DrewEckhardt

QuoteI like how they use the term "working" vacation. Can somebody please explain what this fucker has done to deserve a 5 week vacation? [ou a/reply] You don't like what our fearless leader is doing but would rather he do more of it than take a break and have a little R&R?

Knowing how to do something, how to teach that subject, and how to teach that subject to a specific person are three different things.

Bayesian analysis is more fun than looking at your calendar.

Stretching??? Your spine gets compression during opening shock, (unless you are hanging from your legstraps by your armpits). That's what I thought until the MD told me differently.

Has any one gotten an informed answer from medical professionals about how long to wait and/or know some one I could have look at the original MRI to give a knowledgeable opinion? I herniated L5-S1 and asked both my osteopath and physical therapist about this. Both expressed some concern over landing which doesn't worry me. Neither could provide an answer about opening shock but said the stretching on opening wouldn't be a problem. Prodded some more they couldn't answer about the compression.

Oh man I envy you so much. I havent had a good Fat Tire since I left Denver about 7 months ago. I miss that beer a lot! Hazed and Infused, Sawtooth, and Single Track are all better tasting thirst quenching summer beers. Tood bad they don't have the distribution network that New Belgium Brewery does (I've run into Fat Tire and 1554 in the Bay Area).

Yes. Great for manifesting for another load after a hop-and-pop (getting from LZ to manifest requires a ride on the trailer or in a car).

Popular/newer used ZP canopies in popular sizes depreciate about $1/jump. You might get 600 jumps on a line set. Buy one from a private party with fresh enough lines that you won't reline it. You might buy a Spectre 150 built in the last couple of years with 300 jumps for $900, make 100 jumps, and sell it for $800. Prices vary: shop arround. You can find a Spectre for $500 with just 200 jumps on the line set and sell it for what you paid. Try to have the sale contingent on an inspection by your favorite rigger (your cashier's check comes back if it doesn't check out). Sometimes you get premature line shrinkage and sometimes the canopy has A LOT OF JUMPS the seller didn't know about. There's nothing wrong with some of the older designs - I would and do jump one sometimes in a second rig (Monarch 135). I wouldn't rule one out if that's what your budget will accomodate. Newer designs just usually open softer, are usually more responsive to control input, and usually land slower.

Only if you are a government and other governments approve of your killings or you have a powerful enough military for that not to matter.

Off heading openings can be fatal, you usually exit with 4-6 seconds to impact and open 3-4 seconds up (like opening at 500-800 feet on a terminal skydive), 15 second canopy rides are not atypical, fun jumps can have landing areas with less square footage than the FAA would allow pro-rated jumpers into on a demo or a couple feet of railroad track road bed to work with.... The two sports both use parachutes but otherwise aren't too similar. Talk to Marta in Moab with Apex BASE; 1000+ injury free jumps come from a long history of good judgement and she's an excellent teacher.

The bridge in Idaho has a huge golf-course smooth landing area, you can do a pilot-chute assist to avoid problems with an unstable exit (saw one guy get his feet caught in the parachute lines, fortunately he got away with a lost shoe) or over delay (saw a new jumper freeze up, loose altitude on his longer delay, and then femur in the trees which he would have cleared if he opened higher), no rush to jump, there are great first jump courses where you can get up to a week of instruction in a small group, and it's legal year round.

All BASE jumps are not equal. Accuracy is not important when the landing area is flat and bigger than a football field. It's more important where you're landing on railroad tracks in a narrow canyon where a few feet off in one direction will fly you into a cliff and a few feet in the other will dump you in a 40 degree river with rapids. It's more important where you have 60' to land, going long puts you in trees, and landing short flies you into a steep hillside covered in boulders and pieces of the trees that used to cover the landing area. Here's one example to put things in a skydiving perspective: The landing area under the Mexican big wall is currently 7% of the size the FAA considers to be a stadium for skydiving demos. A pro-rating (10 consecutive standup landings within 5 meters) and 50 jumps in the last year under that canopy would be required. When the second group jumped it did't even meet the FAA's minimum landing area requirement. Two out of seven jumpers went home injured after their first jump. If you're going to jump into tight landing areas buy yourself a big used skydiving rig which will let you make dozens of jumps in a safe environment before you have to do it into someplace nasty. I spent just $700 on a J7 (officially sized for a Manta 288) with a Raven-III reserve.

I'd go to the urgent care clinic just before it closes for the day. You won't wait as long (people with bigger problems tend to go to the ER, and they want to go home and therefore need to take care of you ASAP because there is no second shift) and the insurance co-pay will probably be less (mine is $25 for an urgent care clinic versus $100 for the ER).

True in Colorado. While the ticket gets mailed to the vehicle owner, mailing in a photocopy of your driver's license which does not match the photo gets the ticket dropped. I think the real reason is that photo radar is a revenue generator for local governments and the equipment contractors (some get a cut of profits). .Assessing points would dramatically increase the costs to drivers - I've seen $300/year for 3 years. That would encourage them to fight it (drag an officer into court where he gets paid, challenge the constitutionality of a machine being your accuser and get it) which would cut profits. People may also challenge it politically. $40 is a minor anoyance like getting a couple of parking tickets. $300/year in increased insurance X 3 years

Both are as dangerous as you make them. Jumping from a 500' bridge over water with a huge golf-course smooth landing area and light winds is less dangerous freefalling a 200' cliff with a tight landing area and wind blowing into the cliff. A carving approach under a moderately loaded canopy into a wide open field is less dangerous than aiming for gates following a hard 270 under a highly loaded canopy. Comparisons between the two sports aren't meaningful.

The $200B we've spent on the war effort since 9/11/2001 is a drop in the bucket.

No. When you pull on the toggles quick enough, the canopy slows down, you keep going forwards, it pitches back, the angle of attack goes up, the airflow separates from the top, and it stalls. You don't get any pitching action when you slowly apply the toggles so it takes a LOT more to stall. Landing is more like the first situation. Canopies _really_ vary. My Fox 245 and Dagger 244 take less input to stall in steady flight than my Samurai 105. I can't stall my Monarch 135 without taking a wrap arround my fingers.

To put this in perspective: 1. The debt will increase by over $3400 a family (the 2000 census enumerated 281M citizens with an average family size 3.14; the current population estimate is just shy of 296M). This is on top of the $83,000 the government already owes for each family. 2. Clinton had a $39B _surplus_ in FY 1998, $123B in 1999, $236B in 2000, and $127B in 2001 (revenues declined 127B in FY2001).

A sufficiently experienced small person cannot reach an optimal loading under the smallest stock sized canopies. I'm not a small guy and jump disproportionately larger reserves. Without weights I'd barely get 2.1 pounds/square foot under the smallest Velocity, 2.0 under the smallest Katana and 1.9 under the smallest Samurai. I don't jump enough and live at 5000 feet so the issue is theoretical for me. Other people are less fortunate: there are girls that leave the plane weighing 30-55 pounds less than me. Some will eventually get into competitive swooping and have a real problem - some tiny girls would need 55 square feet to be competitive without weights.

Most incidents are people breaking themselves under fully functioning ram-air parachutes. The damage has gone up as ZP and modern planforms which enable higher wingloadings have become popular, although we've had the problem for over a decade. The cause is nearly always a series of poor decisions. There's nothing new to say about those incidents. Some people would be safer if they paid attention and learned from those mistakes. They didn't then and don't now, so most incident discussions are not educational experiences. Ocassionally we new the hard way. Micro-lines can snag on grommets. Pilot chute hackey sacks tangle with bridles on wingsuit jumps. Such problems need to be reported, but are the exception not the rule.

Just as much as people who tap into the cable outlet convienantly located on their property which they haven't paid for.

The Farmer's underwriters told my agent that my umbrella policy ($1M) covers me on parachute jumps where I'm at fault. He said that there were complications if I got blown off course; I'd argue that would be my fault too for not paying better attention to conditions but a city parks and recreation director got in my way before I looked into it furthur. The umbrella policy is about $200 a year. Might be something to look at if it's just you and you have auto insurance. The policy has exclusions for some general aviation problems; although I specifically asked about them the underwriters felt they didn't apply to skydiving. YMMV. Go Fast Sports got liability insurance two years in a row for their Colorado event; you might track down Troy Widgery.

Bulging L1-S5 disk. OW.

I believe that increased fuel costs have a minimal effect on people's driving habits. Although gas costs are increasing there's a tremendous amount of low density housing being built far from jobs. Most employers opt for less expensive real estate away from urban centers. Big trucks continue to roll off dealers' lots. People are going to continue driving from low density housing to jobs that are not close by in the vehicles they feel they're entitled to have. There are political limits to the CAFE standards. Power requirements are a function of weight and frontal area. Honda Civics and smaller cars can easily get 30 - 40 MPG because they don't have much of either. SUVs can't because of their size. People are not going to accept legislation which forces them to drive the small cars needed to meet CAFE standards that significantly improve fuel economy. Eventually. When I made much less money I was only able to spend $2000 on a vehicle. It costs about $250 a year to insure that truck, $25 to register it, and about $25 in oil and filters to run it. One of my friends doesn't make much as a professional skydiver and saves his pennies by driving $500 cars which would have similar operational costs. That sort of money does not buy new cars, perhaps even those made in the last decade.

This "solution" has been tried on numerous ocean fisheries. No, that's a different situation. As you note we can't duplicate most wild-caught sea food and there are other environmental concerns. We can make gasoline identical to what we get from natural petroleum. The environment is not going to suffer if we shut down oil wells. Thermal depolymerization will even make things better because it keeps waste out of landfills.