this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
684 points (98.2% liked)
Greentext
4460 readers
503 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Brah just discovered conservation of angular momentum
It's not that. Gyroscopic action exists of course, but it's fairly weak against the weight of your body. Balancing a bicycle is just like balancing an umbrella on your finger, except you can easily move your finger any direction you need. To move the bicycle sideways, you need to already be moving forward.
Track stands! Not a contradiction to your statement at all though: you need to be moving just ever so slightly.
With a fixie it's easy, because you can pedal forwards and backwards in tiny amounts. With a freewheel, it's trickier but you get the hang of it with practice. Ideally you'll have an incline, so you pedal forward to go forward, and ease up to slide back. After some practice I can use the raised reflective paint from e.g. crosswalks as the "incline." This miniscule motion is enough to balance
and like you said, it ain't the angular momentum that does it.
~~it really is that though, have you not done the rotating wheel experiment? it is fucking hard to tilt the axis of a wheel rotating at a speed which is comparable to biking speed.~~ come to think of it maybe not:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oZAc5t2lkvo
Which is just regular conservation of momentum plus a force directing it towards some center point it oscillates around, which feels weird because you can hold a lot more of it in your hands than you normally can without that oscillation.