The Wheels on the Bus Go Round And Round by Bryan

Let’s start off with a little riddle.

What is white, at least 2500 pounds, and has 28 feet?

No ideas yet?

Let’s try another puzzle.

What do you get when you cross the Flintstones

with Public Transportation

[]

and a little art?

If the hints aren’t helping, I guess I can give you another hint.

Typically on my commute to work, I read the Boston Metro. It’s not as substantive as other newspapers but it’s good for finding out about daily events and free movie tickets. On the right hand corner, there was a little snippet about an event at the Enormous Room, a hip restauarant Mitra introduced me to.

There, they’d be talking about the new Busycle. The Busycle is a public art/community building/environment project funded by the Berwick Institute. One of the organizers of the project is an MIT alum ’04. The basic idea behind the project was that they would take apart an old 14 passenger van and replace the power supplied by the motor with power supplied by humans by making it a multi-passenger bike. So far they’ve done a lot of work with the project and hope to have the prototype ready in September for people to ride across the city. Eventually, they’d like to take it across the country and encourage people to think about innovative and creative ways to address some of the problems facing the environment today. What I thought was especially cool is that the project organizers really brought in the community to take part in building the Busycle.

Here are just a few pictures I was able to snap at the event.

Technically, the busycle is considered a bike so they’ll be letting people ride it around their neighborhoods in the coming months; I’m hoping there’ll be an MIT stop.

Here at MIT, there’s MIT Student Pugwash, and they often discuss how science, technology, and engineering interface with the issues surrounding the environment and society at large.

Random funny conversation of the day:
Friend: Where are you headed?
Me: To Bob Brown’s going-away party.
Friend: Question approaching. Who is Bob Brown?
Me: You know, Bob Brown, MIT provost.
Friend: Oh, I thought you meant Bobby Brown.

(did you know he has a reality tv show?)

Random trivia fact: Did you know that Elmer the Glue Cow is married to Elsie the Borden Milk Cow?

I don’t know where I learned that.