And The Point Of This Is....?

Fifty Shades of Grey showed us that there's no book so ridiculous and poorly-written that people won't read it.*

The past few years have shown us that there's no candidate so ignorant, petty, vulgar and just plain mean that people won't vote for him/her. 

And there are some ideas so impractical and pointless that some tech person with too much time on his hands won't work on it:

Zhihui Jun, a Huawei engineer, got the idea for the riderless bike when he was recuperating from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident.  Hmm....That sounds like designing a shoe that walks itself while waiting for your sprained ankle to heal.   

Anyway, I must pay all due respect for his talents as an engineer (He must be better at math than I could ever dream of being!) and, I suppose, his imagination.  Maybe it was a "just for fun" project.  After all, what is a bicycle without a rider?

Again, with all due respect to Mr. Jun, he isn't the first to come up with the idea.  This was spotted on an Amsterdam Street a few years ago:

I ask:  Why?

*--Aside from lines like, "I must be the color of the communist manifesto" and the number of times the author uses words like "oozes" and phrases like "my inner goddess," the book is objectionable because its depictions of BDSM are BS.   Don't ask how I know! ;-)

Finding Its Way

So you thought all of the completely pointless high-tech innovations came from Silicon Valley types with too much time on their hands?

Well, here's one from Amsterdam.



As we all know, just about everything is legal there--including some mind-altering substances.  (The beer is pretty strong, too!) So, it's not hard to imagine someone coming up with a self-driving bicycle after inhaling.

Of course, as so often happens with such inventions, its creators didn't think about its target audience.  After all, who would have any use for a bicycle that doesn't need humans?

Still, I understand that sales are brisk...