Been working on this for a while, but the new Kiska website has now gone live.
You can throw some of the boxes around. My best is 9 bounces.

Recently been reading a fantastic book called ‘The Sun Kings‘ about the start of modern astronomy and the impact on earth of the sunspot cycles. Whilst doing some further research into solar flares I came across this article posted today:

Galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high, a NASA spacecraft finds.

“In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19% beyond anything we’ve seen in the past 50 years,” said Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. “The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions.”

The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep lull in solar activity that began around 2007 and continues today. Researchers have long known that cosmic rays go up when solar activity goes down. Right now solar activity is as weak as it has been in modern times, setting the stage for what Mewaldt calls “a perfect storm of cosmic rays.”

“We’re experiencing the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, “so it is no surprise that cosmic rays are at record levels for the Space Age.”

More here..

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090929-cosmic-ray-max.html

Another article here on the the same topic.

Last weekend I went back and visited the MotoX club in Kent where I used to race as a kid. The racing was pretty fierce with some of the most exciting battling I have watched for years. Some funny characters down there too.

Haha. Thanks for the heads up jamie.

The Dow Zero Insurgency
Four days after the Times story on high-frequency trading, Zero Hedge re-launched with a sleeker design and more advertising space, adding staff and posting phone numbers to “offices” in London and Zurich. Zero Hedge has seen its page views triple since July. It began selling $37 Zero Hedge T-shirts, modeled by a rumpled hipster in a green camouflage cap.

Had to hop over to the UK for a few days for work and managed catch up with my sister Cla one evening and some other peeps which was nice as we don’t see each other much.
The weather was well hot in the Uk for this time of year.
More photos later.

My sister Cla and her friends Sarah and Sarah

this dude busted me taking his photo I think, although camera was in the same spot as the shot above.. Got a brilliant zoom on it..

home alone, missing the wifey!

Mash has been one of my favo(u)rite shops in London for about 20 years..

September spring storms have been hammering NZ all month (think April showers in the northern hemisphere only more potent) and with the temperature yoyoing up and down, its been doing weird things to the mountains…

More here

Ahh Konichiwa! Sup Martin! Hope Tokyo is treating you well.  Some nice pics from CHW from the European tour they went on.

San Clemente is a really nice small surf town about an hour south of L.A. We stopped for breakfast.

The waves looked perfect

Just outside of Oceanside we saw these fools. American History X is bleak as hell.

So many empty stores along Melrose.

I was considering getting a snowboard jacket at the Burton store, but it was over 100 degrees so after trying one on I was overheating so bad I had to bounce. Not sure why they dont crank up the AC to make it cold so people can try on all of the winter gear.

Rolled up (Cant get anywhere in LA without rolling) to my friend Claressinka’s art show at her house in Santa Monica, to meet her and some other peeps, then caught up with my cousin for a minute.

Ended up going for a late night cruise the whole way down venice beach with Csaba. Lot of crazies and homeless people down there at 3am, but with a longboard you just fly by so fast they don’t bother you. First time I have ever really ridden a long board and although I missed being able to oli, the big wheels are wicked for getting speed.

Kurt Caselli returned to WORCS racing for his “local” round Sunday and probably wondered why he ever left. He took the lead just before the halfway mark and then pulled away to a monstrous lead. He led a very impressive KTM train that included Mike Brown in second, Brenden Ritzman in fourth and Justin Soule in fifth.

Was great to watch this kind of racing. The whole thing is fairly relaxed (off the track) compared to MX and SX and you can walk pretty much anywhere to watch. Was well hot, the temperature in our car read 109degrees and these guys race for 2 hours. Even the kids race for 30mins. I think I would last 10 mins.

Had a chance to stop by Trestles in socal to check out the Hurley pro. Surfing is big business for sure. 100k prize money to the winner and huge crowds. Kelly Slater got mobbed when he came out of the water.

Had to shoot over to Los Angeles for a week. Was a really interesting trip. More photos later.

San Gerado is up in the mountains in the middle of Costa Rica, a rainforest at about 1500m, still warm enough for a T-Shirt and shorts all year round, although the water in the river was pretty dam chilly. It’s really a stunning place, we stayed at a cute hotel called casa Mariposa for 25bucks a night, with a really friendly American couple running it.

As American culture and society became more complex with more moving parts, it became more distracting. Decades ago we reached the point where the level of distraction was so high that few were capable of navigating it with enough individual consciousness intact to reflect upon, much less question the nature of our national environment. Like the rest of the planet, Americans mostly respond to the world as it is presented to them each day. But the world as it is understood by Americans now comes through many layers of distorted filters, most of them purposefully distorted for economic financial gain by one overarching entity or another. So much so as to be atomized, kaleidoscopically diffracted. One cannot identify even the simplest object through a kaleidoscope. Bedazzled, disoriented and detached from reality, we are rendered effectively blind — thus easily directed and managed. So we listen to the few loud voices to the many and disregard any dissent as background noise.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/08/how-much-freedom-can-one-man-stand.html

I’m sitting here brushing insects off, which then head to their doom as the many geckos grab them out of the air, the geckos then pooping on the floor of the platform where I sit writing. After a while observing the ants munching merrily on the gecko poop, I get up and sweep the ants and poop off the floor and into the undergrowth.

You have to protect your area in the jungle, as everything is vying for space and survival. Anything coming into our corner runs the risk of a fast brutal death by man or woman. Outside of our small area, anything goes and we respect the environments of the other animals, reptiles, birds and insects, but here, in our space, it’s war.

Of course like in war you sometimes exist in a state of mutual unease. The huge tarantula that was not killed but rather encouraged to move on. The mouse that we left to the cat who lived with us, the geckos running everywhere in the rafters, keeping the insect populations at bay whilst singing along merrily together with the rest of the jungle and the pounding of the waves.

I take another pull of the joint and as the smoke enters my lungs, everything seems to be where it should be. Everything has it’s place at this moment in time. Breathing out slowly, the sounds shift, things dying and others being reborn. The cycles continue, micro and macro, oblivious to the Gregorian calender, uncountable, unquantifiable.

The next day we paddle up an estuary in kayaks, through mangrove forests and into crocodile country. I was nervous, but thankfully so were the crocodiles and as we approached, they would glide down into the water off the land and disappear, the only sign of them being the air bubbles popping on the surface of the water near our kayaks. I was reminded about the importance of protecting your area in the jungle and paddled a bit faster to move on.

Bike, riding gear and helmet GFX I worked on for KTM.

Writing this in a hut made out of bamboo with the most exquisite construction. All materials found, or sourced locally. A hut at perfect ease in it’s environment. A seemingly perfect extension of the plants and life overlapping and becoming one with it’s completely open structure. the sounds of the animals blending with the sounds of the sea and wind passing through the hut and me. Everything moving, being born like the new flowers that frame the path to the sea, dying like the fly being eaten by the huge spider beside the path. The dead bug being eaten by the hundreds of tiny insects on the deck of our cabin which in turn give them life.

Nature never hurries and yet everything is accomplished.

The same feeling of having a front row seat into the nature of the cycles of time and life and death, which I felt in Montezuma remains and reinforces itself. What part do I play in this? As the observer? The destroyer? The creator? As inconsequential as a single ant? As a drop of water in a river flowing to the sea? A grain of sand on the beach? I feel at the same time immensely small and yet part of it all. Both timeless and fleeting. All things have their place in nature. Being at this lodge in the jungle reminds me how far outside the natural order of things modern life has moved. It’s an interesting place to be at the top of the food chain. I am reminded of a tattoo I saw on a dude in California. “Now that you can do anything you want, what will you do?”.

Sitting within a table, framed by glass and wood, on a sawdust floor, is the ferocious matt black chainsaw which was used to chop down much of the wood used to construct the huts and furniture around me. The irony that such a destructive machine was used to create such a place of beauty seems a fitting metaphor for the power for good and bad we all hold in our hands.

Twenty five bucks a night gets you a big room on the beach down here. A dirty, moldy, run down room with cracks in the walls, but a room with a curious amount of charm. You can see through the high bamboo ceiling to the world of insects and Gecko’s, partly shielded as we are from the pounding rain by the rickety, leaking roof, the roaring of the waves sounding like they are inside the room itself.

A death has taken place; A mysterious death. When we came back from dinner a huge dead cockroach was on the floor in the middle of the room. The cockroach had been almost cut in half. A Gecko was moving in and out of the shadows of the rafters, the not so silent cockroach assassin, shrieking his victory cries. The Gecko must have gone for the cockroach which then fell onto the wobbly but fast spinning wooden fan hanging from the ceiling.

It looks like the weather was bad in a lot of these photos, but to be honest it was really good most of the time, and the temperature never deviates from a humid 28degrees so the rain is actually quite nice as it freshens things up a little. We were on our way to Manuel Antonio (which we just blew through in the end as it was too touristy) and liked Dominical so stopped to catch a few waves and spend the night.