Boing Boing's Old News = My New News

I know this is a long post, but it's interesting, I promise.

On the BoingBoingBoing podcast I listened to today, the commentators were discussing the Gizmo documentary, about old-timey crazy inventions. In that same vein came two similar inventions that I hadn't heard about before:
1. A Human Pedal-Powered Helicopter (Pedalicopter?) that would allow you to travel at approximately 1,000 mph: The inventor planned to pedal furiously, hovering 12 feet off the ground or so, as the Earth rotated beneath him. He would simply lift off, watch the world spin by below him, and quit pedalling when he was above China or wherever he was going. Awesome. And the best part about this one, is that one of the BoingBoing guys then said "Would that actually work?!?!?"
2. A huge belt-like-thing encircling the earth around the equator, but suspended (somehow) a ways off the ground. It was assumed that, like the pedal-copter, this belt would remain stationary relative to the earth, so people could transport things rapidly around the world simply by hanging things onto it(!!!). That's awesome... just imagining this gigantic belt w/ huge hooks on it, that, to people on the surface of the plant, would appear to be spinning around the earth at just over a thousand of miles an hour... and then, you reach up and try to hook your parcel on there, without losing a limb or being decapitated.... and assuming you succeed, then the receiver of said parcel would have to watch, from some point along the equator, at thousands of similar parcels whirling over head, try to spy the correct one, and then pull it down, again without dying in the process. Just like a baggage claim, but going 1000 miles an hour. With hooks. LOL.

Also, one of the commentators said something about the fact that if you were to drill a hole through the center of the earth and then drop a parcel into it (in keeping with the theme of tremendously rapid alternatives to FedEx), it would take 42 minutes to reach the other side of the planet (see article here for the math). Then, he went on to say, the neatest thing about this, is that for any hole you dig, at any angle, you could drop your package into it, and would take 42 minutes to reach it's destination. In other words, from New York to L.A. would take the same amount of time as from (wherever's opposite China) to China. I did some searching, and it turns out this idea was first fleshed out by Robert Hooke, within the context of a Gravity Train, that would provide for travel around the world (figuratively speaking of course; it would be, more accurately, travel through the world). A quote from a website:
"The basic concept behind the gravity train is straightforward: At each end of the tunnel, an observer looking into the hole would see a downhill slope. If a train at one end of the tunnel were to release its brakes, the force of gravity would immediately pull the train downhill and cause the train to accelerate much like a roller coaster. Steeper slopes would result in more speed, with the highest acceleration occurring in the straight-down tunnels which cross the Earth's center. The train would continue to accelerate until reaching the halfway point, at which time its inertia would be at odds with gravity and it would begin to decelerate. As Hooke's data indicates, if the train operated in a frictionless environment it would reach the surface on the opposite end of the tunnel at the exact moment that its speed reached zero. Naturally, a gravity train operating in a real-world environment would need to bring along enough horsepower to make up the friction loss.
One interesting property of the Gravity Express is that its transit time would always be very, very close to forty-two minutes regardless of the distance travelled. In fact, if the Earth were a perfect sphere, the trip time would always be exactly forty-two minutes and twelve seconds. Greater distances would be traversed in the same amount of time as short ones because the train's maximum speed would be increased enough to exactly make up the difference. Due to nature of gravity, this forty-two minute trip time would be consistent for any size of vehicle."

Man that's neat.