-273 proudly presents, in collaboration with our friends at evilspeculator.com, the outrageous concept Tee depicting the Evil Speculator riding the Black Swan.

More punk than Sid Vicious, most sizes are flying out the door pretty fast, so get em here while you can.

High quality American Apparel T, front, sleeve and back prints.

The dude who inspired me to get back on skiis and pick up some twin tips after many years snowboarding, and after I fractured my vertebra the frst time, has had his own fair share of injuries, resulting in a couple of years absence.

Anyway, Candide Thovex is back! He just claimed a stunning victory after a two-year absence from competition, at the unique backcountry Red Bull Linecatcher contest in Vars, France.

Cant wait to go up tomorrow!

Hahaha, this is Candide too, pretty funny:

Drive to the lift, change, 2 runs fullspeed, and back to the car in 30 mins.

Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first might be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has tended, more than any thing else, to raise us above the condition of the brutes. But the same discontent which has been the source of all improvement, has been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace these latter is our present object.

- Charles Mackay,1841

I can’t recomend this book highly enough.
It provides a powerful insight into the nature of man, which is as similar today as it was in 1841.

“Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome.”

Talking of the madness of crowds, are people starting to see the madness in the Global warming hysteria?

As the debate continues about global warming, the month of December was the 14th coldest in 115 years in the United States… and some scientists insist the earth is entering a cooling trend.

* Wind chills brought temperatures in the Dakotas to 50 degrees below zero, while record cold in parts of Florida is damaging some of the orange crops, and South Carolina called an early end to shrimping season.

* Parts of Canada have seen actual temperatures of 30 below zero… And freezing temperatures and record snowfalls are pounding parts of Asia and Europe too.

* Britain has experienced the worst snowfalls in half a century.

* In India – it’s estimated at least 100 people have died due to the cold temperatures… with dozens more killed in Bangladesh.

* In China and South Korea, heavy snow and unusually cold weather have brought chaos to travelers – blocking roads and trains, canceling flights. After one recent blizzard in Beijing – officials had more than 300-thousand people clearing the streets.

Meanwhile some of the world’s top climate scientists suggest this winter is only the start of a worldwide trend toward cooler weather, which could last for 20 to 30 years. They base their predictions on changes in water temperatures in the oceans.

The scientists say much of the global warming in the last century was actually caused by these oceanic cycles when they were in a “warm mode”… as opposed to the current “cold mode.” They suggest there will be cooler summers ahead too. Continued…

At this point it is appropriate to say, it is not about if the climate is cooling or warming, it is about the fact that we have NO control over the climate one way or another. Warming, however, is undoubtedly more favourable for man than cooling.

Some great photos from the 2010 Dakar rally which took place in South America this year. More here. Looks like it would be incredible to ride there, the terrain is spectacular.

There’s beauty in the world of condensed matter physics, if you know where to look.

Physicist Alan Tennant found it in the transitions between quantum states of cobalt ions cooled to temperatures near absolute zero and then subjected to high magnetic fields.

Huh?

Let me explain.

A Previously Hidden Order

The point here, as Tennant says, is that in the weird quantum world, under certain precise conditions, an order in nature emerges that was previously unknown.

“When I started out I really expected that quantum systems would be somehow more complicated and somehow more confusing than the everyday world that we’re familiar with,” he says. “But every system that we’ve looked at has turned out to be elegant; it’s turned out to be truly beautiful.”

So beauty lies at the heart of matter. But the English poet John Keats already knew that. In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he said:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Lie group E8

I guess this was around 1985, with my brother and sister. My first pair of Nike.

December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6962632/America-slides-deeper-into-depression-as-Wall-Street-revels.html

Photo from Diets on the way to get his coffee this morning in NYC.

Had my mum and Aunt here for a few days and the weather closed in pretty hard, so we took it easy. I took a few fairly shite photos.
December 2009: Second Snowiest on Record in the Northern Hemisphere

Photo snagged from my Bro Luke who who is on the other side of the world in warm Sydney.

Me skiing in Flachau Winkl last week. Cold and snowy over here too.

So, Beijing, Seoul Hit by Heaviest Snow in More Than Half Century, Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years, America having record cold and snow etc. etc.
Hands up all those who still believe global warming is a problem.

It has always been better in science to rely upon observation and measurement, than upon models, because the data is empirical rather than speculative.
The same people who are now still advising governments on the drastic measures (taxes) they (Allegedly) need to implement in order to stop Global warming, focus on flawed and manipulated models rather than on observation. They were saying 10 years ago that Snowfalls were a thing of the past for goodness sakes.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Monday, 20 March 2000

hahahaha.

Photo of a photo