David Jones some years ago assaulted humanity’s embarrassing lack of understanding of why moving bicycles are so stable. Jones performed a series of experiments, from which he learned some surprising things. He revealed them in this article: “The Stability of the Bicycle,” David E.H. Jones, Physics Today, April 1970, pp. 34-40. (Thanks to Catherine Klauss […]
Tag: balance
Introducing the Horse Gyro (new patent)
Attention horse owners/riders: Does your horse sometimes have the inclination to lean the ‘wrong’ way when ridden? Have you thought about fitting it with a set of gyroscopes? Inventor Greg Collier, of Lubbock, Texas, has been granted a new US patent which might go some way towards alleviating equine equilibria insufficiencies. “This disclosure relates generally […]
How a bicycle balances
There’s still some physics mystery, for many people, about how a bicycle balances. Bill Steele wrote about the physics of bicycles balancing themselves, for Cornell University’s Ezra magazine. Nicole Frýbortová demonstrates, in this video, something about how a human rider balances on a bicycle:
The bricycle, a nearly unrideable bicycle/tricycle hybrid
This contraption, the bricycle, is in vital ways intermediate between being a bicycle and being a tricycle, it is adjustable to act as the one, or the other, or something inbetween (a better name for it might have been biandortricycle). The bricycle is said (and demonstrated here) to be almost unridable. Its the work of Owen […]
Foot size and balancing – a link?
Doctoral student Hai Qiu and professor Shuping Xiong of the Ergonomics and Applied Biomechanics Lab at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Korea, have recently been investigating ‘The Influence of Foot Sizes on Human Balance’ “This study investigated the relationship between foot size and human balance performance. The balance performances of 30 […]
If you lose teeth, will you topple over?
If you lose a tooth, another tooth, and several more teeth, will your balance suffer? That’s the question behind this study: “The effect of tooth loss on body balance control among community-dwelling elderly persons,” M. Yoshida et al., International Journal of Prosthodontics, 2009 Mar-Apr;22(2):136-9. The authors, at Hiroshima City General Rehabilitation Center, Japan. begin by […]
America’s mean streak
The Strange Maps blog calls this map [reproduced below] “America’s Mean Streak”, explaining: The mean centre of US population is “the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the US would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one […]