Li Jin stays high and dry with her Amphibious Bicycle.

Four sets of floats, made from standard office water cooler style bottles, keep the bike high and dry. Additionally, it looks as though they can be added and removed rather easily, making it true to the name of an amphibious bicycle, rather than water based alone.

Attaching the floats.

While I doubt it would be overly advantageous in a city with so many bridges like Pittsburgh, the recreation aspect would provide hours of fun on our three large waterways. I would be curious how deep the draft is, and what the performance is like on smaller streams; particularly going against the current.

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(Credit: Denmark Tourism Bureau)

It takes only 15 stationary bikes to maintain a full brightness of the 700 LEDs which cover the 17 meter tall tree.  Impressive and though provoking, especially as the article at CNET then dives into the eco and global warming side aspect.

Not covered in the article is the interesting highlight this puts on technology and improvements in various related arenas. Bicycles and generators have been around for the past century, but very infrequently saw use as electrical generation machines. Only after improving generation and light yielding devices, can we fall back on a primitive form of mechanical energy.

We have toyed with the idea of occasionally powering either of our two belt driven items (Leo and the yet un-named drill press) via bicycle. In this thought process, the issue of power must be looked at, and whether to convert the bicycle to electricity, then power the existing motors, or instead adapt the belt system. When written like so, it seems almost obvious that the most efficient system would be to skip the electric middle man. So why don’t we more often?

Maybe the answer to energy consumption does not lie in hydrogen cars and LED lights. Everyday simplicities brought to mechanical tasks use thousands of kilowatts each day. So maybe we should all hop on our bikes next time we want to open one of those automated sliding doors.