kjl
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Posts posted by kjl
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I definitely agree with the second set. First set.... I dunno if a younger crowd would agree but I've also got no anime or robo-cop experience.
You don't know if they'd agree?! I have presented incontrovertable scientific proof!
Let's look at how these stack in the AWESOME scale, 1-10.
First, boots:
Row 1:
Optimus Prime = Giant Transforming Robot = 10.
Pikachu = Cute, fuzzy, soft = 1(+3 bonus for shooting lightning) = 4.
Row 2:
VF-1 transforming Valkyrie = Giant Transforming Robot = 10 (-4 penalty for being piloted by angsty teen with ennui) = 6.
DragonBallZ = 1 (+5 bonus for being powered by rage) = 6.
Row 3:
VF-1 transforming Valkyrie with battle armor = Giant Transforming Robot = 10 (-4 penalty) = 6.
Sailor Moon = 1.
Row 4:
Contra = Videogame back when men were still men and played Nintendo till their thumbs bled. UUDDLRLRBA<start> = 10.
Banjo Kazooie = Bear with bird in his backpack = 1.
Hardboots = 32.
Softboots = 12.
Bindings:
Row 1:
Terminator T-800 = Hyperalloy combat chassis; very tough; doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead; speaks with Austrian accent = 10.
Tron Guy = Fat guy in leotard with cheap plastic. = 1 (+4 bonus for doing Tron, -5 for being able to see too much of his package) = 0.
Row 2:
Robocop = Part man. Part machine. ALL COP. = 10.
Fisher Price training potty = 1 (+4 bonus for eliminating rubber bedsheets and diapers) = 5.
TD2 = 20.
Strap bindings = 5.
Hardboots>Softboots.
TD2>Strap bindings.
Q.E.D.
You are of course free to disagree with my findings, but you are wrong. Science is not about your opinions or feelings.
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Ken, it would be great if you could Cafe Press T shirt those. Any chance?
Hah, that would be funny ;) Maybe when I am done with my current project in a week or two I will see if I can come up with a more t-shirt-friendly design.
RandyS: my Photoshop skills are weak. I think boostertwo is the resident master.
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Here's one for bindings :D
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Problem: From us young snowboarder people: ski boots have always been dorky. Is there any way we can make them look cool??
Remember, as my signature says: Optimus Prime is a hardbooter ;)
I always meant to put the TD and TD2 in there, too... hmm.
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I hear they control the British crown,
keep the metric system down,
leave Atlantis off the maps,
keep the martians under wraps,
hold back the electric car,
make Steve Gutenberg a star,
rob cavefish of their sight,
and rig every Oscar night.
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My take on "global warming" pretty much boils down to "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I definitely agree that it is impossible to prove that it exists, just like looking at a 2 minute window of the stock market couldn't tell you the overall trend over the next 10 years. By the same reasoning, it is impossible to say that we aren't contributing to environmental damage, either.
However, my reasoning basically follows the same logic of, ironically enough, the argument that we should have invaded Iraq based on the threat of WMD's - I believe the analogy was that you can't wait for "the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud over an American city."
Our curbing of our damage to the environment shouldn't only happen after we have obtained proof by "smoking gun" - if we wait a thousand years before it gets so bad that the vast majority of the people finally agree that, yes, we screwed up the environment, it could be so bad that fixing it would be unfeasible and intractable. Also, I believe that almost everything humans do happens exponentially (e.g. see Moore's Law, or the Law of Accelerating Returns). So if it turns out that we are indeed doing damage to the enviroment, I believe it highly likely that over time we will be doing more damage, and faster, than we are now, meaning that by the time we understand the problem, it will be orders of magnitude more difficult to rectify the problem than now.
By the way, this is why I can't wait for the eventual supremacy of our new robot overlords - I think people are very bad at making decisions where the benefit happens over very large time scales - I'm fairly sure that any changes we make for the better for our environment will be lost in the noise of random fluctuations over our lifetimes, or our kids' lifetimes, or our kids' kids' lifetimes, but over a long enough time period, our descendents far down the line may be unable to survive because of choices we make now.
The other way to look at it is game theory: it doesn't really matter what the chance of our doing irreversable damage to the environment is as long as it is >0%, as the "payoff" for doing irreversable damage is very, very, bad. Therefore in my mind the burden of proof should not be to prove that we are doing irrecoverably bad things to the environment, but to prove that we definitely are not doing irrecoverably bad things to the environment.
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Also, the website mentions that this is Shaun White's and Hannah Teter's first big-mountain experience. People on this board are always making funny statements like
"take an expert
terrain-park/alpine/east-coast/west-coast/free-rider/race
snowboarder and put him in the
race-course/west-coast/east-coast/big-mountain/terrain-park
and he will tend to
do-worse/do-better/suck-royally/kick-all-ass
compared to the opposite."
So here's one chance to see expert freestylers on big mountains ;)
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I would gladly part with 10 bucks to watch big-screen footage of Terje big-mountain riding. That helicopter shot from above and behind of him leaping off the cliff - O M G .
Don't know why they don't use that angle more often in snowboarding movies... so much more dramatic than those straight pointing-at-the-face shots...
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I would really like a working right knee. Supposedly they have the technology, but 3 surgeries later and it's still all busted, loose, painful, and weak.
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Beat me to it. ;)
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Heh, I was wondering where that article came from (noticed the see-also link that showed up at the bottom of the Snowboarding page yesterday or today). Might as well throw the bomberonline link as an external link on there - wikipedians tend to frown on commercial links, but since the alpine community is so small and it's very hard to get information on technique or gear in any place other than online, I've managed to convince the local linkfarm police that bomber was worth keeping on the main snowboarding page. In fact, I used your "physics of a carved snowboard turn" article as an example of how there is useful, non-commercial information on the site as well.
Actually, I'll probably go ahead and add that link now, since you're more attached to bomber than me.
Wikipedia is the best thing ever, isn't it?
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I needed more lateral stiffness in my boots so I could put my angles higher and make my heelside better, and I made a really nerdy post over on snowboarderreview.com asking for help. Somebody from bomberonline (whose name I forget!) saw my post and pointed me over here. And that was that ;)
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I like the idea of Never Summer ;)
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I'm 15.
I've been snowboarding since I was 10. 5 years on softies and this coming season will be my first on hardboots.
Oh boy are you in for a treat!
I'm 29. 6 years on softies, 3 on hardboots.
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I love the brain washing that goes on over at the EC site. In the last five or six years racers have been going to wider and wider boards.
I don't think the EC guys ever claimed that it was racing's "fault" that boards got narrower and narrower; they just claim that the shrinking width of boards starting from the mid-90's to a few years ago contributed to the declining interest in alpine snowboards.
I have no firsthand information, obviously, as I only started carving ~3 years ago, but I do know that when I was first shopping around, I felt that "real carving" boards were mostly 18cm wide, and the 21cm wide boards were hybrid "piste + off-piste" boards (Axis/4WD).
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KJL,
I would challenge you to work more on doing all of these things with your ankles. From my experience, the average hardbooter's biggest downfall is thinking that movements start in joints other than the ankles. It is so easy to do in softies so most people assume that the stiff feel of hardboots takes away ankle movements so that movements must come from somewhere else. Just a thought to start your season. :)
I've said it before and I'll say it again - ankles, ankles, ankles!:D (just practicing for my hardboot lessons)
Hehe, I think you gave me that advice before, Phil! I can in fact do some edge control on the toeside edge with my ankles (the calf muscle is strong), but "lifting the toes" for the heelside turn is impossible for my weak muscles. I can't even flex the boot by pulling my toes up while sitting on the chair lift, let alone try to pull that toeside edge up while in a heelside carve! But the biggest thing I miss from softbooting is lateral flexibility, I hear some people (like the EC people and some others) have their standard bails set up in such a way that they can lean their boots left and right a little, but as far as I can tell the Intec heels pretty much completely eliminate that.
But in any case, I will work on it when the snow comes. You clearly know way, way more about this than I do.
Thanks!
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In general it is harder for me to do very quick maneuvers in hardboots than softboots.
This manifests in at least the following cases:
- Quick counterrotation jump turns are harder in hardboots.
- Moving my weight fore and aft is harder in hardboots because it necessitates bending the big joint at the hips/waist, while in softboots it only requires a quick lateral lean in the ankles.
- Controlling skids is harder in hardboots because, again, edge angle control comes from knees/hips/waist instead of quick ankle movements.
This results in:
- Because moving weight fore/aft and skid control is difficult, "survival riding" on steeps or chutes or death moguls is more difficult on hardboots for me.
- Because moving weight fore/aft is difficult, riding powder is less graceful, and less easy.
- Riding over as opposed to through uneven terrain is harder because the ankles don't flex as much.
Just my 2c.
- Quick counterrotation jump turns are harder in hardboots.
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I'm with you, D-Sub - no hood scoops, spoilers, or aero ground-effects for my shoes, please ;)
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I'll be there. Maybe +1, maybe +2.
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Did I wake up this morning in a parallel universe where gymnastics is cool?
Hehe, gymnastics have always been cool, as long as they were properly disguised as breakdancing or kung fu movies ;)
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Yeah, I test drove one a while back (unfortunately, no AWD ;) ) and the dealer told us not to worry that the engine had stalled when we stopped for lights - the engine just shuts itself off and turns back on when you need the extra power. Very cool.
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I'm in, and I really, really hope things go well for you all. Without this site I would never have gotten into carving, and it is a major joy in my life: I snowboard, I eat, I work, and I sleep, in that order, and that's pretty much all I do. Thanks for the help in finding and buying equipment, the community, the expression sessions, and, well, the carving. Long live you guys.
Take care,
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I rode ~50 days on my first set of heels and then the cable broke. Maybe another 100 days on the second set, with a cable replacement halfway through. Pins have been fine so far, knock on wood.
I ride with my front foot locked and my back foot in walk mode. (I like to drive the board angle with a hard connection at the front boot, and I like being able to crouch down without twisting the board too much by opening up the back).
DSub - I would guess that there is actually quite a bit of force on the pins when on your toeside, especially if you have significant underhang. I imagine that very high angles with lots of edge underhang would be the worst possible case.
Also, I was under the impression that the little wings were just there to guide the pins into the holes, and don't actually support any weight, but I could be completely wrong - I should use the opportunity to check as an excuse to stomp around on the carpet tonight ;)
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Mine are all standing int he garage base up.
Yeah, mine are all standing up, base outwards, in my living room.
Nitro Snowboards-Need advice
in Carving Central
Posted
I love my Never Summer Premier. Really a great board. Also, generally low-key, non-obnoxious, non-tacky graphics. Stiff, heavy, damp.