PopSci covers eXtreme Sports Physics in February

Popular Science magazine has another column featuring my views on some aspects of extreme sports physics. They asked me why record speeds recorded for skiers are substantially higher than record snowboard speeds. They also asked under what circumstances a snowboarder might have an advantage over a skier in a downhill race.

Pick up a copy of the March February issue of Popular Science to find out what I said. It's on shelves now.

They used a cropped portion of the image above in the article. It looks pretty strange in the magazine, but I like the shot showing me carving frontside at the Whitetail Resort in Pennsylvania.

I normally wear a helmet and goggles, but the PopSci folks wanted to see my face.

Backflip Calculation (again)

I've had a lot of folks ask me about the parts of my FMX backflip calculation that I claimed were too hard to show in Blogspot. Specifically they want to know about the part where I figured out that half the energy goes into rotating and half goes into upward motion, when someone is trying to cram in the most flips.

Rather than send it out one at a time, I've made some jpegs out of my notes. If you actually LIKE doing physics homework, you might enjoy these. Also, if you see an error, please let me know so I can fix it before the calculus police catch me.

-Buzz