World: r3wp

OK, so there's nothing wrong with bicycles, but apparently there's 
something wrong with US citizens

Is it as bad in New Zealand?

I bought myself a mountain bike a couple of weeks ago.

Still healing from the wounds caused by impacting with the asphalt.

On your own or by a car?

myself :(  Skidded against the curb when I hit it at a too shallow 
angle.

didn't see that in the manual.

:-)

Well, it's pretty flat over here

Yeah, so in such a place, it's reasonable to bicycle .. but in the 
USA .. when you have monster upteen lane highways... may not be so 
realistic.

We'll see when the oil price hits the projected $200 the barrel

I'm pretty glad I don't have a car these days. Except, you know, 
when I have to go somewhere more than a few miles away.

Graham -- sorry to hear about your injuries.

I can put the opposite case: my cycle odometer says I'm just coming 
up to 5,000 miles this year. With zero accidents or injuries; zero 
time stuck in traffic; total annual running costs of around USD150 
for servicing and parts; and a lot of health benfits.

Good to know there are positive benefits to bicycle ownership !  
 :)

In Chicago we have a mayor who is an avid cyclist. He has been repainting 
a lot of streets on the north side to give them cycle lanes. The 
problem is that many of these streets aren't wide enough for this. 
In some cases 4-lane roads were converted to 2-lane to make room 
for the bike lanes, in some cases parking was sacrificed. On many 
roads this has caused traffic to slow to a crawl. Of course these 
bike lanes are barely used, and mostly serve as a place for drivers 
getting out of their parked cars to stand. The mayor isn't affected 
by these problems though, as he is a southsider.

If you add to that the tendency for bikes to get stolen here, the 
layout of Chicago and commuting patterns, and the efficiency of our 
public transportation, it is rare for people to use bikes here except 
for recreation and the bike messengers downtown.

It's an interesting study, how different cultures use bicycles, and 
it's impact on health and common wellbeing. Here in Denmark, every 
child own a bicycle, we have bicycle paths everywhere. You can go 
from one end of Denmark to the other on bicycle without problems. 
Well, Denmark is rather flat too, highest point around 170 meters. 
In Copenhagen, you see people on bicycle everywhere, going to and 
from work or whatever. I live in the suburbs. Yesterday night I was 
going to the monthly kick-your-friends-butt-on-a-net-café in city, 
and when the trains were late due to technical problems, I ended 
up taking the bike. It's freedom!

Sunanda, I totally agree. If you make up the balance, there are so 
many grave disadvantages to cars that you're wise to avoid them wherever 
possible. They're downright destructive

While I'm willing to consider that the mayor of Chicago is biased, 
he's certainly going in the right direction

Here's a great book about it:

http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=&sku=C8129&imprintID=

Here's the author's site, where you can read many of his essays:
http://www.walkablestreets.com

Badly designed cities are a problem......They need upgrading to the 
standards of the best.
Another site for some inspiration:
http://www.carfree.com/

Exactly

It'd be interesting and highly revolutionary if more cities adopted 
York's highway use hierarchy:
http://www.york.gov.uk/roads/excellence/strategy.html

(My city claims to have done -- they hired the guy who did York.....But 
the planners just don't get it, so progress is painfully sow)/

I bike averywhere, but for longer trips I wouldn't mind one of these:
http://www.theaircar.com/

Henrik .. great idea for an open source rebol book.

I suspect that if you collected all the docs out there, you would 
have quite a decent book without having to write much yourself.

A lot of the docs are copyright RT are they not though ?

that's what I'm figuring... but I don't know if it hurts to try a 
slightly different approach than the manuals do: try to explain how 
the language works, that you have an executable, a console, the desktop, 
the various products and you do this and that to run REBOL programs.

at least I think that'sa basic: what do you do to run REBOL programs?

I've worked with Wikipedia for about an hour now and it's very nice 
to work in. Layout is fairly automatic and easy to learn.

Good work!

Maybe there's something I can contribute to the wikibook

just fill stuff in if you can. I'm not going to write more today, 
so feel free to mess around. :-)

is it possible to create a wikibook group?

Very nice Henrik.

Yes Henrik, quite nice.

a few US cities are bicycle non-hostile, here in Eugene, Oregon where 
I bike most every day of the year is one of them.

Cool Romano, will have to check out Anamonitor 3 and latest ATCP 
sometime.

Congratulations on the French Core guide!

Graham, COMLib.r creates a routine with a callback in it. This limits 
the number of times COMLib.r can be run in a rebol session (ie. the 
console) to 6 (crashes on the 7th). Are you experiencing any "root 
block overflow" crashes ? (I imagine you are encapping it all.)

Nice simple EMR website, by the way.

Just noticed callback crash is fixed in rambo. So it should not be 
a problem soon. :)

Anton ... no, I just usually only call comlib just once.  I must 
try it out calling it 6 times :(

website is simple as that's all I am capable of doing :(

I love it nice and simple like that ! Quick to load, doesn't need 
any fancy features... :)

and doesn't overload my head with yet more custom graphics, formatting, 
fonts and text that keeps changing its position as it loads.

So maybe it was unintentional but you made a very robust website.

In that case, we'll have to thank Max's Remark ... of which I used 
a pre-release version :)

Cool Graham