The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is once again colder than deep space as it is prepared for experiments to resume in late November.

The LHC’s eight sectors have all been cooled to 1.9 kelvin (-271 C, or -456 F) using cryogenic lines containing liquid helium. This operating temperature is colder than conditions in deep space, which is estimated to be 2.7 K. Zero K is the lowest temperature possible. Continued…

Riders basically scrub the jump in order to stay as low as possible. On some jumps going high you waste a lot of time so the quicker you can touch back down the quicker you can get back on the gas. The undisputed king of the scrub is still James ‘Bubba’ Stewart who really pioneered the move. To this day it is still often called the bubba scrub, even though he apparently doesn’t like being called Bubba anymore. Not a bad claim to fame though. It seems there are basically two different ways to do it. One technique is when the body is super offset to the bike axis with one leg straight, the other technique is you keep your two feet on the pegs, turn the bar opposite and crook your elbows which lets you keep your feet on the peg. Anyway, below I have collected the best photos I could find of dudes scrubbing.

Unrelated, but this tune is dope: Blu_Ft_Co$$-City_Of_Los(t)_Ang(e)les…

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Gross and outrageous under-reporting of jobless rates by the government.
Consumer Confidence? Ha!
President of hope huh? Nope. Obama to sign $680 billion 2010 budget for fighting wars. Not sure how he plans to pay for it with 12trillion debt already and 105 trillion in unfunded liabilities… Whatever right.. pffff.

Since it has already been leaked all over the web, here is a rendering of the new Kiska designed KTM SX, which will be revealed at Eicma in Milan in a couple of weeks.

The show bike does look very nice, I have some photos but obviously cant show them yet. Will post some after I get back from Milan.

After 2 back to back winter seasons on the snow, in the Northern and then Southern Hemisphere, Summertime™ has finally reached my bro Luke out in New Zealand.

A decent image gallery viewer has finally reached derestricted.com too. You can just click the photo, or a thumbnail below the image to go to the next image rather than slowly open image after image in a new page.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world in Detroit, houses on auction are not even being sold for their 500 dollar minimum bid. The collapse we sometimes talk about on here has already hit some places…

DETROIT (Reuters) – In a crowded ballroom next to a bankrupt casino, what remains of the Detroit property market was being picked over by speculators and mostly discarded.
After five hours of calling out a drumbeat of “no bid” for properties listed in an auction book as thick as a city phone directory, the energy of the county auctioneer began to flag.
“OK,” he said. “We only have 300 more pages to go.”
Despite a minimum bid of $500, less than a fifth of the Detroit land was sold after four days.
The county had no estimate of how much was raised by the auction, a second attempt to sell property that had failed to find buyers for the full amount of back taxes in September.
The unsold parcels add to an expanding ghost town within the once-vibrant town known worldwide as the Motor City.

photo from PJ

De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things is a first century BC epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. It deals with the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The poem grandly proclaims the reality of our role in a universe which is ruled by chance, with no interference from gods. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand.

Man, this new Little dragon Album is even better than their last. Brilliant:

Thanks to Andy for the phaseone mixtape link:
http://lefserecords.com/tracks/Phaseone-WhiteCollarCrime.zip

Couple of the tracks from it, Animal Collective and doom remixes:

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Totally unrelated, but how weird did this photo I took with my phone come out? Looks kind of like a painting.

http://jeremyjones.net

An interglacial, which we are in now, is a geological interval of warmer global average temperature that separates glacial periods within an ice age. The current Holocene interglacial has persisted since the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,400 years ago.

First time up this season and we had over a foot of fresh powder already, on a reasonable base. Stoked!

Benny charging..

Me carving. Starting slow this year, having learnt from breaking myself first day of the season in the past.

My friend Chris was here from Frankfurt and so together with Jule we decided to go check out the Planai opening for Saturday afternoon which was a nice reintroduction to the snow. Some nice pow up the top.

Sunday we hit up Kitzsteinhorn Glacier which was fairly epic. It is much higher than Planai and there was a lot of snow already for middle of October.

So, small review on the 2010 Lib Tech Travis rice board. I have never ridden a banana or magne-traction board before so it  was a bit weird to start with. Has different balance points due to the C2 tapers and banana shape. Edge control is incredible with the magne-traction and I felt far more confident cranking it over than on my old board. Due to the width and size, edge to edge was a bit slower than I am used to and I needed to adjust my balance a bit (obviously). In powder it is really stable because it is wide and 161.5 long. Pop is good because it is quite stiff and both regular and switch are really stable when you throw down 180′s and the tapers makes it super easy to spin and jib around on. Overall it is a great board but it really needs to be ridden aggressively. The faster and harder I went the more it came into it’s own. I am 5ft 10inch so it is quite a big board for me and I think maybe the 157 would have been a better choice all around, but if it keeps snowing like this, the longer board should be brilliant.

Random flashback to the Summer. Normal.

This skinny local dude was standing barefoot grinning, with nothing but board shorts and his short surfboard on the edge of Puerto viejo thumbing a lift. Since we were heading down to go surf we stopped to cram him and his board into the trunk of our tiny 4×4 car for the 10minute drive along the potholed dirt track to Coccles. He was a friendly fellow, and we got chatting as we drove. I had broken my board the day before and when we arrived he ended up helping me replace one of the two fins I lost (they only had one). He then taped up a ding in the board with electric tape before using a lighter to melt the plastic tape a bit to seal it, after which it was almost as good as new. We gave him a lift and he helped me fix my board. sweet. He told me he ‘Normally‘ surfs  at least 5 hours every day and he had done his whole life….

…later….some guy from Oregon is in the room next to us with his girfriend and since we shared a balcony we get to chatting. “What do you think of Puerto Viejo?” we ask him. “Well, I don’t know what you guys normally eat, but we normally eat hamburgers” he replied, “and the hamburgers here have ham on them. Like actual slices of ham on top of the burger”. He was a big man, sitting there sweating without his shirt on and he didn’t look impressed.

Normal is a fairly abstract concept.

Been snowing here for 24hours on and off. Sticking to the ground at about 800m. Was snowing outside the window too, but melting on landing. More snow forecast all the way up to Sunday… The Salzburg superski Season pass is available in the next couple of weeks, allowing full access to all 23 resorts within an hour of here, up until may. Got to get me one soon…