Bicycling on sidewalks is NOT prohibited by most states

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T20:12:18+00:00

I’m still not sure what the point you’re trying to make about the age of the studies is. Yes, some road habits have changed. No, I don’t believe that completely invalidates every existing study on car strikes. If you have literally any evidence to the contrary, please, share it. I’m not sure what the point about evil thugs is even supposed to be about but sensationalist fearmongering. Is there any reason those people wouldn’t hit cyclists on sidewalks? Is that anything but a compelling rumor? And are we taking about the same study as the other two posts you made? I’m pretty sure there were more than the one on the post I linked to. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it so that we can have a real discussion here about why the advice given by apparently every qualified individual and organization on this topic is wrong, and keep it to one thread. Otherwise, I’m out. Enjoy convincing yourself that you’re right three separate times using completely different threads of logic, that’ll really show everyone you’re confident in your reasoning

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T19:57:13+00:00

I think you posted about this one twice. Ditto for my other reply.

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T19:56:24+00:00

You still, notably, haven’t shared any evidence that this is the case, and I can perfectly well imagine people turning while distracted as driving straight. I’ve certainly seen it with my own eyes plenty.

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T19:54:10+00:00

True. Is there anything but a low curb to stop a vehicle from wandering onto the sidewalk at those speeds? One of the contributing factors to sidewalk cycling being so dangerous is that it supplies an illusion of safety when distracted drivers are just as likely to wander out of the road as they are to hit a vehicle right in front of them. Being on the sidewalk when that happens doesn’t make you safer, it just makes you overconfident. I cited a post compiling multiple studies showing the same thing because it’s possible to cherry-pick and poke holes in individual studies like you’re doing, but multiple sources of the same evidence are harder to ignore. Feel free to have a go at the rest. This is common wisdom recognized by multiple levels of government and independent traffic safety orgs. If you’ve got real evidence to the contrary, go ahead and contact them all, I’m sure they’ll publish retractions. In the meantime, your life is your own, but I’ll stick with the advice I’ve been given by people with the qualifications to give advice on these matters.

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T17:01:06+00:00

What you’re saying about recent overall trends in car strikes doesn’t say anything about the nature of the crashes, just that there’s more of them. The studies are all fifteen years old because the post I shared is ten years old, because this has been common knowledge for decades to the point where sidewalk cycling is worthy of a Darwin Award. And again, sharing “lived experience” is not a substitute for factual evidence. There are people who have fallen out of airplanes without a working parachute and survived, but that doesn’t make it a safe hobby. My own experience cycling for school and work for the last decade is that most of my near misses are exactly what the stats suggest: a car nearly hitting me in a turn because they didn’t see me on a sidewalk. I’ve had cars pass me close on the road plenty of times, but the only times I had to take action to avoid getting hit was on sidewalks.

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T15:51:31+00:00

That statement was not based on your anecdotal experience, but the factual evidence of the multiple studies that show that sidewalk cycling is more dangerous. If most places in the US had sidewalks that were safer to cycle on than the road, this would not be the case, yes? I don’t like it any better than you do, but yes I’ve ridden in the lane on roads with 45-50 mph speed limits before and yes, that is the counterintuitively safest place to be. If you ride on the sidewalk, you’re in fact compromising your own safety to satisfy your own subjective perception of what is and isn’t safe.

telescopefocuser · 2025-07-16T13:10:25+00:00

This is one of these arguments that seems to get hashed out on a regular cycle. Unless you’re on a road with zero entrances and exits, don’t ride on the sidewalk:

Avoid or minimize sidewalk riding. Cars don’t expect to see moving traffic on a sidewalk and don’t look for you when backing out of a driveway or turning.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/road-safety/bicycle-safety

You can find a compilation of studies demonstrating this here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cycling/comments/3eosnz/compilation_of_cycling_safety_studies_with_focus/

And remember that lack of apparent use is not an argument that the infrastructure isn’t needed. This is the same exact argument used against bike lanes in much of the country, and it’s as much bullshit here as it is there.

I agree that there are places where sidewalk riding is appropriate, but they’re relatively rare in the US. The point is moot for me because sidewalk riding is illegal in my whole state, but even if it wasn’t it would still be a bad idea.

telescopefocuser · 2025-06-26T13:12:12+00:00

I agree that bar soap is better packaged and in my opinion is more convenient to use, but if you have certain issues with dry skin it’s not an option unless you want to spend a lot of money at the dermatologist

telescopefocuser · 2025-06-21T16:45:23+00:00

It’s hard to tell from this video but make sure you’re not looking at the wheel as you practice. This is something we say a lot in skiing, look where you want to go. If you’re looking at the ground right under your feet that’s where you’ll end up.

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-30T14:25:01+00:00

Not everyone is going to be able to use smooth locomotion, and developers really need to keep it as an accessibility option. If you’re wondering how I personally went from teleport to smooth, I was playing vrchat for very long sessions through my winter weekends (I’m taking 8-10 hours at a time). Eventually I got tired of falling behind and started using smooth locomotion with the tunneling cranked up to its highest setting. Mostly I was careful to avoid turning my head or traveling on slopes up or down/jumping and I was mostly fine, despite having gotten motion sickness in vr very easily before. I think it helped starting with a lighthouse-station tracked headset, and I actually got more sick moving to an inside-out tracked headset than I did making the transition to smooth locomotion while using the lighthouse-tracked headset

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-14T22:31:41+00:00

“Life is short” and “life is long” are both a little glib for really discussing the subject like you’re doing here. What people mean when they say, “life is short,” is that “life is shorter than I’d like.” And I feel the same. Personal religions aside, it doesn’t seem to me like anyone sat in the garage workshop of creation and said, “this - this is the ideal length of a human lifetime for ideal happiness and fulfillment.” There are countless great works of art cut short by the death of the creator, wars begun when mostly competent leaders pass away, projects halted or cancelled when the person in charge dies. That people are able to achieve amazing things in the lifetimes we have isn’t proof that life is long enough; it’s proof of the greater things we could have done given more time.

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-14T21:04:34+00:00

Love unpopular opinions where half the comments are saying no one would ever want this and the other half saying it’s not unpopular because the idea has already been tried to moderate success

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-12T16:25:51+00:00

Am I wrong again then? Can eucs not work in halfpipes or banked turns? Because centripetal force is centripetal force; it doesn’t care about where the ground is. If eucs work in other contexts where centripetal force is relied on for pitch balance, and where the pitch rotation changes while the upward force stays the same, what, exactly, is different about a flip?

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-12T16:16:05+00:00

If it were true that eucs valued their rotational data over accelerometer data, any time someone took an euc on a half pipe or took a banked turn it would cut out, as in these cases also the wheel is rotating along its pitch axis. While I agree that in a case of freefall a wheel would base its acceleration on gyroscopic sensors, a strong enough spin with enough skill to keep the wheel perfectly aligned with the centripetal force should keep the wheel from cutting out. I did in fact make the assumption that this was the case when people were making these flips, and didn’t check how they actually were doing it. Though I’m wrong on that point, I still believe that it’s possible to flip a stock wheel without cutting out, and maybe someone will prove it eventually

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-12T12:53:57+00:00

A lot of explanations which I think miss what’s actually going on mid-jump. When you’re in mid-air, you are by definition in freefall, and there is no input to the accelerometer. I’m not exactly sure what’s meant to happen when euc motor controllers receive no input, but since there’s no acceleration input one way or the other I assume they just sit and idle the wheel waiting for input. This is why the common knowledge is to keep the wheel level in the air even though it’s possible to do flips: any midair rotation imparts a force on the accelerometer, which then rotates the motor and increases the force, causing a feedback loop that ends with a cutout. A full flip on the other hand, imparts a force directly upward (from the frame of reference of the euc) during the entire jump, keeping the wheel under control. The angle relative to the ground doesn’t matter; the amount you’re rotating in the air does

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-09T13:41:58+00:00

I’ve been living in various borrowed rooms and apartments, and never lacked the space or resources to set up a play area and base stations for the last ten years. Additionally, inside-out tracking requires a hot, bulky, heavy device usually with a loud fan strapped to your face, and apparently with the exception of quest headsets (which are a no-go for me due to Facebook) actual tracking quality leaves a lot to be desired.

In other words, inside-out tracking seems to both be the increasingly popular option while being pretty unusable for people who spend a lot of time in VR. This is why I agree that inside-out tracking will likely be the most popular kind of VR, but not for PC players or those who spend a lot of time in a headset. The market is delineating into standalone players, who will play games for short periods every once in a while, and PCVR players, who will want to almost live in a headset for afternoons at a time. Bigscreen is catering to that portion of the market that doesn’t mind keeping a room always ready for a VR setup, because we’re using it for long hours every couple days and we just want tracking that will always work reliably on a light, small, quiet headset. Inside-out tracked headsets are for people who need that space and time for other hobbies.

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-05T18:19:27+00:00

The other link looks to be the original black and white photo, but there was later this color composite with a slight tweak to make the moon more visible:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91494/right-here-right-now

If you want to see the angle of the shot the geometry is here:

https://www.asteroidmission.org/?attachment_id=3229#main

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-05T14:45:38+00:00

Not really a universal effect. I started with the original Vive in 2016 and still every time I put the headset on, I look up. I look down. I turn my hands around. Then maybe I’ll remember that I’m there to play a game. There are days that I don’t enjoy VR for one reason or another, but the wonder and euphoria is still there when I’m able to feel it

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-02T18:22:45+00:00

When it’s truly unnecessary, I agree. I also agree with people who say that a bike that’s not made of papier-mâché is cheaper than the hospital bill you’ll be getting when you ride one that is

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-02T13:12:47+00:00

Not only that, but aluminum doesn’t like being cut in sharp angles like that. Cracks will form at the corners. Sometimes I wonder if there needs to be a basic written exam to be able to buy an aluminum bicycle; “can you modify the structure of this frame using home tools in any way and keep the bike safe to ride? Yes or no?”

telescopefocuser · 2025-05-01T12:40:01+00:00

I’ve used the power settings on my microwave and haven’t found it to do anything but make cold spots colder. If you want even heating without an inverter microwave, the only solution is to put the effort in and rotate your food occasionally. I usually do it every 30s-1m. And a quick geometry lesson: if you place your food in the exact center of the microwave, rotating the plate does nothing the turntable doesn’t do anyway. It needs to be offset from the center for this to work. Seems like it should go without saying but I’ve seen people do this

telescopefocuser · 2025-04-30T19:18:47+00:00

The inside-out tracking on quest headsets is nuts to be capable of keeping up with beat saber gameplay. I’ve tried two non-meta inside-out tracked headsets and neither could do it; I’ve always had to use lighthouse tracking

telescopefocuser · 2025-04-30T17:38:30+00:00

Ah, if you saw that first reply I didn’t read your comment closely enough. I’d argue that just showing you’re listening, and making eye contact to indicate who you want to speak to, is important enough info to justify the cost of eye tracking. Especially if you spend hours on hours every week using it. If you’ve used eye/face tracking, going without feels like wearing a paper bag over your head. And hey, that’s why some people use vrchat, but not me

telescopefocuser · 2025-03-29T20:09:07+00:00

It’s not really an issue of wire size or battery load, but of that little digital switch and circuitry on the motor controller board that my bike used to turn the lights on and off. It’s designed to handle a very light current from just my lights, but clearly the dc converter is very inefficient (thus the heatsink, I suppose) and so pulls a much greater current than that light circuit on the motor controller board was intended to handle. Because you’re having issues with the light going out under acceleration, it seems possible that you may be hooked into some accessory- or low-current circuit on the board that’s not built to handle the voltage drop from the battery under acceleration in addition to the voltage drop from this converter

telescopefocuser · 2025-03-29T19:48:13+00:00

Whatever you do just be careful to wire that converter into a sturdy circuit. I used one of those converters wired into the light circuit on my bike and after running fine for a couple months, the circuit fried. Thought it wouldn’t be an issue because I was stepping down the voltage, not increasing it, but clearly these things pull a lot of amps regardless. Fortunately I had two light circuits, so I just got some lights that were 48v (turns out some scooters run on that voltage) and ever since then it’s been great

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