Bill’s Reals Blog - Scuba, Travel & Gadgets

From the, it’s on the Internet, so it must be true:

Redheads set for extinction

But the future doesn’t look bright for people with ginger hair.

According to genetic scientists redheads are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years.

The current National Geographic magazine reports that less than 2 per cent of the world’s population has natural red hair - created by a mutation in northern Europe thousand of years ago.

Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and so producing little redheads of their own.

Although it takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger babies, two redheads obviously creates a much stronger possibility.

Some experts warn redheads could be gone as early 2060, but others say the gene can be dormant in the reproductive system for generations before returning.

National Geographic says the gene at first had the beneficial effect of increasing the body’s ability to make vitamin D from sunlight. However, today’s carriers are more prone to skin cancer and have a higher sensitivity to heat and cold-related pain.

Woo hoo! I’m represent’n “2 per cent of the world’s population”.

Trade shows are like the county fair, in regards to random products being sold. I ran across a lady selling bead jewlery, another booth was selling beef jerky (it was really dry), there was a guy painting an underwater mural and finally ran into a porn star.

Yeah, you didn’t read that wrong, Lori Pleasure, was attending and wearing next to nothing. From what I can read on her website, she does this attention grabbing stunt whenever she can. She has a Myspace page as well, but then again doesn’t everyone?

The Scuba Show was great, I’ll come back next year and hopefully it will be bigger and better.

Check out the photo album for more photos on the event.

I was walking around and I noticed a very cute booth babe standing at one of the booths on the end. I stopped by to see what they had and it was what I can only describe as the world’s biggest snorkel. The company Kapitol Reef Aquatics, makes the Kadence technology snorkel.
Designed by a doctor, I’m told that this snorkel is bone dry after a full immersion and will always give you a fresh breath; no rebreathing you exhalations on this puppy.

It work because it’s has an inner collapsible airway and a outer rigid airway with one way valves. Basically, one airway is for breathing in and one for breathing out. When not in use, the airway used for breathing a fresh breath of air is sealed and doesn’t allow either air or water in.

I’m told that this reduces exertion because you are always getting a fresh breath of air.

The unit is pretty large to accommodate the twin airway design. The reviews of this device by the major dive rags, Sport Diver and Scuba Diving, have rated this as an “Editor’s Choice”, with one calling this a snorkel, “a respirator device for snorkelers”. The sell for approx $89.

I walking down the aisle and I saw a bunch of people standing around, so of course I stopped to see what was going on. The booth was showing a demo of a software product called DiveNav which is a scuba diving simulation “game” dubbed vDive. It was unique in the aspect that they mapped areas and you were virtually diving the topography of the area. In the demo, they were showing Casino Point on Catalina Island.

They were doing a survey and by participating in the survey you got a little holographic dive map of Casino Point. This represents the ONLY piece of swag that I picked up at this show.

Anyway, the product looks like a first person action shoot, Gears of War, Halo, and you see the world through your dive mask. You have gauges, can run out of air and you navigate underwater while swimming around. I found it boring and was struggling to see the market for it, alas this is what happens when you work in marketing. I realize that I’m not there target market but still I have an opinion.

The survey seemed like they had built a product and now where trying to figure out the market for it. That’s not a good sign in the software business where you can be obsolete in months. All the best to them, I hope they do well but I’m just more of a get-out-there-and-do-it kind of guy now and would rather go on a real dive.

Next up was the Ouroboros Rebreather, another UK company and a very high tech and high priced rebreather. The Ouroboros features a circular shaped scrubber which gives it a unique appearance. The use of this feature makes it look like the legendary US NAVY Mark 15 rebreather but this unit a lot more reliable and is CE certified.

The Ouroboros is made by the same folks who are involved with the Delta-P VR3 dive computer and this rebreather-friendly dive computer, is the integrated as the main monitoring handset. The unit features an L.E.D. based heads up display to notify the user of a problem. This one feature is very popular and is present on almost every rebreather at the show.

The unit is a little larger than AP Diving’s unit and these start at approx $17,000, depending on the exchange rate. This makes it the most expensive unit currently on the sport diving market.

By the way, Ouroboros is an ancient symbol meaning serpent or dragon.

I stopped by the Hydroptix Masks booth to see if there was anything new to see. I’ve seen these mask, read the reviews but never used one myself. The mask is curved, which expands the field of vision and allows a diver to see the correct size and distance underwater. The rub is that you have to be far-sighted to use it correctly. This is fine for those folks who are already far -sighted but for people with correct vision, you need to put contacts into your eyes to make you far sighted. I’m not a big fan of putting things into my eyes.

They had a water tank that you could stick your fact into and see the difference. Now, the thought of sticking my face into a huge tub of water where over a 100 people had done so before me, wasn’t appealing, but I suffer for my art.

I was able to see how the field of vision changed, it was blurry because I’m not far-sighted but it does expand the field of vision.

They have a hybrid mask coming out for folk who don’t want to deal with contacts but the mask is LARGE.

Deep Sea Supply is a boutique maker of technical diving equipment. Tobin George, the owner, is a passionate diver who has been working closely with DPV maker, Dive-Xtras, to make accessories for the X-Scooter.

He had a couple of new products. A slim, low profile “scooter BCD” for use in scooter-based free diving and what’s called “monkey diving” where you take as little equipment with you for speed.

He also has a nice stage tank rigging kit that seemed really slick.

I headed on over to Aquatica’s booth for more photo gear therapy. They had some new lens housings that now features glass instead of poly-carbonate, those are called Megadomes. I love that name.

Also, they were featuring their large magnification eye-piece, Aqua View, that fits most of the current Aquatica housings. These were pretty common sighting now, across most of the manufactures, and were available for most housings out there except for Ikelite, which of course, is the housings I own.

Aquatica’s aluminum housings are well built and good to a depth of 300 feet. I was told that they are developing a line of housings for the entry level DSLR cameras, which should be out later this year/early next year.

I stopped by Light and Motion’s booth to see what they had that was new. The new item was the Titan housing for the Nikon D200, it’s seriously made me consider ditching my trusty Canon 20D and throwing in with the Nikon crowd.

Since they are using the camera’s USB connector to control it, it allowed them to place the buttons and controls in a well thought out and logical order. It also features a large LCD that displays your current f-stop and aperture and the housing feature L&Ms integrated strobe control system, ROC.

They also showed off a Sony HC7 Bluefin video housing that features a touchscreen control which was very cool. I’m amazed at how small the prosumer HD video cameras are getting.

I will say that Paul Barnett was very cool and patient in walking me through the products they had on display.

I have an Ikelite housing and two DS-125 strobes, so I had to go over to Ikelite and see what was new. They had some new housings out for the entry level DSLRs, like the Nikon D-40, and were showing me the new control for the iTTL/eTTL strobes.

They are moving from a set of push buttons, to a dial system that speeds up selection and uses less real estate on the back of the housing.