champu

It's time to retire the Easy-Bake Oven. Also, you forgot the option for "The $1.75 compact fluorescents work just fine."

Don't leave us hangin. When? What rig? Was the reserve the correct size for the pack tray? Details please. If it's the incident I think he's talking about, it was at Elsinore about a year and a half or two years ago. Rig was an Infinity but I'm not certain of the container and reserve sizes. I'm pretty sure he discussed the incident with Kelly at VSE. The jumper in question did a 630 on a velocity 90 loaded at about 2.4 with a Sport Cypres 2 (not a good idea.) When sent to airtec they replied, "yep... you made it fire..." and converted it to a Speed Cypres 2 free of charge before sending it back.

Extremely tired?

The company I work for sponsors engineering fairs, robotics challenges, etc. for students at local high schools to try and get them excited about that kind of thing. We get a pretty steady stream of e-mails asking for volunteers for those events. I haven't worked at one yet, but I have led a couple tours of our campus to that effect. Last fall I got to give a guest lecture at the UIUC (my alma mater) engineering career expo talking about what I actually do with my engineering degree. You don’t necessarily have to pick between MMIC designer or management and I think people were glad to hear that.

Birther.

This ties into what quade was getting at about doing things for the wrong reasons. A lot of people in and from developing countries, for example, are getting engineering degrees because someone told them that it was a straight-forward path to a viable career. That alone, never mind what they might enjoy doing, was enough for them to keep their nose in text books and get a degree. I don't think it's a good idea to try and foster this kind of culture domestically just so we can say we "produce" as many or more engineers than country x. Our focus should just be on making sure those that do have an interest to begin with see it as something they can do, and continue to want to do. *shrugs* I'm not a developmental psychologist but it make sense to me.

I don't think people doubt that STEM careers are viable. I think what's lacking is how accessible said careers seem (i.e. you don't have to be a super-genius) and how engaging said careers seem (i.e. despite often dry course work you get to do cool stuff at the end of the day.) Trying to look for or manufacture some messiah engineer in popular culture who will finally make engineering cool seems like a pretty silly way to go about things, but then again I'm already an engineer. I think if folks like your brother (the high school physics teacher, not the other engineer) are interesting enough and encouraging enough to their students that will go a long way.

We need to dig giant holes and bury as much heavy stuff as we can find. This will speed up the Earth's rotation (like a figure skater pulling her arms in while spinning), generate stronger winds, and cool everything back down again.

No, 50% chance you're below the median! Also incorrect - this would only be true if there were 0 people AT the median, which obviously is nonsense, since the median is the most frequently occuring number. You're thinking "mode." Median is the number that falls directly in the middle, with the same number of values above and below. Mode is the one that occurs most often. Sorry, just had to get the last word on that one! To elaborate on my last post, for discrete normal distributions, the mode, median, and mean are all coincident. So if you're going by whole integer IQ numbers then yes, the average person has an IQ of 100, more people will have an IQ of 100 than any other IQ, and the person who is more intelligent than half the rest of the population will have an IQ of 100. But intelligence is arguably a continuous normal distribution. That means the mean and median are still coincident, but the number of people with exactly average intelligence is zero. So, half the population is below average intelligence.

Well, people arguing for the strictest controls (e.g. you can only do turns over 90 alone, in your home, in bed, under the covers, with the lights out.) have a pretty easy position here because 1) yes there will likely be some benefit and 2) they don't have to do anything differently. It's free. Doing big turns into a main, 90s only, landing area in the middle of a load is not a good idea and shouldn't be allowed. Doing a big turn in a designated high performance area after you've noted even one lower canopy that could get in your way is not a good idea, and the high man needs to yield. So what are we left with? Canopies flying where they "shouldn't be", they don't get seen by the HP pilot, the turn is performed, and we have a close call or an incident. Okay, why didn't the high man see the lower canopy? Is there a way his or her pattern could be changed to provide better visibility of people flying into that airspace? Why was the lower canopy there? Can a jump run and specially designated outs be established that makes it essentially impossible to just end up over there unless you're trying? I think the frustration, mine anyway, comes from people giving up on these questions, throwing their hands up in the air and saying, "We who land straight in could be anywhere... Who knows... We have no idea... Some of us don't even care... but that's not our problem, that's your problem, and so we're putting more rules on you who wish to swoop."

Money and fame

No, no, NO!!! It's a bell-curve, dammit! The mean and median are coincident for a normal distribution, so half of the population is below average intelligence. /edit: lol, misspelled intelligence

I think there's more truth in those quotes. The differences between these and Howard's quote aren't very subtle.

I apologize if my post came off high and mighty.

Student was a fair ways north of the pond with winds from the north. Students should not be on the west side of the runway. Yes, the military student, his military instructor, and myself all had a brief convo. The student wasn't where he should have been, but that's not the point. Students happen. A lot. Focusing on the student? No wonder we're having problems with HP landings. I didn't say yell at the student, I didn't say focus on the student and forget the swooper, I said sit down with the student. I've made quite a few high performance approaches and landings at the swoop pond at Elsinore. I've also aborted (usually happens on, or in some cases even before, my downwind leg) countless times because someone was haplessly flying over the approaches to the pond. None of these people have been students. Respect for separation of landing areas and flying predictable patterns needs to be learned and understood by everyone. The earlier in a person's career we drill this into their heads the better. As I'm sure you know, by the way, flying where it sounds like this student was flying isn't just dangerous in terms of canopy collisions at the swoop pond. At student canopy altitudes that poses a danger to your wingsuit corridors as well. /edited to add: I apologize for the confusion, I'm apparently not having a very good day for written communication.

Your posts to this thread are completely at odds with my experience in and since school. The only thing I can agree with is that taking psych and humanities were a good source of perspective, but not just about the women in attendance. The non-engineering courses I took (all in undergrad) were... chem, psychology, microecon, philosophy, world music, microbio, natural resources, and the history of western science. Everything else was physics, engineering, math, or computer science. I haven't taken a literature or foreign language course since high school.

Was this over the pond? If it was I'm assuming a ground witness, the student, and the student's instructor had a sit down to go over what changes should be made to their holding pattern and landing pattern to be more predictable.

"Great, you've pinpointed it. Step two is washing it off." That attitude is pretty understandable immediately after a divorce, but for the same reason that dating immediately after a divorce is a bad idea. That's gonna have to go.

I think posting a quote or a statement in a thread, kicking off a thoughful discussion about that quote or statement, ignoring that discussion, and then reposting the quote or statement in another thread is pretty rude.

Hey what's wrong with hiding in academia? I like academia, the real world sucks. You could always try working at a national lab, that's sort of like "the real world lite."

128 byte [sic, don't know if you mean 128-bit or 1024-bit, but regardless...] is not the highest encryption level in existence. More to the point, though, "highest encryption levels in existence" is a bit of a silly term. I think you're presuming all attacks against encryption are brute force, which is definitely not the case, particularly when you've got the whole system in your possession.

You evidently attended the wrong engineering schools and go to the wrong dropzones.

You should finger-trap your excess break line. I leave my camera on under canopy and if nothing interesting happens I tape over it so at any given moment I most likely only have video of my last canopy flight. So here ya go... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuhACSEQTbY

He's dead, Jim.

haha... This is the image I get in my head whenever someone says they love their soft openings on canopy X and quote an absurd snivel duration of 1000 ft or more.