Arrrrgggh! My Eyes!

The current issue of Science includes an article by Martin Hilbert and Priscila López entitled “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” The content of the article seems to me unremarkable, a laborious estimation of the total quantity of data stored on different media in recent decades. It’s hard to see anything useful coming out of this, but to paraphrase Muhammad Ali — if they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, perhaps they can make something useful out of this study.

I mention the article only because of the astoundingly bad graphics it contains. Take this for example,

And as confounding as that is on screen, it was far worse in print, where the various colors and patterns were harder to distinguish. Scientific graphics should illustrate trends and/or to encapsulate voluminous data in useful summaries. Beyond the trivial point made by the line graph in the background that we’re storing more data now than we used to, and that it didn’t used to be digital but that now it is, this graph seems to tell the reader “we don’t know if any of this matters, so we’re going to print everything.” Meanwhile, the pie charts are so hard to read that the reader would almost certainly have been better off had he just been given the tables of underlying data.

I was on the slopes again with my Sled Dog snow skates, and my friend Gary was there too. He nuked a pair last month, a feat I had tried to replicate but failed.

A great weekend of spring skiing. The kids are so charming as they learn. And Gary, of course, disintegrated another pair of Sled Dogs.

This ends his collection. Unless the Norwegians restart the assembly line, he’s going to have to move on to skiboards or something.

Back in the mid 1990s, inline skating exploded in popularity. The number of people skating increased by 40% to 50% each year, and it seemed each season brought another new player to the market. First Rollerblade, then K2, Roces, Salomon, etc. etc. etc. In racing skates, you first saw Bonts, then Simmons and Miller, and people moved from 72mm wheels to 80mm to 100mm. Pressing the expansion of the market, some entrepreneurs incorporated a company called SnowRunner to introduce a Swiss innovation called snow skates to the U.S. market. In the words of the company, “Snow skates are . . . designed to permit travel across snow using a skating motion or gliding downhill like an alpine skier.” The devices looked like ski boots with a smooth base, and the action was a tiny bit like inline skating.

The company changed its name to Sled Dogs and came public in 1994, projecting millions of people would adopt their new sport. “The Company believes that snow skating not only appeals to the new winter sports enthusiast (active individuals who enjoy the outdoors and are eager to find a winter activity that is quick and fun to learn) but also will appeal to a broad segment of the nearly 31 million in-line skaters in the U.S., primarily the 20 million who, according to the Company’s marketing studies, currently do not have a winter sport of choice. The Company also believes its products and the new sport it is creating will be an alternative for infrequent skiers and snowboarders in the U.S.”

Snow skates were slower than skis, and tedious on a traverse, but otherwise a lot of fun. Some friends and I were prominent inline skaters at the time, and were given demo units. We would do things like link arms and spin around in circles as we plummeted down a run. Technically difficult terrain was often a lot easier for us than for people on skis. Our snow skating got some press; the photos below appeared in an inline magazine.

I’m in the back here:

And here I am again:

They had a great logo, produced some television commercials, enlisted “Top Dog” demo skaters around the country, and got rental and demo units into hundreds of ski resorts. However, the business was doomed. The inline skating boom ended and management of Sled Dogs got desperate. They chased the snowboarding market with an ill-conceived brand extension called “K-9s” that had a larger base than the original skates, and were much harder to control (especially when the base detached and went shooting ahead of you down the mountain, as these were wont to do). The company soon went out of business. They sold their licenses or patents to a Norwegian company that developed some later models, but which seems to produce only a small run each season and is usually out of stock.

One of my skating buddies took his original Sled Dogs out of the closet this weekend for the first time in over ten years, and hit the slope. Unfortunately, the company seemed to have used a cheap plastic in their design, and the age plus the cold was too much for them:

The skates exploded.

So we’re looking for replacements. We’ve found a canadian company selling 20-year-old Snowrunners, and a Korean company with a much too expensive snow-base for actual inline boots. I’ve gotten my old Sled Dogs out of the basement (both model sd250 and a pair of K9s the company sent me), and I’ll take them into the mountains next weekend, trying my hardest to blow them up the way Gary blew up his. Wish me luck.

February 21, 2011 update — my skates survived. I will try again to destroy them next week.

I am on jury duty today. Civil court, as it turns out. I last served in 2003, when I sat on one of the “murder and mayhem” grand juries (grand juries in New York specialize in drugs, family, violent, or white collar crime). On the violent crime grand jury we heard about a dozen cases, none of which I am allowed to disclose, though I will say that one of the accused had tried to kill himself by pressing a running power drill against his head until, I think, he broke the bit, then slashed his wrists, jumped out of an eighth story window, and survived. I proposed that we waive any indictment in exchange for this superman’s agreeing to be dropped on Afghanistan, but that power is evidently not available to grand juries.

Anyway, since my last stint they have installed Wifi in the court building.

I’m seeing 47 unambiguous PCs on the network and 12 Macs, with another 56 I’m not sure about. All the official machines seem to be PCs. I’ve noticed one machine with a public directory featuring a bootleg collection of hiphop recordings.

The man two seats to my right has fallen asleep and is snoring. Everybody else is jealous.