University of Washington will provide students and staff electric bicycles to reduce car traffic in and around campus.

http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?articleID=38255

I was reading through the talk titles for the Unite for Sight conference on health and development (at Yale) and thought you folks might be interested in Columbia’s Bamboo Bike Project. Copied from their website, their goals are:

To build a better bike for poor Africans in rural areas.

To stimulate a bicycle building industry in Africa to satisfy local needs.

Here is their website:

http://duck-rabbit.ldeo.columbia.edu/bamboo/Home.html

If you bike, you don’t have to buy a T-pass (~$50) or a gym membership (~$50).  If you are 25 and invest this money instead at a 4% rate of return, which is rather low, you will have $118,590 at age 65.  If you can get a 12% rate of return, as perhaps you might in mutual funds, you will have $1,188,242 at age 65. 

Please everyone check out Diary of a Redheaded Cyclist for the utube of the couch bike.  Best of all is that the guy who made the bike rode across the country on it with a (scandanavian?) guy who had been his exchange student something like a decade ago–and they hadn’t seen much of each other since.  I want to have long lost friends who make couch bikes.

 Unrelated to biking, but possibly as useful in everyday life as a bike:  I heard on NPR two days ago that a gender neutral pronoun has entered the slang of baltimore high school students.  Instead of he or she, students use yo.  For example:  Yo is riding a bike.  Yo’s bike is better than mine.

CRISIS!

but today I am inside counting colonies, which is possibly the most boring task ever, but not as stressful as writing my thesis.

Two purchases have revolutionized my winter biking life: a Burton snowboarding jacket that is waterproof and down, and Patagonia fleece pants.  Now I am impervious to all weather.

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