An Electric Motorcycle With Old School Aesthetics

Read about this bike and more on Wired.com

"Don’t let the old-school aesthetics fool you–this beautiful motorcycle is thoroughly modern and headed straight for the Isle of Man TT race.

The Saroléa SP7 marks the return of a storied Belgian marque after half a century, and it’s easily the prettiest electric motorcycle we’ve seen since Electra Racing brought an electrified Norton Featherbed to the TTXGP. Despite the classic café racer styling, Saroléa has built a leading-edge machine with a carbon fiber frame and swingarm. The motor is good for 130 kilowatts–Saroléa says that translates to 180 horsepower, but our math puts it closer to 173. Whatever the figure, it’s definitely in literbike territory. Saroléa claims the bike will hit 60 mph from a standstill in 2.8 seconds; top speed is limited to 155 mph.

The bike uses an axial flux motor. Most electric motors direct the flux, or the flow of the electric field, outward through air between the moving rotor and stationary stator. The SP7’s axial flux motor sends the electric field on a parallel path, along the motor’s axle, which means the bike can use lighter and thinner “pancake rotors.” These rotors are ideal for producing power at constantly varying speeds, something vital for going fast through turns, dips, and rises along a race course.

Electric bikes have been racing at the Isle of Man TT for a couple years now, but they haven’t hit the same speed and performance benchmarks of their internal combustion counterparts. Electrics have topped 100 mph on the TT course, but gasoline bikes regularly hit 130 mph looping the 37.7 mile course. But with marques like Honda, and now Saroléa, competing in the electric category, expect to see performance leaps.

If Saroléa doesn’t sound familiar, that’s because the Belgian marque is returning to motorcycles after 50 years. The company was founded in 1850 as an arms and munitions maker, then moved on to bicycles and eventually motorcycles. It disappeared after merging with another Belgian motorcycle company, Gillet Herstal. While a motorcycle brand with that history that might be content to revive classic styling with modern engines, Saroléa has instead built one of the most futuristic motorcycles we’ve seen.

Saroléa has signed 35-year-old Scot Robert Wilson to ride the SP7 at the Isle of Man TT, which takes place from May 24 to June 6. Wilson, when not professionally racing motorcycles, works as an architect.

Watch the unveiling in the video below."


Official reveal of the Saroléa SP7 electric superbike from Saroléa Racing on Vimeo.

Want To Cut Your Grass Faster?

Worlds fastest lawn mower and one hell of a cool build

Many a time on the back stretches of my lawn I postulate on ways to cut it faster or how many cans of beer I can drink while mowing. Yes, these are time tested problems and ones in which this shorebilly tinkerer thinks of what else can be created with a lawn mower. Did you see our lawn mower pirate ship?

Knowing that there are other gear heads out there who aspire to greatness with what might be simple tools is a great feeling. My grease soaked hat sends a cheers out to these Brits that just conquered a Guiness Book World Record with a lawnmower that hit 116+ mph. Bravo!!!!

Find a treasure trove more on Wired Autopia

For some, there’s nothing better than spending a lazy Sunday cutting the grass on a riding mower. For others, ripping around a racetrack is the perfect way to unwind on the weekend. Honda thought they could combine the two, and the result is a 109-horsepower beast that just set the world speed record for lawnmowers. Yes, that’s a thing.

Honda’s U.K. division joined up with its British Touring Car Championship partner Team Dynamics and tore apart a Honda HF2620 Lawn Tractor before revamping the whole thing with a custom-fab chassis and a 1000cc engine from a Honda VTR Firestorm motorcycle. For good measure, the team took the suspension and wheels from an ATV to cope with the extra grunt.

Of course, this is a lawn mower we’re talking about. Guinness, sticklers that they are, required that the Mean Mower be able to actually cut grass. So Team Dynamics created a custom cutter deck out of fiberglass and installed a fuel tank, high-capacity oil cooler, and secondary water cooler for the radiator in the mower’s grass bag to preserve as much of the look of the original tractor as possible.

There’s a six-speed paddle shift tranny, along with a custom racing seat and exhaust, and since they couldn’t find the right size steering rack for something this small, they pilfered one from a Morris Minor. All that adds up to a mower geared for a top speed in excess of 130 mph with the 109 hp 1000cc engine propelling its 308 pounds from 0-60 in just 4 seconds.

Damn you Honda for beating me at something I have always dreamed of, worlds fastest lawn mower

Two electric motors were installed on the cutter deck, with 3mm steel cable spinning at 4000 rpm making to keep the judges happy. It can actually cut grass at up to 15 mph, more than double the speed of the machine on which it was based.

The world record was set at the IDIADA Proving Ground, in Tarragona, Spain on a 2km stretch of tarmac. Top Gear writer Piers Ward was behind the wheel, averaging 116.57 mph over two runs in opposite directions through a 100 meter speed trap, crushing the previous lawn mower speed record of 87.83 mph.

Ward wrote that the mower was stable, with “no wobbles, no drama.” Sounds safe enough, even if it doesn’t have a seat belt.

Beats Music Plans To Crush Spotify Through Algorithms

Beats' Music aims to crush all other streaming music providers by using a complex and unique algorithm to find music specifically catered to your listening tastes

Read more on Wired

"Beats Music won’t be joining the most-tracks arms race when it launches Tuesday. Instead, the new subscription service brought to you by Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will win converts through a potent mix of smarter algorithms and human curation. From the moment you first open the app, every interaction is recorded and used to determine the next album, playlist, and track to serve up. The result is more like a personalized mixtape than an online jukebox.

“No one was doing a music service; everyone was building a music server,” Beats Music chief executive Ian Rogers told WIRED. While services like Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody have some social discovery tools built in, they all launched similar products in an era when the rule was he with the most tracks wins. As a result, those companies got caught in a race to be the biggest. As they concentrated on the enormity of their music catalogs, their discovery mechanisms lagged. For instance, Rdio’s “Heavy Rotation” discovery option presents you with music your friends currently are enjoying, but it’s not smart enough to tell you to listen to David Bowie’s Hunky Dory because you love Lou Reed’s Transformer.

That’s where Beats Music is different. The service is betting on smarts instead of sheer depth. While it will have enough songs to compete — anybody entering the game at this point has to — with a library millions of tracks deep, it hopes its unique approach to music discovery tools will give it an edge.

As soon as you begin using the streaming service, Beats starts logging your “music DNA.” This serves as a personal profile used to determine which albums and tracks would be most relevant to you. To start generating your DNA, the service asks rudimentary questions, like which bands and genres you love.

But it takes other things into account. Your age is especially important to Beats Music. Tell it when you were born, and it figures out when you were in high school. The music of your youth — the stuff that was popular when you first got a Walkman or an iPod, the band that made it big when you got your driver’s license, the record that was all over MTV just before your freshman year of college — is the music with the strongest memories for you. It’s a fixed point in time that’s the most culturally and musically relevant to you. And it’s being crunched by the company’s algorithm.

Your sex matters, too; women and men usually have different tastes. Also important to Beats: the volume at which you listen to music. Which artists do you crank up? Who do you play quietly? It even tracks the music you send to Airplay speakers. The songs you use to fill your home are given a different mathematical weight than the songs you use to pass time at work.

But the system doesn’t solely rely on algorithms. It’s also backstopped by a small army of curators and behavioral scientists. This human element is there to help present music that doesn’t simply sound like the music you might enjoy, but also feels like it. Just because you listen to Mumford & Sons doesn’t mean you’d want to listen to a bunch of songs featuring banjos, for instance. You’d probably be more at home listening to Arcade Fire than Earl Scruggs. Humans can help make that determination. Algorithms can’t.

At launch, the app takes all this information and presents a personalized “Just for You” list of albums and playlists. The Influencers’ picks are especially fun. My love for Depeche Mode (especially Violator) was picked up by the service without my direct input. The list is filled with David Bowie, T-Rex, Joy Division, The Ronettes, The Beach Boys, and others. While listening, the connection is suddenly apparent.

All this personalization and curation is the result of input from music producer Jimmy Iovine, a longtime proponent of subscription services, and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who is the company’s chief creative officer. Reznor was key in fine-tuning the curation and personalization aspects, but both he and Iovine wanted an experience that resonates with listeners and artists. That includes fixing how the artists’ pages are presented.

When you discover a new band, it can be difficult to determine which of their albums you might enjoy. The app solves this by presenting the essential albums for any given artist. Search the Beach Boys, and you’re shown Pet Sounds and The Smile Sessions, not that horrible Still Cruisin’ album from the late-’80s. Plus, actual album release dates are used instead of the date they were added to the streaming service. This is great when you want to hear 1970s Bowie instead of 1980s Bowie. Yes, there is a difference.

Beats Music won’t have a free tier. It’ll cost $10 a month, with a special for AT&T customers of $15 a month that includes five family members and 10 devices. This is an anomaly in a field where almost every service offers a free way in for listeners. But then, Iovine and Dre were instrumental in convincing people we didn’t need the lousy earbuds that ship with smartphones and music players.

“We know people will pay for something where there is value,” said Rogers. “Enough people pay for headphones, it’s an exciting business. We think we can do the same thing here.”"

Jack Black Was Onto Something...

Jack Black may have been onto something a few years back in his movie Nacho Libre. Not just the fact that Lucha Libre is huge in Mexico but the fact that it puts the fun back in wrestling while also injecting it with an air of mystery. 

Jack Black in Nacho Libre

Wrestling has always been about larger than life characters, but there is just something alluring about watching a Lucha Libre match that is quite different from the bouts we see here in the US. Read up on the article below and have some insight into a recent match in Tijuana, Mexico as seen by a writer from Wired Magazine.

Various Lucha Libre posters from events in Reno, Nevada

Luchadores masks at a market in Mexico

Lucha Libre - Heros of the Ring advertising

Lucha Libre ring girl

Link to original article on Wired.com


When a friend heard I was going to Tijuana one Friday night a few years back, he shook his head and said, “Dude, you’re going to die.” I could only laugh as I said, “Naw, I’m not going to die. I’m going to lucha libre.”


Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about badass pro wrestling, Mexican-style.


As a wee Sol, I was fascinated by the professional wrestling I saw on TV and loved trying to catch them faking the drama. It was like trying to catch Santa (mom) stuffing presents in my stocking. There was something, too, about the crazy costumes and improbable personas that piqued my curiosity.There has in recent years been a plague of violence along the border, and I don’t mean to make light of it. But I figured if I was going to Tijuana looking like a goofy tourist and focusing my attention on the wrestling arena, the greatest threat I’d face would be a flying chair or two. Turned out it wasn’t even that bad. I didn’t even get Montezuma’s revenge.


So you can understand why I’d been wanting to catch lucha libre in TJ for quite some time. I got my chance while chasing down some Weird Sports in SoCal. From downtown San Diego, I took public transportation to the border and wandered along the nutty zig-zag pedestrian walkway across the border.






It’s easy to catch the action. Bouts are held almost every Friday at the Auditorio Municipal Fausto Gutierrez, a mere seven minutes from the border. It’s cheap, too, with tickets starting at five bucks.
I’m still kind of mad at myself for taking French in high school. What a waste. Sure, I can order a café au lait with the best of them, but Spanish would have been so much more useful. Predictably, plenty of people speak English in TJ, including my cabbie, who shuttled me to the auditorium. I found an ATM for some dinero and hopped in line for tickets. Few people were springing for the premier ringside section, so I joined the crowd in the cheap seats. Usually, I’ll try to wrangle a press pass, but sometimes it’s easier to go as a fan with a camera. And more fun. So that’s what I did.


I went through security with my gear with no problems. And then I found myself laughing at all the grown men wearing luchador masks being frisked by federales looking for weapons. It was surreal.





Hey Wiki. I’ve got a question for ya: What’s the story with lucha libre?


Well, Sol, in the early 1900s, professional wrestling was mostly a regional phenomenon in Mexico until Salvador Lutteroth founded the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (Mexican Wrestling Enterprise) in 1933, giving the sport a national foothold. The promotion company flourished and quickly became the premier spot for wrestlers. As television became a viable entertainment medium during the 1950s, Lutteroth could broadcast wrestling across the nation, subsequently yielding a popularity explosion for the sport. Moreover, the emergence of television allowed Lutteroth to turn lucha libre’s first breakout superstar into a national pop-culture phenomenon.


Thanks Wiki. Very insightful. And what’s the story on the masks?


Good question, man. Masks (máscaras) have been used from the beginning and have a historical significance to Mexico in general, dating to the Aztecs. Early masks were simple, with basic colors to distinguish the wrestler. In modern lucha libre, masks are colorfully designed to evoke the images of animals, gods, ancient heroes and other archetypes, whose identity the luchador assumes during a performance.


One thing I noticed is how family-friendly lucha libre is. Kids stared wide-eyed, mouths agape, at the body-slamming ballet. I’m guessing that’s how I looked when I was their age, watching WWF on the TV. I’ve seen smaller-production lucha Libre in Latino neighborhoods in L.A. and Denver. There’s a sense of love and trust between the wrestlers and the fans, and the whole thing feels like the world’s most awesome family reunion. Kids wander around the ring as sweaty sportsmen make sure not to squish them, even as they taunt fans who usually include their wives. For most of the night, I just wandered around taking photos, admiring the frenzied atmosphere and sipping on my namesake cerveza. Yep, living large.


After the bout, I caught a cab and returned back to the border after stopping for some amazing tacos. When I approached the American border officer, he looked at me straight faced and asked “Do you have anything to declare?”


“Definitely,” I said. “I declare I had a great time.”

Lucha Libre in Tijuana, Mexico

How Spotify Works: Pay The Majors, Use P2P Technology

We have been professing our love about Spotify for a few months now but if you have been interested in checking out the service and wondering just how they operate, read the article below.The amount of choices on the service leave us scratching out brain thinkin' on new songs to listen to and its with the plethora of offerings that we find the most enjoyment. Hell if you want to dive into Chaupin or Bach or move into country or metal, its all a few clicks away.

Link to original article over on NPR.org 

Ken Parks, head of Spotify's New York office: "With a streaming service like Spotify that gives you access to everything in the world instantaneously, those distinctions between ownership and access tend to disappear."

If you've ever tried listening to music on a web site, you've probably had the experience of waiting ... and waiting ... for a song to start. The cloud music service Spotify thinks it's found a way around to get music to your computer faster; employing some of the same technology the music industry has been fighting against for years.

One of the first things you notice about Spotify is how quickly it starts playing the song you want to hear — even if it's not already stored on your computer. There's no wait for buffering or downloading. Spotify feels, in a word, instant.

John Pavley, Spotify's VP of engineering, says, "We're set up so that we can deliver the music with a meantime average of 285 milliseconds. Which is, like, super-fast."

That number he mentioned — 285 milliseconds — may sound arbitrary. But Charlie Hellman, director of product development for Spotify, says it's not. According to Hellman, "The human perception of instant — if you hit a button that's tangible in the world — is something like 250 milliseconds. By bringing the time to play on our service down to about 285 milliseconds, the perception is that you already have the file on your computer — that it's instant."

Spotify launched in Europe three years ago, and in the U.S. this past August. The basic idea behind the company isn't brand new. Music streaming services — sites where you pay a monthly fee for access to zillions of songs — have been around for a decade. But they've never broken through to a mass market.

 

Eliot Van Buskirk, who writes about music technology for Wired and Evolver.fm, says Spotify might. "To an extent, Spotify is basically like other services we've had," Van Buskirk says. "But the difference is, it has, I think, reduced the friction for people trying this stuff out. And that was one of the first things I noticed: it's just impossibly fast."

Spotify hopes to use that speed to lure consumers to the free, advertising-supported version of its service — then convince them to pay a monthly fee to use Spotify on their phones and mobile devices. Its target audience is the millions of people who continue to download music for free from peer-to-peer networks.

"The problem with the environment when Spotify launched the service over three years ago is that the illegal alternatives were better, simply better than the legal ones," says Ken Parks, head of Spotify's New York office.

Parks says Spotify is trying to build a service in which creators get paid, but the user's experience doesn't suffer. "With a streaming service like Spotify that gives you access to everything in the world instantaneously," says Parks, "those distinctions between ownership and access tend to disappear."

To make this happen, Spotify borrows a few tricks from the peer-to-peer networks. Instead of downloading a single song file from its own server to you, Spotify searches for copies of the song wherever it can find them, including the computers of other Spotify users.

"Behind the scenes while the music is playing, we're grabbing it from wherever we can," says Pavley. "You can't interact with the P2P network, it's just a little facility that we use to move things along very quickly."

Before he came to Spotify Pavley was actually VP of engineering for Limewire, a popular peer-to-peer network. Unlike the P2Ps it's trying to replace, Spotify actually has licensing deals with the major record labels. And in September the company announced a deal with Facebook. Van Buskirk says that allows Facebook users to automatically share the songs they're listening to via Spotify.

"It gets closer and closer to that original Napster feeling," he says. "'What do my friends have? Can I have that?' And now it's like, 'Yes, you can.' And there's a whole mechanism for finding out what they have that you're already using anyway."

But Van Buskirk says Spotify's deals with the major record labels didn't come cheap. Spotify says it has more than 2 million paying users worldwide — although the company declined to discuss how many of them are in the U.S. Van Buskirk, and others, think the company will have to sign up a lot more if it's going to make a profit.