kjl

To avoid making the other crazies want to kill us as well (and avoid turning those on the fence of being crazies into crazies). Jack, I think you've got stuff all backwards. The issue is not whether or not regular, normal muslims care if OBL was treated according to his religion. It's just about 1) taking the high road and 2) not provoking the crazies, who SELF-identify as muslim. e.g. the KKK, the Westboro Baptist Church, Ann Coulter, and a whole bunch of other crazy people self-identify as Christian. If they are treated as Christians to avoid pissing off their crazy followers, does that have any bearing on whether or not they are actually, really Christians? Does it affect how crazy or violent or hateful you, as a "normal" Christian, are?

And thus ends the least crowded, best carving runs evar :(

I find the fact that we aren't using metric incredibly embarrassing, actually. It's pathetic. Everybody else managed to switch over just fine; we're the only ones that utterly failed.

I think maybe because you are a communist, you are making a slippery slope argument against capitalism when you assume that if somebody is trying to maximize their profits, being unethical and deliberately lying is just part of the game. (I could be wrong, though) There is nothing hypocritical about "attempt to maximize your profits without lying." Without trying to be all braggy about it, I feel like I am a good example of an ethical capitalist. I have done exactly what you claim a capitalist should not - disclosed that the car I was trying to sell had some funny electrical problem that actually was not manifesting itself while potential buyer was looking at the car, while at the same time asking for more money because the tires were brand new. I have also downloaded a cracked version of (expensive) software (Adobe Illustrator, at ~$500) to test if it would work for me beyond the 30 day trial, and then I actually purchased a legal version when I decided I did like it (which I didn't even use, since the cracked version was just fine) simply because I believe the company should be paid what they ask for if I want to use their product. When I say I would charge people more for something on ebay than I would on bomber, I don't mean I would charge the "fair" price on bomber and try to screw people on ebay by lying - I mean I would charge the "fair" price on ebay and give it away for a lower price here, just to be nice (just like I would sell something I don't really have a need for to a friend for a nominal fee. e.g. this bike is worth $500 but I don't use it anymore, so really it's worth $0 to me, but I could get $500 on ebay - if I give it to my friend for $200, we both win. No problem. I would find it tacky, and consider my friend no longer my friend if he flipped that bike for $500 for a profit of $300). I'll be honest, I don't really give my old stuff away usually, or gouge my friends, or sell it on ebay. I'm lazy, so most of my old stuff lives in the garage.

Well, I disagree with this... as long as "gouging" refers to simply trying to get as much profit as possible without being unethical like your coworker Gordon or anybody being deceptive in their description of the items. If you are just talking about grabbing a good deal when you see it and flipping it for a quick profit, I have no problem on eBay, for this possible flawed reasoning: On eBay everybody is anonymous and you are competing in a global market. Everybody is attempting to maximize their profits, so I have no problem if you try to maximize your profits as well, as long as you play by the rules (no lying). You're not "screwing" anybody because everybody is playing by the same rules. In contrast, I believe (correctly or not) that on bomber classifieds, people are not necessarily trying to maximize their profits, just like at my workplace, you'll see stuff like "I have these great boots that I just don't use any more - they're worth $200 but if they find a good home to anybody here I'll let them go for $50; other wise they'll go on eBay next Friday." If you grab those boots and flip them on eBay, you are profiting and preying on the other person's good will and charity. Maybe an analogy would be lining up for a ski lift. eBay is like: no ordered line- everybody is cramming as hard as possible to the front to get on as fast as possible. If those are the rules of the game, you should also cram to the front. I view bomber classifieds like an ordered line, where everybody is waiting their turn. If you ignore the line and get on, you're not breaking and laws (there's no sign that says you have to line up), but you're taking advantage of everybody else's willingness to at nice.

I guess I'd hope that at the small, community level that a lot of people seem to think bomberonline is, cutthroat capitalism at its greediest extreme is not desirable or appropriate. e.g. 1) Tsunami hits. Convenience store owner can sell bottled water for $100 a bottle. Fair, according to the letter of the law. But he's a dick. 2) I'm on day 1 of a 3 week carving vacation, and my intec heel breaks. Another carver brought extras, says "sure, you can have this heel for $800." Sure, demand is high; I need the heel or the rest of my 3 week vacation is ruined. That guy is an ass, though. According to the letter of the law and the rules of capitalism, these things are all fair, but do you really want people to behave this way all the time? Screw that. This sort of thing turns me off so much that when I encounter people like this, I go out of my way to screw them, even at personal cost to myself. When I was in college, 5 friends and I rented a house for the year from a group of students who lived there the previous year. They sold us all the furniture in it for some nominal fee ($200 maybe for tables, chairs, etc.. Maybe more than the actual value of the crappy furniture, but less than the value of having to shop for furniture while taking classes). They said, "we bought it from the last tenants for $200, they bought it from the tenants before them for $200, and you can sell it all to the next tenants next year for $200." The next year, the next tenants came in and tried to lowball us and would not budge. So our choices were to accept $100 or nothing. We unanimously decided to donate everything we could and then destroy everything else. We took a net loss of $100 rather than reward people for being dicks. I suppose you can sit around and flip gear on bomber for profit if you want, but I would disapprove, because my understanding is that the way the bomber community works is more like a bunch of friends passing gear back and forth for a fair price but without taking advantage of each other, and less like a bunch of profit maximizing individuals. Perhaps my understanding of the culture is wrong, though. On Ebay or craigslist, it's fair game for sure.

If I was young and invulnerable I'd be into this... http://www.vimeo.com/9970489

I tore my PCL many years ago, maybe 16 years ago now. For the first ~6-7 years I didn't really notice it, but the unnatural motion (shin shifting backwards) slowly got looser and looser and looser until it really started messing stuff up (my knee would lock up, I'd get pain for days after sports, etc.). Quads help some, I guess, but you're right, the calf is probably more important; I noticed a long time ago that flexing my calf muscle would pull my shin into the correct place. Having better, stronger calf muscle tone made it less shifty. However, my knee degraded to the point where I needed the full reconstruction, and I have to say, the rehab sucked, but it was worth it to not have to think about it any more. Now I don't have to concentrate on holding my knee together every time I fire my hamstrings. BTW, I think snowboarding (alpine or otherwise), is probably one of the least stressful sports to your PCL. So that's a good thing. Even cycling, on the back stroke, stresses the PCL when you fire that hamstring. Watch out for bending your knee with your foot poked out to the side (like standing with duck feet and squatting). It won't hurt anymore because you have no PCL, but it'll be stretching stuff apart in there that's not supposed to stretch apart.

Man, I remember that run, too. Sick. Maybe second year on plates, sitting at the top of the steepest run I had ever tried to carve on, with like 40 other carvers watching, and it was my turn, and go big or go home I guess! I made 5 very, very high speed carves, just barely holding on for dear life on those heelsides, got to the bottom with the biggest ****-eating grin of all time, and I was hooked. OK, I was already hooked, but I was hooked more. Man, that was a great session overall, too, with the bomber factory tour (with the fainting) and the A Basin (with the high altitude fainting) and the shrimp and the carvy carving... etc., etc..

I don't think Garrett carves that much anymore - though he's been up to visit my neck of the woods (SF) twice or so in the last few years to give talks at and attend science/physics conferences, and we've done some kitesurfing in the bay when he's free and I'm uninjured :) Here's him in a lab coat from... gosh, 7-8 years ago? The last year that the SES was actually half in Summit county. I think this was at Beaver Creek... on Harrier? It's been a while. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7929436707249581510#

Kitesurf.

Thanks, I'll try q-tipping the big stuff out with something sticky and then blowing the rest out with compressed air. Compressed air easier to find at Home Depot or Radio Shack?

I accidentally stripped two centerdisk bolts and have successfully drilled the heads off and then removed the rest of the bolts with pliers. So everything is good to go now except that there are all these little steel shavings and splinters everywhere from when I drilled out the bolts, including inside the inserts. Anybody have a good idea of how to get those shavings out? A magnet was not as effective as I thought it would be. Would a bottoming tap work, or would it just drive the metal shavings somewhere bad (or fail to remove the shavings)? Thanks.

No, I don't think it's stupid; I've pondered this before as well. Actually, I was thinking of having both bindings be free to rotate, and not stiffly, but freely. The positioning of your feet/knees/hips would be enough to put the angles of the bindings where you wanted them. I think it would be hard to get used to, but a pretty awesome, smooooth butter ride when you got used to it. It would finally solve that whole "toesides easier on flatter angles and heelsides easier on steep angle" issue. The engineering issue would be of course how to get smoothly, freely rotating bindings that are still strong in all the other directions. I don't know anything about engineering, but I'm pretty sure that involves a bunch of ball bearings. Also fun to imagine: freely rotating teleboard bindings :) I think that would be useless, as you're completely negating the toeside at flat angles with tele bindings. But funny to imagine riding anyways.

Super short clip; one turn by Curly. <object width="711" height="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10754916&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10754916&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="711" height="400"></embed></object><p><a href=" ">Curly on Ruthies</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user2412350'>http://vimeo.com/user2412350">Ken Lao</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

Bummer to hear :( I just met Curly for the first time on Ruthies at Ajax last Tuesday I think. Nice guy, and he was riding great. Hope he comes back strong for next season.

I think the question of "should we pay for a public service from a common pool of money" does not have an absolute universal answer, where the "correct" answer is NEVER (what you seem to think) or ALWAYS (which I guess some people think the bleeding heart liberals think). Perhaps in an ideal world you could make a case for NEVER, but in the real world, there are just certain kinds of things which we as a society have decided is worth providing to the public, and it turns out the private sector is bad at implementing. For example, you are already FORCED to pay for roads, traffic lights, stop signs, crosswalks, and even the highway patrol, even if you never use a car. We've decided that roads are infrastructure that is worth having, and everybody is taxed, and everybody pays for it. It's nice that the government runs it, because despite whatever complaints you may have, imagine the disaster that would ensue if Sprint, Verizon, and AT+T each had separate, competing road networks and were trying to convince you to switch to their exclusive plans with confusing daytime and nighttime toll rates and roads. Things like that are better handled in the public sector rather than the private. Also, nobody would ever pave roads out to small towns if it was privatized because the cost would never be recouped. Or in another example, I am fine with being forced to pay for NWS/NOAA to give out flood and tornado warnings, despite the fact that I don't live in tornado alley or in a flood plain. It's just another way of spreading the cost of essential public service and safety out around to everybody. Government regulation is what makes utility companies lay down electrical lines to remote residences way out in the boonies, where it would be economically infeasible otherwise, so the cost of those customers getting power lines is subsidized by people like me, who live in densely populated areas. Again, I'm OK with that, because I think people should have access to electricity. Health care is just another one of those things, in my opinion. Clearly not working as it currently exists, and I certainly think general health care is something worthy of public dollars, certainly more than the federal corn subsidies, etc.., or even, say, the fact that I subsidize the building of long roads to remote towns. I do agree with Jack that it is repugnant for me to have to pay for somebody else's avoidable health issues (e.g. smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, etc.). However, I think the good outweighs the bad for the reasons outlined above, and also because it seems like any system but our current system results in lower costs overall anyway. Partly confusing the issue of costs is that for anybody who works for a large company (which is most of us, probably), the cost of your health insurance is hidden from you since your company pays for it, but they pay too much. If my company paid me the money instead and I bought my own government regulated health insurance, that would be fine with me.

Wikipedia discourages links to commercial sites. I had to fight to keep bomberonline on there a few years ago (and I "won" the argument since bomberonline was perhaps the only repository for carving information online back then - I think it was before Scott's Carver's Almanac was around). I'm actually surprised to see yyzcanuck in the external links. Jose: I think Jack and I at least did some work on the page a long, long time ago. You should definitely edit it if you feel it could be improved. That's the beauty of wikipedia - anybody is free to edit it; just do so in good faith (and if you've used it as a resource before, you probably have at least some sense of what they are trying to do: present information as factually as possible, from a neutral point of view, with no original research. No prosthelytizing).

Oh, in that case I don't believe in "steering". I was viewing "steering" as applying a yaw force on the board, which I do do.

Softcarver: I agree in general with what you say. However, I would argue that the presence of a "slow skiing" sign (indicating beginner merging, high traffic areas, etc., etc.) removes most mitigating factors in a crash. Yes, sometimes things happen out of the blue that might cause an accident, but the whole point of the caution/slow skiing signs is to get you to ski at a slow enough speed so that they either don't happen or the consequences are less severe. e.g. if you get into a high speed car crash in a school area, it doesn't really matter what happened - maybe you thought you were being safe driving fast, but a dog jumped in the road and you swerved and lost control: but the whole point of the slow school area speed limit is to get you to drive at a speed where the consequences of having to swerve are not as critical. The only thing I can see being a reasonable defense is: 1) he wasn't actually riding that fast and the patroller just happened to break his leg in a freak fall or 2) gear failure that occured before entering the slow speed area. Also, he's going to jail for two days. That's not going to ruin his life. Also worth noting: when they assign blame for auto accidents they don't usually have "patrollers calibrated to judge speed by eye" or radar guns - they take witness accounts and assess the damage of the crash. I do not have the full facts of the case, but the fact that they tried him and put him in jail indicates to me that the patroller was probably pretty messed up, and thus clear that the guy was going pretty fast/reckless. I agree - I don't want a police state on the hill. However, if I enter a slow zone and slow down for a bunch of kids, I would be very, very angry if some bozo steamrollered me at 35 mph. That's not responsible.

Also, speeding in a slow zone is sort of by definition reckless. If you speed in your car through a slow children zone and hit somebody (an adult even), yeah, you are probably going to jail.

I voted yes. Yes, definitely. A caveat: if you are talking about just ONE carved turn (like the J drill, where you set your edge and ride it around until you come to a stop going uphill), then no, you can just set your edge, not worry about yaw, and ride the thing around. If you are talking about linked carved turns, yes, for sure. The board does yaw a lot over the course of a turn: 180 degrees if you are completing your turns. I suppose you could make the case that if you are leaning over 90 degrees you are really "rolling 90 and then pitching up through your whole turn", but the fact remains that the whole "body+snowboard" mass rotates quite quickly through 180 degrees around the surface normal of the snow, and during your turn transition, you need to completely reverse that angular momentum into your next turn. Sure, if you engage your edge hard enough, eventually the sidecut will reverse that angular momentum for you, but in my opinion you can make the transition smoother, easier to engage, faster, and more gracefully if you purposely start rotating your upper body and start reversing that angular momentum early, and then steer the board into the next turn. I'm not oversteering into a skid, I'm preemptively steering it into exactly the yaw speed that it wants to be turning due to the sidecut in the next turn. In my opinion, one of the reasons a lot of people have really slow and/or awkward transitions is because they don't steer enough (they move their weight over the board and switch edges, but it takes some time for the angular momentum (yaw) to turn around, and during that time they are in a weird, vulnerable position requiring some flailing and/or waiting to get back to a nice carved turn going the other direction.

I think a few years ago when I was more aggressive offpiste I would have been better at "proactive" jump turns where you're not "braking to stay alive" but "setting up your next turn". I think the fact that I carve so much and softboot so little these days has made my off piste riding deteriorate. I'm sure the skills are still there, but the confidence, aggressiveness, and on-the-fly route planning are not what they used to be. So now when I do tight trees I am braking around tree after tree instead of tracking along on a line that meanders in between them, if you know what I mean, which probably looks about the same to a causal observer, but I am doing lots of brakey counterrotating turns instead of real turns. I know what you are talking about regarding extending and letting the board come around. It may require a tiny bit more effort to do because you have to engage more body parts, but when you do it it seems like it takes much less energy, is much smoother, and you end up in a better, balanced riding position for starting your next move. I think for me it's more about mentally preparing myself and getting into the zone more than actual technique.

Toes to heels. I think it only affects me when I have to jump turn or brake hard, like in trees. I think I do a very counterrotated kick turn and end up facing straight downhill with the board sideways and weight on the back foot, which makes the back knee hurt if the angles are too high (twisting of the foot inwards). The "performance" of the turn is not necessarily compromised, but the cartilage in my knee might be :)

Hey, John - does riding at 45/32 hurt your ability to ride offpiste? iirc when I increased my angles up that high I had issues doing heelside jump turns.