nathaniel

The reason that a particular device was designed in a particular way does not necessarily extend to all similar devices. For instance, I can't turn by neptune off, (except maybe by removing the battery...). If I don't want my neptune on my jump, I take it out of my ear. This is a superior design than any number of on//off switches, because this way I can infer the device's likelihood of operation without interacting with it. The consequences of the neptune being on or off when I want it otherwise are lesser than that of an AAD...but that's not of consequence here because the neptune's operational model is superior. You are making unnecessary assumptions about how an aad ought to be constituted and operated. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That's unjustified. And possibly unjustifiable, imo. There's not even an explicit need for an on or off at all, since this concept is redundant with whether it ought to fire. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

We're doing everything but by suggesting that it cannot be improved, and erecting strawmen to show that it can't. It's crooked... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

No! Well yes, but like we discussed about Airbus that's a bad design. There's no reason that a design cannot be flexible to fit the user. Like spandex clothing vs burlap. This is a false dilemma, since there is no reason that both cannot be catered in the same device. It will not be quite as static or dull as the devices you are thinking of. (ed: Crumple activators for) Airbags in a car, for illustration. You can perform all the complex maneuvers in a car you want, but when the dashboard crumples it matters not whether you are a 16yr old on a learners permit or Kyle Petty. Or a flight simulator (or a game)that can be programmed with varying degrees of realism(difficulty), which can be selected by the operator, or which can be dynamically tuned by the simulator's analysis of your performance. The engineering & functionality of these examples differ from each other and from AADs, but they demonstrate that multiple user classes can be willed away, or adapted to by advanced design. Someone else's failure to do it correctly in the past is irrelevant, there's every reason to believe it's possible, short of an actual implementation. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Less than pleasant research results. Definitely not conclusive about skydiving & coffee yet tho. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-01/acoc-clb011306.php My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That's a particularly troublesome analogy, due to Alan Turning's research on non-provability. There is no analogue for the unsolvability of the general problem of opening a parachute. An error creeps in here due to (false) category. The distinction between groups A and B is in the hands of the designer, and need not hold any meaning at all. Even assuming that there is a group A and a group B, a sufficient complex sorry, bad word choice device could be constructed that exceeds both group A and group B -- honestly there aren't all that many cases in the general parachute opening problem, and none of them is complex. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I think I'm not being clear then. I'm not trying to endorse any particular change to the device, quite the opposite. I agree with all of you that there's more bad designs than good ones, and finding the good ones takes time, money, and effort, and is itself an error-prone process. There are deficiencies in people that changes the device could possibly fix. That's all. What changes? I'm not sure exactly, if it was obvious someone would have chimed in by now. Non-obvious is different from impossible. To assert contrariwise requires that the cypres cannot be exceeded. This is hubris, extremely unlikely, but not yet disproven. Or that the cypres can be exceeded, but the value is so marginal and the cost is so great that nobody should be allowed to do it. This is also unlikely, but not yet disproven. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Sorry then, I just had a big cup of coffee My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Close. I want better toys and dumber jumpers not to die on account of their being dumb. Like you always gripe about, some people don't learn well. Teaching them more is one approach, and accounting for their likely mistakes is another. Neither should be pursued to the exclusion of the other, and neither will ever result in perfection, even though perfection is our goal. There's no reason to categorically reject either approach. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

You seem to like analogies Ron, so here's one. All the alchemy in the middle ages does not disprove the theory & practice of chemistry and physics. All the cypres misses, airbus crashes and vigil misfires we've seen do not disprove the theory & practice of ergonomic design. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Keep the insults flowing. Let it all hang out. People do use airbags sometimes to break their falls. In movie stunts for instance. It's not absurd. Whomever is thinking about landing a wingsuit is also probably also thinking about airbags. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That is a well known example of an attempt at ergonomics that failed... There is more to ergonomics than the times that people have famously screwed it up. The screwups are apparent in as the shadows of the wisdom that it embodies. Put another way, the application of ergonomics was incidental to the Formal cause of that incident, and failure of ergonomics was the efficient cause. We should not thus conclude against further applications of ergonomics. A further application of ergonomics could have prevented this incident. There's debate about it in the same way there's "debate" around evolution...some people cannot refute the premise of ergonomics, but dislike it enough that they vainly assume it away. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

And this is where data comes in. Any complete nub can go to Gary Peek's website and say with complete authority, "a skydiver can fall at rate X", or "the opening shock on a canopy can be Y". "Experts" unarmed with such data can't compete. But arm them with data...then they are to be reckoned. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Here is where we are not in phase. It is not mutually exclusive for everyone to read their manuals and follow all the instructions or for devices to be improved so that people don't have to read the manuals. It's not zero sum...it's a positive sum because the more of either that the operator and the manufacturer do, the more safety the user has. One of them, improved design, has the potential to be more reliable than the other, because it is human nature to be fallable. The opposite, that machines cannot ever possibly exceed humans, is but arrogance. There's an opportunity here for manufacturers to step up and give us operators an improved ability to control our safety. It's not their obligation or their responsibility, but that won't stop them. They'll do it because people like me will pay them for it. 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 for lack of a better word to indicate the rest of the relationship. My usage is not without precedent...it's used the the tech world to some degree to refer to user interfaces of all sorts. But I'm not attached to terminology & I actually wouldn't mind to take in new language, if you have any to offer. IMO, that's part of "ergonomics" / human-machine-interface. "If the shoe fits" type of thing. In this case, the shoe nearly fits, but not quite. History is replete with examples of machines that exceeded their designers' original intentions. Could be and were modified to exceed their original form. Ron & Lawndart's proposals for modifying the cypres to fit a wingsuit pilot are facile. It completely misses the point to focus on dead ends like that. I'm sure I will, if someone doesn't before me. My trade is not in device design and manufacture right now...If anyone wants to wait for me to do it, it will be at least several years... My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

How's that adage go, great minds think alike... LawnDart21 Ron Clearly that's not the way to do it then. Ok then, we're done, time to call it a day. It must be impossible to do There's more than one way to tell how high up off the earth you are, and whether your parachute has opened and whether another one ought to be. Not all of them are accessible to us right now because our current designs have all made similar choices. You guys have it tho, using a single variable (altitude) parameterized over time is not the Way. To start off with, there are non-trivial ways of tinkering with the cypres mode of operation, such as creating a base station (presumably at the manifest office or in the plane) that could program cypresses throughout the day with authenticated data about the dropzone. Then we can get weird. GPS wasn't affordable in the early '90s. It's still not particularly reliable today. Then there are radio services such as LORAN and WAAS, DGPS, radar, transponders, etc, all of which in 1990 couldn't fit into a device the size of your altimeter, but today that can. I've got a hunch that something like this could be used to improve upon the cypres, or at least match up to it in many circumstances. In 1990 you couldn't buy a video camera that ran off tiny batteries and could fit on the side of your head. And you couldn't buy a computer fast enough to process images from the cameras we have today, and certainly that computer wouldn't fit in your pocket. The 5" handheld ipaq I just bought outclasses the cutting edge 30 lb system I bought in 1997. Hardly anybody had studied the image processing algorithms you'd use. My imagination is not limited by the toys I have in front of me. Yours shouldn't be either. The military, at least, has demonstrated the feasibility of using video for navigation. They've been doing it on big budgets since the 70's at least. Why could this never work for skydiving? For illustration about what's easy now compared to 1990, last year a kid put together an automated aiming system for his BB gun using a webcam and his computer. linkety goodness Actually it's been redone independently, this time with a paintball gunwith more linkety goodness My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That's ergonomics! (sorry goose491). Not so much that the design is bad but that changes to the design of the machine can make up for deficiencies in the design of me. And all the people like me. That's what the device is for after all. I don't have enough hubris to be certain that I'm more like the 1%(or whatever miniscule percentage it is) of people who needed their cypres due to incapacity instead of in-volition. Key the cypres debate in 3...2...1... To me the cypres is only a successful and popular brand. Like a Model T in the 1910s. But not the epitome of design by any means. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

There is much hand-wringing about what it means for one thing to cause another. The Ancient Greeks dealt with this same problem, and this is the solution that Aristotle, one of their scholars, came up with. Material cause: "that out of which a thing comes to be, and which persists," e.g., bronze, silver, and the genus of these (= metal?). Formal cause: "the statement of essence" "the account of what-it-is- to-be, and the parts of the account." Efficient cause: "the primary source of change," e.g., the man who gives advice, the father (of the child). Final cause: "the end (telos), that for the sake of which a thing is done," e.g., health (is the cause of exercise). What does this have to do with skydiving? Many times people say "he died because ...", or "his parachute failed due to a ..." etc. Why does my canopy snivel, why do I get off heading openings, etc. This is a lexicon to help us think about asking and answering questions. Examples (made up incident) a. He died because his organs turned to jelly. b. He died because when he deployed the parachute it partially opened and became entangled with his legs, causing a spin. He cut away the main but it did not separate, and his cypres fired, deploying his reserve into the tangled main. The combined entanglement did not slow him enough until impact. c. He died because he did not cock his pilot chute. d. He died skydiving. Typically it seems that the media reports (d), the Final cause only. They sometimes try to get at the Formal and Efficient causes, but they usually screw it up. When people post to the incidents forum, they usually want to know the Formal cause first, and then debate and learn from the Efficient cause. Sometimes the Material cause is at issue, such as when people with prior or previously unknown health conditions die in the midst of skydiving. When somebody asks, "what can cause this", to answer the original poster it is worth trying to find which of the causes they are after, and for everyone's sake it's usually worth discussing the others (at the risk of being verbose). And then the subject is materially beaten to death. reference: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/4causes.htm My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Your memory and mine are much the same...and I agree that he's probably right on the safety bit. But the market has shown that safety is not the only consideration on the average jumper's mind when he purchases a rig & new risers.. Why else would mini-3 rings still be everywhere? Hrm...maybe we need a new bsr against mini-3 rings

I know that some of my wants are unattainable...that doesn't keep me from wanting them. It's part of being human, don't you think? I have no data from Aerodyne...but I suspect they have a reason up their sleeves for going with a tweaked design. Tho not all improvements are safety related, like Bill Booth said about mini 3-rings. Perhaps not quite as reliable as full size, but sexy enough to sell very well. Another weakness of the current cypres: wingsuit jumpers like me. I regularly descend at way less than airtec / ssk's published activation descent rate when I'm "cruising" in my suit. If I were to get distracted and pass through 750 ft I don't have too much confidence that my cypres would do anything. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Sure. But it's an open-ended conjecture... For it to be demonstrably untrue, the cypres would have to be the pinnacle of design. Do you predict that AADs will look & function much the same in 50 or 100 years as they do today? One button, 4 digit display hidden inside the backpad or at the neck of the rig, 12-year device life? 14-hour manual reset. Limited data interfaces, no integration to real-time data collection & presentation instruments (think about what Alti-2 is doing with their Titan research)... No. There's no way I can assume that the cypres is the end of the line. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

*cough* People have been working on improving the 3-ring. Aerodyne has been using one with a lengthier middle ring piece, I don't remember who came out with mini-3 rings first but I do remember hearing Bill Booth lament that someone else built & sold it before him (he didn't seem to think it was safer than the original 3-rings...but he did seem to begrudge it being invented by someone else...) It's inexorable. Just because you are satisfied today with a product doesn't mean it can't be improved. Even airtec/ssk made minor tweaks to the cypres 2 over the cypres wrt ease of battery maintenance. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I'm not debating the utility of the device with you. I use one myself. There are also several dead men six feet under who can attest to the fact that design improvements might cause fewer people to die. Laugh all you want. Improvement in gear design is not about giving manufacturers responsibility. Gear manufacturers rarely push you out of the plane or pay the manifest girls for you. Responsibility doesn't mean squat if you are about to get hurt because you and your gear didn't get along. And the point is that's not a one-way street. What it comes down to is getting better gear and being able to do more with it. Before you die. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That's a fatalist attitude. Just because error cannot be totally eliminated doesn't mean that reducing it isn't worthwhile. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't give up just because we have something that's more than halfway decent. 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 it. What I want is to never have to worry about it not firing when I want it to fire, or firing when I don't want it to fire. An on-off switch might not the best design in this circumstance, since I am fallable and I can't be counted on 100% to get the switch right. More like 99.9%. "Should have done it" is little consolation to me if I get caught in that 0.1%, especially if the device could have been designed to account for it. Saying that a simple on-off switch is optimal sounds a lot like an unwarranted assumption about ergonomics. I think you guys should read a little bit on the subject...for starters you might try the archives of the Risks Digest which has a lot of descriptions & discussions of accidents, some of which could easily have been prevented by ergonomics. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?