Hey kids, do you know what the new afterbang for the 2010 season is? The physics of moguls. Flexing the knowledge of moguls is going to be so hot this year, you watch. On the forefront of this craze is this interesting article from the pointy-headed academic set about how moguls are made and how they work. For instance, did you know that you that:

"...cyclic erosion and deposition can be represented as a sine wave, square wave, or any other wave with wavelength 2r, half that of the skier s path. The waveform s amplitude a and morphology depend on the skier s ability, the length of the skis, and so forth. Even snow conditions play a role in determining a, but a typical value is about 1 cm or so for hard-packed snow. A specific representation for the erosion deposition wave W at position x created by a skier n may be given by the sinusoidal form W_n(x) = a sin(2 x/2r_n + _n), with positive W corresponding to deposition."

I bet you didn't. Maybe Jon Symms did, but he is god at math and you are presumably not. Anyway, the gist of the article, so far as I can tell, is that:

-you can make a mogul field in as few as 100 skier runs

-each mogul migrates uphill by about ten meters each season

-For every meter a mogul moves uphill, the amount of work on put in on the part of the skier is equal to about half a light beer.

I don't really know what any of this means, but if you are up for a fun diversion, you might learn a thing or two by reading the article and that is never a bad thing. The video below purports to show the uphill migration of moguls over a season, but the hell if it shows any such thing to me: