Brent Kearney

Everyone knew that it would happen sooner or later — the world’s most populous country now has the most number of people on the ‘net, and only 19% of them even use the Internet. Techcrunch published a summary yesterday of the latest World Internet Usage Statistics findings, in the form of a top 15 list:

Top 15 countries, by Internet population:

Asians dominate the Internet population, as shown by the IWS graph:

Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Only 15.3% of Asians use the Internet, according to the report.

According to Forrester, online retail sales in the USA for 2008 was forecast to be $204 billion. 73.6% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, so there is about $2.77 billion of sales online (per year) per 1% of the population that is online, in North America.

Canadian online sales, despite over 84% Internet penetration, amount to only $12.8 million according to StatsCan, so Canadian stats are rounded off when calculating for North America.

It probably doesn’t translate directly like this, but if we assume that Asian Internet users spend online the same way that U.S. consumers do, there is a potential Asian market of $42.4 billion right now, with wild growth in the coming years. Anyone selling online would be well advised to translate their website into Asian languages!

It was puking snow in Banff last night at midnight, when I went to bed. I had spent the past two hours tuning my skis, excited for the morning to come. The forecast called for clear skies, for the first time in a week of fog and snow storms. Over half a meter of snow fell on the local resorts, and I planned to be first in line when the lifts opened.

I got off the Sunshine gondola at Goat’s Eye mountain, just as the lift was opening to the public. I’ve done so many times in the past five years on powder days, usually to be rewarded with fresh tracks of fluffy knee-deep powder everywhere I ride. Not today though.

Despite it’s having dumped snow every day this week, mother nature threw a curve ball, and there was a quick melt-freeze cycle before Friday morning. My first run on Goat’s Eye involved scraping across dust on crust: about 2cm of dust on what felt like half a meter of crust. It wasn’t the porcelain type that can develop on the Goat, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant for my fat powder skis. One run was enough, and I jumped back on the Gondola to test the snow on reliable old Mount Standish.

Standish was much better, as it tends to be. The snow just accumulates on it’s south-easterly aspects, which also happens to be a stunningly beautiful place to ski first thing in the morning, as the sun rises behind Mt. Assiniboine. Maybe it’s the early sun that hits those slopes that softens the snow in the morning. In any case, I found some fresh gnar close to the ski area boundary on a steep little run called Laryx. The last time I was there, it was a rock garden, but there is finally enough snow that I didn’t bottom out once, and I was ripping fairly hard.

Unfortunately Laryx is only long enough to get about four turns in before you hit the cat track. A short jaunt over to Strawberry Face provided a few more powder turns before returning to the corduroy. I ended up repeating that line about 5 times, which only took around 40 minutes (yeah, it’s short), before hoping over to Continental Divide to see what the big mountain had to offer. It offered mostly wind-packed snow, with shallow pockets of loose powder between crusted moguls. A couple of runs there was enough, and I thought I’d check out that old chestnut, The Shoulder, which often hides a little powder oasis outside of the mainstream slopes.

Today The Shoulder was totally wind-blasted, the tracks of yesterday’s powder-hounds entombed in white marble, mocking me, and pounding my thighs all the way down as I negotiated the death-cookies. I decided to bear right, and skate back to the Goat’s Eye area, where I boarded Banff Ave and skied out to the parking lot. Maybe tomorrow conditions will be better.

This NY Times article has summarized the latest physiology research on warm-ups: the age-old practice of static stretching (stretch & hold) before exercising actually does more harm than good. Studies show that static stretching can weaken your pre-workout muscles by up to 30%.

Instead, athletes should do a short aerobic warm up, followed by dynamic stretching, which basically involves doing similar motions that will be involved in your actual work out. For running, do some squats and lunges, for example.

The embedded video on that page is worth watching. In it, manager of sports science for the U.S. Tennis Association Mark Kovacs says that the most important part of the warm up is — surprise — warming up, i.e. getting blood flowing to your muscles by doing a light jog, for example. After that, dynamic movement will further help your muscles warm up and get ready for action. It is also mentioned that static stretching is a good thing to do for cooling down. Damn, I too often skip that part.

An example of dynamic motion that makes for a good warm up is The Spiderman, which involves crawlng on hands & feet, bringing your foot up beside your hand while leaving the other way behind, sort of like a crouching lunge. Thankfully, Duke University’s Sports Medicine people have posted a helpful video on YouTube: