Very timely article, as I'm currently sitting in the doctors office waiting room to be seen for a sprained ankle.
> The resulting vasoconstriction from cooling, not only reduces tissue oxygenation with necrosis if extreme, but inhibits the inflammatory response needed to initiate healing.
Wondering if this means applying heat would speed up healing due to increased blood flow.
There's a balance. Excessive inflammation pushes joints and ligaments out of position. However, it's the way the body brings fluids to heal the injury.
Manage it, don't let it go wild, and don't try to drug/compress/ice it into oblivion and make it last longer.
Currently have my moderately sprained ankle elevated. This is the worst sprain I've had in 20 years, so taking it really easy.
The difference is that a traditional RWD car has a heavy engine in the front, but is being pushed from the back where none of the weight is. So lack of traction and fish tailing is the obvious result.
However, I think a RWD electric car would have less problems with traction (and thus, fish tailing), since the weight is distributed over the length of the car more evenly.
I think push vs pull is legit, but I don't think it would be as much of a problem when all the weight isn't in the front. I'd be interested to hear from some Tesla owners who drive RWD in the snow.
Not really...check weight distributions for any modern vehicle, you will find the majority of the competent manufacturers get it right around 50/50 front/back. Meaning your FWD Honda has no advantage over a RWD BMW except for the tendency for the Honda to understeer and the BMW to oversteer. This is the main problem in less than ideal traction conditions...
I'd be willing to wager that most front wheel drive sedans sold in the US are closer to 60/40, not 50/50. Pickup trucks (very popular in the US) also have a weight distribution much more skewed to the front.
50/50 distribution is more common for sports cars sure but that is not the majority of cars sold.
This is true, at least for premium cars. However even if the FWD honda and RWD BMW are similar in the flats. The hardest thing to deal with when it's slippery is the climbs, and then the RWD has the advantage.
Even on the flats, when cornering the FWD has the front wheels steering and accelerating, while the RWD uses different wheels for that. Granted not a big difference, especially since when it's slippery you aren't using many HP.
When the force vector is coming from the back it has the tendency to go into any direction. When there is enough grip in the front you can steer. A heavy engine in the front means even more grip.
But that's all useless on ice. Even if the car was 100% balanced.
FWIW, a traditional RWD car is usually pretty close to 50/50 weight distribution, while a FWD car is usually closer to 70/30.
However a RWD racing car is typically also biased with more weight on the driven axle, e.g. the Porsche 911 is around 40/60. So it's pretty pretty clear that more weight on driven axel == good. It's just not possible to get 40/60 in a BMW 5-series type car while keeping the practicality.
Anecdote: growing up in the UK in the 70s / 80s, snow was rare and most drivers didn't know how to cope. RWD was common in Cortinas, Sierras etc but it was the little rear-engined, RWD Skoda Estelle that I remember doing the best in the snow. I particularly remember an orange one weaving past abandoned cars.
I mean no offence, but I think a few of these opinions are probably because of your skill level on both a snowboard and skis.
> It works far more of your core muscles and your quads and hamstrings that skiing does, so it takes some time to figure out how to control all that with the precision.
If you're skiing hard, the core and quads are fully engaged. Especially in deep snow. In fact, I suspect that you need more engagement on skis.
> The key for me was to really understand that the board itself wasn't something I rode on top of, but instead of was a living vessel I was part of, and that I could twist, rotate and otherwise manipulate using movements in my legs, subtle shifts in center of balance and core muscles. Once that started to make sense it became much easier and I found it far easier and more rewarding that skiing for me.
Everything you said here about snowboarding applies to skiing, however it takes longer for that to click on skis because there's more to coordinate.
> Skiing is many moving parts you have to coordinate, snowboarding is one moving part with many subtle means of expression.
I definitely agree with the sentiment of one moving part with subtle means of expression, but when you get good at skiing, it starts to feel more like one moving part.
This is my experience as someone who snowboarded for 15ish years before switching to skiing a few years ago.
Not a fan of riding with headphones for one main reason. You won't hear other people yelling for help. This is especially important when you ski off piste at west coast resorts. I never want to accidentally miss something yelling for help or blowing their whistle in a tree well. If you're an east cost skier, this is probably less important.
Also, it's infrequent, but I have avoided a few collisions because people yelled out at me when I was popping out of the trees onto a piste.
> I find most people are naive of the problem especially in the west coast states, unless they spend a lot of time outdoors either recreationally, or landscaping, gardening, ranching, farming, hunting, etc.
I find that most people who spend a lot of time outdoors are also naive about Lyme. I can't count the number of people here in BC who've told me that Lyme doesn't exist here (medical doctors included). The employees at REI asked me why I was buying permethrin just to use in BC. They said Lyme isn't a concern here.
Not legal to sell, but legal to possess. I go across the border and stock up at REI in Bellingham. No problems bringing it back across. Apparently this is quite common for lower mainland residents. When I brought 4 big bottles of the stuff up to the register, the first thing they asked was if I was Canadian.
> Genius (and I'll be using that term sarcastically from here on in)
Slightly off topic, but it really bugs me when people ridicule these workers who are just doing what they've been instructed to do. Seems to happen all too often when discussing the Genius Bar.
Nobody pays a marginal rate > 50% in Canada. However, this will be counted as a capital gain, since Match almost certainly bought his shares in the company. That means 50% of the proceeds will be added to his taxable income. He'll pay around 25% of his total proceeds in tax.
His employees probably owned ~10% of the company, so let's say he sold his shares for $500M. He probably walked away with around $375M after tax.
> Founders are committed and in for the long haul, and either make a lot of money or none.
This used to be true, but I don't believe it is any longer. It's become fairly common for founders to do secondary sales and cash out some of their equity early on. For example, the founders of Secret famously sold $6M of their stock 6 months after starting the company.
Sometimes employees have access to those sales, but in many cases they don't.
5-7 day battery life and always-on, e-paper-like color screen. This enables you to use Pebble as an actual watch, or in general as an information radiator - you don't have to interact with it in any way to see the data you need; you just have to look at it. They had these features (sans color) before Apple Watch / Android Wear even existed!
What personally made me buy Pebble over Android Wear / Apple Watch was not point-by-point spec comparison though, but the apparent philosophy of the company since day one. They went with practical (always on e-paper screen instead of touch) and hackable (Pebble is programmed in C, no stacks of Java bloat, no licenses to buy). From the beginning, they were giving off the utilitarian vibe, as opposed to the later Apple's strategy of building an expensive toy. It's a difference of mindsets.
Or at least it was, given that Pebble seems slowly going towards the mainstream.
> 5-7 day battery life and always-on, e-paper-like color screen. This enables you to use Pebble as an actual watch
I'm not sure why the "always-on" aspect is an advantage. The Apple Watch display turns on when I raise my wrist to look at it. Always-on seems more like a vanity feature than actually useful. If you aren't looking at it, it serves no purpose to be on.
The battery life has never been a problem for me. I put the watch on it's charger when I get in bed, and take it off when I wake up. I don't think I've ever hit < 40% battery at the end of the day.
> Apple's strategy of building an expensive toy.
I don't believe that is the intention at all. I think Apple is trying to create a truly useful device, with a much broader scope than Pebble. Personally, the Apple Watch has been very useful for me. I would be very unhappy if I had to give it up. My Apple Watch watch feels significantly more utilitarian than my phone.
I also think you're underselling the fitness aspect. I've been much more active since I got my Apple Watch. The importance of physical activity is hard to understate.
Also, I visited my doctor recently and she was a bit worried that my pulse was high. I showed her the graph of my pulse over the last week, and she was no longer worried. In the future, when we can measure thinks like blood pressure and blood glucose, it will significantly improve people's health. That's clearly where Apple is headed.
I love Pebble as a company and I think they make a really great product. However, it's wrong to say the Apple Watch is nothing more than a toy. It's already had a decent impact on my life, and I think that impact will be exponentially larger in a few short years.
> The Apple Watch display turns on when I raise my wrist to look at it
This is one of those features that has to be 100% perfect for it to work in this form factor, and based on my colleagues Apple Watch (base model), that is not the case. In addition, I don't always turn my wrist to see my Pebble -- I don't need to. This is a small feature but saying its not actually useful is absolutely ridiculous in my opinion.
> This is one of those features that has to be 100% perfect for it to work in this form factor
As an Apple Watch owner, I can state that this is not the case for me, and thus it clearly doesn't have to be 100% perfect. Might it frustrate some people? Sure.
The tradeoff is that my watch can do many more useful things than the Pebble. The additional features are significantly more valuable to me than multiple day battery life and an always-on screen.
> This is a small feature but saying its not actually useful is absolutely ridiculous in my opinion.
I think we have different definitions of "absolutely ridiculous".
> The Apple Watch display turns on when I raise my wrist to look at it. Always-on seems more like a vanity feature than actually useful. If you aren't looking at it, it serves no purpose to be on.
Yeah... if you are wearing it. When I'm at my computer I don't like wearing a watch. So I take it off and place it next to my laptop (hate the band rubbing the desk/keyboard). In that scenario, always on is useful. Also when biking or motorcycling (especially far) I mount it to my bars because I like to be able to see it, again, not wearing it on my wrist. When biking (I bike a lot), the fitness function of an apple watch is <4 hrs. I take longer bike rides that that, so battery life is key.
> I put the watch on it's charger when I get in bed, and take it off when I wake up
yes... but if you don't have to do that for a week, it's much better. Just because you are willing to charge it daily doesn't mean it's acceptable.
All that said.... as an overall Apple fan and fitness fanatic, I would love an apple watch, if and only if, it allowed me to get 5+ hrs of fitness tracking WITHOUT bringing my phone along (so it needs GPS). So alas, I'll hang on to my Garmin which gets 24 hours of continuous GPS recording + my original Pebble until Apple Watch 2.
And to elaborate on the bike mount use, it's not just for "I want a clock on my handlebars." Paired with the GPS in your phone, you can use a Pebble as a bike computer, providing information like speed, distance, and elevation change.
The battery life and daylight visible / always on screen are requirements for this.
I think you're misinterpreting my original post. It's not a shot at the Pebble, or any other device. It's an argument that the Apple Watch is not a toy, and is actually quite useful day to day for many people. It was an argument against a generalization, not an argument for one.
> The battery life has never been a problem for me. I put the watch on it's charger when I get in bed, and take it off when I wake up. I don't think I've ever hit < 40% battery at the end of the day.
Compare that with my use case, where I wear my watch all the time and use it for sleep tracking, yet still I only need to charge it once every five days.
As for always-on, it makes the watch low profile. Depending on watch face it can actually fool people that it is a normal watch. I had a co-worker noticing after a month despite wearing it every day (when I received a message) that it is a smart watch.
>The battery life has never been a problem for me. I put the watch on it's charger when I get in bed, and take it off when I wake up. I don't think I've ever hit < 40% battery at the end of the day.
as a comparison, I can take my pebble to a very long weekend and not bring the cable and still be fine. The battery lasts 5 days in pretty normal circumstances
> The Apple Watch display turns on when I raise my wrist to look at it. Always-on seems more like a vanity feature than actually useful. If you aren't looking at it, it serves no purpose to be on.
There are lots of cases when you want to glance at your watch without doing an explicit, lively motion with your hand. For instance, as I'm typing this comment, I can look at my Pebble without moving the wrist. When a notification comes, I can read it without doing anything but moving my eyes downward. Since I spend 8+ hours every day in front of one computer or another, it's extremely valuable. Similarly, it applies when you're e.g. carrying things, or doing chores.
> I also think you're underselling the fitness aspect. I've been much more active since I got my Apple Watch. The importance of physical activity is hard to understate.
Probably. I admit I might be a bit biased against sports and fitness, for various hard-to-untangle reasons :).
> Also, I visited my doctor recently and she was a bit worried that my pulse was high. I showed her the graph of my pulse over the last week, and she was no longer worried. In the future, when we can measure thinks like blood pressure and blood glucose, it will significantly improve people's health. That's clearly where Apple is headed.
That's a great use of such technology, I admit. You communicated with a specialist and used your data to your advantage. That's how it should work. But generally, it doesn't. I dislike the whole quantified self movement (and fitness-oriented smartwatches are a part of it) for generally being a cargo-cult field. What you usually get is a device that measures something and puts the data in a completely unneccessary (but required to monetize you) cloud app, which then happily displays you some shiny graphs. The prettier the graphs the better thing sells, even though they're often pretty much useless. You can't export your data, you can't study your data, you just have some graphs. You're supposed to look at them and say "oooh, cool!".
There's a broader point here that applies both to QS enthusiasts and dashboard designers and people working on IoT - graphs are means, not an end. They exist only to improve user's decision-making process. Different graphs help with different questions, so it's important to allow users to manipulate the data presentation, and even more important to teach them the right questions to ask.
We have a technology that could really enable people to live smarter, healthier and better, and instead of that we're being fed shiny trinkets that monetize your data and lock it in so you can't use it for your advantage.
> 5-7 day battery life and always-on, e-paper-like color screen
When Pebble was the "InPulse" watch for BlackBerry phones it had none of these things. This feature set is relatively new compared to how long they've been working on watches. The InPulse watch was a lot closer to the feature set of current Android/iOS watches (including the terrible battery life).
Less is more: the Pebble doesn't surpass all the functionality in the Apple Watch or Android Wear devices, it pulls back and focuses on being a great watch, a great tool. It's not a small phone stuck on your wrist. The long battery life with an always on, sunlight-proof display is what really makes a Pebble a Pebble.
2 days of battery life is going to rub some people the wrong way but I think for what they were going for here, it was a good compromise. This continues their core excellence of making a great watch that includes smart, connected features.
I am waiting for my Pebble Time Steel to be delivered. I'm not disappointed at all with this announcement and I'm proud to see Pebble expanding into new markets.
It doesn't really do anything the other two don't. The bid difference that I think people are trying to state is that no one really uses any of those other features. Not really.
Pebble gives you notifications, time ... new ones give you heart rate monitors (I think?). You don't get those other features no one else cares about, but you do get like five days of battery life.
I'm still on my Pebble Steel and I still really like it. I even saw one in a retail store in Ireland today. Was kinda weird.
> The bid difference that I think people are trying to state is that no one really uses any of those other features. Not really.
I'm curious which features you are referring to? I have no need for 5 day battery life on my watch. Would it be great? Hell yeah. However, I also have no problem tossing my watch on the charger when I get in bed, just as I do with my phone.
Features like: answering phone through the watch, drawing, playing tic tac toe or other games (pebble also has some games, but it is quite silly to play games on watch), sending heart beats to someone else, or emoji.
That's I think all Apple Watch offers that pebble doesn't. I did not mention measuring pulse, because it is useful if you use watch for fitness tracking.
> The resulting vasoconstriction from cooling, not only reduces tissue oxygenation with necrosis if extreme, but inhibits the inflammatory response needed to initiate healing.
Wondering if this means applying heat would speed up healing due to increased blood flow.