riddler

0:0:0 - sick, freezing cold outside, nothing new under the sun. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Nothing wrong with making the plans whilst drunk, but one should be smart enough not to follow up when sober. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

This brings up a good point because I want to be a tandem instructor some day. Just how often do you get puked on? I see a lot of student jumpsuits every weekend that have been sprayed down and hung out to dry. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Wanna buy my house? I live in Denver and I'm trying to move somewhere warmer where I can skydive all the time. Seriously, though - drugs. Try drugs.

About what a coach can actually sign on the ISP student progression card. The 2003 has both the "traditional" A license card, and the new and improved ISP card. I assume that the "old" card is there for students that got on-bard before ISP, and that all new students will be using ISP? The new card specifies that for ISP Categories E-H, a coach may only sign off on the free-fall portions of the skydive. Then they go on with signatures that say "I" (I assume this is AFF Instructor), "C/I" (I assume coach *or* AFF Instructor), "R/I" (Rigger *or* AFF Instructor?) and "P/I" (Pilot *or* AFF Instructor?) as specified in various pages 67-97 of the SIM. I think I am beginning to understand that the coaching is teaching students to be safe in general. But this question is about what I can actually sign on the card. I don't want to sign off portions I'm not supposed to and have USPA reject the application as a result. As a coach, I may only sign the first line of each category, marked "Freefall" or "Exit/Freefall", and various portions of the skills on the right-hand side of each category? I have no idea what killer dwee is, but I'll take some of that now

http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/ Some quotes from the page: It used to be about phone calls, faxes and spam. Over the last few months, they have been finding ways to try to dupe people out of personal property as well.

OK - hope this is not off-topic, but is there one single thing that causes most of these smaller holes? Is it the forces of opening? Or maybe the wear of packing/opening/repacking? And are there any good tricks to try to prevent them?

The performance is more significant on smaller canopies, I believe. You would feel less of an improvement on your 170 than someone on a 66. I've heard that a lot of un-cocked pilot chutes will still pull the pin, if given more time to snivel. Is this true?

It's interesting reading about this guy on eBay. He has over 300 reviews, and most of them are positive. There are 4 negatives, though, and what's interesting is his responses to people that give him negative feedback. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

That wasn't sappy, skymama - that was cool. I wish my mom was a skydiver. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Oohh - nice. How do you make the little pound symbol? I don't know if that's a keyboard character for you, or if you have a markup on dz.com for it. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

How does that break down? I assume part is for gear rental. Do you pay any taxes on jumping there? I also assume $35 is British pounds? Just a curious American ... Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Skydiving has made me a better person. As for the rest of you, I'm not that sure Both of us skydive. She works weekends and doesn't have much money, so I do it more than her. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

I kind of like this idea. Why don't skydivers declare themselves a new species and dedicate themselves to learning to fly? If I start flapping my arms now, I might make a difference. Maybe I'll have kids - assuming Social Services doesn't try to take them away because of all the arm flapping - and I'll teach them the best way to flap their arms. If they practice every day, they might actually get an inch or two off the ground. If they teach it to THEIR kids, they might do a little better. Within a few dozen generations, we could probably do it. Birds started out as land-walking dinosaurs, you know. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

That's it Quade, we want to find out just how good Billvon really is by getting him to jump with BOTH eyes covered j/k. In all seriousness, I'm one of those shameful people that doesn't look at the horizon to land (bad Riddler, bad!) I tried it for the first 50 jumps or so, and all I got was a hole on the backside of my jumpsuit. Brian Germaine advised me to look for the point on the ground that doesn't move - I do that and it works for me, but I do keep my eyes on it all the way until I start my flair. This isn't the "advised" way to land, but I would hazard to say it's kept me out of the emergency room so far. Because I land like I do, depth perception isn't as important. I don't need both eyes to find the spot that doesn't move. I'm definitely not saying this is a better way to land (it's not), or that anyone else should do it (they shouldn't). It's just what I do, and in my case, I think I could probably land with one eye. Of course, I haven't tried it, but I'm still working on flaring with one arm

As a free-flier, I don't think this is a good idea. We often say that 5 seconds=1000 feet, but forget that that applies to a terminal belly speed (120MPH = 880 feet/5 seconds). It's not too hard for 5 seconds to be closer to 2,000 feet when free-flying. If you amend your point to add occasionally checking your alitmeter and eyeballing the ground, then it becomes hard for me to argue with that. After all, I'm not locked-on to my alti the whole jump - I tend to check it every 5-10 seconds, and use the ol' internal clock to gauge those 5-10 seconds. I just believe that assuming your internal clock is a reliable reference is generally a bad idea. It's far too easy to distort your internal clock with other factors. But what the heck do I know? I have less than 400 jumps. Maybe after thousands of jumps, I will feel comfortable doing that. I kind of hope not. It only takes one bad jump. Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Most probably did not happen: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/mrs.nat.king.cole.htm http://www.snopes.com/glurge/transfus.htm Good stories, though. In my experience, you can derive just as much hope and/or faith in human nature by paying attention to things that happen around you every day.

I love wind tunnels. Even the so-called "crappy" ones are pretty awesome. http://www.philbell.com/adventures/vegas/vegas.html Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

0:0:0. Canuck, you are crazy. It was cold enough to freeze the balls off of a polar bear this weekend. I wasn't about to jump for anything. Haven't heard the story about Peter and the restraining order. Have the courts told him to stay at least 50 yards away from those slurry bombers? Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Apparently, eBay disagrees as well: "Invalid Item The item you requested ( 2160749477 ) is invalid, still pending, or no longer in our database. Please check the number and try again. If this message persists, the item has either not started and is not yet available for viewing, or has expired and is no longer available." Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

Was this the DC-3 that was in Eloy for the Christmas boogie? And what year was it built? Trapped on the surface of a sphere. XKCD

I would say this might be an issue for your lawyer. If your company does not expressly forbid what you do away from work, it's none of their business. Even then, depending on what you do, it's probably none of their business, and should not show as a negative on your work performance. At the very least, you should suggest that they mitigate by letting you work from home. The extra risk you assume driving to work every morning is probably unreasonable. You can teleconference into the meetings.

Thanks for looking up the specs, Erno. That pretty much settles the issue, I think. But I have to wonder if it's different for my setup? You almost need information by year - my tri is a 1994, and one master rigger told me that they "changed" the design somewhere in the early 90s, so it's conceivable that the pack volume for the main and maybe also the container (1988) are different than what paragear may list for the new stuff. I think you guys are right - I should call manufacturers to find out. In answer to some of the responses: Definitely not the rapides - it's definitely the bag - I can take it apart and see it. The rapides lie straight and further down the sides. One of the difficulties with older gear that had a few owners. I wouldn't know unless I checked manufacturer's specs. All purchased second-hand. Refund is not a big deal to me - I got a good price on this setup from a fellow dz.commer and it's treated me well so far. If anything, I think the bag is already too large for the main. Thanks for the responses all - I think you guys are right - it stems from a container/bag/main mis-match. And it doesn't help that I can't pack! But to return to the original question - could this result in a problem with deployment?

I love this quote

I'm not an expert in this field, but I have to disagree with most of your "time awareness" argument. I should also say that I never did static line, or time-delayed jumps, with the exception of a few hop-n-pops (count to five, pull). I think that most people (probably a higher percentage of skydivers) feel that their perception of reality is accurate, but it's my belief that most of what we perceive is skewed from reality by many factors. One factor is excitement - the more excited we are, the more our perception is skewed. The majority (IMO) of skydiving related deaths can be attributed to mental mistakes - people that *thought* that they were right about something, when they weren't. Instruments can fail, of course, but in most cases, they are less likely to fail than our perception of reality. So, having said that - most of my skydives are 50-60 seconds. Can your arguments about 20 seconds apply to something three times as long? How about if you factor in the "excitement" of the skydive, where time appears to speed up or slow down, depending on the person and experience level. Even the most experienced skydivers can have an exciting jump that skews their perception of the time involved. I don't think altitude awareness necessarily HAS to come from an instrument, but I would trust my eyes (looking at the ground, looking at my alti) a lot more than my perception of time in an adrenaline-driven sport like ours. Right now, I'm relying on my instruments, but I have far less than 1000 jumps. This issue probably comes down to a few things. Experience, excitement and exposure. The more experience you have, the closer your perceptions are to reality - students are less likely to know their air-time than skygods. The more excited you are, the further from reality - again students, or anyone doing something new or different on a jump. By exposure, I mean air-time. Most people can probably count to five in a skydive more accurately than they can count to 60. Another thing to consider is fall-rate. Free-flying - Exit from 12,500 feet, spend the first part (the slide) in a sit. Transition to head-down for 10 seconds, then cork out and go back to a sit for 20 seconds. Flop over on your belly for 8 seconds to slow down and get ready to pull. What altitude are you at? Do you really want to do the math in free-fall? What about big-ways? A 4-way falls slower than a solo belly. Do you want to do the math? What about when the four-way funnels and you are effectively solo for part of the jump and in a group for part of it? Sorry about the long post! It's 3:15 AM right now, and I'm waiting for news on our servers at work. It's a difficult question complicated by the fact that most people have difficulty admitting they might be wrong. Can you admit you might be wrong in 5 seconds or less?