Traffic

As the oil crisis worsen, and the price of petrol continue to raise, more and more Americans are reconsidering their use of their cars, more and more decide to commute using bicycles with some unexpected results.
As more and more people take their bike in the streets of New York, more and more agressive behaviour can be seen between the different users of the roads: car driver versus bicycle user, and biker versus pedestrians. Car driver are not used to share their space with bicycle, unlike what is happening in Netherlands (where more than 15% of the population is using bicycles ), American car driver does not seem to know how to behave nor the cyclists as most of them are newbies in the bike commuter comunity.

And this highlight the weakest link of the car based transportation system: the human factor.
As explained in the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, it seems we are behaving like total nonsensical idiots when we sit down behind the wheel of a car.

An interesting fact to think about next time you're driving:
- the safer a driver feels ( because he's driving a SUV, or he's on a straight road... ), the more dangeroulsy (fast, or careless) is going to drive.
As a result roundabouts, are probably safer than red-lights intersection as it forces us to take more attention to our surroundings.
Our perception of danger in a car is false, and falsed.


Trafic movie by J.Tati

Moutain Bike

I went moutain biking in Ballyhoura moutain , a very moutain bike trail. I had not done moutain biking in a long long time ( first time since i moved to Ireland ), very good and off course i've fallen ( and will fall again ).

A video which shows part of the track:


A good website for outdoors activities in Ireland:
http://www.coillteoutdoors.ie

Back to...

Parents gone, I am back to my old routine...including pub ... does not really mean I've stopped going during their stay, as it's a bit of a nonsense to visit Ireland without spending some time to the pub... (should I've said in the pub ?... only French can understand that question if they think haircut ...).

And it's also back to school, not that I am concerned, except for the heavy traffic in Limerick.

Few notes, after reading a dutch story in the New York Times [In the Netherlands, Life Runs on 2 Wheels (Sometimes 3)], I've been more and more interested in the past week into: Recumbent bicycle (horizontal bicycle), and Velomobile.
And very interesting story, about how in 1934, the UCI ruled that these kind of vehicule were not bicycle and therefore forbidden in any cycle competition.
The amazing fact is the world speed record is: 130.36 km/h , set by Sam Whittingham of Canada on a recumbent bicycle (in 2006, officialised by International Human Powered Vehicle Association ) , and the hour record (same guy) with this bike is: 85.4 km.
In order to compare, the records recognized by UCI (upright bicycle) are: speed = 82.53 km/h (1986), and hour record = 49.700 km.
It's more likely, that without this decision of the UCI, the recumbent bicycle would have been widespread... and you can even seen them on water.

I especially like the trikes by Greenspeed. And I should really start using my bike again for my journeys to work.

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Others news, Limerick has a new low has shown in the RTE program PRIME TIME [you can watch the program on the web].
I've read what happen in a article called Petrol Bomb Outrage, the Limerick Post : 2 children (4 and 6) have been severly burned during the arson attack of youngs against Garda police car in the Moyross area... Very sad and frigthening story.
An horrific recent petrol bombing of a car with two young children inside, violence flared on the 8th & 9th of September when Gardai were ambushed by a group of at least 30 youths in the Delmege Park/Pineview gardens area. Petrol bombs had been prepared in advance of the Gardai arriving and 2 squad cars were damaged.

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If after watching Prime Time, you still want to come live in Ireland, here two very useful sites:

• Maison des Francais a l'Etranger (mfe), the forums are full of informations.
• http://assistanatenirlande.hautetfort.com/[French]

And fortunatley there is also nice pubs in Limerick.

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And in the rest of the world:

• Sarko has a new friend W (NYTimes, Blog Big Picture [Fr])
• Jospin reviens (Arte Radio [Fr])
• the number of muslims immigrating in the USA is rising (NY Times), after 9/11, I quote the article: "In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents — nearly 96,000 — than in any year in the previous two decades."
• the website FaceBook touch the limit of the personal data sharing and blogging (NYTimes article, BBC article). The latest functionality of this personal webpage website, (you can read the apologizes of FaceBook on his blog), was feeding and redistributing to your contact community any change on webpage/blog/list of friend ... etc ... resulting in user complaint about respect of privacy.
• Some sympathetic feminist blogs: Bad Feminist, Pseudo-Adrienne, F-Words....
• And in the Irish news, a survey found that 1 in 8 women mistakenly believe it's not possible to get pregnant the first time they have sex. The TNS MRBI survey also found that 6%of women wrongly assume the pill offers some protection against sexually transmitted diseases.

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