Word: wheele
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Easier said than done. First, Chemist Jones tested the common theory that the bicycle's front wheel acts like a stabilizing gyroscope. He attached a second front wheel, parallel to the first that did not quite touch the ground. It could thus be spun in the opposite direction of the standard wheel, canceling out the gyroscopic effect. Jones optimistically named his creation URB I (for Unridable Bicycle 1). But surprisingly enough it proved to be easily ridable...
...Caster. Next, Jones investigated the notion that a bicycle's stability somehow depends on the position of the front wheel's point of contact with the ground. The rider, after all, usually steers instinctively in the direction of a potential fall, thereby moving the point of contact to one side and increasing the bike's stability. To foil that balancing act, Jones replaced the regular front wheel with a small furniture caster mounted directly in line with the steering-post axis so that turning would not shift the point of contact. Trouble was. the caster quickly became...
Next, Jones turned the front wheel 180 degrees so that its point of contact was farther behind the steering axis than it is in an ordinary bike. Instead of riding the bike himself, he simply pushed it off. "Incredibly," he reports in Physics Today, "it ran on for yards before falling over." By moving back the contact point, Jones had inadvertently increased the front wheel's torque. This twisting force normally counteracts the bike's tendency to fall over by steering it in the direction it is leaning. URB III was. in fact, even more stable than...
...pointblank range, scarcely 20 yards, the guerrillas fired three U.S.-made 82-mm. bazooka shells. They could hardly miss. One shell exploded above the driver's seat; he was killed instantly but clung grotesquely to the wheel as the bus swayed another 60 yards down the road. The other shells hit the body of the vehicle, tearing out the floor and spraying the occupants with shrapnel. Bodies, bookbags and lunch boxes were strewn around the wreckage. Two teachers and seven children died instantly: another student and teacher died later, and the remaining 20 aboard the bus were all wounded...
...invention of murder is even more ingenious: Cain learns how to kill Abel with the trial-and-error self-instruction of a man inventing the first wheel. All ends on a chorus of Moonlight Bay that seems to forecast with terrifying accuracy the sweetly ominous banality of millions of lives to come as sex and murder endlessly cycle...