This reminds me of the backwards brain bicycle a bit [1]. I get that the argument they’re making here is one of physics - but failing to ride a counterintuitive bike isn’t something that can just be ‘done’ without a lot of practice!
But taking the headset off, now everything was upside down.
Interesting dude. Experiments seem to have been about a century ago.
(I thought I'd read that this had been done earlier, but Stratton comes up when looking for "glasses that turned everything upside down" as mentioned)
[0]: A fixie is a bike with no freewheel. So the pedals follow the back wheel, and the other way. So if I pedal backwards, the bike goes the other way.
(1) In Germany we do this in clubs and proper sports halls as seen in the video with elastic flooring. Don't attempt tarmac until you definitely know what you're doing.
It's also very safe to try out and do, which is counterintuitive to most people who haven't tried. Overwhelmingly the most common failure mode on a unicycle is that you just stop riding it, and then it either gets ahead of you or behind you, and you hop onto the ground.
Your body's also always approximately vertical no matter what they incline you're riding up/down is. So e.g. riding down stairs on a unicycle is much safer than on a bike, if you screw it up you just let it roll ahead of you and you're standing on the steps.
I'll do that without hesitation on a unicycle, but on a bicycle there's no way I'm doing that on on anything except a mountain bike I trust.
Ha. My experience with a unicycle was the exact same as my experience with Segway and Hoverboard: flat on my back, knocked-out cold, with back-sprain that lasted months.
But then there are 36 inch unicycles, which can go quite fast. I started with a 24' (< 10 km/h), then I bought a 29' (< 18 km/h). The 29' does feel fast. One day, I'd like to buy a 36', which would be a bit slower than a bicycle, but still quite fast. Some people ride them around the world [42].
Maybe not as elegant as the artistic cyclists, but that almost incidental level of control is insane.
I tried to learn riding backwards last summer, too. Eventually I stopped because I needed the bike for actual riding and my knees preferred having a freewheel. A ridiculously low gear seemed to help, I tried 40x20 (on a 622 with 165mm cranks) for a while.
note to self knock up wife.. get child fixie bike.. take bike for self when kid is at school xD I'm sure the experiment will be worth the college debt.
I would occasionally lose the muscle memory too, for about a week at a time.
Off topic: I didn’t do it for speed though, I did it for typing comfort, and as someone who has had RSI scares, I’m really happy with my decision (and with my decision to get a Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard). My two main activities these days are hand-intensive: typing and sleight-of-hand card magic. I need my hands to be in good shape! Honestly, I’m a little baffled by how few programmers use ergonomic keyboards, since their hands are so important to what they do, but only a little, since it took me years before I finally bought one myself despite thinking about it for a long time (I regret not doing so sooner).
> Pity I work on the road a lot and have to still use laptop keyboards a lot of the time.
Yeah, I use laptops and an iPad too and its obviously not very comfortable in comparison. Luckily I've managed to avoid it a lot lately, but its not always possible. It really sucks when I have to use an ordinary keyboard though and I definitely feel the discomfort :/
If you're thinking of switching (or not) to a product or service because of the inventor's personality, you're already "not cool".
If people based their use of Linux on Linus's personality, it'd still be a hobbyist OS.