Tweel on The 4400

[Stan671]

Tess, one of the 4400 returnees who was taken in 1955 drew a picture of what appears to be a Tweel. <grin>

http://www.sdobrowski.net/images/Tweel4400.jpg

Stan Dobrowski

[drolsinatas]

Are these going to be available for the Segway anytime soon? In the video, the guy had them on his Segway. I go off curbs all the time. I'd buy that tire on the first day of release.

This thing rules.

[Stan671]

Before anyone can answer, "when", they have to answer, "if". I understand that they are available for the iBot, but I would imagine the decision to offer them on the Segway HT has not been made yet.

Stan Dobrowski

[Brooster]

What's a 4400, a 4400 returnee, and what's the deal with 1955?

Just curious, thanks.

Brooster

[Stan671]

"The 4400" is a TV show about 4400 people that had disappeared during the last 80 years or so and then were all returned at once to the present time looking and acting exaclty as if time stood still for them. However, it seems that many of them have powers, such as being able to tell the future or heal people, etc.

"The 4400" was a 6 episode summer series last year and the new season is premiring tonight on USA.

Stan Dobrowski

[wwhopper]

I spoke with the Tweel marketing team at Michelin to try and get them to come to SegwayFest DC - and they declined.

Will W Hopper
DCSEG Member
Come out to the Mid-Atlantic Regional SEG America Event - SegwayFest - DC Sept 23-25 in Washington DC - The Most Segway Friendly City in America!

[KSagal]

So is someone saying that the Tweel is made by aliens?

I would twoubt that.


Karl Ian Sagal

Each road you travel should be just a bit better for having had you pass.

[Stan671]

Not aliens. The people were taken to the future and then re-seeded back unto the past. So, the Tweel must be a vision from the future. Maybe they are on all of the Segways in the future. <grin>

Stan Dobrowski

[Hauptagon]

Argh... Stan, it looks like no one "got" it. [xx(] Not to worry, I know what you're talking about! :)

-Justin

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." -From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

[BJ]

Grrreat scot Marty. Another sequel to "Back to the future"

[GyroGo]

Mathematical genius can be idiotic. The ability to create time dimensions as equations does not substantiate travel back from the future. The future only exists as human imagination, or when it becomes the present.


(yeah, I know it’s just a TV show, but I just can’t believe how many people think it’s possible to come back from the future) There is present and past, there is no future ;)

[legpain]

I've been trying! got the below from Michelin...

Thank you for visiting the Michelin Web site and sending us your e-mail.
Regarding your comments,

"I ride a Segway because I'm handicapped. I have problems putting air in the tires. If there is ANY WAY I could get tweels for my Segway I would be EXTREMELY grateful to you. Please respond as I REALLY need them. Thank
you, John"

We appreciate your interest in the "Tweel".

Presently, Michelin's intention is to continue to develop Tweel technology beyond its initial applications on the iBot wheelchair and Centaur personal transport from Segway. The Segway you see with the Tweel is just a prototype and the concept is still fully in development. We would recommend that you contact Segway for more information regarding any further plans for future applications.

You can find press releases, illustrations and download high resolution photos at www.michelinmedia.com.

If you have additional questions, please respond to this email
or you may call us at 1-800-847-3435 (toll-free) between
8:30AM and 6:00PM Eastern Time Monday through Friday to allow
one of our Consumer Relations Representatives to assist you.

Michelin North America
Consumer Relations Department

From Segway...

Dear John,

Although we did testing with the Tweel on a Segway HT, we have not nor plan to release them as a product at this time.

Any further inquiries should be directed to Michelin.

Thank you,
The Segway Team

What do you think?

John

[KSagal]

Legpain,

I think you should have no problem in pressuring LLC into giving you Tweels for your seg. They are very responsive to requests for technology that doesn't currently exist.

Think of how fast they responded to requests for batteries, or even the technological leap foreward, a kick stand that works...

This post is fully tounge in cheek. DO NOT TAKE OFFENSE, no matter how sensitive you are.

One problem that I see when it comes to segways and the segway community is that there is a long gap between the first introduction of a new product into developmental testing to when it ever becomes commercially available. We here in this community do not like to see that wait nor wait that wait...

In the past, there was often years involved. Now it is many months, as many as 24 or 36. We simply do not want to be that patient, even if we have no power to overcome the technical nor financial difficulties....

Karl Ian Sagal

Each road you travel should be just a bit better for having had you pass.

[macgeek]

... and thats the twheel deal!

Jonathan

"Think outside the car"

[GyroGo]

I'd travel back in time for a winning night with Vanna on the Tweel of Fortune.

Geez, I must have something better to do than posting my random thoughts. Yeah, bye.

[Hauptagon]

GyroGo, I don't think that just because people find these stories interesting they believe future time-travel is possible... I'm actually completely in your boat in that respect, but even as an astrophysics major I can still enjoy those kinds of things.

I actually have a harder time overlooking those space movies where the rockets are always burning! Argh!!! Even than, I do my best not to think about it, because some of those movies are just too entertaining to dismiss due to gross scientific inacuracies ::Cough Cough:: "Star Wars" ::Cough:: ;)

-Justin

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." -From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

[GyroGo]

The power of edit allows travel back to change my post, as if it had always been this way:

PBS Nova online (found at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/through.html)
quote:The physics of time travel is still in its infancy. While all physicists today admit that time travel to the future is possible, many still believe time travel to the past will never be easily attainable. Don't believe anyone who tells you that humans will never have efficient technology for backward and forward time travel. Accurately predicting future technology is nearly impossible, and history is filled with underestimates of technology
And Carl Sagan says he does not know that it is impossible. Too much science for common sense.


Post prior to time travel:
quote:Originally posted by Hauptagon

GyroGo, I don't think that just because people find these stories interesting they believe future time-travel is possible...

maybe my friends and ::cough:: ::cough:: relatives are nutty than yours, but I recall actual discussions with sci-fi types saying maybe. And I believe there have been some way-out scientific speculative articles in some popular publications, if I recall correctly (please don't make me search, it might require time travel).

[pam]

Well, it looks, then, like you could time travel to the future, but not be able to get back {grin}. Pam

[yosgof]

Is it Carl Sagan or Karl Sagal?

- Yossi
http://gallery.photo.net/photo/3365119-lg.jpg

[GyroGo]

quote:Originally posted by pam

Well, it looks, then, like you could time travel to the future, but not be able to get back {grin}. Pam

Einstein supports time travel into the future, it is not as controversial as going back.

But you can quote ME (errr, the not so famous Shaman of Time) as saying that even THAT is smoke and mirrors - playing with semantics. Einsteinian forward time travel does not skip over time to a future destination; it merely states (and this is all presuming that my layman brain understands this correctly, and it's entirely possible I'm missing something) that time seems to pass relatively slower traveling at light speed (or in the passenger seat of my car) as matter moves (and ages) slower. But is that really not an objective way of looking at it? If I freeze one hourglass and heat another, is time moving faster for the more active molecules? While time may seem to pass at different speeds inside a system, there still is an objective passage of time outside the system and/or relative to other systems. We just have to quantify time in other systems (speeds) as relative to earth, as this is the measure we are familiar with.

Or maybe I don't have a clue.

12.5mph into the future...... Yeah Baby!

[yosgof]

GyroGo, afraid its the latter.

- Yossi
http://gallery.photo.net/photo/3365119-lg.jpg

[Hauptagon]

No, that's exactly it... in relativity, a body approaching the speed of light (or any fraction of c) will appear to be on a slower clock from outside reference, and when taken to the limits you can imply time travel, but it's not even remotely time travel, it's just a difference in frame of reference. If we send out a ship to fly at, say, half the speed of light so that when it's 100 years in the future it will only have aged, say, half that (I don't know if it would actually be half), than that's all fine and dandy, but the people who sent the ship off would still have to wait a hundred years for the ship to complete it's mission! I think it's this simple misconception that makes the public falsely believe future time travel to be more plausible than past time travel. We also have to remember why most respected physicists believe faster than light travel is impossible to begin with -- as speed increases towards c (light speed), relativistic mass (that mass in the object's frame of reference) approaches infinity (a limit function, if anyone cares)... so you'd actually need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate any further (past c), at which point time is now ticking infinitely slow for that body in it's frame of reference, which implies that that body would see the end of the universe occur around it (big crunch?), which also means that time itself might end in that the universe may reappear in a different number of dimenions... a popular theory of today states that before the big bang, this may have actually been a 10 or 11 dimensional universe, and that the mathematical symmetry that exists on that level was just to unstable -- it collapsed and two other universes were supposedly born (our 4d world and a 6d world that collapsed to an infinitude), my point being that, even if we could travel the speed of light (not gonna happen), we still wouldn't be time traveling... OK, sidetracked...

Anyway, the cosmonaut who spent the longest time in orbit (Sergei Vasilyevich Avdeyev -- had to look that up) was under the effect of relativity for long enough to have landed back on earth some measurable fraction of a second younger than if he'd not been moving... this doesn't mean he's a fraction of a second in the future and can see things happening that much time before us, it merely means he didn't age quite as much as the rest of us for that time. It's just what you said... fooling with semantics.

But perhaps I misread your post, GyroGo... I was meaning to agree with you.

-Justin

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." -From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

[KSagal]

quote:Originally posted by yosgof

Is it Carl Sagan or Karl Sagal?

- Yossi
http://gallery.photo.net/photo/3365119-lg.jpg


It's the latter, and there are billions and billions of little differences...(not the least of which is that he is dead...)

Karl Ian Sagal

Each road you travel should be just a bit better for having had you pass.

[Mr. Protocol]

However, the cosmonaut was in an accelerated frame of reference, so welcome to general relativity...

Or so I always thought. Prof. Ford at the U. of Michigan once took us through the twin paradox, and showed that actually special relativity had no problems with accelerated frames of reference, but most of the twin's aging happened just at the point when the other twin was "rounding the bend" at Alpha Centauri, not at a steady rate during the journey.

That just seemed weird to me so I became a computer scientist instead.

To keep this on topic, I postulate that the traveling twin was riding a Segway with star drive. Would that be cool or what?

[GyroGo]

quote:Originally posted by KSagal

It's the latter, and there are billions and billions of little differences...(not the least of which is that he is dead...)

Well, hate to be morbid, but in the future THAT difference will be eliminated. You will both be dead. Billions and Billions minus one.




One day in the future, there will have been a billion electripeds manufactured, maybe even a good percentage Segways.

[GyroGo]

quote:Originally posted by Mr. Protocol

That just seemed weird to me so I became a computer scientist instead.

And there's nothing weird in computer science :D

[Hauptagon]

quote:Originally posted by GyroGo

quote:Originally posted by Mr. Protocol

That just seemed weird to me so I became a computer scientist instead.

And there's nothing weird in computer science :D


No, nothing at all! :)

-Justin

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." -From Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory