Monday, March 13, 2017

Cool, but yikes

Engineers at Google and Levi's have teamed together to create a jacket designed to allow cyclists to be connected with the world, but not staring at the screen on their phone.  As such, they view it as a big safety advance--and then they promote it with a video of a cyclist without a helmet. 

Hint; if it's cool enough to wear a jacket while cycling, it's not too hot to wear a helmet, and quite frankly I much prefer the thought of shattering a helmet to the thought of shattering my skull.   So they take care of a third order safety issue while neglecting a first order one--did they actually talk to any cyclists before doing that video, or for that matter before they did the jacket?

They certainly didn't ask me--while the technology is cool, time on two wheels is generally "alone" time for me, and quite frankly the weather in Minnesota is too volatile to achieve connectivity with just one jacket.   So it falls, as far as I'm concerned, into the bin of "solution in search of a problem."


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