@vvill 31638 wrote:
I doubt it. The safety bike was so close to perfection already. Hard to improve on the energy efficiency of cycling.
I wonder how they measure “amount of computing”. Number of instructions? Calculations? CPU cycles? Given Moore’s Law it’d be surprising to me if a Google Search didn’t stack up against something from 1969.
Warning – leaving the main topic
While computational speeds have dramatically increased, we aren’t typing much faster. That damned human interface thing again. People are sticking with their QWERTY keyboards almost universally.
I don’t think we have see the exponential improvements from IT elsewhere, particularly in the areas that include things mechanical or things human. After all, the world record for a mile went from 4:14 in 1913 to 3:43 in 1999 (I guess we went metric after that). The Indy 500 speeds didn’t do much better, going from 75 mph in 1911 to about 190 mph today. In cycling, using the Tour de France as the most available, Googleable, information the average speed went from 25.7 kph in 1901 to 32.9 kph in 1951 to 39.8 kph in 2012. Granted the terrain may have changed but there I’d argue we are seeing the increased fitness of the riders (the mile times went down by 12%) and the improved bikes since 1901.
If the 12% increase (from the run) in fitness were applied to the TdF, the 1901 speed would increase to 28.8 kph (25.7 * 1.12) and the rest might be the attributed to hardware improvements. Because the “engine” remains the rider, the Indy 500 150% increase doesn’t seem likely.
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