CS Department Bikers
It’s suddenly fashionable to ride two-wheelers — bikes, scooters, and motorcycles. Of course, bicycles have always been a popular form of transportation, and lots of our faculty and students are avid bicycle riders. See, for example, the story on Majd Sakr and Chuck Thorpe’s experience on Race Across America.
Motorcycle and motor scooter riders have been less common — until now. Gary Miller is not only a major force in computer science research, particularly in areas such as meshing algorithms and spectral graph theory, but also a long-time motorscooter rider. And yes, he got me sucked in. I am now the proud owner of a Vespa LX 150. The cool thing, though, is not that the CS Department Head is now commuting to work on a scooter. It’s that I’ve since learned that there are other two-wheelers in the department. For example, here is a picture of Manuel Blum on his Harley-lookalike:
Manuel looks a lot like a scruffy biker-dude, don’t you think? :-)
And here is a picture of part of our gang:
From left to right: Carla Miller (Gary’s daughter), Gary Miller, Margaret Reid-Miller, me, and Manuel Blum.
I realize that for some people, seeing me on a little (70 mpg) Vespa instead of my usual 400 horsepower GTO (at 13 mpg) might be a bit surprising. But at this point, unlike David Hagele, who sold his Porsche and is now driving a Vespa, I won’t be giving up my muscle car any time soon.
Vroom vroom!
Peter Lee @ July 9, 2008
I was looking at getting a motor scooter this summer, and I couldn’t believe all the different brands there are out there. I looked around and found this site to be really helpful: www.motorscootershopper.com. I ended up getting a Kymco.