I am Alex and I like imagining and understanding how a skateboard works. I also like thinking about and analyzing the political economy of the skate industry. It doesn’t matter what I studied, because what you will find in this website does not go any further than secondary education material: if you went to school until you were 17, you have been taught all of it. I’m not 17 any more, but I started skating again a few years ago and pretty soon I discovered LDP (during a trip to Barcelona in 2012-ish); it’s basically a type of mellow slalom, a cool-looking way to get your skateboard going without having to push. My focus is on (and my references come from) this sub-discipline.

I started participating in the online LDP community since around 2014. Soon after, I got annoyed by the way certain aspects of the equipment were represented and explained by “the experts” in the community, but also the industry itself; an industry which incidentally is not particularly obsessed with mathematical literacy. I realized that they can make claims that make no logical sense and still convince others (a symptom, I think, of the way the skateboarding culture and its norms in general were constructed and have evolved). When I voice dissent and attempt corrections, the skate lords double down on falsehoods and become aggressive, with confidence inversely proportional to the value of the content. Perhaps that’s my main motivation for writing this blog: to re-tell the theory the correct way, without the awkward online interactions.

What will you find in here? Mainly articles about how skateboards work. They are write-ups of math/logic problems that came about when I was trying to understand skateboards. Searching online, one soon realizes that public forums, but also professional skateboard websites, are full of misconceptions and persistent myths over these issues. My main goal with these texts is to set the record straight. This kind of articles is categorized under “Math.” In a similar vein but in a rather more empirical direction, I also wrote a few posts in which I try to investigate specific attributes of particular products. These posts are labeled “Data.” Finally, there’s a few texts where I try to understand and describe the inner workings of the skateboard community (labeled “Sociology“) and the skateboard industry (labeled “Political Economy“) as they look like to me. The former are more theoretical, while the latter generally contain more empirical observations. If you want an overview of all the posts, try the contents page.

My approach of this (as well as of any other) topic is simple:

• I believe we need rigorous proofs and airtight explanations. The simpler, the better (but never simpler than necessary). Without them, we shouldn’t trust even our own perceptions. The latter are influenced by peer pressure, placebo, “brain bugs” etc. And the manufacturers will provide what the community of consumers would buy without necessarily being able to justify its use either.

• This thing matters to me immensely because I really care about this sport and I also care deeply about the truth. And because we’re not talking politics (well, except for the political bit which will always remain debatable), or religion, or philosophy, but physical reality, the existence of one, distinct, universal, objective reality must be assumed.

• I do not disregard the power of deduction. In place of falsifiable, repeatable empirical experiments (which we lack), and also due to the happy fact that we are observing a very, very simple physical system (i.e., a skateboard and a rider), deductive reasoning is perfectly fit for the purpose of providing the evidence we need. I oppose the radical empiricism that underlies the rejection of logical reasoning in forums. So, dear reader, let’s not wait for elusive empirical data in complacent agnosticism. Let’s use our imagination and reason with rigor and consistency and prove our points.

• Similarly, I reject the fetishization of a form of the irreducible complexity argument, prevalent in forums, which wants to treat almost every logical question/problem in skateboarding as a question of collective experience (authority over which, of course, only senior community members have) and which views skateboards as a black box whose contents we will never have access to. On the contrary, I believe that secondary education, if applied with the rigor of the scientific method, is sufficient for giving answers to a decent part of the questions that arise. Mistakes will be made, questions will be left unanswered, but the effort won’t be fruitless.

• Particularly for the “math” content, I use secondary-school geometry, trigonometry and physics. I try to build my understanding piece by piece using basic logic. I have avoided adding formal proofs and equations in the posts (preferring natural language and images), but I might add them later. However, all of what I write is proven rigorously (unless stated otherwise). The math content in here, though rigorous, is not of academic level. I’m just trying to put in plain words basic concepts and facts about the skateboard, facts which anyone with basic education can verify or falsify.
For more advanced content, the reader might want to check out a relevant post, a “literature review” of sorts, that I’m updating continuously every time I find something interesting from the academia.

• Particularly for the “sociology” content, I begin my analysis by distinguishing between a public/consumer group of actors and a professional/merchant-manufacturer group of actors. I find the relation between the two groups is such that the distinction holds and it is necessary to explain the persistence of certain trends. That said, there is a strong harmony and a resounding lack of conflict between the two groups (which are normally, in other contexts, more at odds with each other) in almost all the topics I probe.
And again, for proper academic content you might want to look elsewhere, though I invariably provide links to my sources.

So, this is what this blog is about: clarifying things without worrying about online spats, disgruntled stakeholders, gatekeepers, or other constraints. For whom and why do I do this? Just so that I make sure these things have been said. Somebody, sometime in the future might appreciate it. I, in the future, will surely also appreciate having a record of these thoughts, because my memory will eventually fade.

– July 7, 2019 (last edit: 23 April, 2021)