Following the theme of "kamikaze," my initial plan was to create a pinwheel using easily accessible materials, and then hold it out the window of my car as I drove 80 or so MPH on Highway 580 over the Altamont Pass. For those outside of the SF Bay area, there is a farm of windmills on the leeward side of the hills that the Altamont Pass ... um ... passes through.

I thought that the death of the pinwheel somewhere in those hills would be a fitting end to a hastily constructed wind-powered device.

Alas, my initial tests showed that the flimsy paper would be bent immediately upon reaching any sort of speed whatsoever. I brought the pinwheel back inside the car, and decided to just see if I could get it to operate within the confines of my car. A cross-current flow of air was created by opening various windows in the car to different heights and holding the wheel up around head-level. Opening the windows too much caused gusts that were well above the pinwheel's ability to withstand.

With one hand on the wheel and the other on the other wheel, I realized, I had no additional hand to film my experiments. Nor to document the pinwheel amongst its wind-powered spinning brothers and sisters. I had to stop and document the pinwheel with its family.

I stopped at the top of the pass, and recorded video of the pinwheel struggling to move through the currents of air passing through my open windows, and panned across to show the windmills in the distance. Panning back showed a final perfect spin of the wheel.