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Old 06-27-2020, 04:51 PM   #25 (permalink)
California98Civic
Cyborg ECU
 
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Coastal Southern California
Posts: 6,299

Black and Green - '98 Honda Civic DX Coupe
Team Honda
90 day: 66.42 mpg (US)

Black and Red - '00 Nashbar Custom built eBike
90 day: 3671.43 mpg (US)
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Again, I just don't want to have a conversation politics, which is where "political power" and "sovereign individual" and "collectivity" takes us. I respect your interest in that stuff, freebeard, but I don't want to touch hot buttons like that. This is a general efficiency discussion focused on self-consciously critical thinking about technology and our relationships with it. Fuller is a pretty good example, I am learning.

Buckminster Fuller seems to me to have keyed his work to much more than just individuals. His vision of future technologies was a vision of a different future for all. That is a technological vision that is also a social vision. The Dymaxion was also a high fuel economy car, and it was not conceived as a production prototype. It was an idea promoting concept car and a deconstruction/reconstruction of the concept of a car. Hardly a practical or safe road car, the thing is almost better understood as the marriage of art and technology. That is not entirely different from this Critical Engineering gig, which emphasizes hacking ideas and objects of technological dependence for demonstrations that make people think differently and more conscientiously about their lived experience with technology.

I think a lot of our EM hacking for fuel efficiency is like that, too. Or almost like that. My own car is part art and part technological (not especially good as either, I know).

Here is another great YouTube channel. Here is a dude breaking down and reusing Tesla's "power wall" branding, using the detritus of disposable electronics, making highly functional stuff. His EV VWs are cool, too, speaking of "general efficiency discussion"! In this video he does some cool teaching. He is a hacker, and a great one. It is not Fuller and it is probably not critical engineering, but it is close to the latter in some ways, I think.

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See my car's mod & maintenance thread and my electric bicycle's thread for ongoing projects. I will rebuild Black and Green over decades as parts die, until it becomes a different car of roughly the same shape and color. My minimum fuel economy goal is 55 mpg while averaging posted speed limits. I generally top 60 mpg. See also my Honda manual transmission specs thread.



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