nathaniel

It doesn't have to be a guy Not in Massachusetts maybe... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Find a guy to go with you and do the good cop bad cop thing. Tell them you're engaged, and that the car is for you. You get to be the good cop, your friend is the bad cop. Don't be afraid to walk away if it's not a good deal... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

cheers fella... thanks to ZHills for being so friendly thanks to matt for your amazing stills & generosity thanks to all the birdies for all the flights & keeping them safe thanks to scott for making it happen fie on the winds and low clouds My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

old technology... dropzone.com to test a "force shield"-like internet search before reposting news from biased sources, which immediately repels propaganda from all angles. The system, dubbed "Google", uses website spiders to track incoming propaganda and reveals it when it is time with an "invisible force", according to investors. Quite how it does this, unsurprisingly, is a trade secret, but industry whitepapers suggest that the algorithm involves... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Now if they only charged ticket fares by passenger weight as well Or is that a topic for SC My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I gather they used multiple values in a simulation of individuals, based on estimated parameters of the course of the disease and number of people interacted with, average distance traveled, etc... It appears that the research paper itself is online here, if you're curious enough wade through it

A major reason for that is that bird flu is seasonal, much like the common cold and west nile. Bird flu is expected to peak around this time of year, iirc. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

FWIW the WHO article I linked mentions that leukopenia has been a symptom...making me wonder whether immunosuppressives are indeed a bright idea. I'm a complete layman tho, so really I can only speculate. Science may tell... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

No argument there. But through them the Church reintroduced logic and reason into society, and even though the Church did not always approve of the product it's hard to imagine what would have happened without them. If the Church deserves blame for pruning excessively, it also deserves credit for planting the seeds. IMO anyway. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Yeah, that's the half empty part. The half full part is the part about him receiving his education at a university that was founded by the same Church. It's not black and white. The Church screwed up a whole lot, but the Church is largely responsible for the scholastic systems that developed into our contemporary education systems. It was not all smooth sailing, but without the Church we would probably not have modern universities. So in that way, it has made contributions to science that are immensely significant, if indirect. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

It's inaccurate to purport that the Church caused the Dark Ages, although it's probably true that it contributed. There wouldn't have been an enlightenment at all if the Church hadn't gone off founding and funding universities. What if Galileo hadn't gone to school at all? This is one of those half full / half empty situations... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The difference is between what's predicted for a pandemic vs what's estimated of the people who are known to have contracted it so far...I'm assuming most of the risk to the average person is from a potential pandemic rather than from exposure to the current strain, which is clearly more lethal. I don't think anyone is predicting the mortality rate to stay so high if / when a pandemic were to strike. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

not yet...but it's relatively straightforward to reverse engineer the thing. I can make my own graphs now, for instance, but I haven't yet spent the time to write a software package. Getting IR to work under linux has been a real pain, mainly due to crummy IR drivers IMO and higher priorities on my part. Could probably do it under windows...but there's Paralog for that. Although paralog claims it runs on linux, they don't offer linux support for neptunes, and it simply doesn't work for me. Not to mention the packaging is awful. In a few months I'll probably have something sorted out... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

No, that's not quite right. The Church preserved that same corpus of knowledge through the Dark Ages, and eventually sponsored and unleashed it, so that it developed into what we benefit from today. Islam, for its part also contributed many of the things you take for granted. Which is not to say that their hands are clean or that they didn't also screw a lot of things up... You owe your livelihood to organized religion more than you admit. It's hard to say how much was lost, and it is easy to see what was not. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Right now it's not contagious between humans, and the mortality rate is estimated at between 1 and 30 per cent. Which is where you get newspapers quoting huge death rates from a pandemic, they only quote the high figure. It /is/ being found in increasing numbers of different species such as different types of fowl, cats, and pigs too iirc. To date people seem to contract it by inhaling bird poop; most of the people who have come down with it are people who live with birds or people who work with birds. There's some speculation that there may be a large number of people who contracted it but who didn't have any symptoms at all, but there's not much proof of this. Part of the fun is that testing for bird flu is very inaccurate, and a high-end, time consuming and expensive laboratory is required to confirm any results before they can be relied upon...the tests only get done when someone gets very ill or dies. It's believed to have an incubation period of approx 1 week (during which time the victim is contagious but doesn't know it yet), which is about twice as long as regular flu, but once symptoms set in the disease seems to take its course more rapidly than regular flu. It's spreading rather quickly among wildlife and chicken farms in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and there have been predictions it'll reach North America via migratory birds within a year's time. Although some scientists are convinced that it's poorly regulated and illicit poultry trade that's responsible for the spread instead of migratory birds...really there's not enough evidence to know (yet). And the best part is that currently there is no vaccine and the vaccines we have for ostensibly similar flu viruses must be used in very high doses to connote any benefit... WHO Bird Flu Fact Sheet My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

clicky My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Where else can I get a free groping? My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

On one occasion I had the manifest staff at Skydive Chicago ask me not to jump my wingsuit due to "air traffic control will be sending planes this way all day". It struck me that the people who made this request of me were more or less incompetent, and that trying to reason with them would be an exercise in wasted breath. So I packed up my gear and went back to Hinckley. Both DZ's are close enough to Chicago's major airports that they deal with commercial overflights on a regular basis--if anything Hinckley is 20 or 30 mi closer... I've been back to SDC since, and I've flown wingsuits without any more trouble from the staff. Give the folks at Houston a few weeks to think through their situation & whether it's worth losing customers and friends ... If they decide it is then you should feel no shame in obliging them

They like to be called "instructors" around these parts... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Just found a link to this post in another forum with screenshots of PC-exclusive games due out this year. Crazy. I think I have to upgrade my PC now. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

On a cloudy day at wffc 2004 My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Seems like the requirements on a wingsuit are slightly different from a rig tho, which was got me motivated towards plastics instead of metal. There are more of them (14 per wing on my suit), there's presumably less pressure on each one individually, and there's much greater sensitivity to friction since I'm pulling a long cable through them all. Tho a spur is probably worse on a rig grommet since the closing loop is woven nylon & very prone to catching and sticking versus a cutaway cable getting shaved... I'll hand the suit to a rigger in person, see what they think. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I've not seen too much info about the MTR3... So I bought one. Got it in the mail this week. Put 3 jumps on it today. About the suit The suit is a mono-wing style, as the pictures on Matter's website show. the arm wings are roughly equilateral in shape, and meet the body below the hip. The joint between the arm wing and body is no such thing, the body and wing are one piece of fabric and form a single planar surface. The curve where the trailing edge of the arm wing meets the hip is reinforced--it's rather stiff. On the inside there's no walls between the leg wing intake and the body or between the arm wings and the body, other than the wing ribbing on the arm, which is perforated. The whole suit inflates, and literally flies as one surface (see below for flight details). The leg wing has kevlar inserts, which give the wing noticeable form on the ground. This probably contributes to inflation in the air. The leg wing meets the front surface of the leg fabric, like the Firebird and the Vampire, and unlike the GTi, Classic and the GS1 where the leg wing attaches to the interior or rear surface of the leg. The rig is inserted from the top end of the suit and zippered into place. The GS-1 uses a similar design. Whereas the GS-1 has neoprene wrapping and velcro seals underneath the cutaway and reserve pillows, the MTR-3 uses woven nylon-bridle type material and snaps. On my custom-fit suit, I had no concerns about the suit interfering with the main cutaway and reserve handles. Slightly above the knees the suit has some neoprene material. Presumably this is to reduce leg-wing tension. Remark: In person, the effect of the single body-arm-leg wing continuum makes the arm wing seem proportionally bigger than the pictures on the website. This could either be a perspective issue on the Matter website (perhaps the camera was placed too low) or possibly due to design scaling and body shape--I've got very long arms and legs, and a relatively short torso. The neoprene knees are a stealth feature. They seem to be most helpful in the plane, and are very effective at reducing fabric tension with knees bent in cramped quarters. A problem I didn't know I had, but which I'm glad is solved on the MTR3 suit. Someone described the MTR-3 as a cross between a heavy-duty wingsuit design and a tracking suit, and this seems to be a good description of it. Wingsuit cutaway system A single arm-cutaway handle is connected to cutaway cables running parallel to the arm zipper. The cables are joined at the breastbone with a rapide link. A cloth handle sewn onto a card also attaches to the rapide link, and the card tucks into little pouches to cover up the metal link and the ends of the cutaway cables. Remark: The rapide link is overkill. Something like an RSL clip or equivalent would be preferable. The GS-1, which uses a similar design, uses a three-ply velcro system. The tuck tabs on my suit are perhaps 1/8 or 3/16 inch too large, making it difficult to tuck them in--and the tuck pocket is inflexible. The design could be improved by making the tuck tabs tapered or by making the tuck pocket out of a stretch-fabric material. Or by using velcro, a la the GS-1. One particular concern came up earlier this week when I tested the cutaway system on the ground. The flanges on the back of several of the metal grommets had fractured or compressed (see pic), exposing sharp edges on the grommets. The edges had a tendency to catch on the cutaway cable and shave off a little yellow plastic, and significantly increasing the pull-force required to extract the cable. Some type of plastic (eg, UHMWPE) grommet, if it could survive the conditions of wingsuit flight, would be a superior material. I experimented with coating some of the grommets with a steel-based epoxy, I'll update this post when I reach a conclusion. An alternate approach might be to solder down the rough grommets as well...using a low-melt solder--tho some low melt solders have lead and cadmium in them, both nasty toxic metals... When I found this problem on Thursday, I notified Cedric of Matter Clothing immediately. He responded via email that Matter is investigating the issue. Putting the suit on. Arm zippers are on the underside of the arm, meaning they stop at the armpit. Leg zippers are standard. Booties are fine, and it was pleasant to find that the excess material that ebbs up behind the heel on my GTi has simply been excised from the MTR-3. Single, central torso zipper, much like the original Birdman design, back before there was a Classic there was The Birdman Suit with a central zipper. Neoprene collar comes high up on the neck, right up to my adam's apple. The bootie-hip snaps have magnets in them. Remark: My suit is custom-built, using measurements originally taken by Scott Campos at WFFC '04 for my GTi plus a few corrections based on how my GTi fits. The result is that my MTR-3 is a very good fit. Since the torso zipper can't go beyond the leg intake, the suit is a little difficult to put on. Pretty much every other suit uses two zippers on the torso that can run down to the thigh, and I prefer that design. The leg zippers are just about right. The arm zippers stop at the middle of my upper arm--probably a couple inches too short, but this really isn't a big deal. By the time you've unzipped your arm wings and are reaching for your toggles, chances are you've taken your booties off already, so the suit has flexion. Putting magnets in the bootie snaps is a great idea, every suit should do this. Never fiddle with bootie snaps again! Flight. Fall rates were in the 60's and 50's of mph, with sustained troughs of 45-50 mph (using indyz's gaussian average of raw neptune data). Remark: The suit inflated firmly and very quickly and flew stable down the hill. I'm used to flying my GTi with a combination of probably 40% shoulders and 60% feet, and after ~ 200 jumps on it I feel very agile flying my GTi. The MTR3, by comparison, reacted very little to shoulder input, and a little less to foot input than my GTi does. Part of this I'm sure is me being conservative on my first flights, but much of it is the monowing design--there's tension between the legs (hips) and the wrists, in a way like the GS-1 and unlike BM and PF suits I've flown. It's different form the GS-1 tho in that the GS-1 had direct tension between the toes and the arms, on the MTR3 it's a restriction more on the arms than the legs. The leg wing has a tremendous effect. It reminded me of the sensation I had flying a Vampire, although I don't feel totally confident to make a direct comparison right now since * I've not flown a vampire that was custom fit to me * I've put a combined total of 5 jumps between the two suits * I didn't have GPS for any of the jumps * it's been months since I flew a Vampire. Massive disclaimer notwithstanding, this suit gave a good push. Like yuri_base has shown us with his beautiful L/D graph, airspeed gives lift. This became highly noticeable to me on the MTR3; when I surged forward my glide ratio improved dramatically. There were scattered clouds today, and on two separate occasions I completely overshot the hole I was aiming for, by what felt like 1/4 mile . I've read that the MTR2 design was prone to leg-wing flapping. I experienced moderate flapping when I relaxed my feet, but the flapping stopped immediately when I pointed my toes. Anyone who's seen me in a flocking video knows that I know leg wing flapping...there is no flapping issue with my MTR3. First impression summary The Good

That calls to mind a great physics lesson from 8th grade...making a "bomb" out of a coffee tin, a pile of white flour, and a candle. Pile the flour on top of s screen, put the screen on the wide end of a funnel and run a hose from the small end to a plunger or a rubber bulb. Light the candle & seal the tin. Quickly squeeze the plunger or bulb to disperse the flour before the oxygen runs out...boom. Don't try this at home, kids! I believe the lesson was that many unconventional things are combustible and / or explosive if you grind them fine enough. Grain elevator explosions come to mind as well.... Kinda makes me wonder why it's still legal to carry bags of flour and plastic bags onto airplanes. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Forget the pics, I want to know how it flew My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?