kjl

A few years ago, I read a pretty detailed study showing trucks and SUVs were significantly less safe in practice than smaller cars. Yes, in a head-on collision, a small car will get totally destroyed by a pickup or an SUV - there are a few non-obvious and interesting points that they raised, however: 1) head-on collisions are very rare. The vast majority of fatal accidents are not head-on, and in particular, for SUVs and maybe pickups, are actually rollovers, so much so that any advantage in headon collisions was lost (for example, if all SUV drivers in head-on collisions survive and all small car drivers die, SUV drivers still lose overall if there are 100 times as many rollovers as headon collisions). 2) SUVs and pickups were more likely to be involved in accidents than small cars. Whether that is because small cars handle better so drivers can avoid accidents, or drivers of small cars are terrified so they drive safer, or SUV and pickup drivers are lulled into false security and drive less attentively was not addressed, but the end data was pretty unassailable: SUVs and pickups were significantly more likely to be involved in accidents. 3) I remember looking at the final statistics and of the top 10 dangerous cars (driver/passengers most likely to die), like 7-8 of them were trucks or SUVs, and only the other 2-3 were the tiny subcompacts you'd expect to be deathtraps. I can't remember which cars were the safest, but I think they were basically the normal sized, reasonably well handling cars, like your Sentras and Civics and the like. Also iirc the SUVs based on cars instead of trucks (Rav4, etc.) were safe as well. 4) The most shocking thing to me looking at the data was: SUV drivers were slightly more likely to die in a car accident than small car drivers, but way, way, way more likely to kill somebody else. It was a lose/LOSE situation if you were in one. I don't know if the data still applies. This was at least a few years ago, when SUVs were basically just light trucks with a different macho looking body on top of it, and so were basically starting out without the benefit of decades of advances in car safety. If they have made SUVs as maneuverable and able to avoid accidents as small cars and as unlikely to roll in a collision, perhaps it is different now.

I had it last year. It was brutal. I am a really healthy guy with a strong immune system and rarely get sick (although two years in a row I got sick at the SES :) ). But this one was brutal. I was really sick for >1 week, with the worst of it with a fever of >103 for 2 days at the end. I was so tired and fuzzy-headed and messed up I couldn't think straight - I basically depleted my store of food and drink in the house with 2-3 days left in the sickness to go and was so brain-fogged I couldn't really figure out how to get more food (like, I couldn't actually come up with the solution to get food delivery or call a friend or anything), so the last couple of days I was subsisting on powerbars and gatorade mix. I was also too foggy headed to understand that that was probably not very good for me. That being said, all anecdotal evidence is basically completely worthless. If some girl dies from H1N1 that should not make you want to get the vaccine, and if some girl gets a totally broken nervous system from the vaccine, that should not make you want to avoid the vaccine. It's really as simple as this: Your chances of getting and dying (or suffering from unacceptable effects) from H1N1 are X. Your chances of dying (or suffering from unacceptable side effects) if you take the vaccine are Y. If X is greater than Y, you should take the vaccine. To answer corey_dyck, yes, vaccinating yourself will make it so you won't get sick so you can't pass it on to your kid. This is sort of related, though not exactly, but interesting reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

Oh, hey Jim! I'll actually probably see you - I'll be there the week before the SES :)

Advice for eastcoast boilerplate riders taking turns in Colorado: don't fold the nose. I can't make it for the first time since I first started going to the SES, what like 6 years ago. Bummer! Work said no. Have fun!

I think I started hardbooting in 2002 or 2003. Lots of days in for a weekend warrior though.

I've been "crosstraining" with nonstop kitesurfing. Feel that quad burn! Abs and back, too. ... though to be honest, I think my hardboot carving is really just my offseason training for kitesurfing now :)

Just wanted to point out that if you were ever in a collision with somebody (especially your fault) and the other person got mangled/shredded on your spikes or screws, you'd feel really, really bad.

No no no, I wear it to look more like Batman to impress all the nerds. -- Ken

Heya, yeah I do wear the Dainese multisport jacket. I dress as if the body armor was a fairly thick layer, so in Aspen on a cold day I may still just have long underwear, the body armor, and then my soft shell on top of it. The multisport jacket is like the motocross jacket I guess, except I believe it may have fewer restrictive straps, etc. to allow more arm movement. I did not have to upsize my jacket, but then again I am a skinny guy. I have armor under my jacket in my avatar. I do not even notice I am wearing it anymore except when I take off my jacket and the jacket gets stuck on the plastic armor pieces. My armor is also in case of getting nailed from behind by straightliners, though I thankfully have not needed it yet. I figure the only people catching up to me will be going fairly fast, but when they hit me, I will be going mostly across the fall line, meaning it will be a very high speed collision, and I will be very low and crouched down.

I agree: logically if you look at it, the snowboarder stance (alpine in particular) is in no way symmetrical around anything. If the "perfect" sidecut offset turns out to be 0, it's just a happy accident, but there's absolutely no reason it should be that way due to the mechanics of the human body... You all heard it here first: the breakthrough KJL asym design is a backwards asym. If 5 cm toeside sidecut offset forwards is bad, 0 cm offset is better (since all the WC podiums are symmetrical), maybe the problem is that they haven't pushed it far enough that direction: there's no real reason not to try -1, -2, ... -5, until it stops getting better, right? If anybody here wins a WC race using a reverse asym board, you owe me a beer. :D

Haha, no, definitely not. But my center of weight definitely tends towards the tail on toesides, and tends towards the nose on heelsides. Does nobody else experience that, really? I mean, I'm kidding about the opposite asym thing - I like my symmetrical board just fine, but I would guess that my experience is common, that your weight naturally wants to drift back on toesides (and yeah, I can push the weight forwards if I want to, but my body isn't necessarily happiest there), and your weight naturally wants to drift forwards on heelsides. I find it quite difficult to, say, carve a heelside turn in hardboots with my weight on the back foot, or carve a toeside turn with my weight on the front foot. Therefore my toeside sidecut should be set back and my heelside sidecut should be pushed forwards, right? :D Just for kicks, I will totally pledge to borrow Joerg's goofy asym Pureboard #1 at the next SES and ride it regular footed. It will be totally awesome for me if it works, and totally awesome for everybody else if it doesn't.

As NateW and others have pointed out, it all matters where your center of gravity is, and not where the heels and toes of the boots happen to lie. People have used this fact to opine that asyms are bad, but I have yet to hear anybody discuss this on the forum before: In a "natural" powerful stance to maximize angulation on a toeside turn, does a normal rider's center of mass tend to move towards the nose or tail? And in a natural, powerful stance to maximize angulation on a heelside turn, does the center of mass tend to move towards the nose or tail? I think with my body, a natural toeside turn would tend to shift my center of weight backwards, as bending the knees and leaning away from the snow at the hips/waist tends to shift everything back towards the tail. It's only through lots of practice that I've been able to incorporate that weird sideways leaning pencil-pinching thing to bring the weight forwards again on the toeside turn. Similarly, I think the most natural heelside stance has the weight forwards, over the front foot. I'm just guessing a lot of other people feel this way as well (heelside turns strongly on the front foot, and toeside turns sometimes sitting back on the back foot). If the goal is to have my weight centered on the sidecut radius, I now actually want to try riding the opposite-side asym (a goofy asym, even though I am a regular rider). It might be interesting to sit comfortably back in a toeside turn on the back foot without having to concentrate so hard on pushing that front shin down, and have the sidecut radius actually be centered while I do so, and vice versa on the heelside.

Oh, and the ride itself: You can't see it in this picture, but the words on the end of the board say "The Evolution of Carve" :)

Kite, wind, water, sun. Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Yum.

You just have to able to let it go :) Snowboards are meant to be used, and when they get used they get scratched and dinged from rocks and torn up by your own foot if you kick snow off of it or while you're skating with a foot out or whatever, and it's happier being used than it is being perfectly preserved on the wall somewhere. At least that's what Toy Story 2 taught me :D In any case, you're going to ride the board for a while, and if you're like me, eventually decide you want a different board, or it gets worn out, and it'll go into semi-retirement, at which point you can use that Billy Mays scratch filler on it and frame it and put it on the wall and put a new design on a new board :)

I designed this last year and got the topsheet through snowboardmaterials and got Bruce to make me a Coiler: Everything worked well and the board itself looks great. Well, it's scratched to hell now, but whatever - in the end it's just sporting equipment!

I haven't been able to see images on bomber in months now it seems like.

173 Coiler Stubby carvey 172 Rad-Air Tanker non-carvey

Good lord, people. Don't feed the trolls. 1) If there is laminar flow over an airfoil/sail/kite/wing providing lift or thrust Bernoulli is in effect. 2) Bernoulli has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that clearly, CLEARLY, Bordy and his crew have kite flying/gliding skills and plenty of control to be able to jump and glide like that on the snow. If they didn't they'd be crashing/tumbling the kite and killing themselves. The fact that occasionally they hit an updraft does not change the fact that they are under control. If you are snowboarding and hit a patch of soft snow so you change your weight and technique to adjust for the snow, that's considered "in control" and simply "adjusting to changing snow conditions", correct? Why is "hitting an updraft and sining the kite to the side to exit the updraft" any different? If you hit a piece of chop windsurfing and it knocks you airborne for a second, is that "out of control" or just simply a fun part of windsurfing? 3) The fact that Bordy has great kite control seems to have nothing to do with your weird, weird, rambling original post, photodad. Yes, carving is way, way, more niche than windsurfing. I can go out any day to any of the various kiting/windsurfing spots and see more windsurfers there than there are carvers in all of California, as far as I can tell. I go to Squaw Valley and see 1-2 other carvers on a hill. I go to Kirkwood, apparently the Tahoe Mecca of carving and see 5. I go to 3rd Ave to kitesurf and there are dozens of windsurfers any day of the week. Also: there are dozens of stores within 20 miles of me that carry windsurfing equipment. There are 0 that sell carving equipment. I think in Tahoe there is 1 store that sells Head boots. I take my alpine board to the only ski shop in the Bay Area that has any idea what they are doing (i.e. they know what I mean when I ask for a 0 degree base edge angle and a 2 degree side edge angle) and even they only vaguely know what the board is. I kited from Golden Gate bridge in nuking, choppy, gusty conditions, overpowered on a 12m kite, downwind to Berkeley today with 100 other kiters. It was beautiful kiting in front of the bridge, I got a billion massive, massive jumps in, made a whole slew of slashing carving turns, made some new friends, and drank a sh!t ton of beer and ate my body weight in Hawaiian BBQ. Life is good. Be happy. Why are you all so angry?

Bordy: Good lord that is awesome. So, I can pop 15 feet or so of air without too much problem on the water - why can't I glide like that (and why don't I see anybody else on the water gliding forever like that)?

Can you use a twintip kiteboard for wakeboarding? My Ocean Rodeo Mako has I believe something huge like 1.4cm of concavity. I don't know what that works out to, but just looking at it it looks like it has the equivalent of a negative 10 degree base bevel which means it holds an edge really well.

Hi, Mike. As I think I mentioned to you before I have a full PCL tear from a tibial plateau impact as well, maybe 15 years ago now. FYI, I also did not get surgery, and played a lot of sports (some snowboarding, but mostly lots and lots of very competitive ultimate frisbee), and just from having excellent leg musculature had no problems for a long time. My knee was quite lax, and I could do the party trick of shifting my shin forwards and back in relation to my knee, but I had no problems with running, cutting, sprinting, or snowboarding, with regards to athletic performance or pain. However, after 8-10 years, things started wearing down in there - I guess all the sliding around of the tibia started grinding stuff around in there, my knee would sometimes lock and refuse to straighten, I would get a ton of pain for a day or two after tournaments, and in general it started to really negatively impact my life. (I'd play sports one day and then have too much pain to navigate stairs for a day or two afterwards). Eventually I gave in and got surgery, and as a guy who generally doesn't like surgery when other methods will do, I have to say my life is significantly better than it was before. It is nice to not always have 5-10% of my brain subconsciously dealing with the knee (worrying about guarding it or dealing with pain) at all times. Just an FYI and another data point from a guy who had basically an identical injury and also had extremely strong quads and was able to play sports at a pretty high level with no problems or pain, but eventually wore down after a decade. Oh, P.S. - an example of what I mean by having my brain kind of subconsciously guarding my knee all the time: you say you're on the bike all the time; you may find that pedaling in a circle rather than just stomping down with your quads may cause some pain eventually. This is because pulling your foot backwards after the downstroke fires your hamstring, which will shift your tibia backwards since you no longer have a PCL, unless you also strongly contract your calf, which will hold the tibia forwards again. The human brain is really adaptable - after some time you just "figure it out" and the brain will shift a bunch of that crap to the subconscious, so that when you fire your hamstring your calf will kind of fire on its own anyways, but there will always be this little nagging thing hanging over your head all the time. One of the nicest things about getting the surgery was all these little naggy things went away and I don't have to think about them anymore.

As somebody who really, really loves carving an alpine snowboard, I have to say I find watching a snowboard PGS even more boring than bobsled, biathlon, short track speed skating, or even curling. Yeah, even curling; the strategy of where they place guard stones, the precision of curling stones around other blocking stones, intricate plays where they'll knock a stone out of the way and hide the new one behind a guard - those are all actually totally awesome to see played out :) I think the main reason I don't enjoy watching snowboard PGS is that the skills I have developed freecarving have nothing to do with racing. I guess the equipment is roughly the same, but aside from that it's all different. I can't tell who has good technique, who has bad, why one guy is faster and one guy slower. To me they are all frantically trying to switch edges as fast and powerfully as humanly possible. I can look at skiers doing slalom and see that some are graceful and some are powerful, and watch them shift their weight back and forth from their tips to their heels, and in the downhill event, I can see where they are putting their weight, and I can see little bobbles in their form as they desperately try to hold an edge, but for some reason I can't tell what they hell the snowboarders are doing. I don't know why, especially since I can't ski. I find most ski events fairly boring to watch as well, except the downhill. BTW, why is there no downhill alpine snowboarding event? It seems like getting people on massive 2m alpine boards and having them hurtle down the mountain at 60 mph would be pretty awesome to watch.

Anybody have a solution to just plain old having your butt hurt from sitting down for so long? I think I can sit down for about an hour and a half before I have to start alternating which buttock I am putting my weight on. Then, I sit on my left buttock for like 30 minutes, then right, then the left, but this time only for 20 minutes. By the end of 5-6 hour long flights I am switching every minute or so, sitting back, sitting forwards, sticking one foot under my butt, sticking knuckles under my butt, getting up to pretend to go to the bathroom, doing a wall-squat with the back of my chair, etc..

Saying swine flu is not a big deal because there are only a few hundred cases of it and only a few deaths when regular flu kills 36,000 is fundamentally not understanding math. Every sickness starts with just 1 infection, until it passes from person to person and infects exponentially. If ebola spread through the U.S. and you looked at it a week or two after the first infection, you'd only see a few hundred infected. This flu may or may not turn out as bad as all that (for some reason it seems less virulent here than in Mexico), but if you just look at straight numbers for the worst case scenario: The flu is easily transmitted from person to person, and routinely infects 10-20% of the population. The US has ~300,000,000 people, which means every year, about 30-60,000,000 get the flu, of which about 36,000 people (mostly elderly and children) die. The swine flu in Mexico currently has a mortality rate of 4% (19 out of 473), meaning ~4% of the people who get it die. A simple extrapolation: 300,000,000 people in the U.S. * 15% infection rate = 45 million infected (this is common - happens with every flu season) 45 million cases * 4% mortality rate = 1,800,000 people dead. Or, to put it into numbers easier to understand - I work at a company with ~1000 people in it, which is small enough that I know the names of the majority of them, and recognize everybody else. If the flu infects 15% of them and kills 4% of the infected, that's 6 people that I eat lunch with every day, dead from the flu. If you work in a company with 100 people in it, flip a coin; tails: somebody you work with is dead. Note that the great influenza of 1918, which was responsible for the vast majority (~75%) of deaths in World War I (it killed an estimated 40,000,000 people in a year, far more than died in 4 years of global warfare), only had an estimated mortality rate of 2-5%, which is right in the range of what Mexico is seeing right now. Now, personally, I don't think it will be as bad as all that, simply because if you look globally, as opposed to just in Mexico, the mortality rate seems really low. Also, I don't see the point of panicking. You get the flu or you don't; if you live in an urban area, really, there's not much you can do about it. My prediction: the expert medical care in the U.S. along with suggestions from the WHO and CDC will squash swine flu, and then everybody will think, "hey, that swine flu wasn't so bad" and then proceed to bash the greedy medical system and the CDC and the mainstream media for perceived fearmongering or some imagined conspiracy to drive up medical profits or distract the population from [insert your particular crusade issue], despite the fact that it was their care, warnings, and preventative measures that saved us all.