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Did you know? (Random things in life)

James

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Aren't zebra stripe patterns unique, too?
This one was.

IMG_6614.JPG
 
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TS
Tricia

Tricia

The Velvet Hammer
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Thread Starter
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Tricia

Tricia

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Did you know pineapples grow on bushes?
Pineapple bushes.jpg
 

ADKmel

Skiing the powder
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Did you know that Loons (the bird) can dive underwater up to 250ft and hold their breath up to 5 minutes?
 

James

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Did you know three time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond got into cycling because of Wayne Wong and his freestyle camp at Whistler?

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Interestingly enough, Wong may have had his greatest impact on a young Greg LeMond, who once attended one of Wong’s freestyle ski camps at Whistler. “Greg asked me what I did in the summertime for training and I told him I rode my 10-speed bike,” says Wong. “When he got back to Reno, he got a bike and started riding.” Wong laughs. “Skiing isn’t my claim to fame; Greg LeMond is.”
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http://legacy.tahoequarterly.com/2013/06/push-it-to-the-limit/


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Young Greg was hooked on the new sport of mogul freestyle skiing, and for his 14th birthday was sent to up to Wayne Wong’s ski camp. Coaches there said bike riding was ideal to get in shape for skiing.

LeMond bought a road bike at Rick’s Bike Shop in Reno, and a guy named Cliff Young, a racer in Northern California, invited the teenager to a Reno Wheelmen Club meeting. Two weeks later LeMond showed up in tennis shoes, tank top and running shorts, with his 35-pound bike in the middle of the Reno winter.

“Everybody else had their leg warmers on, with Italian bikes,” he said in a 2007 interview. “I ended up getting second place. It was a 28-mile race, four laps around a 7-mile loop right in front of my house.
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https://www.bikemag.com/pavedmag/5-reasons-why-hes-greg-lemond-and-youre-not/
 

pete

not peace but 2 Beers!
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pete

not peace but 2 Beers!
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from https://www.skimagic.co.uk

thumbs up by me on number 4 ....

number 10 aligns with Apollo 11 celebrations


Besides being a popular sport, below are 10 interesting facts about Skiing:
  1. The word ‘Ski’ is derived from the Norwegian word ‘skíð’ which means a split piece of wood.
  2. The first recorded downhill skiing race was held in Sweden, in 1879.
  3. Alpine skiing made its first debut in the Winter Olympics of 1936 and German born Franz Pfnür became the first man to win the gold medal in the championship.
  4. ‘Skiing’ is the only six-letter word in the English language with a double ‘i’ exactly in the middle.
  5. St Bernard of Montjoux is the patron saint of skiers. He was proclaimed a saint by Pope Pius XI in 1923. Bernard became a patron and protector of skiers as a result of his four decades spent in missionary work throughout the Alps. St. Bernard dogs are named after him.
  6. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the man who introduced skiing to Switzerland. After returning from one of his ski trips in Norway, he brought with him some skis as he felt Switzerland had the perfect terrain for it. In his own words, ‘I am convinced that the time will come when hundreds of English men will come to Switzerland for the skiing season.’
  7. Skiing is one of the fastest non-motorized sports on land. Skiers can ski faster than a car and this was proven by Simone Origone in 2006 that set a world speed skiing record at 156.2 miles per hour compared to the speed of road cars at 120 miles per hour.
  8. Many skiers invoke the name of ‘Ullr’ the Norse God of winter and make small offerings to get him to unleash a powder dump on selected ski hills.
  9. Telemark bindings invented by Norwegian Sondre Norheim, that bind the ski to the plastic boot made it possible for skiers to jump in the air.
  10. Astronaut Harrison Schmitt said that astronauts travelling to the moon should learn the art of cross country skiing as he believed that the techniques involved in skiing will help walking on the moon easier and envisioned ‘lunar skiing holidays’ in the future.
 

dbostedo

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^^^
Neat... but regarding #7 I'm not sure where that 120 mph number came from. Lots of cars can go much faster than the fastest skier.
 

James

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Interesting about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Did not know! It appears true that the Brits basically started the ski holiday. I think they also convinced a train line to run in winter so they didn't have to walk.

“On any man suffering from too much dignity, a course of skis would have a fine moral effect.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
https://www.conandoyleinfo.com/life-conan-doyle/conan-doyle-the-sportsman/skiing-at-davos/

With such a long history of modern skiing, and having invented the world cup, Sir Arnold Lunn, why are they so bad in wcup performance?
 

dbostedo

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Philpug

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^^^
Neat... but regarding #7 I'm not sure where that 120 mph number came from. Lots of cars can go much faster than the fastest skier.
Non motorized sports, but still not faster than many of todays cars.
 

cantunamunch

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And Marc Hauser needs to specify "horizontally"

Not at all. We can project Marc Hauser's velocity onto any plane we like, including one parallel to the plane Simone Origone travels.

This is not an advantage to Origone.

Hauser's glideslope speed is faster than his overland aka 'horizontal' speed . Origone's glideslope speed is his overland speed.




Considering your earlier post about cars, I was actually expecting you to notice that we need to be extremely pedantic about what we define as 'non-motorised'.

Is Denise Mueller-Korenek non-motorised? Because she has both those guys beat simply based on published numerical values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Mueller-Korenek - 296 km/h

I don't think we could easily write a rule to distinguish between Mueller-Korenek and Hauser. They both involve performance within a body of air that was not set in motion by them.

Origone's speed record looks easier to distinguish on paper since it, at first glance, involves starting with potential energy only, and no assisting momentum transfer. But I suspect that trying to do that will create a bureaucratic mess of after-the-fact windspeed corrections.
 
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