It's been crazy watching the evolution of hockey sticks from wood to aluminum shafts, then to carbon-fiber. The prices have steadily skyrocketed, but it's hard to deny the incredible effects of just these material design changes. There are of course trade-offs, most notable being the tendency of these new carbon fiber sticks breaking without much warning, or apparent wear. The speed at which the shot comes off the stick now is pretty mind-boggling, too, which makes it easy for me to justify 300+ for a stick. They tend to either break soon, or last a lot longer than old style wood sticks, or aluminum + wood blades, etc.<p>I'm eager to try out one of these new designs myself but the pricing is just absurd for a beer league even if I'm playing in the top non-pro league in Colorado, and one of the teams I play against is all retired well known pros.<p>Like anything it'll come down as the process is refined and likely this approach is adopted from top-to-bottom. Excited to try one out for sure!
Wonder if hockey will either go the way of Tennis (where technology has rapidly changed how the game has been played) or baseballe - where the bats are always wood.
Got distracted by the new post already added above this one, about the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge. In particular, other than its being a rare example of a spectacular bridge collapse that was more-or-less caught on film, I'm not sure it's a great example for an engineering ethics class. Because the most likely cause of its failure wasn't any particular ethical consideration, but the interaction of phenomema (wind vortex shedding and structural resonance) about which nobody had a lot of experience or knowledge at the time. Time goes by and we learn from the successes and the failures. Almost every major earthquake ends up pushing a few changes to the building codes. We now return you to your regularly scheduled hockey-related program.
Puck bounce is already a weird randomization. It seems like have a hole in your blade that might hook the edge of the puck would only increase that randomness.
There's a pretty strong tradition of wrapping tape around the blade that I imagine is hard to break. I wonder how much that hurts the supposed benefits.
What am I looking at here ?<p>Is there, in fact, a web-based reference copy of a mailchimp brokered mailing list ? Do all mailchimp campaigns auto-generate these pages ? I have never seen this before.<p>I've never considered a mailing list, or mailchimp campaign, for rsync.net but for some reason those same things <i>with a bloggy web page backing store behind it</i> weirdly appeals to me ...
I got a strong "Nimbus 5000" vibe reading this. It's pretty easy to read this and replace "stick" with "broom", "ice" with "arena", "quaffle" with "puck", and "hockey" with "quidditch" - and have it all sort of sound right.