear gloves besides warmth:

    1. When you wipe out, your gloves will save your skin.
    2. They pad your hands a little so they don't go as numb.
  • worthawholebean (unregistered)

    Wow. The ability of people to overcomplicate things is amazing.

  • (cs) in reply to Konstantin Savenkov
    Konstantin Savenkov:
    The alike story has happened in quite famous russian hardware forum site (http://ixbt.com). There was a thread where one person put an interesting question: how to burn some picture on a CD. Many software solutions was proposed, with strong mathematical basis (e.g. formulas that describe how to project bitmap to polar coordinates and then to a position on a spiral CD track). There was even man who claimed they made such software. After 400+ messages (with more fine grained formulas and techniques) the thread was killed on a flight by some man, who posted the following message: "Why don't you just cut your picture from adhesive tape, applicate it to a CD and then burn ANY data over it?"

    The products to do this actually exist in the form of Disc T@2 ("tattoo") from Yamaha and Lightscribe from HP:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_T%402

    I have one of those yamaha drives, but I am sure Lightscribe is more useful because you can put the labeling on the non-data side of the disc.

    Incidentally, I don't think that is a great example of things being overcomplicated because the "paper and scissors" approach the guy described could never give you the kind of results that using the drive could. For instance, the Disc T@2 technology could lay down many shades by changing the laser power and so could essentially print black and white pictures on the back of a disc.

    The links off that wikipedia article have pictures.

  • Sander (unregistered) in reply to AbbydonKrafts

    Moreover, this system seems to work just fine on most occassions.

  • eight days a week (unregistered) in reply to dragonfrog
    dragonfrog:
    I wonder how many of the people commenting roughly to this effect, actually bicycle any meaningful distance, in winter, in a place where winter means it.

    I don't know what winter means to you, but winter for me is usually 30 degrees F average with days as cold as 10 F. I bike to work every day and usually try to do training rides on weekends. Fortunately this winter has been pretty mild (no real snow yet).

    But you're right, I have a feeling that most people commenting don't ride in particularly cold weather.

  • SM (unregistered) in reply to NancyBoy
    NancyBoy:
    Most of the time their efforts are confined to regurgitating Simpson's quotes though.

    Are we still talking about OJ? ;)

  • Francois (unregistered) in reply to bob the dingo
    We'd simply use a thin inner-jacket (like a wind breaker) and run some flexible tubes from the tip of the sleeves to the midriff (which never seems to get cold). There'd be valved inlet and outlet water connectors at the sleeves to distribute the warmed water to the hands via a fine mesh of smaller tubes.

    The water would circulate due to the one-way valves and compressions of the device caused by walking/cycling movements.

    Wow, these guys managed to make a very good description of the human lymphatic circulation system from a 2-line requirement!

    Maybe there is something to that ID "theory" after all :-P

  • meshko (unregistered)

    The real WTF here is that the original guy didn't know how to use Google! I'm getting google ads for "headed motorcycle gloves" all over story page!!

  • Jx (unregistered) in reply to SM

    Reminds me of a requirements gathering session not too long ago. It is not that suprising that in a technical consulting firm the hammer for every nail is a web app.

    Requirements (1) Need a calendaring application that works like Outlook. (2) Needs to give reminders just like Outlook. (3) Needs a way to track contacts, like Outlook. (4) Need access to it over the web (like OWA). (5) Needs to integrate with Outlook.

    Q: Couldn't you just use Outlook since all the users already have it installed and are familiar with it? A: No, it doesn't meet our needs for this project. Q: So you want our (2 person) team to build a product like Outlook, but with more features for your project? A: Yes, but we need it in a couple of weeks. Q: What is wrong with Outlook, you could have that TODAY. A: It doesn't meet our needs, I can't describe why not.

    On another similar encounter I was asked to build an application to keep track of (I can't even remember what anymore). Requirements:

    1. Single user.
    2. Items to keep track of <50.
    3. Attributes of items to track 5-10.
    4. Use cases: Enter data, look up data.

    The requestor wasn't happy when I suggested Excel, or a legal notepad and pencil.

  • (cs) in reply to worthawholebean

    Another tale of over-complication is in order.

  • Nobody (unregistered) in reply to bob the dingo

    Home

  • Nobody (unregistered)

    sdafsd

  • Nobody (unregistered)

    asdfasdf

  • Nobody (unregistered)

    The captcha is silly

  • Nobody (unregistered)

    The captcha isn't even checked

  • Olie (unregistered)

    Hey, can we get sir_[sorry, I forgot] to post a URL to a high-res version of that demotivator? I think I need it for my office :)

  • (cs) in reply to asfwefaw
    asfwefaw:
    poss:
    Reminds me of the story about the millions that Nasa spent during the Space Race, developing a pen that could write in zero-gravity.

    The Russians just used a pencil.

    Oh God. Please go to snopes.com every time someone tells you something, because you don't seem to possess any critical-thinking skills.

    http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

    I'm guessing that asfwefaw is a pianist. Interesting little moniker; all left-handed, and has a trill on the first beat of the second 4/4 bar ... but I digress.

    First of all, let's not kid ourselves. 90% of everything on the Internet is crud (Sturgeon's law, and I've just verified the precise figure on, er, the Internet). This is in fact a conservative estimate with regard to the Internet, and misses out the huge amount of stuff that is not just crud, but also mind-rotting crud.

    I wouldn't go around recommending Internet sites as Ultimate Authorities if I were you. Not even snopes, which is actually quite thought-provoking and generally sane; so I looked it up. (See what happens whenn you provide a URL?)

    Right. Well, first things first. Snopes offers no evidence that "poss" is absent critical thinking skills. It doesn't mention him by name, it doesn't offer criteria for the judgement of such skills, and, generally, it doesn't really suggest that he's got the basic story wrong. And it's only a story, not an assertion.

    What snopes appears to do, to me, is to provide a decent summary of the origins of this particular meme. It's pretty non-judgemental (and therefore obviously not written by a software engineer), but it seems to support most of the comments, corrections, et al made under this current article.

    Or, on the other hand, one might just read the entry in snopes. With a view to "critical-thinking skills." (What's with the hyphen? This ain't German we're talking in, here...)

    My favourite part, for which I had to resort to opening up the original source, because the page is FUBAR, is this:

    "Because of the fire in <NOBR>Apollo 1,</NOBR> in which three Astronauts died, NASA required a writing instrument that would not burn in a 100% oxygen atmosphere. It also had to work in the extreme conditions of outer space"

    Well, that sums the case up for providing a usable escape hatch then. Not to mention not pumping 100% pure oxygen into the capsule when the astronauts are still on the ground.

    Incidentally, why isn't the Russian idea, ie using a grease-proof pencil, a better engineering solution?

    Oh, I know:

    Carnildo:
    sir_flexalot:
    poss:
    Reminds me of the story about the millions that Nasa spent during the Space Race, developing a pen that could write in zero-gravity.

    The Russians just used a pencil.

    Sorry to hammer with posts, but that's a common misconception. Graphite flakes off and gets in the equipment... Russians use something like a grease marker. Still funny though!

    And to further shoot that down, the pressurized pen was developed by an independent company, without any assurance that NASA would go for it.

    The pressurized pen has other advantages, too: it can write while upside-down here on Earth, and it won't leak ink in a low-pressure environment.

    Excuse me, I must go off and test this proposition. You're going to have to take my word for this (although you can look it up on snopes, if your critical-thinking faculties are sufficiently well advanced), but this seems to be true of a grease-proof pencil as well.

    My head is spinning because I just forced myself to write while upside-down here on Earth. I do have to quote my favourite comment here, because it's not the one that immediately occurred to me when I read the WTF, but it should have been:

    ajp:
    i gotta say, when ever i see anything about glove i think of the juice.

    [image]

  • TheRider (unregistered) in reply to Blame
    Blame:
    denz:
    It seems no-one found out that the human body is already equipped with a heat-transfer system using a liquid medium, pumped (through one-way valves) through flexible tubes, etc.
    Not only that, but one that reduces heat loss from the important areas by pumping less of said medium to the extremeties when they're cold. I'm sure we can override that safety feature, though.
    Override the safety feature? Easy. Just drink a few whiskeys before getting on the bicycle.
  • eppydoo (unregistered)

    effing brilliant. You savants who defend this sort of folderol make working in technology more painful than dealing with the ignoramuses who refuse to try to understand it.

  • Singletonitis (unregistered)

    Jaaa. Now i got a alias for those with Singletonitis disease, jjaaa

    http://www.theserverside.com/blogs/thread.tss?thread_id=42116

  • Eirik (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that the submitter and almost no one here understand that these guy was only kidding around. Just trying to come up with silly solutions. Anyone who isn't retarded understand that gloves is the obvious solution. The submitter seems completely clueless, I would hate to work with him.

  • (cs) in reply to sir_flexalot
    sir_flexalot:
    you know, we actually have these hand warmers here for if you don't have gloves. Pretty much any gas station sells them, it's some chemical in a little bag, feels like it's got little marbles in the bag. When you open the container, it just gets hot and stays hot for hours. If you hold those and the handles at the same time, you don't need gloves, so there already is a non-gloves solution. The correct path to a solution: find all the existing solutions, if none of those are suited to you THEN you create a new solution. You don't create a new solution and THEN look around and get mad that you reinvented the wheel!

    In their defense, they did at least try a Google search before trying to invent something. And to many people out there, if five minutes on Google doesn't find something, it must not exist.

  • SomeCoder (unregistered) in reply to eppydoo
    eppydoo:
    effing brilliant. You savants who defend this sort of folderol make working in technology more painful than dealing with the ignoramuses who refuse to try to understand it.

    Well one thing to keep in mind is that there is an enormous difference in discussing something like this purely for the intellectual enjoyment and actually writing code based on it.

    I would gladly join in a conversation about a 43-tier application and how it could work simply for the intellectual stimulation (which assumes that you are having a conversation with someone who is intelligent enough to not seriously suggest such an architecture). Would I write said 43-tier app? No, but discussing wild ideas can and does lead to innovation and at the very least can be enjoyable.

    Note: I'm not necessarily saying that today's WTF fits the above category.

  • (cs) in reply to Eirik
    Eirik:
    The real WTF is that the submitter and almost no one here understand that these guy was only kidding around. Just trying to come up with silly solutions. Anyone who isn't retarded understand that gloves is the obvious solution. The submitter seems completely clueless, I would hate to work with him.

    Oh no, there really are people out there who would go through a huge process to invent a brand new product when something like a glove would work just fine. If you have never had to work with one, please tell me where you work so I can apply for a job...

  • poopdeville (unregistered) in reply to OJ

    Or you could just use a clicker shifter, like the one my Kona Dew has. Pull a trigger, and you go up a gear. Push a trigger, and you go down a gear.

    Fixies are nice, especially for riding on ice though.

  • bendydan (unregistered) in reply to eight days a week
    eight days a week:
    dragonfrog:
    I wonder how many of the people commenting roughly to this effect, actually bicycle any meaningful distance, in winter, in a place where winter means it.
    I don't know what winter means to you, but winter for me is usually 30 degrees F average with days as cold as 10 F. I bike to work every day and usually try to do training rides on weekends. Fortunately this winter has been pretty mild (no real snow yet).

    But you're right, I have a feeling that most people commenting don't ride in particularly cold weather.

    Exactly. Coldest we've had so far this year was -28c (=-14f), and that's still easily manageable. Big layered mittens work fairly well, but I have poor circulation in my hands at the best of times, and even when my fingers are warm my thumbs still get cold because they're not next to anything else.

    The secret is to get mittens with integrated liners rather than trying to layer, because even with no shifters to worry about I still need to be able to move my hands from on the brakes to not-on-the-brakes to get enough force on hills, and as someone else pointed out, the more extra flappy bits of glove there are past fingertips, the harder this is to do.

    I'm generally on a fixie or singlespeed, because there's so much gravel and salt put down around here (Calgary) that the deraillers get all bunged up, and phantom shifting is a real pain on hills. (and, yes, I have brakes on my fixie, because there's three solid blocks of steep downhill on my way to work with lights at the bottom, and I don't have enough leg strength to keep speed down without brakes).

    The worst days are after a big dump of snow -- 6 inches of fresh snow is tiring but possible, but 2 inches of lightly-packed snow (after one or two cars have been past) is awful, you can't ride over it, and it's a slog to get through it, even ignoring the tendency to slide around the place.

    -- dan

  • me (unregistered)

    That "tubes for redistributing heat" system sounds suspiciously like "blood" to me :P

  • Leo (unregistered) in reply to dragonfrog
    dragonfrog:
    When you ride your bike, you put weight on your hands. This cuts off the circulation significantly; in addition, your hands are more exposed to wind. On a day when you might be comfortable walking with only very thin gloves, your hands on the handlebars will quickly become very cold and numb, even with thick gloves on.

    Then the trick is not to put weight on your hands this way. If you cut off you circulation you are sitting somehow wrong (and thus bending your wrists too much). And if you are unable to adapt - buy yourself a nice device to rest your weight on your arms: http://triathlon.ksv-baunatal.de/Heiko-aufsatz1-web.gif

    And if you are still getting cold fingers/extremeties - a bodily function as some people pointed out - this might be a warning that it is really too cold to stay outside any longer. If the marvellous system you described saps out all energy from your body to warm your entire body ou might find yourself beeing cold rather sooner then later.

    I like the gloves - solution. Preserving the energy. Preserving the work time ;)

  • bob (unregistered)

    RE: "good developers need creative outlets"

    Those should be called "hobbies." That's why it's healthy, and good for whatever project they are working on, for them to go home, every once in a while.

    WRT Gloves, http://www.hippohands.com/index.htm seems to answer most of the problems cited above by cold-weather biking enthusiasts.

    But I think I've reached that age where I realize I don't know it all and it probably has already been thought of so now, the first path I go down before crafting a peddle-powered-heat-transfer-hand-warming device is to do a little research and see what I can leverage. Taking out the rounds of rowsing design and refinment does make the job less envigorating, but I found that the job gets done sooner this way and can go home to my hobbies and put that energy towards something safer.

  • snoball (unregistered) in reply to OJ
    OJ:
    Re: snoball

    The solution is simple and beautiful: fixed gear bike. No brake or shift levers to worry about. Also makes you work harder and thus increases heat output.

    Racing style handlebar is also nice in winter: The cork tape wrap is a good insulator and Campagnolo levers are quite easy to use even with mittens on.

    Racing style handlebar when half your commute is covered in snow? I don't think that's gonna be safe. If they're used in addition to regular style ones, that'd be ok.

    Additionally, fixed gears are pretty impractical for people who need to do a quick (~20 min) ride to work. No gear is suitable for all speeds they'll encounter.

    Even these http://www.gerbing.com/heat/gloveslw.html deaden sensitivity too much, IMO.

  • (cs)
    sir_flexalot:
    you know, we actually have these hand warmers here for if you don't have gloves. ... If you hold those and the handles at the same time, you don't need gloves, so there already is a non-gloves solution

    Those aren't to hold; they're to put inside your gloves or boots when it's really cold. True when working, but doubly true when biking or skiing. Trendy expensive skiing gloves even have special pockets for them.

    Remember, if you're biking, you need to add 20 mph or so to the wind chill. Holding something warm in your hand while biking would not only be a really dangerous idea (good luck steering, supporting yourself, braking, and shifting while doing that) but just wouldn't help. The wind cuts through light gloves easily; bare fingers are unthinkable.

    I used to bike to classes and work every day in Iowa winter. I never used anything beyond a coat, lobster gloves, an under-helmet skull cap, and sometimes a face mask, but I wouldn't laugh at someone who wants more. The original idea was not that bad. Even their final idea might be something many of us would buy if professionally developed. Admittedly, I have doubts, and for a "hey, we can throw this together this weekend" project, it's hopelessly complicated. Not worthy of ridicule, though.

  • iw (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    You may be interested to find that blah blah Russia blah blah Fisher pens blah blah snopes!
    Hey, that reminds me of this story I heard: Apparently, the American space program was looking to develop a pen that writes in space, because regular pens don't work in zero-gravity. They ended up spending millions of dollars developing it. The funny part is, the Russians had a simpler solution: they used a pencil!!
  • M (unregistered)

    You lose grip when you wear gloves. Some people don't like gloves.

  • (cs)

    My favorite part is that the design would ultimately have to include gloves. In fact, to improve system performance and reduce heat loss, they would probably even be insulated gloves.

  • (cs) in reply to M
    M:
    You lose grip when you wear gloves. Some people don't like gloves.

    If you truly want to be The Complicator in a way these people were not, invent some weird wind shield device sort of like the air doors they have at casinos in Las Vegas. You'd pretty much be throwing "human-powered" out of the bicycle thing, and it'd be an unwieldy contraption, but whatever...

    If you don't want to be The Complicator, buy grippy gloves. I have some; they're nice.

  • Mooo (unregistered) in reply to Rick
    Proper gloves are enough for me. My feet and legs do get cold. I believe the physics behind this is that the feet and legs are spinning and have more wind passing over them than my hands.

    My wife has Raynaud's. She uses special gloves with built-in batteries and electric heaters. These heated gloves are available in regular department stores, usually with the ski equipment. So I imagine they're popular. They are a bit bulky, but not too awkward for cycling.

  • JarFil (unregistered)

    KISS my gloves!

Leave a comment on “The Complicator's Gloves”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article