dorbie

Partly tradition partly the alti of a lot of the flying and other emergency scenario details. Look at discussions here about cutting away under 1k vs more fabric. Most of the dangerous scenarios are more likely to be encountered low and near obstacles. Someone also made and marketed a cutaway system and was unable to sell enough, they did sell some to test pilots. I think there's a mix of justifiable reasons and industry inertia. I like my PG round, I know it's unlikely to wrap my wing and deploys damned fast. I can also choose my deployment direction and there's a chance (probably slim) I could throw it out of my wing if I took a wrap. I don't think I'd change it now given a choice, but Calvin (who posts here) I know wants to do this very thing after his PG accident.

Hey, I don't want to get arrested for scaring the operator.

Indeed, go look at the section labeled "Controversy" and see the two graphs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_war_syndrome#Controversy Read carefully. Life is messy & complex, sometimes too complex for people to figure this stuff out. We are not well served by pressure groups with a chip on their shoulder and those who pander to them.

That syndrome if it even exists has been blamed on many things from vaccinations to the denaturing of aspartame in soft drinks (to name but two of a dozen 'causes'). DU is just another bugbear for the crazies to blame with inadequate evidence and extremely one sided misleading assessments. For every cause you will find compelling 'reports' by passionate people pointing the finger at their pet cause, all teh reports are deeply flawed and of course mutually contradictory.

Good to hear of a story where this is saving lives. This is the real reason DU is used. It's a self-sharpening penetrator and is the most effective weapon for the job. To call DU a WMD is simultaneously frivolous and obscene.

A highly misleading reply. It was a perfectly accurate reply. Do you dispute the accuracy of the facts in my post? Your posts on DU have been highly selective and I consider them misleading. It's quite shocking to see a Physics Professor pander to the kind of anti-DU hysteria that's been posted here in the past.

Correction, it stood for "Immigration and Naturalization Service". It's now subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security with a slew of other agencies. ... edit to say it may have been split since it was absorbed; there is the CIS and the ICE they seem to be different arms of the DHS....

How grubby is it when a PM dictates what a sport team can & can't do?

The reviewes are .... mixed, read the first one .

We're not discussing barrel rolls. These are loops where you pitch through the vertical rather than roll through it.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1f4_1179038976

So is Carbon-14 and your body is riddled with that, heck it's in everything you eat!!! WMD, DU is not.

Some stitching software gets the geometry of the problem wrong. I've written software to do this (actually for large projection displays) and unless you project aspherically corrected images onto a sphere (in the case of your problem) it can't be made to work for large sequences / wide angles. I think the software I linked to should be able to handle it, but approach it from first principals. Before you feed it your images you should try to correct for the lens. Take a reference image of a regular grid and correct that to be ortho-rectangular (completely aspherical), this is quite simple, you can then reuse that correction because it is always the same for that lens at that angle (if it's a zoom). Using the true field of view for your corrected image it can be projected onto a sphere and aligned with other images that go through a similar process, ultimately building a completed image. Yep 'seeing' and other factors will affect the success of the final image. You should try to do a color match, mainly setting the black level right first and then figuring out if additional tweaks are required. Enough variation will present a tough challenge but you can always try to match conditions & settings. OK, year round for the full hemisphere you're going to have to stitch. If you have problems with the stitching software available let me know. Again I'll stress that aspherical is more important than wide (IMHO). I should be able to help you get something useful working. You should also think about your desired output, you cannot simply print such an image without a chosen projection, it is analogous to publishing a map of the Earth. You need an output projection.

Never happens though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3RnWSd4vBc

That would suck. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8PwuKY-lhY

Consider image stacking, especially for specific targets, but it should work with wider fields too, provided you are reasonably consistent across images. Major changes in aspherical projection would have to be corrected for example. (you wouldn't want to select a different target unless your lens was completely aspherical). This particular tool includes wavelet processing and reconstruction to deconvolve multiple images, but at its simplest stacking helps tremendously with noise. It also helps you cherry pick and align your best images for sharpness. Something free like this should be painless: http://www.astronomie.be/registax/ http://www.threebuttes.com/RegistaxTutorial.htm Search for astronomy image stacking for alternatives and tutorials. If you want the best results then the more images with longer lenses will produce the highest resolution final product, but you need to stitch them correctly. Each image you produce is a section of a sphere, this is always the case for a stationary viewer in photography, but in the case of astronomy it's particularly obvious because you're talking about the celestial sphere. To create a high quality sky panorama stitching many images onto a spherical base image would allow you to generate the highest quality final database. For this to work well you need re-projection but it really depends how much time you want to devote to what could be a very non trivial project. For this purpose a good aspherical lens rather than a wide angle one may be a better option especially considering the typical implications for sharpness across the sensor when wide open. I see you getting a production path going for your sky survey as follows 1) generate a photographic sequence for each region of the sky. 2) stack image sequences to reduce noise and experiment with wavelet processing 3) Aspheric correction of each image. 4) stitching to chosen celestial projection. 3 should be consistent and you can figure it out for your lens and stick with that. It can also be done between stage 1 and 2. Stage 4 is non trivial but packages exist to support this kind of mapping, it essentially is a quicktime VR style projection (if that helps you understand this) but there are many projections possible just as there are many types of projection you might see used to represent a map of the Earth. Something like this (chosen because it displays a great example of what you need): http://www.pixtra.com/ Or the free equivalents, Google panorama stitching tools. If you really want to capture the celestial sphere this is the way to go. Finally.... If you want to give yourself a grand project then I suppose you could do this year round until all the visible sky from your site is captured. That would be kinda extreme though, then of course there's the missing portion of the Southern sky you could pursue from other sites, really extreme... unless you found an antipodean or equivalent co-conspirator. P.S. if all this is too much, then at least the stacking software should help

Only after a hard opening.

Will you take a check?

Fun watching him tear Reagan a new one on this and over blaming opposing terror for causing terror...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d7fHvHXeiQ

Video of Hitchens on free speech, excellent stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lBw99RbEyA

There's still the minor inconvenience of the judicial system and its requirement of evidence.

That just doesn't translate well. You need to go out immediately and paint "Britain's Finest" on the side of your motor. Read it, absorb it, believe it. We'll soon have you straightened out.

That is possibly the most conceited post I've read here. You seem completely oblivious to your sin of comparing your fellow travellers to Hitler's Nazis in the most glib and unsupported way while managing to avoid any iota of introspection concerning your own political opinions in a greater historical context.

No bears, that's what's pussy.

A bunch of the stuff on the Wiki is total propaganda. Just some of the skydiving-related history stuff has me reeling. Correct it. I deleted the wiki error I saw, it ain't here anymore and answers.com will re-scrape it at some point.