An ice idea.

I don't usually (ever) write about sports. It's not that I'm not a sport fan. If you're born Canadian, at some point you become a hockey devotee. It's in the genes. But there's been a breakthrough in the technology of the game that is going to take it in new directions.

As anyone who has ever skated can tell you, it's punishing work, learning how to skate. Your rear end takes an incredible beating as you struggle to master the balance and the starting and stopping. In fact, I found that I never did.

When I ice skate, I can only turn in one direction. I'm ideal for those outdoor and indoor public skating hours when everyone goes around and around in one direction and nobody has to stop (because many can't). I learned how to avoid crashing into people by crashing into other people. And when you stop, you're supposed to turn sideways on your blades and drop down so that the leading edge of your blade cuts into the ice evenly, sending up a flash of white snow that is really a cloud of ice chips. It looks so, so, suave. In fact, you can't play hockey if you can't hockey stop.

I'll never forget the time I decided to save ten bucks and sharpen my own kid's skates. I guess I was just ignorant enough of skate sharpening to think that you could take an ordinary grinder and run it over the blades. Trouble was, after all the trouble of lacing R's skates up, and pushing him out onto the ice, his feet shot out from in under him like Bambi's, and he couldn't even get himself back up again.

The secret, of course, was that the professional skate sharpening machine has a very thin, convex profile grinding wheel which they constantly keep formed by running a special profiling diamond dressing tool against it. The result is that the sharpened blade is slightly hollow-ground, giving two edges to it. It is these edges that determine whether you'll start, stop, slide or slip on the ice. So skating is like dancing on four knife blades pointing downward.

But of course I went through the era of the bobskates that strapped on my winter boots, so I never started out the hard way. You can stand on bobskates, and if your brother pushes you along from behind at a reasonable pace, you can pretend you're skating. That's kind of my style now, too, although at some point I did learn how to turn around 180 degrees and skate backwards until stopped either by the rink boards or by someone coming the opposite way (known in hockey parlance as a "check").

The big problem till now for anyone playing hockey is the extreme expenditure of energy in chasing after the puck. It requires exceptional skill to be able to follow the rubber around the rink, given that it can come from any direction at high speed. So a hockey player is a major anticipator: exceptional hockey players recognize and anticipate plays, using their peripheral vision to great advantage in positioning themselves on the ice to minimize the amount of energy they have to expend.

The physics of frozen water is such that as you skate, you're actually melting the ice through the pressure of your own weight on the narrow blades. But recently, after some years of testing, a Canadian inventor has developed a heated blade. This device has been shown to save energy and offer quicker starts and stops because it doesn't freeze up like the ordinary blade. Instead, it keeps the ice at a constant temperature slightly above freezing, because, as everyone knows, the friction is reduced between the steel and the ice by the thin layer of water. So, less energy is needed to skate.

So I guess I'm really not writing about sports after all, but rather about physics. Heating the skate blades is just another example of fundamental laws of physics with a practical application that would not have been possible without the invention of microchips and the improvement of battery technology.

My understanding of the physics of skating is very simple It's the Law of Levity. "What stands up must fall down."