(c)architecture
Axles rotate 90 degrees to let you drive straight into a parallel parking spot. Or, potentially, rub all the treads right off your tires instantly.
The New York Times: At M.I.T., Rethinking the Car for City LifeThe start of a new school year at M.I.T. means that, once again, students are about to reinvent the automobile.
On Wednesday, the first day of the fall term, students and interested observers will hear a progress report by William J. Mitchell, a professor of architecture and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ryan Chin, a Ph.D. candidate, on a project to create a car for the city of the future by the institute's Media Lab. The design study grew out of Mr. Chin's doctoral thesis, which compared the way cars are designed with the ways buildings are designed.
Begun two years ago with help from General Motors, a longtime sponsor of the Media Lab, the project's early stages included a bonding session in which participants learned about vehicle dynamics at the Skip Barber driving school in Monterey, Calif.
Though the project is still virtual - a rolling prototype is at least a year away - the vehicle is widely known on campus as 'the Gehry car' for the involvement of the architect Frank Gehry. Dr. Mitchell brought Mr. Gehry, who designed the institute's Stata Center, to the program.
I want to go to MIT and have them send me to Skip Barber's school. It's much preferable to my former idea of joining the CIA in order to take their offensive driving class.
...
I just now tried to find a link to an offensive driving course (didn't find one) and ran across
Happy Woman Magazine, a parody site of women's magazines "We think so you don't have to." The article on why women should be offensive drivers starts out with promise but ends up sucking. The site is tremendously unfunny (obviously women's mags are too easy a target) and reminds me of when we used to write
chit articles that belied our own bitterness and insecurity more than made anyone laugh.
In another search result, a blog post titled "offensive driving" simply reads "Driving naked is not a crime. You crazy Victorians!"
* Ray, 9/09/2004 02:26:54 PM
