champu

Haha... Russians are terrible actors.

Just a note / something to think about for everyone watching and posting examples of pressing together / counter-twisting risers to get out of line twists... ...remember that although it may work really well, you should still have and obey a hard deck. It's easy to think this method foolproof and say, "who cares if it takes me down to 1000 ft to get out of these twists? It works every time!" And that's all fine and dandy until you go to pop your brakes and one of your steering lines jams and now you're under a spinning main below 1000 ft. Getting out of twists on your main before impact does not automatically equal a safe landing.

Ten canopies were in the air at the time including me. My group was the first of two four-way teams getting out on a pass at 10500 (which is why you don't see me looking back North very much.) There were two planes flying offset by about 10 minutes with the occasional load dropping military jumpers worked in there. So, no other aircraft were dropping at the time. I am the video guy and pulled at break off which is why I was high and landing amongst the second group. Three of my teammates fly velocities (two fly 90s and one flys 103s) so they land well before me unless I work to catch them. The orange canopy you see me pass towards the beginning of the video is my other teammate who flies either a pulse 135 or a safire2 139, I forget which of the two is in this video, they're both orange. She expects me to pass her.

You're right, the lens is not especially wide (0.5x, or on this video camera about the field of view of a 25-30mm lens on a 35mm camera) so you're not quite seeing what I'm seeing, but it's a reasonable approximation. My overall strategy of where I'm looking takes advantage of the fact that I know where I'm planning to go my entire flight. That's step one. Step two is I'm looking where I'm going to be in about 5-10 seconds, and I scan around that area for people who might also be there in about 5-10 seconds. I then try and make small adjustments to my flight based on what it looks like they're trying to do. Sometimes you read people wrong and you re-encounter them, as in this case. I know how to abort a turn and use a braked approach to maneuver around someone and land safely though, so it was really a non-event. I posted the video as an example of how something bad might unfold. To be clear: I don't mean for this to be a, "look at this noob-canoe blowing my swoop" rant or anything like that. I just like the idea of discussing canopy flight here rather than in that other forum. I may post more videos of the same nature if I have any other interesting situations come up.

If you've ever seen video on board the ISS you can hear the constant hum of ventilation fans that keep air moving through the complex. On the US segment it's all integral in the walls of the modules. In the Russian segment they actually have blowers and flexible ducts running between modules that are more apparent. The very large gray arrays you see sticking out all over the outside of the station are radiators to dump excess heat overboard from all the electrical power that gets used. You'll note they're positioned somewhat perpendicular to the solar arrays because you don't want direct sun on them. The ISS, and just about every other satellite, also use thermistors (temp sensors) and heaters positioned strategically around to keep things from freezing when they are in shadows. The heaters are not too dissimilar from the defroster in the back window of your car. On some satellites if you want to keep the temperature down you can put mylar/kapton thermal blankets or mirrors over things to keep them from absorbing as much radiation from the Sun.

Yeah, that's a pretty rookie mistake. You have to look for both turn signals and "body language" to figure out if and how many cars may be turning right on red as you approach lights. I also slow down and slot in as I approach a line of cars that is starting to move so I'm never along side a car as it starts accelerating. The one thing I can't figure out is why so many people tend to list over into the curb / right part of the lane as they slow to a stop in a line of cars. 5 mph? plenty of room to get by them. 2 mph? they look like they're parked against the curb. This is more annoying than dangerous though.

So the reason I posted the video... I saw the low guy at 0:55 and thought, "he's too low to cross over the center of the DZ [per the rules] and must be on his downwind leg landing at the alternate area" and so I went into a little brakes to let his teammate go by so I could follow him down. I then proceeded to almost do a 90 deg turn right into the low guy on final. For those of you wondering about ways to avoid canopy collisions as a lower slower canopy, you can start by following the DZ rules. This is not to say that had I hit him it would have been his fault, but had I hit him, I don't think whose fault it was would have mattered much to the two of us. The rest of the jumps that weekend I made it a point to ditch the convenient part of the landing area (we were doing back-to-backs) and just land in the North half of the area if I opened at all North of the landing area. As Dave reiterated, better to walk a bit.

I'm interested to hear people's thoughts about this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v44V07iTzCs

I don't think they give the astronauts on the space station enough off-the-schedule free time for them to be "fixing" things, and many of them are not engineers anyway. Pretty much all the work done with experiments and station maintenance is collaborative with folks on the ground that have video of what's going on up there. The station's laptops I think are almost all running WindowsXP. Most of the mission utilities like their communications, scheduling, procedure, and location software were probably developed to run in Windows so it doesn't really make sense to change it. I'm not sure what OS the station's flight computers/power/life support systems use... probably VxWorks.

This is a fair question because the answer isn't intuitive. Riding on the sidewalk is illegal in a lot of places (because it's not safe for pedestrians) and depending on the road and side street situation, can be much more dangerous for the cyclist. When people pull up to major roads on a side street they usually roll up fast and stop in the cross walk. They're also always looking at the roadway, not the sidewalk so even if they have visability they don't use it. Pedestrians aren't going fast enough for this to be a problem but bicycles can easily traverse the left lane and run into the car that just flew into their way in a fraction of a second. Also, people passing you and then immediately turning right such that you have to slam on your brakes and/or take evasive action is already a big enough problem when I ride in the roadway and I'm positive the person saw me. If I rode on the sidewalk I'd get sideswiped in this fashion multiple times a day. Drivers wouldn't pass someone in the left lane and then turn right from the left lane across the nose of another car, but that's effectively what they do all the time to bicyclists. For the same reason you don't drive your car on those roads if you can help it, the route very quickly becomes convoluted and I don't want to deal with 5000 stop signs. And it doesn't solve any of the intersection problems on major roads. Using sidewalks and back streets assumes that the biggest hazard as a bicyclist is being hit from behind when you and the car are just driving straight down the road, but that's not what you need to be most worried about.

Theoretically you could tune a VASMIR engine to [more or less] continuously counter drag which would keep the station at a constant altitude and you wouldn't corrupt or cause problems with long term microgravity experiments.

As a cyclist, I "encounter" dozens of cars, trucks, and buses on the road on my way to and from work. My odds of having to deal with a dangerous idiot driver are a lot higher than the odds that any of them have to deal with a dangerous idiot cyclist. So there's not as much reciprocity there as you may think. The roads I ride to work have a 40 mph limit but it's usually busy hours so lights get backed up and it can be slow going for motorists. I very quickly realized just how impatient and idiotic the decision making of most (yes most) drivers are during their work commute. People go so far out of their way to pass me regardless of how wide or narrow the lane happens to be at the moment only to end up stuck behind backed up cars 100 yards down the road.

Most comm sats are in geosync roughly over the equator. This allows you to provide coverage to a given region using one satellite which is nice, and it has the added benefit that you don't need to do complex tracking with your antenna on the ground. Doesn't work so well at far North and South latitudes because a satellite over the equator would be too close to the horizon to reliably communicate with. The Soviets came up with a pretty cool orbit to get around this that is highly elliptical and has a period of 12 hours. The satellite spends most of it's time loitering at a high altitude over the edge of the arctic circle and makes two fast swingbys around the south pole every day. With two satellites timed correctly you can provide continuous coverage to high latitudes (or low latitudes, but I'm not aware of any satellites in this type of orbit over the antarctic.) Sirius radio uses a similar orbit but with a 24 hour period. Putting a manned spacecraft in orbits other than Low-Earth is a little trickier because the radiation levels you have to deal with are quite a bit higher out there. To stay out there long term you need much better shielding. GPS satellites move intentionally. This helps, for a couple reasons actually, with the position information you can get from them.

pfft... you're going to jump it packed? "It happens every time, they all become blueberries."

The reports all conclude that growing up around violence makes you more likely to commit violence. I think that result is pretty intuitive. But I don't see any evidence to suggest that toy guns and super soakers act as some kind of cavitation site for violence with real guns. Agreed, fundamentally, I'm just skeptical of this program's ability to accomplish much.

Since the thread is about jihadist attacks in the US, sectarian violence in Iraq is hardly pertinent. The discussion evolved [devolved?] into which group of radical actors was loonier or had a greater propensity to be violent and dangerous. Some people seem to be arguing that Islam is easier to misinterpret than Christianity, and therefore that "Muslims make better terrorists." My post was not in support of that argument, I just wanted to point out that wrapping what's going on in Iraq right now into a package and calling it a "civil war" in an effort to downplay it in the discussion isn't really fair either. As I said, volume is not the only difference between terrorists attacks and a civil war, but the tenuous state of governments in the Middle East combined with the fact that there are simply more Islamic nutbars than Christian nutbars over there does largely explain why Marc's list is so long and why an equivalent list for Christianity would be much shorter. There just aren't that many large masses of Christians living under tenuous governments to foster violent nutbars these days. At the end of the day it's an uncontrolled experiment of sorts, from which you can't really conclude anything positive or negative about the religions as a whole.

Yeah, pretty much. If an Islamic country is having a civil war, every attack is not a Jihadist Terrorist Attack. War is war. Targeting civilians is wrong, but it really doesn't have anything to do with terrorist threats outside of the country at war. nnnn.... this argument is pretty thin, particularly in Iraq right now. If a majority of people are trying to get a government underway and an extremist group is setting off bombs in markets, mosques, and politicians' homes, that's not a civil war.

I think the single quotes around "Jihadists" and the word "consider" were fairly important features of the headline.

Haha... a bit of an understatement...

oops, my question wasn't clear either... If he normally flies a storm 135, why did he show up to the dropzone with a katana? (that he wasn't allowed to jump)

I'm confused about him normally flying a storm 135 and yet having a katana in his rig (which Elsinore apparently doesn't allow with wingsuits? How does that work?)

probably not more than about $1200/yr

Don't forget the Jonathan Bullar lawsuit... ACOARTTCD (Automatic Cutter Of Anything Routed Through The Cutter Device)

The reason banks were able to pay back TARP and the reason the economy is adjusting itself out without a complete disaster is that people like yourself and people at the far end of the other side of the loans are slowly eating the negative effects of the bubble. Also, people like myself who bought a house last year from someone who had owned it for ten years are allowing some of the real [non-bubble] appreciation in the market to be realized. It's generally a bad idea to try and make the economy do anything really quickly, so I wouldn't trade a mostly flat future for a small uptick now like you are suggesting with debt forgiveness. In regards to your particular situation, don't forget what is technically/legally happening when you buy a house. You are buying a house. The bank is loaning you money. You are not jointly purchasing a property with the bank. Banks have no interest in owning houses. Being able to afford a house doesn't just mean being able to make the payments on whatever loan or loans you happen to be able to get while living paycheck to paycheck. Being able to afford a house means being able to repay any loans you need to take out to buy it. That means having some form of reserves to weather looking for a new job or trying to sell the place if you get laid off. That also means if you feel you might have to sell the place to pay off the loan, that you structure the loan to avoid going underwater in the near term.

Politicians appear to count on single issue voters because campaign stances are distributed amongst parties in an insane manner. I find it extremely difficult to agree with even a majority of what any candidate promotes. It reminds me of the territory claiming at the beginning of the game RISK, it starts out with people trying to grab a whole continent and then devloves into blocking tactics and pretty soon everyone's just got armies all over the map. What's even worse than, and all too often combined with, single issue voters are straight-ticket voters. When a presidential candidate for a party says something you don't like and you run to polls and vote for a city councilperson, mayor, district board of education member, congressperson, senetor, governer, comptroller, etc. for the opposing party there's no end to the potential damage you can do to your own well-being.