| I don't know who you are, but I came within a hairs whisker of meeting the man and it is one of the few things in my life that I honestly can say I regret. That he 'discovered' something is a strawman, that's not what this is article is all about, if you had actually gone further than skin deep (say past the title) you would have seen that for yourself. That's not a claim Engelbart made, that's just something his daughter said (last line in the article). And anybody that has driven a recumbent knows this too, but that doesn't mean you get to belittle all of them for pointing this out. If you got nothing out of it because you already knew all of it then good for you, I've been riding bikes since I was 3 (hard to avoid when you're dutch) and only in my late thirties I finally fully grokked the dynamics of riding a bicycle, they're anything but intuitive. The most interesting thing about bicycles is how we got them to be so 'right' without knowing that theory, it's a classical case of evolution in progress, nobody with the physics knowledge required ever sat down to design the thing, tons of weird designs were tried (and are still being tried) which led to a nearly optimal shape. And lots of the bits and pieces in that near optimal shape were used long before they were understood. Incidentally there seems to be a disproportionate representation of the ability to juggle and ride the monocycle amongst mathematicians, why is that? |