North Korea plans long-range rocket launch

BEIJING -- North Korea announced Saturday that it will send a long-range rocket into space this month, trying to make up for a public relations disaster in April when a much-hyped launch failed.

In the announcement attributed to a spokesman for the Korean Committee for Space Technology, North Korea said the rocket would carry a "polar-orbiting earth observation satellite" for "peaceful scientific and technological" purposes.

Nonetheless, the launch is seen as a defiant move for an impoverished country that is already subject to a U.S. ban from developing nuclear and missile technology.

PHOTOS: North Korea's April launch preparations

The timing -- between Dec. 10 and 22, according to the announcement -- coincides with several sensitive dates on the Korean calendar.

On Dec. 19 there is a closely contested presidential election in archrival South Korea that could be swayed by the rocket launch. Perhaps more important on the North Korean calendar, Dec. 17 marks the one-year anniversary of the death of longtime leader Kim Jong Il, who is believed to have ordered the launch.

A successful launch is also seen as key to establishing the legitimacy of successor Kim Jong Un, the late dictator’s son who is still in his 20s.

North Korea had been in the midst of a propaganda campaign, claiming that it would become a "strong and prosperous nation" by 2012, which happens to be the centennial of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the dynasty’s founder.

PHOTOS: Rare glimpse of North Korea

"It seems like they are trying to keep up with their declaration that the year 2012 will be the first year of  'strong and prosperous nation,'" said Koh Yoo-hwan, North Korean studies professor at South Korea’s Dongguk University. "Because that had failed, they will try and finish the project within this year."

The earlier launch was an embarrassment for the regime, which had invited foreign television crews into North Korea to publicize the feat. But the rocket flew for less than two minutes before splashing into the Yellow Sea, close enough to South Korea that its intelligence services were able to recover pieces to analyze.

"The purpose of a rocket launch is for domestic politics," said another South Korean specialist, Baek Seung-joo at Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. "This is their chance to recover from embarrassment in April, and also to strengthen the Kim Jong Un-centered leadership."

In the announcement, North Korea said the satellite, known as Kwangmyongsong-3, meaning "bright star," had been "manufactured by its own efforts and with its own technology, true to the behests of leader Kim Jong Il."

"Scientists and technicians of the DPRK  [North Korea] analyzed the mistakes that were made during the previous April launch and deepened the work of improving the reliability and precision of the satellite and carrier rocket, thereby rounding off the preparations to launch," the statement read.

The April launch was the third attempt for North Korea, the last two having taken place in 1998 and 2009. This launch, like the attempt in April, is to take place from the Sohae military installation on the country’s west coast near the border with China, and is probably headed south toward the Philippines. The 1998 and 2009 launches, directed to the east, caused great consternation in Japan.

Technologically, lauching an intercontinental ballistic missile or satellite is essentially the same, with the main difference being what the rocket is carrying. The fact that North Korea is simultaneously developing nuclear weapons has raised fears that eventually the United States could be within its range.

South Korea's first rocket from its own territory, Naro-1, was scheduled to launch Thursday, but was delayed until next year because of technical problems.

In a statement, the South Korean foreign ministry said Thursday that the North's planned launch is "a grave provocation and a head-on challenge to the international community."

The North Korean statement was not a surprise because satellite intelligence released in recent days showed a movement of trucks around the launch site, according to 38 North, a think tank affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.

"If Pyongyang follows past practice in preparing for a launch, it could be ready to fire a rocket as early as the end of the first week in December," 38 North said in the report released Wednesday.

Demick reported from Beijing and Choi from Seoul.

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Geek Culture's 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers

Angelina Jolie extends her reputation as filmdom’s most compelling ass-kicker, Female Division, when Salt opens Friday. Midway through a summer freighted with testosterone, Jolie’s lithe Agent Salt is a potent reminder of the power of feminine fighters.

A minority presence in sci-fi and action realms even in 2010, women warriors remain the exception to the guy-centric rule in film, TV, videogames and comic books. But that’s changing, according to Action Flick Chick blogger Katrina Hill, who moderates the "Where Are the Action Chicks?" panel Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con International.

"Compare the original Predator to this summer’s Predators," she said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. "The original film was a complete boy’s club, with the only woman in the movie being a hostage. Today, Predators has a kick-ass chick mixed in as an equal amongst these other badass men. So there are steps being taken in the right direction. It just takes time."

The rise of the female fighter will be addressed at no fewer than three other female-dominated panels at this year’s Comic-Con (Thursday’s “Divas and Golden Lassoes: The LGBT Obsession with Super Heroines” and Friday’s “Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web” and “Women Who Kick Ass: A New Generation of Heroines,” which features Fringe’s Anna Torv and V’s Elizabeth Mitchell.)

Here’s a look at 26 sexy-fierce female ass-kickers who’ve relied on biceps and brains to periodically kick-start geek culture.

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Glen Campbell considering more live shows in 2013

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Glen Campbell may be wrapping up a goodbye tour but that doesn’t mean he’s done with the stage.

Campbell is considering scheduling more shows next year after playing more than 120 dates in 2012.

The 76-year-old singer has Alzheimer’s disease and has begun to lose his memory. He put out his final studio album, “Ghost on the Canvas,” in 2011 and embarked on the tour with family members and close friends serving in his band and staffing the tour.

Campbell’s longtime manager Stan Schneider said in a phone interview from Napa, Calif., where the tour wrapped for the year Friday night, that recent West Coast shows have been some of the singer’s strongest. Campbell will break for the holidays and if he still feels strong he’ll begin scheduling more shows.

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Online:

http://glencampbellmusic.com

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Small union is causing big problems for ports

The small band of strikers that has effectively shut down the nation's busiest shipping complex forced two huge cargo ships to head for other ports Thursday and kept at least three others away, hobbling an economic powerhouse in Southern California.

The disruption is costing an estimated $1 billion a day at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, on which some 600,000 truckers, dockworkers, trading companies and others depend for their livelihoods.

"The longer it goes, the more the impacts increase," said Paul Bingham, an economist with infrastructure consulting firm CDM Smith. "Retailers will have stock outages, lost sales for products not delivered. There will be shutdowns in factories, in manufacturing when they run out of parts."

Despite the union's size — about 800 members of a unit of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — it has managed to flex big muscles. Unlike almost anywhere else in the nation, union loyalty is strong at the country's ports. Neither the longshoremen nor the truckers are crossing the tiny union's picket lines.

The strike started at the L.A. port's largest terminal Tuesday and spread Wednesday to 10 of the two ports' 14 cargo terminals. These resemble seaside parking lots where long metal containers are loaded and unloaded with the help of giant cranes.

The union contends that the dispute is over job security and the transfer of work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other countries. The 14-employer management group says that no jobs have been outsourced and that the union wants to continue a practice called "featherbedding," or bringing in temporary workers even when there is no work.

The two sides haven't met since negotiations broke down Monday, but they were scheduled to begin talking again Thursday night. The union has worked without a contract for 21/2 years.

The clerical workers are a vital link in the supply chain. They handle the immense flow of information that accompanies each cargo ship as well as every item in the freight. One shipload of shoes, toys and other products is enough to fill five warehouses.

Logistics clerk Trinie Thompson, 41, normally spends her days working with railroad lines and trucking companies to ensure that the right containers are sent along to their proper destinations. On Thursday, she was walking the picket lines at the docks.

"We will be setting up trains to Houston, trains to Dallas, to Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest," said Thompson, who has worked for 10 years for Eagle Marine Services terminal, which is affiliated with the giant APL shipping line.

"For a typical container ship, we will have to set up multiple trains. We might be sending 200 to 300 containers to Chicago alone, and there will be paperwork for all of them."

The strike comes at a time of simmering labor unrest at other U.S. ports, underscoring the unusual power labor holds in maritime trade.

On the East Coast and Gulf Coast, another group of shipping lines and terminal operators called the United States Maritime Alliance has repeatedly failed to reach agreement on a new labor contract with the International Longshoremen's Assn. A strike that might have involved dozens of ports was avoided only after both sides agreed to extend negotiations past the September end of their current contract.

A strike also was narrowly avoided at Portland, Ore., only a few days ago in a dispute between grain shippers and union workers.

Operations at Oakland International Airport and at the Port of Oakland, the third-largest port in the state behind Los Angeles and Long Beach, were affected by a brief strike this month.

Maritime unions "have successfully organized one of the most vital links in the supply chain, and it's a tradition they nurture with all of their younger workers," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a UC Santa Barbara history professor and workplace expert. "They have a very strong ideological sense of who they are, and for now they are strong."

In Los Angeles and Long Beach, the 800 clerical workers have been able to shut down most of the ports because the 10,000-member dockworkers union is honoring the picket lines. Work continues at only four cargo terminals, where the office clerical unit has no workers.

"Longshoremen stand up when other workers need our help," said Ray Ortiz Jr., a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's Coast Committee. "Sure, it's a sacrifice to give up a paycheck when you refuse to cross the picket line, but we believe it's in the long-term interest of the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor area to retain these good local jobs."

Stephen Berry, lead negotiator for the shipping lines and cargo terminals, said the clerical workers have been offered a deal that includes "absolute job security," a raise that would take average annual pay to $195,000 from $165,000, 11 weeks' paid vacation and a generous pension increase.

At a news conference Thursday, Berry denounced the tactics by the clerical workers, calling them "irresponsible."

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Incoming Jets Animate Atlanta Airport's Epic Data-Driven Sculpture

Dan Goods has a pretty cool day job managing communications for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, but he's got a really cool hobby: The Pasadena brainiac makes data sculptures on an epic scale.

In collaboration with designer Nik Hafermaas and programmer Jamie Barlow, Goods' latest piece, airFIELD, installed at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, runs flight data through an app that spits out "on" or "off" signals to Frisbee-sized discs of liquid crystal suspended from the ceiling. Each time a jet takes off or lands, passengers are treated to a cascade of overhead lights synced to the flight's trajectory.

"We're not working with major data sets," Goods says. "It's basically: Have the planes landed? Have they taken off? And how far have they gone?' But it's interesting information and we're trying to show it in a poetic fashion. If you're sitting there waiting for two hours for your flight to Switzerland, then it gives you a sense of the heartbeat of the airport."

Prior to airFIELD, Goods curated Pasadena Museum of California Art's 2009 Data + Art exhibition, then joined Hafermaas and Google's Aaron Koblin to complete a San Jose International Airport installation in 2010. Titled eCLOUD, the piece uses weather data to activate thousands of hanging "smart glass" tiles that shift appearance every 20 seconds to reflect changing weather conditions.

Citing an MIT experiment that used solar wind activity to spin pinwheels, Goods says, "I liked the idea of taking arcane, weird data and making it into something physical. That kind of ambient data I think is really interesting because there's only so much you can see on a screen. I like the idea of experiencing data as something that's all-encompassing. How can you listen to data? How can you sense the physicality of data?"

Check out gallery for images, video and text deconstructing airFLIGHT, eCLOUD and other data-driven projects.

Images courtesy Dan Goods except where noted

Above: Arrivals and Departures Activate Atlanta Airport's airFIELD

Produced by UEBERSEE, the installation runs data provided by FlightAware tracking service through Dan Massey's custom C++ program. The application transmits electrical charges that instructs each single-pixel disc to become either opaque or translucent. "We were thinking about fluid dynamics, like grass blowing in the wind, and it had to work in three dimensions. It took a while to get the piece to feel like the airplane has just flown over your head, because that's what we wanted. We wanted it to feel as if you were standing at the end of the runway and these flights are flying over you and you're physically seeing the fluid dynamics of the aircraft as they go by."

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Producer sues Pythons over ‘Spamalot’ royalties

LONDON (AP) — It’s no joking matter.

A producer of the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” is suing the British comedy troupe over royalties from the hit stage musical “Spamalot.”

Producer Mark Forstater wants a bigger share of proceeds from the show, which is based on the Pythons’ 1975 movie spoof of the legend of King Arthur.

Lawyers for Monty Python are contesting Forstater’s claim and will present their arguments later. Python members Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones will give evidence during a five-day hearing that began Friday at London’s High Court.

Forstater is suing the trio and the two other surviving Python members, John Cleese and Terry Gilliam. The sixth member of the troupe, Graham Chapman, died in 1989.

Forstater’s lawyer, Tom Weisselberg, said that under an agreement made when the film was produced, “for financial purposes Mr. Forstater was to be treated as the seventh Python” and entitled to the same share of “Holy Grail” merchandising and spin-off income as the other members.

But the lawyer said Forstater had not received his fair share of royalties from the stage show, which has been a hit around the world. It ran on Broadway for almost four years to 2009 and is still playing in London’s West End.

Weisselberg said Forstater, who was declared bankrupt earlier this year, had been forced to go to court because of his “difficult financial circumstances.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Hockey Coaches Defy Doctors on Concussions, Study Finds

Despite several years of intensive research, coverage and discussion about the dangers of concussions, the idea of playing through head injuries is so deeply rooted in hockey culture that two university teams kept concussed players on the ice even though they were taking part in a major concussion study.

The study, which will be published Friday in a series of articles in the journal Neurosurgical Focus, was conducted during the 2011-12 hockey season by researchers from the University of Western Ontario, the University of Montreal, Harvard and other institutions.

“This culture is entrenched at all levels of hockey, from peewee to university,” said Dr. Paul S. Echlin, a concussion specialist and researcher in Burlington, Ontario, and the lead author of the study. “Concussion is a significant public health issue that requires a generational shift. As with smoking or seat belts, it doesn’t just happen overnight — it takes a massive effort and collective movement.”

The study is believed to be among the most comprehensive analyses of concussions in hockey, which has a rate of head trauma approaching that of football. Researchers followed two Canadian university teams — a men’s team and a women’s team — and scanned every player’s brain before and after the season. Players who sustained head injuries also received scans at three intervals after the injuries, with researchers using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques.

The teams were not named in the study, in which an independent specialist physician was present at each game and was empowered to pull any player off the ice for examination if a potential concussion was observed.

The men’s team, with 25 players and an average age of 22, played a 28-game regular season and a 3-game postseason. The women’s team, with 20 players and an average age of 20, played 24 regular-season games and no playoff games. Over the course of the season, there were five observed or self-reported concussions on the men’s team and six on the women’s team.

Researchers noted several instances of coaches, trainers and players avoiding examinations, ignoring medical advice or otherwise obstructing the study, even though the players had signed consent forms to participate and university ethics officials had given institutional consent.

“Unless something is broken, I want them out playing,” one coach said, according to the study.

In one incident, a neurologist observing the men’s team pulled a defenseman during the first period of a game after the player took two hits and was skating slowly. During the intermission the player reported dizziness and was advised to sit out, but the coach suggested he play the second period and “skate it off.” The defenseman stumbled through the rest of the game.

“At the end of the third period, I spoke with the player and the trainer and said that he should not play until he was formally evaluated and underwent the formal return-to-play protocol,” the neurologist said, as reported in the study. “I was dismayed to see that he played the next evening.”

After the team returned from its trip, the neurologist questioned the trainer about overruling his advice and placing the defenseman at risk.

“The trainer responded that he and the player did not understand the decision and that most of the team did not trust the neurologist,” according to the study. “He requested that the physician no longer be used to cover any more games.”

In another episode, a physician observer assessed a minor concussion in a female player and recommended that she miss the next night’s game. Even though the coach’s own playing career had ended because of concussions, she overrode the medical advice and inserted the player the next evening.

According to the report, the coach refused to speak to another physician observer on the second evening. The trainer was reluctant to press the issue with the coach because, the trainer said, the coach did not want the study to interfere with the team.

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Most Americans Face Lower Tax Burden Than in the 80s

What Is Fair?:
Taxes are still a hot topic after the presidential election. But as a country that spends more than it collects in taxes, are we asking the right taxpayers to pay the right amounts?

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Alan Hicks divides long days between the insurance business he started in the late 1970s and the barbecue restaurant he opened with his sons three years ago. He earned more than $250,000 last year and said taxes took more than 40 percent. What’s worse, in his view, is that others — the wealthy, hiding in loopholes; the poor, living on government benefits — are not paying their fair share.

“It feels like the harder we work, the more they take from us,” said Mr. Hicks, 55, as he waited for a meat truck one recent afternoon. “And it seems like there’s an awful lot of people in the United States who don’t pay any taxes.”

These are common sentiments in the eastern suburbs of St. Louis, a region of fading factory towns fringed by new subdivisions. Here, as across the country, people like Mr. Hicks are pained by the conviction that they are paying ever more to finance the expansion of government.

But in fact, most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980.

Lower-income households, however, saved little or nothing. Many pay no federal income taxes, but they do pay a range of other levies, like federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Only about half of taxpaying households with incomes below $25,000 paid less in 2010.

The uneven decline is a result of two trends. Congress cut federal taxation at every income level over the last 30 years. State and local taxes, meanwhile, increased for most Americans. Those taxes generally take a larger share of income from those who make less, so the increases offset more and more of the federal savings at lower levels of income.

In a half-dozen states, including Connecticut, Florida and New Jersey, the increases were large enough to offset the federal savings for most households, not just the poorer ones.

Now an era of tax cuts may be reaching its end. The federal government depends increasingly on borrowed money to pay its bills, and many state and local governments are similarly confronting the reality that they are spending more money than they collect. In Washington, debates about tax cuts have yielded to debates about who should pay more.

President Obama campaigned for re-election on a promise to take a larger share of taxable income above roughly $250,000 a year. The White House is now negotiating with Congressional Republicans, who instead want to raise some money by reducing tax deductions. Federal spending cuts also are at issue.

If a deal is not struck by year’s end, a wide range of federal tax cuts passed since 2000 will expire and taxes will rise for roughly 90 percent of Americans, according to the independent Tax Policy Center. For lower-income households, taxation would spike well above 1980 levels. Upper-income households would lose some but not all of the benefits of tax cuts over the last three decades.

Public debate over taxes has typically focused on the federal income tax, but that now accounts for less than a third of the total tax revenues collected by federal, state and local governments. To analyze the total burden, The Times created a model, in consultation with experts, which estimated total tax bills for each taxpayer in each year from 1980, when the election of President Ronald Reagan opened an era of tax cutting, up to 2010, the most recent year for which relevant data is available.

The analysis shows that the overall burden of taxation declined as a share of income in the 1980s, rose to a new peak in the 1990s and fell again in the 2000s. Tax rates at most income levels were lower in 2010 than at any point during the 1980s.

Governments still collected the same share of total income in 2010 as in 1980 — 31 cents from every dollar — because people with higher incomes pay taxes at higher rates, and household incomes rose over the last three decades, particularly at the top.

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British judge urges new press regulator due to hacking scandal

LONDON – In a highly anticipated and lengthy report, a senior judge Thursday recommended that a new, independent regulatory authority be set up to monitor Britain’s raucous press and to crack down on media abuses such as phone hacking and other unethical newsgathering practices.

Justice Brian Leveson said such a regulator was necessary because the press had at times “wreaked havoc in the lives of innocent people” through its intrusions on privacy and relentless pursuit of scoops.

The new regulatory body should be backed by law, but it should not include any politicians, in order to avoid government control of the press, nor any editors, in order to maintain full independence, Leveson said.

The regulator would replace a previous press complaints commission that is widely recognized in Britain to have been a failure, particularly with regard to the phone-hacking scandal. Evidence has emerged that hundreds of high-profile figures may have had their cellphones tapped by the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

The scandal gave rise to a months-long, government-commissioned investigation into media culture and ethics by Leveson, who heard testimony from more than 300 witnesses.

The recommendations in his 2,000-page report are likely to please some hacking victims and satisfy demands of some lawmakers who say that Britain’s media, in particular its sensation-seeking and gossip-hungry tabloids, have been allowed to run amok.

But the news organizations themselves have expressed alarm over any form of regulation that has its roots in law and that, they fear, could be the first step toward government censorship. Although they recognize the need for oversight, many news outlets have pushed for a better system of self-regulation with no legal underpinning.

Leveson was eager to emphasize his respect for a free press and denied that his recommendations represented any threat to it.

“The press operating freely and in the public interest is one of the true safeguards of our democracy. As a result, it holds a privileged and powerful place in our society,” he told reporters. “But this power and influence carries with it responsibilities to the public interest in whose name it exercises these privileges. Unfortunately, as the evidence has shown beyond doubt, on too many occasions those responsibilities … have simply been ignored.”

The report has been eagerly awaited for months. As its release date neared, politicians and high-profile individuals dug in on either side, calling for laws to regulate the media or warning against them as an unacceptable infringement on a free press.

“As parliamentarians, we believe in free speech and are opposed to the imposition of any form of statutory control,” said a letter signed by 86 lawmakers. “The solution is not new laws but a profound restructuring of the self-regulatory system.”

A recent poll, however, found a majority of Britons in favor of some kind of regulation of the media backed by the force of the law.

The witnesses who appeared before Leveson included some of Britain’s best-known public figures, such as Prime Minister David Cameron. Actor Hugh Grant and "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling denounced media invasions of their privacy. Media baron Rupert Murdoch and other newspaper proprietors spoke about newsgathering practices.

The inquiry was launched last year after the hacking scandal exploded in the public consciousness with the revelation that the News of the World had tapped the voicemail messages of a missing 13-year-old girl, whose body was later found dumped in the woods by her killer.

Like a fast-spreading fire, the scandal quickly engulfed key pillars of British public life, putting the heat not just on tabloid newspapers but also the politicians who cozied up to them and the police who offered scoops in hopes of flattering coverage. Within days, the head of Scotland Yard resigned, as did one of Murdoch’s closest confidants, and the 168-year-old News of the World was shut down.

Three separate police investigations – into phone hacking, computer hacking and bribery of public officials – were spawned by the affair. Dozens of people, most of them journalists at Murdoch-owned publications, have been arrested.

Only a few hours before Leveson’s report was released, the former head of Murdoch’s newspapers in Britain and a onetime senior aide to Cameron appeared in court on charges of paying public officials for information.

ALSO:

Three managers arrested after deadly Bangladesh factory fire

Outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderon heading to Harvard

Google opposes German push for search engines to pay newspapers

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Making a Dirt Dog, Vol. 4: As the Bike Turns

Editor’s note: For those of you joining us late, Peter Rubin’s a roadie making his first foray into mountain biking. He knows nothing — seriously, zero — about that side of cycling, so he’s chronicling his adventures in the hope that others might learn from his inevitable mistakes.

It’s Day 2 at Gene Hamilton’s Better Ride skills camp. After a day in which I spent close to eight hours in a parking lot and about 15 minutes riding on a trail, I can’t say I was all that excited about waking up at 7 on a Saturday for more of the same. But there I was (albeit in a different parking lot). And this time, we were learning how to steer.

No, really.

So here’s what you don’t do on a bike when you want to go around the corner: turn the handlebars. Well, kind of. Under 6 mph or so, that’s really the only way to do it. But once you’re going faster than that, wrenching the wheel in a given direction means you’re about a half-second away from kissing pavement. The front wheel will just keep turning in that direction until it hits a right angle and you fly over the handlebars. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself.

Done?

What happens, you no doubt noticed, is that you didn’t kiss the pavement. Your bike actually swerved in the opposite direction. That’s because your body, purely instinctively, counteracts what your brain thinks you’re trying to do. (Give it up for self-preservation!) All of this is to say that turning the wheel is not how you turn. The thing is, you already know that — at least, your body does. You’ve internalized what’s commonly known as “countersteering,” which essentially means initiating a turn in one direction with the intention of going the opposite direction. But as Hamilton, who founded Better Ride, and coach Dylan Renn pointed out, it’s not so much steering in the opposite direction as it is applying pressure in the opposite direction. That is, if you want to make a sharp left turn, you apply pressure on the left handlebar. That initiates a turn to the right, after which your bike will lean left to compensate, and you can lean into a sharp left turn.

Now, this is no secret among road cyclists and motorcyclists. But the effect on mountain biking is a bit more pronounced because the crux of MTBing is to stay balanced above your bike no matter what. From front to back and left to right, your mass should be centered above your bottom bracket. That means that if your bike is going to be leaning to the left for a sharp left turn, you separate your body from the bike and allow it to lean without leaning along with it. Which leads us, conveniently, to the Better Ride cornering method.

1. Attack position. Always attack position.


2. Look into the turn. Building on the vision drills of Day 1, we learned how to look at the apex of the turn as we initiated cornering, so that we’d be looking well past the turn by the time we were actually mid-corner.


3. Initiate cornering via counterpressure.


4. Separate from the bike by straightening the arm to the inside of the turn, and rotating the outside hand forward over the handlebar just enough so that the outside arm is bent at a 90-degree angle. (If this sounds confusing, see this image from Better Ride’s Facebook Page).

After lunch, we took to the trail (only five hours after the day’s class began!) and climbed through Pearson-Arastradero Preserve to the top of a series of sweeping turns. They weren’t switchbacks — that’s a whole ‘nother set of skills, and one I’d learn on Day 3 — but certainly tight enough that going through them with a good head of steam would press into service all the techniques drilled into me in the parking lot. Dylan stood at the apex of one, Gene at the apex of another, and we took turns bombing down through the turns. And then again. And again. Attack position. Counterpressure. Separate from the bike. And I swear to you, every time I headed down anew, my smile was bigger than the time before.

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