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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Although the century-old technology has disappeared from most people's daily view, magnetic tape lives on as the preferred medium for safely archiving critical cloud data in case, say, a software bug deletes thousands of Gmail messages, or a natural disaster wipes out some hard drives. The world's electronic financial, health, and scientific records, collected on state-of-the-art cloud servers belonging to Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and others, are also typically recorded on tape around the same time they are created. Usually the companies keep one copy of each tape on-site, in a massive vault, and send a second copy to somebody like Iron Mountain. Unfortunately for the big tech companies, the number of tape manufacturers has shrunk over the past three years from six to just two -- Sony and Fujifilm -- and each seems to think that's still one too many. The Japanese companies have said the tape business is a mere rounding error as far as they're concerned, but each has spent millions of dollars arguing before the U.S. International Trade Commission to try to ban the other from importing tapes to America. [...] The tech industry worries that if Sony or Fujifilm knocks the other out of the U.S., the winner will hike prices, meaning higher costs for the big cloud providers; for old-line storage makers, including IBM, HPE, and Quantum; and, ultimately, for all those companies' customers. [...] Although Sony and Fujifilm have each assured the trade commission that they could fill the gap if their rival's products were shut out of the U.S., the need for storage continues to grow well beyond old conceptions. Construction is slated to begin as soon as next year on the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope with thousands of antennas in South Africa and Australia meant to detect signals emitted more than 13 billion years ago. It's been estimated the project could generate an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of raw data every day, the equivalent of 300 times the material in the U.S. Library of Congress and a huge storage headache all by itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In my experience one of the hardest things to teach riders is how to get into good body position when standing up. I’m not talking about getting them to bend their body in a way that looks like good body position, I mean where they are actually strong and balanced on the bike.

And no, these two things are not the same.

I can get someone to act out good body position by telling them “butt back and chest down” and “get your elbows out” but that doesn’t mean that they are strong and stable there. What you will often see is someone who can act out good body position in a parking lot but will revert back to bad body position habits as soon as they get out on the trail.

The reason for this is that you need to get down into that position while maintaining a strong core and upper back position. Simply leaning over with your elbows flared out isn’t going to do that for you.

While there are a lot of great exercises to train this movement skill like the deadlift and swing, the best exercise to learn the movement is probably the Bulgarian Goat Bag Swing.

Created by strength coach Dan John, I learned this exercise recently while attending one of his seminars. This exercise is so great because it gets you into the same position you want on the bike while forcing your hips, core and upper back to stay engaged. This gives you the same feeling you want to transfer to the bike and greatly improve your ability to hold your body position on the trail.

In this video I show you the Bulgarian Goat Bag Swing (in case you’re wondering Dan named it that so it would be obvious if someone tried to take credit for the exercise) and explain more about how it can help you improve your body position on the bike.

Try doing 2-3 sets of 10 reps of this exercise with a 25-25 pound kettlebell as part of your next workout. You can also work a set or two into your warm up for workouts with deadlifts or swings to help get the core and hips online. You can also use it before doing your skills drills to help instill the feeling you want to maintain on the bike.

All in all this is a very valuable exercise to add to your toolbox.

Remember that the real key to improving your skills and fitness on the trail is to work on improving how you move off the bike so you can move better on the bike. Knowing what to do won’t work if your body can’t get into the right position in the first place.

Hope you liked this mountain bike exercise tip, if you have any questions about this exercise or how to use it as part of your program please leave a comment below and I’ll answer it as soon as I can.

And please help me spread the word by clicking one of the Like or Share buttons below.

Until next time…

Ride Strong,

James Wilson
MTB Strength Training Systems

For the first time since 2009, the coastline of Lake Superior has frozen hard enough that people can venture out onto the ice and into the sea caves that line the shore near Wisconsin's Apostle Islands. Like the Lake, itself, the sea caves are frozen and covered with sparkling icicles — from dainty needles to thick, massive stalagmites.

These are different caves from the ones I went through in a dinghy in the summer a couple of years ago. Those caves were at Devil's Island, about 6 miles from the mainland. The caves you can see in this, and several other videos taken by YouTuber Shannon Kowalski, are right up along the mainland shore, at the base of some steep sandstone cliffs. The cliffs themselves are the remains of a sandy river basin and chains of shallow ponds that dotted the landscape here a billion (yes, with a "b") years ago. The caves are much more recent, forming as waves from Lake Superior slowly erode holes in the sandstone.

You can read more about visiting the caves at the National Park Service site:

Visiting the caves in winter requires at least a 2 mile hike (round trip) on the ice of Lake Superior. Cold temperatures can form thick ice, but wind and waves can break up that ice and make it very unstable. The conditions at the caves can change in less time than it takes to walk there.

You should also check out more of Shannon Kowalski's sea cave videos:
Video 1 — featuring some amazing, feathery ice formations
Video 2 gives you a good idea of how big the interiors of some of these caves can be
Video 3 shows you the shoreline and the cliffs
Video 5 is the one I have embedded at the top of this post, with more great shots of the shoreline
Video 6 looks like a great place to encounter a Wampa