It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond.
Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.
Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian.
I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
My parents were kind of over protective people. Me and my sister had to play in the backyard all the time. They bought us bikes for Christmas but wouldn't let us ride in the street, we had to ride in the backyard. Another Christmas, my dad got me a basketball hoop and put it in the middle of the lawn! You can't dribble on grass.
When I'm in New York, I bike everywhere. I have a couple of bikes stored over at Ed Norton's. It's the only way to go. But in Hawaii, I drive. I have a little Volkswagen Bug, from the 'Drive it? Hug it?' phase. I run it on biodiesel.
I wouldn't recommend people to go up and ride their road bikes in Kenya. Bikes are not meant to be on the roads. But the mountain biking is fantastic. You can go right up into the tea and coffee plantations up in the highlands. You can descend the great Rift Valley.
Don't get me wrong, I think bikes are terrific. I own several of my own, including a trendy mountain style, and ride them for pleasure and light exercise.
Bikes and planes aren't about going fast or having fun; they're toys, but serious ones.
So we're going to do a Battlestar Galactica themed bike and bring another one of the bikes.