grue

My first burble was on a non-student jump, I think it was jump like 27 or something right around there, and while I knew in theory what had happened, I wasn't 100% sure how I was supposed to deal with it. My response endeded up being to curl into a little ball and cannonball off the other guy's rig to get clean air I figured "well, since there's no air anyway, I might as well protect myself and get ready to collide..." cavete terrae.

That's roughly standard, but many dropzones will make exceptions for the right reason. Most dropzones, in my limited experience, are more likely to let an athlete in that weight range jump than a couch potato, the presumed logic being that a muscular, in-shape 230lb hockey player is going to be able to deal with a potentially brisk landing better than than a 5'1" 230lb land manatee would probably would. cavete terrae.

SL jumps at my DZ are $40, but student freefalls are $25/each with gear rental, so that could be correct. cavete terrae.

I haven't jumped since the last day of the Holiday Boogie cavete terrae.

SCRUBS! cavete terrae.

I don't know if this will be any help to you, but here goes: My ski/snowboard gloves have removable liners. I reckon you could likely buy them separately, or just find some very thin fleece gloves at your local mega-uber-mart. I wear these inside my american football gloves that I jump in if it's cold out. I wore them most recently on my 21,800' jump at Eloy, and they were more than warm enough. I've also used 'em on some of the colder days out here, and I've never had my hands cool enough to even notice discomfort. The best part is that you have almost the exact same feel as you normally would with your normal gloves. cavete terrae.

zombie cockroaches unholy masters guide them only to their death Fuck february colder than my ex girlfriend get to jump less, too. cavete terrae.

http://loom.corante.com/archives/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php February 02, 2006 The Wisdom of Parasites Posted by Carl Zimmer I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa. As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head. The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears. From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash. The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes. The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative. Ampulex%20emerging.jpg I find this wasp fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it represents an evolutionary transition. Over and over again, free-living organisms have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision. If you consider a full-blown parasite, it can be hard to conceive of how it could have evolved from anything else. Ampulex offers some clues, because it exists in between the free-living and parasitic worlds. Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today. And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with their sting. But they can manage only a crude imitation; the manipulated cockroaches quickly dehydrated and were dead within six days. The wasp venom somehow puts the roaches into suspended animation while keeping them in good health, even as a wasp larva is devouring it from the inside Scientists don't yet understand how Ampulex manages either of these feats. Part of the reason for their ignorance is the fact that scientists have much left to learn about nervous systems and metabolism. But millions of years of natural selection has allowed Ampulex to reverse engineer its host. We would do well to follow its lead, and gain the wisdom of parasites. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna follow Howard Hughes' lead. ANyone have some tissue boxes and glass jars? cavete terrae.

http://www.catch27.com/join.php?invite=119058 I have no idea what the actual point of this site is, I think it's like myspace for people with ADHD or something It's kinda fun though! I'm amassing a proper pimp's stable! cavete terrae.

Durka Durka Freefall Association cavete terrae.

When I was talking to my brother after my cutaway at Eloy, he asked "So did you have to replace the lines, or are they just shorter now?" "Dude... what?" "After having to cut them away, can they be reused, or do you need new ones?" cavete terrae.

I dunno, but I hope my friend never finds out that I hooked up with her little little sister, or she'll kill me. cavete terrae.

66. I really, really do not wanna live to be 66. cavete terrae.

Dave, can we use raw video from other places? E.g. other people's dumps from a jump? Or do we have to have shot the actual video ourselves? cavete terrae.

I've gotta write a few papers that just aren't gonna happen if I don't find a way to keep myself off the site. Ban my whole IP from even viewing the site if possible. I can safely return at noon CST on Friday at the latest, but I'll have someone post for me if I'm done early cavete terrae.

What do you guys think? If the guy's a really good cook, and wanted to make, say, a 4 cheese tortellini with marinara sauce served over a herb-encrusted chicken breast, with a side of breadsticks? cavete terrae.

Depends on how hard up for a jump I am. I'd say it'd take a lot to make me jump below 30°F on the ground. cavete terrae.

I liked the Sprint "crime deterrent" ad. It gave me something to laugh at besides their technology and phones cavete terrae.

That sprint ad was great! I'd never ever ever EVER be a Sprint customer, but I liked that ad cavete terrae.

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Took these in Eloy. http://spiceweasel.net/swoop/swoop.jpg http://spiceweasel.net/swoop/swoop2.jpg http://spiceweasel.net/swoop/swoop3.jpg http://spiceweasel.net/swoop/swoopseries.jpg I need to work on the cropping and composition of the the last one, but I think it might end up neat. cavete terrae.

I'm going to be ordering a Firefly suit pretty soon, and the main issue is that I have no idea which cut I should get. I'm about 6'3", 225lbs or so (plus gear). I've only done a bit of freeflying with other people, here's the link to a vid of one of the jumps: http://spiceweasel.net/grue-benji-mittar.mov I'm the nerd in the (borrowed) red suit. I'm not sure how much I can slow myself down or speed up, because I'm so new (I think that was my 75th total jump), so I'm hoping the video will give a bit of a help for the more experienced guys. Hell, any tips on my form would be appreciated, too EDIT: Video wasn't finished uploading. Should be ready now. cavete terrae.

Yowza. Looks like $550-600 for the Seizure Suits, according to Sherry at FireFly. cavete terrae.

Yeah, all cuffs and collars will be black no matter what design I get, I was just too lazy to do it on the pic. cavete terrae.

I found this post looking for something entirely different, but I want you to know i'm only letting it slide since I was still a lurker when you posted it cavete terrae.