Motorcycle Helmet Performance: Blowing the Lid Off
How good is your helmet? Will it actually protect your brain in your next crash? These seem like easy questions, ones you probably think you can answer by reciting the lofty standards your helmet meets and the lofty price you might have paid for it. But the real answers, as you are about to see, are anything but easy. There's a fundamental debate raging in the motorcycle helmet industry. In a fiberglass-reinforced, expanded-polystyrene nutshell, it's a debate about how strong and how stiff a helmet should be to provide the best possible protection.Why the debate? Because if a helmet is too stiff it can be less able to prevent brain injury in the kinds of crashes you're most likely to have. And if it's too soft, it might not protect you in a violent, high-energy crash. What's just right? Well, that's why it's called a debate. If you knew what your head was going to hit and how hard, you could choose the perfect helmet for that crash. But crashes are accidents. So you have to guess.
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Bootlegger Mini Liquor Bottle Ankle Concealer
Looking for an innovative new way to sneak liquor into events? This ingenious soft flask fits right around your ankle and conceals up to six miniature liquor bottles at a time! Just slip the spandex anklet on, load it with your favorite stuff and pull your pant leg down to cover it up. It’s a lot easier to use than most of the concealable flasks on the market and if you ask us, it’s more respectable too. To others, you’ll just look like another guy wearing pants. Underneath you’ll have a secret stash/mini-bar.
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eBay Find of the Day: Czech out the 1956 Avia 750 MKIII streamliner
Bidding is over and this gem is gone, but it's a worthy look at history nonetheless. Czech company Avia, now a truck builder known as Ashok Leyland, built two-stroke, two-cylinder cars in the fifties that were converted to racers. Czech driver Miroslav Jurca got hold of one in 1956 and turned it into this: the 750 Mk III. The aluminum and magnesium alloy skin sits over a steel tube chassis, within which lurks a 750cc, four-stroke BMW engine. A surprising amount of tech also lives under that revised bodywork, including a fully-independent front suspension with unequal-length A-arms, coil springs, telescopic hydraulic shocks and torsion bars; an independent rear suspension with coil springs and hydraulic-telescopic shocks; a transaxle gearbox and lightweight alloy-magnesium rack and pinion steering. You can have a detailed look at this interesting car it in the photo gallery below.
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If the Earth Stood Still
The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results. The most significant feature on any map that depicts even a portion of the earth's ocean is the spatial extent of that water body. Typically, we do not pay much attention to the delineation of the sea because it seems so obvious and constant that we do not realize it is a foundation of geography and the basis for our perception of the physical world.
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