Think this guy enjoys esoteric sports? I hope this doesn’t mean that telemarking is the unicycling of the ski world. If anything, I’d say telemarking is more like cyclocross. Unicyclists would be monoskiers. Further, I’d bet fixie riders prefer twin tip skis, and anyone wearing purple gaiters rides a recumbent.

A study that began with half-drowned rats and continued on college students indicates that cycling or swimming at a furious pace for about six minutes per week has the same endurance-building affect as working out for six hours per week. This study is basically proof that interval training not only works, it works better than anyone expected. This is great news for busy and super lazy people. The only catch is that the workout actually takes longer than six minutes per week since you need to workout at an all-out sprint for 20-30 seconds, take four minutes off, then sprint again for 20-30 seconds and so on until your sprint time adds up to 6 minutes. Also, those six minutes of workout should be intensely painful otherwise they’re not working. Maybe dust off the “no pain, no gain” shirt for riding around the park.

Sure, crunchy white people love moleskine notebooks, but what are you supposed to use while hiking the AT with your trusty walking stick and Argentine friend? Field Notes are appropriately 1950s looking and they come in slim sizes to fit in your shirt pocket. Aldo Leopold famously used these things and kept all his bird-watching notes in pencil so they wouldn’t run in the rain. Reading bird-watching notes sounds about as exciting as standing in the rain, so I guess that worked out for him.

You could buy a recycled raincoat made from truck tires, but it won’t do any good once it ends up in the landfill. Too many sleeping bags and jackets use recycled materials but can’t be recycled. The Spanish company Equilicua devised an interesting way to close the loop and return this stuff to the earth. The Spud rain jacket is made from Bioplastic that will not only completely biodegrade, it will also furnish nutrients for potato seeds embedded in the jacket. A small clay pod in the jacket holds seeds, and when you’re done with the coat you simply bury it and potatoes grow. Be a great way to smuggle illegal potato seeds into California.

via Treehugger

The U.S. Army has declared war on remote southeastern Colorado. The Army is asking to expand their current training site in Colorado from 370sq miles to triple the size at 1,025sq miles. The expansion would give them space to practice more defensive maneuvers and coordinate mock attacks with air support. The only problem is that no one wants to give them the land. The space they want is covered in dinosaur fossils and American pioneers ran their wagons over it on their way to Santa Fe. Most of the land is currently used by ranchers who have been running cattle across it for generations, and almost all of them are reluctant to sell. In fact ranchers have opened two lawsuits against the Army:  One trying to stop them from using imminent domain to take the land and another alleging that they need to conduct more environmental-impact studies before shooting two tons of depleted uranium bullets into the land. The Wall Street Journal has the full article.

Thanks Mitchell