There's so much going on in the world at one time. Watching movies about the future are great, some really give a good feeling or vibe, while others really almost seem to hit the nail on the assumed head. What often is the case though, is a vision of singularity, there's signs of age, but often not signs of past, and just too much present. In everyday life now, there is a common them of the present, but the present is made up of a wider spectrum of items and imagery of a vast past, mostly a more recent one, a bunch of current trends, and many predictions of the future. Our everyday lives have these elements in them, and we seem to brush past them often.
In any case, here are some links to things and stuffs that have come up in conversation from time to time with a loose theme of 'future'.
Picture above is a Movie car named Blue Djinn which was built for a movie called 'FastLane' that was never released. You can read more here: Blue Djinn.
Aerodynamics is always a struggle with the general public to understand. But with the current F1 and prototype cars of today. A technology perfected by a company who simply builds race cars, is a simple technology that will pass down to street driven cars in the future. Bodykits are an old idea, the concept being to remove the air from below the car, this was an improvement over the older, unmodified bodied cars, but it's still a dated technology. Smoothing the path, and reducing the vehicles volumetric foot print is the current wave of aerodynamic technology, but it too is a very old idea. It has yet to trickle to street cars on a popular scale. This Celica pictured above was built by a racing company called "Dome" which if you've played the Gran Turismo series, would be familiar with their car the 'Zero'. You can read more here: Celica under body, Dome Zero.
Last but not least is an old technology that seems much to new for it's time. Like watching Speed Racer, or Knight Rider, the idea of a power boost button has always been a bit absurd in the general, uneducated media take. However, KERS finally justifies the ignorance, or accidental genius of the writers. Basically, when the car is slowing down, it allows the resistance of an electric motor, the drag of spinning the motor up, to generate electricity. This electricity is sent to another electric motor with a weighted flywheel on it. The newly created electricity is used to spin the flywheel at an insane amount of high RPMs. When the driver wants, or needs to, they can press a button which reverses the process. The spinning flywheel spins up the electric motor creating electricity, to send back to the other electric motor to give the car a boost in acceleration. The funny thing is, this has been on and off in F1 racing for some years now, and everyone I seem to speak with about it had no idea. Odd. There's a short little video here: KERS williams.
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