Piezoelectricity update

I've spoken very briefly about piezoelectricity in blog posts here, here, here, and here, so I think it's worth giving a quick update on the recent goings-on in that space. At last week's Paris Marathon, piezoelectricity took a bit of a leap into the mainstream, with a creative project from British company Pavegen Systems. From a Bloomberg article written prior to the race:

Paris Marathon organizers will lay energy-harvesting tiles across the course on Sunday to ensure not all the effort expended by the race’s 40,000 runners goes to waste.

The flexible tiles made from recycled truck tires will span a portion of the Champs Elysees for about 25 meters (82 feet) of the 42.2-kilometer course, according to Pavegen Systems Ltd., the U.K. maker of the tiles. Each footstep generates as much as 8 watts of kinetic energy, which is fed back to batteries that can charge display screens and electronic signs along the route, the company said.

Schneider Electric SA (SU), the race sponsor, aims to eventually make the Paris Marathon an event that generates energy rather than consumes it, Aaron Davis, the company’s chief marketing officer, said in Pavegen’s statement. London-based Pavegen aims for its tiles to help cut carbon emissions and boost energy efficiency in cities around the world in the future, it said.

“Imagine if your run or walk to work could help to power the lights for your return journey home in the evening,” Pavegen Chief Executive Officer Laurence Kemball-Cook, who invented the technology, said in the statement. It’s “a viable new type of off-grid energy technology that people love to use and which can make a low-carbon contribution wherever there is high footfall, regardless of the weather.”

Pavegen declined to say how much energy the tiles will produce because there is a competition for the public to guess. Schneider Electric will donate an extra 10,000 euros ($12,850) to charity if generation tops 7 kilowatt hours. That’s enough to run a light bulb for about five days, according to Pavegen.

According to this article, it was unclear immediately after the race whether the 7 kWh goal had been met, but I nevertheless applaud the race organizers and the company for their creativity.

It's of course way too early to know if this technology is realistically scalable or viable, but it's clearly a step in the right direction. The more energy we can harvest from our own activities, the less we have to "produce" or mine or burn. I'm hopeful that this is a method that can catch on and become economical enough to achieve wide acceptance.

[Bloomberg]

Cheers to a marathon legend

A while back, I wrote about marathon runner Fauja Singh, who set a world record in 2011 by becoming the oldest man (and first centenarian) to complete a marathon. Now, it seems that the miles have taken their toll on our old friend, and he's finally hanging them up.

Say goodbye to our very old friend Fauja Singh, the 101-year-old marathon man dubbed the “Turbaned Tornado” who gave us 12 years of incredibly slow but consistent inspiration. He’s finally admitted that age has caught up to him and he will retire from competitive running after the Hong Kong Marathon on February 24th. 

This doesn’t mean he’s going to stop running, though. Oh no. Far from it. Says Singh: “Running is my life. I will keep running to inspire the masses. I will keep running for at least four hours daily after that.”

Man, good for him. As I said when I first wrote about Singh, I'll be happy to make it to age 101, let alone be running marathons at that age. Here's one last shout out to a distance running legend.

[NBC Sports]

Marathon Badassery, Part VI

I'm at least fairly confident this is the sixth installment of my "Marathon Badassery" series. We've got one, two, three, four, and five here, so unless I missed one this is lucky number six.

It's interesting enough that Runner's World is reporting that a man completed the recent Baltimore Marathon wearing flip-flops. 

The fact that Keith Levasseur posted a time of 2:46.58 makes it even more unbelievable. His goal was a sub-three-hour time, he told Runner's World. 

"I knew it was all about maintaining a very efficient and balanced stride," he told Runner's World. "There were times when my feet and ankles would get tired from maintaining a more rigid stride than I might otherwise have and I would start landing more on the outside of the my foot and cause my heel to slip off the sandal. It only happened a few times and when it did, it would refocus my concentration on my stride and posture." 

Oddball running stunts are nothing new, and countless runners have completed marathons in costumes or barefoot, but Levasseur's speed is remarkable.

Of course, the obvious question here is "why?", and I don't really have a good answer for that one. I don't usually like to recognize these kinds of stunts on the blog unless they're seriously badass—since so many of these stunts are just basic attention-whoring behavior—but in this case I figured why not?

At least this guy really did run a marathon in under three hours, unlike some people we know, and that deserves to be recognized one way or another. Nice running, big guy.

[Boston.com]

Marathon badassery, revisited (Things that are awesome)

People who (regularly) run marathons amaze me, and always have. I've run exactly one marathon, and the training for it alone nearly drove me insane. It also took me a very long time to recover. That's why I'm always more than willing to give a shout out to the crazy people who do crazy things at marathons--the Chilean miner, the pregnant lady and the 100-year old man, the Marine who ran with a gas mask on, and the guys who destroy course records on brutal courses.

In that tradition, I introduce you all to Julie Weiss.

A Santa Monica, California woman who lost her dad to cancer says she will stop at nothing to raise money for research -- so other families won't have to endure what she's endured. 

Julie Weiss is on a mission to run 52 marathons in 52 weeks. 

"My body's getting used to this. I'm changing my diet, becoming more healthy and learning to run more efficiently," Weiss said. 

Her father died of pancreatic cancer in 2010, just one week before the biggest moment in Weiss' running career: qualifying for the Boston Marathon. 

Weiss is part of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network's TEAMHOPE. 

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States and one of the least funded for research, according to TEAMHOPE. 

"My goal is a million dollars," Weiss said. 

Her website, marathongoddess.com, has already raised more than $100,000 towards that goal. 

"When people tell me I'm crazy or nuts, it means I'm on the right track and doing something good."

After watching the video in the link, it seems like she's got an awesome attitude and a really healthy approach to her (completely insane) goal. And given the demands she's putting on her body, she's also pretty much cruising--she's been running anywhere between a 4:40 and a 5:30 marathon, which is impressive by any measure, especially without real recovery time.

Of course, since she's qualified for Boston before, she's obviously a skilled runner, which she would have to be in order to think that something like this is a good idea. So send this woman some good vibes, because she certainly deserves them. And if you're into that sort of thing, throw a little donation her way via her website.

[KSDK]

R.I.P. Micah True

I was saddened to read this weekend of the passing of running legend Micah True, a somewhat reclusive man who was nevertheless made famous by Christopher McDougall's Born to Run, which I wrote about here way back in the day.

Up mountainsides, through deserts and the wildest of rugged terrain, there was little that could break the serenity or solitude of Micah True as he ran. Only, perhaps, the pounding beat of his heart or the rhythm of his feet as they hit the trail, mile after mile after mile. 

For True, running -- the pure act of traveling relentlessly long distances -- was a passion that needed no justification. To those who knew him well, it also brought forth an intense playfulness in the 58-year-old ultra-marathon runner. 

"When he was out on the trail running, it was like someone just rang the school bell and said, 'Recess.' It was utter playfulness," recalled Chris McDougall, a friend of True's and author of the nonfiction best-seller "Born to Run." 

True's body was discovered Saturday evening in a remote part of southern New Mexico's Gila Wilderness. The search began for him days earlier after he failed to return Tuesday from a 12-mile run... 

Barry Anderson, a manager at Runner's Den in Phoenix, said the sport would greatly miss True. 

"He was both an international running celebrity, and the first person to smile and shake your hand when you crossed the finish line behind him," Anderson wrote in a posting on Runner's Den Facebook page. "The fact that so many people from all over the country dropped everything and immediately went to his aid is testimony to the way he lived his life and the way he himself treated his friends." 

Many on Sunday described True in the most reverential and laudatory of terms, with "legendary" and "inspirational" chief among them... 

True was the race director of The Copper Canyon Ultra Marathon, a 50-plus mile extreme race that took place in Urique, Mexico. This year's race marked a record turnout with hundreds of runners, most of them local Tarahumara, or Raramuri, Indians who are known for their extreme running. The prize money and corn vouchers awarded to finishers were all aimed at helping the Tarahumara. 

True was featured in articles in running magazines and was a central character -- known by his nickname, "Caballo Blanco" -- in McDougall's "Born to Run."... 

Without True, McDougall said he's not sure whether the Copper Canyon race will be able to continue. The Tarahumara are extraordinarily reclusive and True was able to build a relationship with them based on trust and confidence, he said. 

"He is the only person, I think, in our lifetime who has done a great job of very respectfully bringing awareness of that tradition to the rest of the world and creating a race that is a celebration of who they are."... 

Mark Cosmas, owner of iRun in Phoenix, said True was all about living life and helping other people enjoy running. 

"He might not have been the fastest or the most talented, but the joy and the passion that he brought to the ultra-running community was just infectious," Cosmas said. 

Some found solace in the fact that True died doing what he loved most -- what he did most every day of his life. 

To grasp the importance of running to True and a glimpse of that playfulness all his friends talked about, look no further than the short greeting on his voice mail: "Chances are I'm either running up a mountain, or I'm drinking a cerveza ..."

I'm usually not so good with the eulogies (those who know me best probably know me as an emotionless clod), but for True I'll give it my best shot, even though I never met the man. If you haven't yet read McDougall's book--and if you have even a passing interest in running--I highly suggest you take this as an opportunity to do so. Everyone who met El Caballo speaks about him in the same glowing terms as those quoted in the above excerpt, and I can't help but be similarly impressed from a distance.

True was clearly a unique and "colorful" character (much as I dislike that term) who lived life by his own rules, in his own way. In our increasingly homogenized society, I think that's something that's as admirable as it is rare.

I always aspire to have a little bit more Micah True in me, if only so that I can better enjoy each day in front of me without worrying about what tomorrow brings. Running, for me, is one of the few things that helps give me that perspective, and I'm glad that I've discovered it as an outlet (even if took me nearly 30 years to do so).

I'll be taking this opportunity to re-read McDougall's book, which I find to be both fascinating and oddly inspirational. I hope you'll feel the same way about the book and about Micah True. R.I.P.

[ESPN]

Still more marathon badassery

It's been a while since I had an entry in this series, but yeah... it's time.

One of the 45,000 people who ran in the Bank of America Chicago Marathon [October 9th] was 38 weeks and five days pregnant. 

Amber Miller crossed the finish line then gave birth to her second child, a bouncing baby girl. 

June Miller was born at 10:29 p.m., weighing 7 pounds, 13 ounces. 

"We signed up for the race in February, and then two days later I found out I was pregnant," Amber Miller told reporters today at Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield. "I wasn't real determined to run, and I kind of thought I would have already had the baby. And you know, it comes to the night before, I'm still pregnant -- and I paid for it, so I'm gonna run it."

And yet, that incredible act of child endangerment (wait, what?) wasn't the only crazy marathon story to have come out this month. From our friends up in America's Hat...

Fauja Singh, 100, finished Toronto's waterfront marathon Sunday evening, securing his place in Guinness World Records as the oldest person — and the first centenarian — to ever accomplish a run of that distance.

Singh, a British citizen, was the last person to complete the race, crossing the finish line just before 6 p.m. ET with a time of 8 hours, 11 minutes and 5.9 seconds.

Okay, so no, the old man's time isn't exactly "impressive", but holy crap... I'll be happy if I can stay awake for 8 hours and 11 minutes when I'm 100... wait, who are we kidding, I've got no shot of reaching 100 in the first place. This guy wins. Sweet beard, too.

[WGN]
[CBC]

Quote of the Week

Following up on yesterday's Boston Marathon theme, I'll just keep things rolling for Quote of the Week and give the honors to Darren Rovell, for putting things in perspective (which can be hard to do when somebody just ran 26 miles in a tow at a sub-4:42 pace).

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The men's and women's winners in the Boston Marathon today win $150K each. Josh Beckett will make about $680K per start."
                      - Darren Rovell, CNBC reporter

Well, for what it's worth, until 1986 the Boston Marathon winners didn't get anything at all (save a laurel wreath and maybe a bowl of soup), but yet they still ran. So I guess we can consider this progress, or else just agree that people run marathons for reasons other than money alone.

That would certainly help explain why 24,000 people ran yesterday's race, even when 23,950 or so had zero chance of winning it or even coming close. I, for one, played baseball my whole life, and I loved it. But I definitely wouldn't have loved it if I'd been as hopelessly mediocre as I was in last year's marathon--which I loved every minute of.

Maybe running is one of those things (like golf and sex) that you just don't have to be good at to enjoy. Or maybe we runners just train ourselves not to derive our sense of self-worth from our victory (or lack thereof), because there's always someone faster (just ask Ryan Hall).

Or, more likely, we're all just willing to pay more to see a baseball game than we are to see a race. Yeah, considering that nobody out of the tens of thousands who watched yesterday's race actually bought a ticket, that's probably a pretty important piece to the puzzle. At any rate, congrats once again to Geoffrey Mutai for one of the more impressive feats I've ever seen--even if Josh Beckett did make more for beating the Blue Jays over the weekend.

Wow

Yeah, the Sox are winning, which makes me happy, but the real news on Marathon Monday is from... well, what else, the Marathon. The men's winner, Geoffrey Mutai, ran the fastest marathon ever run, anywhere in the world.

Kenya's Geoffrey Mutai won the Boston Marathon in an official record time of 2 hours 3 minutes and 2 seconds, breaking the previous Boston record set last year by countryman Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot (2:05::52) by more than two minutes.

However, while Mutai has a world record time, it will not be recognized as such internationally in part because of the hilliness of the Boston course.

Yeah, Boston isn't recognized for world record purposes because it's technically a downhill course, with the start at Hopkinton a few hundred feet above the finish, which is at sea level. But for anyone who has run through the rolling hills of Newton, we all know that the Boston course is no picnic. It's one of the toughest marathon courses in the world, so to set a world record there is incredibly impressive.

I don't know what's in the water lately up in Boston, but this is the second straight year that the course record has been destroyed by the men's champion. The result is that the course record has come down from 2:07:14 (set in 2006) by more than four minutes in two years. That's incredible.

Pity poor Ryan Hall, who, after setting an American course record in 2010 but finishing a distant 3rd, bettered his time by nearly 4 minutes this year. His time was faster than the course record set just last year, but Hall still finished a distant 4th behind Mutai's ridiculous time (yes, 4 runners broke the previous course record today). In any other time period, we'd be hailing Hall as one of the best runners in Boston Marathon history. But in this slice of time, he's just an also-ran. Tough luck.

[Boston Globe]

A tale of two athletes

Over the past week, a number of inspirational sports-related stories have drawn my attention, and two of them held my attention because they were so jarringly different. Here's the first one, which caught my attention as a (recently minted) distance runner:

A 400-pound sumo wrestler made history Sunday becoming the heaviest person to finish a marathon.

Kelly Gneiting, 40, grabbed a Guinness World Record at the Los Angeles Marathon after he plodded across the finish line drenched in rain and with a time of 9:48:52.

"I did it, but it was hell. Pure hell," Gneiting told the Los Angeles Times...

Gneiting, 40, weighed 400 pounds before the race and 396.2 pounds after he used a combination of running and walking to conquer 26.2 miles in pounding rain and fierce wind.

The Idaho native crushed the previous world record for marathon weight - 275 pounds - and also set a personal record beating his 2008 L.A. Marathon time of 11:52:11 by more than two hours.

My first response is the natural one, "good for him". I understand the desire to "climb the mountain", so to speak, and to do something you never thought you would (or could). That's why I decided to train for and run the Boston Marathon last year, so it's a familiar sentiment (though I weigh a couple hundred pounds less). This guy refused to let his weight be an obstacle, and he ran through blisters and pouring rain to get to his goal. Cool.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

Gneiting, who calls himself "The Fat Man," is 6-feet tall and has a 60-inch waist. And he has a sense of pride to match his heft.

"I honestly think I'm one of the best athletes in the world," Gneiting told the Los Angeles Times last week before the race.

Okay, okay, easy there tiger. You finished the marathon, and good for you.

But let's be serious here, "fattest man to finish a marathon" is sort of a dubious distinction. It's kind of like being rated as the dumbest U.S. President (oh hey there Warren G. Harding, what's going on buddy?), or the worst playoff team in history. And when your finishing time for the marathon paces out to over a 22-minute mile--slower than most people's typical walking pace--I wouldn't get too uppity about your achievements.

As for the best athlete in the world... well, I'd say this guy has a pretty fair argument:

Arizona State's Anthony Robles hopped off the mat at the NCAA wrestling tournament after a perfect season. Penn State coach Cael Sanderson, familiar with perfect seasons, notched the Nittany Lions' first team title since 1953. And an ex-Penn Stater brought Arizona State another title with a pin of one of Sanderson's young stars.

Born with one leg, Robles took the 125-pound title Saturday night with a 7-1 win over defending champion Matt McDonough of Iowa. Robles' three-day performance here earned him the Outstanding Wrestler award.

For Robles, it was the finish to a 36-0 senior season and a journey begun when he took up wrestling as a high school freshman in Mesa, Ariz. He was anything but a dominator at the start.

"I was a terrible wrestler, only about 90 pounds, but my mom told me God made me for a reason, and I believe that reason was for wrestling," says Robles, who was given a standing ovation on the podium by a sellout crowd of 17,687 at the Wells Fargo Center.

Okay, yeah. Enough said. When it comes to overcoming obstacles and doing things that nobody thought possible, Anthony Robles > Kelly Gneiting. And it's not even close. Congratulations, Anthony. You are the man.

[NY Daily News]
[USA Today]

This is getting ridiculous

After my two previous posts about marathon badassery, a reader decided to keep the party going by alerting me to the story of Tim Sweeney, who pretty much takes the cake.

It took Tim Sweeney almost seven hours to finish the New York City Marathon but he walked on air every step of the way.

The 33-year-old medical miracle competed in the epic race Sunday with a new set of lungs after receiving a double transplant a year ago.

"It was so much more than I expected. It was overwhelming," Sweeney said after clocking in at just under six hours and 55 minutes. "I didn't care about time. I really wanted to finish. It meant a lot to me."

Sweeney, a personal trainer from Connecticut, suffered from cystic fibrosis, but always stayed active.

Wow. This is almost getting ridiculous. I was pretty proud of myself for running a marathon, but now it seems like everyone in the world is running them while doing handstands and towing 18-wheelers the whole way, then turning around and running the whole thing again while blindfolded. I'm impressed by all of them. Crazy stuff.


[NY Daily News]

More marathon badassery

Having posted last week about gas mask-wearing marathoner Sgt. Jeremy Soles, there's no way I can ignore Chilean miner Edison Pena's feat yesterday in the New York City Marathon.

He finished more than three and a half hours behind the champion, yet Chilean miner Edison Pena won the hearts of spectators with an inspiring effort at the New York City Marathon Sunday.

Pena, the 12th miner brought to the surface last month after being trapped with 32 companions for 69 days, ran daily through the tunnels of the mine until the rescue and was invited to New York by race organizers.

Coping with aching knees during his 26.2-mile trip through the five boroughs of New York, Pena completed the journey in five hours 40 minutes 51 seconds to sustained cheers from crowds of more than two million who lined the course.

If I was trapped underground for ten weeks, I think I'd spend the next three months eating Chinese food, drinking heavily, and trembling in fear. I certainly wouldn't be running a marathon a month later, that's for sure.

It's always interesting to see how people react and respond to traumatic experiences. Some people don't ever recover properly, while others approach the rest of their life as a gift, and take full advantage of their second lease on life. It seems like Edison Pena is in the latter camp; he sees his story as an opportunity to lead and inspire, and he's (literally) running with it. Congrats to him.


[Reuters]

This guy is a badass

I would be remiss if I didn't post this article, interestingly enough passed along to me by today's guest poster.

Former Marine Sgt. Jeremy Soles made history on Sunday when he set a Guinness World Record for running the entire 26.2-mile Marine Corps marathon while wearing a gas mask in an unofficial time of 4 hours, 29 minutes and 2 seconds.

Soles, founder of the nonprofit group Team X-T.R.E.M.E., dedicated his achievement to Marine Cpl. John Michael Peck, who suffered traumatic brain injury in Iraq in 2007 but insisted on returning to combat, only to lose both arms and legs in a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan in May.

"He embodies everything that Team X-T.R.E.M.E is about: Overcoming mental and physical obstacles," Soles said in a phone interview on Monday.

Sunday's event was the culmination of two years of conditioning and training. The gas mask restricts his breathing by about 25 percent, and all the gear associated with the mask weighs 15 pounds.

Man. Running a marathon is hard enough (the two big toenails I lost still haven't entirely grown back), and doing it with added impediments is just nuts. I took an enormous pride hit during the Boston Marathon when I couldn't manage to keep up with the guy in the Cat in the Hat suit (seriously, that dude was hardcore), but I couldn't help but be impressed.

But running with a gas mask on? That's taking it next level. Bravo, man.


[Military.com]

What can we learn from studies with "conflicting results"?

After training for and running my first marathon this spring, I've naturally taken an interest in distance running and a lot of the literature surrounding it. I wrote about it once before, after I read Christopher McDougall's fantastic book, Born to Run.

So I was naturally drawn to this item in the New York Times last week. Entitled "Do Marathons Hurt Your Knees?", Gretchen Reynolds' column attempted to make sense of the sea of studies surrounding marathon running and its effects on the body.

The idea that distance running inexorably leads to arthritis is deeply entrenched, despite the publication of a number of recent studies that have found otherwise. In one representative experiment, the knees of experienced marathoners, with multiple races behind them, were scanned with magnetic resonance imaging technology, and then scanned again 10 years later. The runners’ knees were and remained robust throughout that time, with few significant cartilage abnormalities. The only truly unhealthy knee in the study belonged to a former marathoner, who had quit the sport. In the years since he stopped running, his joint had deteriorated badly...

But then came the latest study on the issue, this one from researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, using a more sensitive type of M.R.I. technology than had been available in the past... The results, published earlier this year in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, are eye-opening. On these more-sensitive M.R.I. scans, the researchers found evidence of significant biochemical changes in the runners’ knee cartilage, particularly in the days immediately after the race. According to their postrace scans, the racers had elevated values for two technical measures of the health of their cartilage matrix...

In other words, the issue of whether distance running does or does not harm your knees would appear still to be open (to the considerable satisfaction of some of my nonrunning friends).

The column, unfortunately, didn't do much to try to reconcile these two studies with each other. This has become typical of much research (and especially media reporting on such research). When faced with studies with conflicting results, a staid "more research is needed" is uttered as a conclusion, and we all move on knowing little more than we did before, inevitably confused.

In my opinion, when we see conflicting results like these, it's usually an indication that we may be studying the wrong thing. It's not a matter of whether running itself is inherently good or bad, but the way we choose to run--how we train for marathons, what type of shoes we wear, the surfaces we run on, what type of shape we are in to begin with, et cetera, ad nauseum.

It's difficult bordering on impossible to execute a study on "running a marathon" while holding all other variables constant. There are nearly infinite factors that could separate one marathoner from the next--not to mention marathoners from non-marathoners. So we need to be very careful not to assume that any study has properly isolated the variable that it is attempting to examine. That is, after all, the essence of scientific research.


[New York Times]

Not all innovation is progress

While I was training for this past April's Boston Marathon, multiple people recommended that I read Born to Run, Christopher McDougall's fantastic best-selling book about distance running--which I then did. The story itself is entertaining enough to make it a must-read, but the more lasting legacy of the book has been the interest it created in the barefoot running craze. Openly questioning the design of the modern running shoe, McDougall issues a stern rebuke of Nike and other manufacturers for having created a generation of injuries among distance runners. This recent Harvard study lends credence to McDougall's criticism (emphasis mine):

Habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers.

The study continues to suggest that by making heel-strikes more comfortable, modern running shoes are encouraging runners to run in a manner that actually maximizes the impact on their feet and legs. Running shoes make it easier to run improperly, rather than training runners to run in a manner that makes injury least likely. Therefore, despite all of the technological advances of the last 30 years, injury rates have remained stubbornly high, and in fact by some measures increased.

"Innovate or die" is a common refrain in the business world, and in many ways it is accurate. But from the consumer's standpoint, it is important that we understand that just because something is "new" does not necessarily make it "better".

Not all innovation is progress--some innovations simply make it easier for us to do things improperly. This cannot be considered a net positive for us as a consumer or for society as a whole. I'm reminded of the many "innovations" that car companies have made in recent years--the self-parking Lexus, the self-stopping Mercedes--and I wonder if these are really good things. Do we really want our roads to be filled with people who don't know how to park, or who have a built-in excuse not to pay attention to the road?

These kinds of "innovations" can indeed be good sellers, and huge money-makers for the companies who create them. But they do not necessarily drive our society forward. Does this mean I'll be going out tomorrow and picking up a pair of Vibram FiveFingers? No, probably not. But I certainly won't be shelling out $125 for a pair of AirMax shoes that will end up causing an injury.