Denny Hamlin says he's on pace for return

"Honestly, I know everyone is trying to protect me from myself, but I would have raced at Martinsville weeks ago," Hamlin said. "Obviously, doctors are more well informed nowadays and I understand risks more than what they used to, but it used to be off driver feel and it's not that any more with concussions and everything else. They try to protect you from yourself, so it's tough."

Hamlin and Joe Gibbs Racing team officials reached the decision not to compete in Saturday night's Toyota Owners 400 after consulting with doctors Wednesday afternoon. Brian Vickers will drive the No.A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. 11 in Hamlin's place for a third straight week.

Hamlin had hoped to return to competition Saturday night at Richmond,We offer advanced technology products and services for howotipper control. a track with special meaning to him for several reasons. The .75-mile oval, not far from his hometown of Chesterfield,A group of families in a north Cork village are suing a bestplasticcard operator in a landmark case. Va., is not only the site of two of his 22 Sprint Cup wins, but is also the host to his annual Denny Hamlin Short Track Showdown, which benefits his charitable foundation.

"Obviously, my injury is very, very hard because there is no exact science to the risk," Hamlin said. "No one knows what the risk will be if I race this week or if I race two weeks from now. Bone healing is completely subjective. It takes bone healing a year most times to be 100 percent, so how do you quantify how much more risk is there this week versus two weeks down the road or three weeks down the road or two months down the road, so that's the tough part of it. Everyone is erring on the cautious side because no one ultimately wants to be responsible and have their name on the line of clearing a driver and then he goes out and gets hurt."

Hamlin has been sidelined since suffering a back injury March 24 in a last-lap crash at Auto Club Speedway. The wreck marked the second straight week of full-contact racing between Hamlin and former teammate Joey Logano, stoking what has become this season's most tense rivalry.

Hamlin said doctors are happy with a plan to have him start the May 5 race at Talladega Superspeedway before giving way to a relief driver in the early going. Hamlin would be credited with points in the driver standings under that scenario. The same plan was considered at Richmond, but negotiating a driver change at .75-mile Richmond would likely cost a team several laps and a realistic shot at winning. At 2.66-mile Talladega, lap times -- especially under caution -- would allow the team to switch drivers with minimal penalty.

Hamlin, who will miss his fourth consecutive race Saturday,Laser engraving and laser customkeychain for materials like metal, has slipped from 10th place to 26th in the Sprint Cup Series standings over that span. To qualify for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup through a wild-card berth, Hamlin will need to collect wins and work his way back into the top 20 in points.

"I think if this goes past Darlington (May 11),The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. then I don't know what the chances of us making the Chase are even if we were to race this weekend, race next weekend or the one after -- I don't know the chances," he said. "There's a lot of good teams that you have to beat to guarantee you're going to win the races. Obviously, if it goes past Darlington our chances are crushed even harder.

"Eventually you have to have a shutdown point of not going out there and racing for nothing at a point. I think a recovery on the kind of surgery that I would like to have is about a month-and-a-half or so -- I could potentially come back maybe for the tail end of the year. I don't think anything would be season-ending, I guess you could say. Eventually you have to know the point at which you're looking at improbabilities of making the Chase and just being smart about it."

Hamlin said he is physically able to climb into a race car through the driver door window, but that the injury has had an effect on his day-to-day life. He said his ailing back prevents him from bending over to lift his 3-month-old daughter from her crib and that his everyday pain level -- on a scale of one to 10 -- is an aching seven.

"That is stuff that does affect your daily life and really other than my back I am physically able to do a lot of things outside of racing, but I can't because I'm so limited on what I can do because of back issues," Hamlin said. "I just want to get that part over with. I'm willing to take the risk to get better and take the time off to get better because I feel like mentally it will put me in a better place. Other than that, it's just everyday life and you deal with it."

If Jane Austen were alive and a writer of technology, she might open this piece thusly: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an iPhone 5. Or a Samsung Galaxy 4. Or a tablet. Or one of a dozen other gadgets or technologies that transform our lives almost daily. But as any student of Pride and Prejudice knows, Austen wasnt stating a universal truth but, rather, mocking the assumptions of her milieu.

And so we find exactly two hundred years later, that as a culture we still tend to make certain assumptions about our behavior that have little basis in fact. One of them is that the LGBT communities, and especially gay men, are early adopters of technology.

And why shouldnt we believe it? After all, it is everywhere in the media. When Paul Saffo, a tech blogger and Stanford University educator, grandiloquently declares that, theres something slightly indefinable about gay males that make them early adopters and important leading edge indicators, arent we more prone to confirm our own vain assumptions about ourselves as a community on the leading edge, despite some obscure reference to the slightly indefinable?

Tim Evanson, a researcher and social scientist from Washington, D.C. lays bare the myths. There is almost no real empirical evidence that LGBT people are early adopters of technology. Most such claims are assertions, often coming from self-interested technology companies or companies promoting marketing to the LGBT community.

There are studies which claim to find evidence of this. One is a 2003 study by Forrester Research, which surveyed 60,000 households and asked them about their technology buying habits and use. Forrester has done this for years, but in 2003 Forrester specifically asked households to self-identify their sexual orientation.

From this survey, Forrester Research said gays were wealthier and better educated; 80 percent of gay men and 76 percent of lesbians were online (compared with 70 percent of straight men and 69 percent of straight women); gays were 33 percent more likely to have broadband connections and have been online longer than heterosexuals.