Three Cool Things (SAR jet suits, Car battery boosters, Timelapse of the universe)

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Here are three things that I thought were interesting. Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

SAR jet suits

As someone who carries a Garmin inReach device equipped with an SOS button into the backcountry, I found this video by Gravity Industries quite exciting. It shows a demo of a search and rescue in the UK, where the paramedic gets to the victim in 90 seconds using a jet suit, saving nearly a half hour. Footage of a human gliding through the air in the mountains is quite surreal. The machinery looks quite clunky, but like anything the tech is always improving. Who knows what applications there are on the horizon.

Car battery booster pack

I haven't needed to own my own car til last year. I finally had to immerse myself into the world of car ownership: scheduling oil changes, comparing insurance rates, and dealing with intermittent bursts of worry that it'll get broken into. Over the last decade, I've had three friends whose car batteries died on them. In all instances, we were far from any city or town, parked at a trailhead or in the middle of an endless dirt field. We were mostly lucky to have another car nearby equipped with jumper cables. In one instance though, we endured a long and memorable night.

Buy on Amazon

Until recently, I resigned to the fact that this was the norm of car ownership: a battery is bound to die at some point from accidentally leaving a light on and you’d better hope a friendly person is around. I found learned quickly that's not the case. You could just buy a brick-shaped battery that could bring the juice back to your car within a minute. It's unbelievable to me that everyone doesn't carry one of these in their trunk. You could even charge your phone with it in an emergency. There are several variations of this gizmo, some expensive models adding features like the ability to inflate your tires. I kept it simple (NOCO Boost Sport GB 20 500A) and went with reliability for a solid price. So far I haven't needed to use it, but there's tons of praise for this thing across the web. It feels like a no-brainer.

Timelapse of the universe

Even if you're not scientifically inclined, I'd encourage you to watch at least the first two minutes. Capturing over 50M views as of this writing, the video is a stunning glimpse into what's in store for the future. It seems bizarre, illustrating what'll happen trillions of years ahead, but the predictions are grounded in real science (e.g, we know the Sun will die out, the earth's magnetic poles reversing, etc). In the YouTube comments there's an unmistakeable mood of feeling insignificant, afraid, and amazed in the face of this realization. Here's a favorite line: "…and you afraid to talk to the person you like."

Three Cool Things (Everesting, Icarus film, Cyclon shoe)

This post is part of a (potential) weekly series where I share just three things that I thought were interesting. Leave your thoughts in the comments section!

EVERESTING

There’s a good chance you’ve already heard of this. When Tom told me about it this week, he seemed surprised that I hadn’t. Everesting is a pretty simple concept with pretty simple rules: you ascend a single hill multiple times without stopping until you cumulatively have totaled 8,848m (29,029ft). As of September 2020 just shy of 12,000 people have accomplished this and have made it to the hall of fame on Everesting.cc. The first recorded attempt of this feat was by George Mallory’s grandson (of the same name) in 1994 when he rode eight laps on Mount Donna Buang. Afterward, rules started to form around it and it became more official. No surprise that there’s been renewed interest in the challenge from both pros and weekend warriors alike as they’ve looked for creative ways to push themselves during Covid.

I took a look around the map on the Everesting.cc map and found a few successful attempts within NYC, which is famously not hilly. Someone had biked the Williamsburg bridge for 37 hours straight to accumulate the required elevation gain! It’s not something for me, but I’m very impressed by the effort.

Icarus (2017 film)

I watched this film while on a spin bike, which felt appropriate. Initially the film seemed like it was going to tell a story about cycling and doping. We see filmmaker Bryan Fogel intentionally (but reluctantly) taking performance enhancing drugs under the supervision of Russian scientist Grigory Rodchenkov. It seemed like a bizarre, athletic version of the film Super Size Me where a guy ate nothing but McDonalds for a month as an experiment.

Icarus takes a turn mid-way through and becomes a film about Russian state-sponsored corruption, the dangers of telling the truth, and the lengths people will go to win. Grigory ends up being a whistle-blower and exposes what’s considered the largest scandal in sports history. He’s now in the US Federal Witness Protection Program and has left his family and financial stability in Russia. It’s so much more than a sports movie. Check it out on Netflix. It won an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2018.

Cyclon shoe

This came up on my Instagram feed and the clickbait title caught me: You will never own this shoe. That message was placed on top of a fairly boring-looking all-white sneaker. It was an ad from On Running. The idea is that these running sneakers are rented, not sold, via a subscription service of $29.99 a month. This shoe is partially made from castor beans and is recyclable. The value prop seems to be: instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars a year on running sneakers that you’ll toss, you get a fresh pair every month without the guilty conscience of your kicks ending up in a landfill. Check em out for yourself on their website.

There’s a lot of emotion in the comments section of their Facebook and Instagram posts to say the least. My point of view is that spending $360 on running sneakers every year is way too much, but perhaps this is targeted to more serious athletes. I also feel uncomfortable with subscribing to yet another service. I’m already paying for (or sharing) the Adobe suite, Spotify, video streaming services, Peloton, Amazon Prime, my iPhone etc. Do I really need another?

A bigger question is: how much more am I willing to pay to reduce my footprint? Unintentional pun.