mcstain

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Posts posted by mcstain

  3. JWest

    I will probably wear a camera before 200 jumps and I will do it safely. I will do it by recognizing that the camera is a distraction and by focusing on the dive. I am not a camera flyer. My job is not to get the shot. The camera is just there to record what ever it records. If it doesn't record anything than who gives a shit. You had a successful skydive. If the camera gets snagged I'll pull my helmet cutaway and execute the emergency I practiced on the ground.



    Do you honestly think you're the first person with less than 200 jumps to think that they have "the right stuff" to jump a camera safely?

    Simply turning the camera on and off is a distraction. The argument for the 200 jump minimum is that for the first 200 jumps, you shouldn't have anything non-essential distracting you before, during or after your jump. On jump run, you should be checking your handles, not fiddling with your GoPro to make sure the red light is on. Same goes following deployment, you should be checking your airspace, not trying to turn your camera off. On the way to the plane, you should be checking your gear and rehearsing the dive, not thinking about whether your camera has enough battery or storage space left on it.

    In Australia, the minimum requirement to jump camera is a C license, which can be obtained after 100 jumps. It's not my place to decide whether this is appropriate or not, but I do have an opinion on people who are so sure they can do something safely and therefore should be exempt from rules or regulations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

  7. MisterCrash

    I tried discussing this with my psychiatrist today. She also rejected my arguments. During the session she made several comments on what a difficult patient I am and they could have easily discharged me from the hospital because all I did was lay down in the couch.

    I told her I needed more help in getting my ass into fitness therapy and she said the staff already tried everything to help me get into therapy. She said I needed to show more commitment to fight my depression. The basic line I got from the conversation was "you are responsible for your depression, you should solve it".

    That's why I escaped from the hospital and will ask they fire me immediatly. If I have to believe my psychiater there is nothing they can do to help me and I should go find alternatives.

    I'm really dissapointed in the way they treated me...



    Argh, that really sucks, I'm sorry to hear that. I tried to allude to the possibility of this happening in my post. It can take a long time to find a psychiatrist/psychologist/doctor that you see eye to eye with. Ultimately it can be a process of trial and error where you tell your life story over and over again at initial consultations until you find someone that you click with.

    That said, it really doesn't sound like your current therapists are helping at all. I had to laugh when you mentioned that they thought you were a difficult patient because all you did was lie on the couch. What do they expect from someone experiencing depression!??? Enthusiasm is not one of the symptoms of depression.

    Hang in there, and try to find another doctor to help out with your situation. It won't be easy, but finding the right person will help you to get the treatment that you need. In the meantime, try to look after yourself as best you can, and shoot me a PM if you want to chat.

  8. MisterCrash

    Just stumbled upon a 4 minute video about depression. It seems so well explained. In an other way that doctors and psychiaters have given to me:
    http://9gag.tv/p/aKkd3X/learn-the-science-of-depression-in-4-minute-it-s-worth-your-time-asapscience

    Could anyone tel me why my brain hasn't been scanned yet and why my DNA hasn't been analyzed? According to this video that should be the first things to do before the doctor can diagnose you and start treatment to stimulate brain growth?



    Not quite. The studies that the video is referring to are massive scientific studies designed to examine the biological basis of depression -- they are not referring to the methods used to diagnose depression. The diagnostic tools (e.g., standardised questionnaires like the K10 http://www.beyondblue.org.au/the-facts/depression/signs-and-symptoms/anxiety-and-depression-checklist-k10, DSM-V criteria) we have for depression do a pretty good job, without the need to scan brains or analyse DNA, which would be far more expensive and time consuming and not specific enough to apply to the individual biological makeup of everybody.

    In terms of stimulating brain growth, this can be achieved in a number of ways without even needing medication. Learning a new skill or even taking part in regular exercise has been shown to stimulate neurogenesis at some level. This could be why exercise can have an antidepressant effect in some people.

    Quote


    The more I do research the more I keep getting pointed at cannabis.
    http://www.jci.org/articles/view/25509
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5yzEu3JGQ#t=195
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U8XARojnbM&feature=youtu.be
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzdN-gHrsEQ&feature=youtu.be&a

    Why haven't my doctors put me on CBD yet?



    I'm not up to date on all of the research behind CBD yet, but to my knowledge it is not legal everywhere in the world, and it's not a preferred first stage medication to treat depression. In time, with more research it may become as widely prescribed as SSRIs (which increase the amount of serotonin available in the brain), but medicine and science tend to be incremental. Things rarely advance in leaps and bounds, especially with something as controversial as treating patients with cannabis derivatives.

    Best thing to do is to find a health care professional such as a doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist who you can discuss this kind of thing with. They will be far more up to date on the research in terms of CBD, but you may need to shop around to find someone a little more open minded. A lot of doctors prescribe on the basis of the status quo -- so if a medication like an SSRIs works for 70% of people, they will continue to prescribe SSRIs for all of their patients until a better option comes along. Other physicians may be more willing to enter into a non-conventional treatment plan, and this is something you can negotiate together.

  9. Alexg3265

    However I think there are a number of fucking morons and people committing suicide that can more easily skew a smaller sample. So if only 24 people in 2013 died skydiving, (I'll have to look this up) how many were suspected suicide no pulls? How many were low cutaway, reserve not quite open? All I'm saying is if you stack your cards right I fell the risk can be substantially smaller. If I go in, it'll be a dust devil at 100 ft or something I couldn't have thought of. Not because I wanted to pull low for fun(like an AFF student this weekend, that the instructor pulled for him, and then he chopped because he wanted a little more free fall, oh and he had line twists. No joke. These people skew statistics. He landed off and left the rig and reserve there. Yeah)



    Thanks for the reply. I've said all I'm going to on this topic, but thought I'd leave the annual fatality reports here for anyone interested. The USPA provides a detailed report annually on the circumstances surrounding each fatality: http://parachutistonline.com/category/tags/fatality-summary. Definitely good to read over each year's report to get a feel for what circumstances lead to fatalities, and to think about how you might handle being in the same situation. You might also be able to get a feel for the numbers involved in possible suicide/intentional no pull incidents here.

    Has that AFF student been banned from the DZ? I wouldn't want to be anywhere near them in the air if that's how they behave while still in training.

  10. Alexg3265

    Besides, STATISTICALLY you're more likely to die in a car wreck on your way to the dz, than actually jumping. Just saying....



    Can you show your working for that? Because I'd argue that your claim is false (statistically).

    It's really hard to compare skydiving with other activities like driving because of their relative frequency. The risk of dying on any one skydive is approximately 1/133,333, but of course this is influenced by your skill level and the risks of the particular jump you might be taking part in (wingsuit, relative work, freeflying).

    For driving, one way to compare the risk is by comparing the approximate distance travelled per fatality, and then working out the risk you expose yourself to on a yearly basis by driving and comparing that to the risk of making a given number of skydives in a year.

    For example, I want to compare the risk of skydiving to driving. In Australia, there are 5.8 fatalities for every billion kilometres travelled by motor vehicle (including drivers, passengers, cyclists and motorcyclists). The average person drives 10,000km in a year, which represents an overall risk of death from driving in Australia of 1/17,241. In comparison, the risk of death from performing eight skydives in a year is approximately 1/16,666.

    So while the odds of dying from skydiving per jump are lower compared a year of driving, once you jump more than 8 times in a year, skydiving represents the greater risk.

    To put this another way, one jump is approximately equal in risk to 6 weeks worth of average driving (~1150km). I'm not sure where your dropzone is, but I'm guessing it isn't 1000km away. Therefore, driving to the dropzone is not statistically more dangerous than the jump itself.

    Of course, there are so many variables involved in both of these activities that a comparison is essentially nonsensical. But I still think it's disingenuous to make the claim that the drive to the dropzone is more dangerous than skydiving overall. Again, I feel like statistics can be manipulated in many different ways to support vastly different arguments.

    The fact remains that there are choices you can make both on the ground and in the air that will reduce your chances of being injured or killed while skydiving, and that's what we should be focusing our attention on.

  11. shift

    Things more dangerous than skydiving

    Texting while driving: 6000 deaths per year
    Falling out of bed: 450 deaths per year (USA only)
    Icicles: 100 people per year (Russia only)
    Jellyfish: 20-40 deaths per year (Philippines only)
    Dogs: 34 deaths per year (USA only)
    Falling coconuts: 150 deaths per year
    Champagne Corks: 24 deaths per year
    Ladders: 355 deaths per year (USA only)
    Lightning: 24000 deaths per year



    Wrong, wrong, wrong. You've made a fundamental mistake here to claim that skydiving is safer than these activities based purely on the number of deaths per year. The difference is the relative frequency with which people are exposed to these risks.

    How many people get out of bed in the US each year? Billions. How many died from doing so in a year? Only 450. There are far fewer skydives completed each year than the number of people that get out of bed in one day in the US. For this reason alone, it would be reasonable to expect the rate of death from getting out of bed to be higher than skydiving, simply because it is done more often by more people.

    Getting out of bed is extremely safe, but for a tiny percentage of people it results in their death. Let's assume that 300 million people get out of bed every day in the US. If 450 people die doing this each year, than the average risk of death from performing this activity is 0.00000041%. This is much lower than the 0.0075% chance you have of dying from skydiving based on the yearly statistics.

    Let's also look at the champagne statistic quickly, because the numbers of deaths caused per year are the same for champagne corks and skydiving. 304 million bottles of champagne were sold in 2013 (this is just the sales figures for genuine champagne, not including any other sparkling wine with a cork that pops out). Compare this to the 3.2 million skydives that took place for the same number of deaths, and you'll see that opening a bottle of champagne is much safer than skydiving.

    To really compare relative risk of activities, you need to consider the frequency with which they are performed. If not, you could use faulty logic to claim that naked skydives are 100% safe because no-one died skydiving naked last year.

    I agree with others like JeffCA who have stressed the importance of making good decisions to reduce your exposure to risk while skydiving, but trying to argue that you're safer being a skydiver than getting out of bed in the morning is ridiculous.

  12. JeffCa

    That's not what "cumulative" means in this respect. I understand the math well, but not sure if they chose the correct phrase with "cumulative risk". The OP cocked up his math, subsequent posters fixed it and are correct. The OP was suggesting with his original math that if you skydive 133,000 times, that your risk of dying would be 100%, that for each jump you get away with, the chances the next one would kill you increases, as you get closer to the 133,000 number, your odds of death would slowly increase to 100% for any given jump.



    Right, thanks for clarifying. I've seen people make the argument that the risk doesn't add up over a lifetime of jumping before though.

  13. Holy fuck there are some clueless know-it-all statisticians in this thread. To those of you saying the risk is not cumulative -- wake up and think about it for a second.

    Imagine you have a coin: flip heads and you live, flip tails and you die. 50% chance of death on any one flip, right? Now, how likely is it that you will make it to fifty flips? Pretty fucking unlikely. Yes, the chance that it will come up tails on any one flip is 50%, but if you keep flipping that coin over and over, eventually your number is going to be up. REPEATED EXPOSURE TO RISK IS CUMULATIVE.

    Apply the same situation to skydiving, except that this time, it is much less likely that you are ever going to flip tails. Let's imagine that the coin is weighted so that it will only ever land on tails once out of every 133,333 coin tosses. This is the equivalent of saying that on any one jump you have a 1/133,333 chance of death. Now keep flipping that coin. Again, as in the example above, the chance of death on any one dive is 1/133,333. But over a lifetime of jumping, you increase your exposure to the risk that the coin will come up tails.

    On any one jump the risk is low. But do it over and over again and you increase the chance that your number comes up. It's that simple.

    See here for a worked example: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/29950/does-repeated-activity-increase-the-probability-of-a-specific-event-happening

    If you replace the numbers in the answer with the correct statistic for risk of death on one skydive, you can calculate your relative risk of death over a lifetime of jumping by specifying the number of jumps you expect to do.

  14. Deimian

    I am not sure the hard deck even matters here. I mean, your hard deck is there to cut away your main and have enough altitude to deploy your reserve safely. In this case the reserve is already deployed, so I am not sure if the hard deck is really relevant. Keeping in mind that obviously the highest the better.



    Yeah this is a good point. I guess hard deck was the wrong term to use here. I was more referring to the idea of an altitude at which I commit to landing with more nylon over my head versus attempting to cutaway. As others have brought up though, this biplane could potentially turn into a downplane so I guess it's a situation that you need to constantly keep monitoring until you're on the ground.

    Will definitely be bringing this up with instructors next time I'm at the DZ.

  15. Oh man, that's ugly. I don't know what the best thing to do would be, but my first instinct would be to cutaway and hope that I could get out of the line twists after the main (hopefully) departs. That's presuming I'm above my hard deck. Below that I really don't know what I'd do. Thanks for posting this, I'll be chatting with my instructors to get their advice next time I'm at the DZ.

  17. MisterCrash

    I have been taking meds for years. Had electroshock therapy and other therapies. Nothing seems to work :(



    Definitely keep trying different meds. Some people it takes years and years before they find one that works for them. Though it does sound like you've tried a number of different approaches so it's not like you're avoiding the issue.

    One other small thing is to assess your diet and exercise regime. Do you eat mostly fresh food with plenty of fruit and vegetables? Do you exercise regularly? I've found these things to affect my moods and general outlook on life to a surprising extent.

  18. Fall0ut

    Hope this does not turn into "vaporware" like the C6 Air..



    On that note, I received an email from Sky Systems a week ago saying that the C6 was in the "final stages of testing" and that it would be available in 3-4 weeks. Of course, we've been hearing a similar story for a long time now, but perhaps it is indeed getting closer to release.

  19. ASOT_QC

    I was at 1500' when I realized I would not have any flare at all. So I braked the canopy at about 60-75%, prayed for a soft landing and started to maneuver into a landing pattern.



    What is your hard deck?

    Quote

    That day, we had a No-wind approach so there were no turbulence on the ground. I kept it braked until I touched the ground, very slowly, with only a 2-3 steps to stop the landing.



    Did you consider using your rear risers for landing? Do you know where the stall point is on your rear risers?

    Quote

    Anyway, my point is :

    JUST DON'T EVER LET GO OF THE TOGGLES ONCE YOU UNDO YOUR BRAKES!



    I think that there are some other lessons to be learned from this incident, apart from holding onto your toggles. Did you speak to an instructor or experienced jumper about the incident?

  22. SethInMI

    ...what would you do with your 1-2 min of time if you found yourself in the air after some sort of event (say at a low enough alti (15k ft or so) that you could function.



    Assuming I didn't have a rig on board:

    1. Slow fall like my life depended on it and prepare to PLF into the softest looking object/area on the ground
    2. Go for one last tracking dive and try to enjoy the view. At least when your buddies hear about you pounding in miles from the crash site they'll know you went out with a smile on your face.

  23. Rover

    What a load of melodramatic crap. [:/]

    Quote

    It would be the first time in five years of skydiving that he’d needed to cut away, but hey, there was a first time for everything. Besides, part of him was excited to see what it was like. He closed his eyes to better focus and shoved his hand up from his hip to grasp the cutaway handle



    :S Looking might work!

    ***The canopy malfunction had been so violent that it had yanked the cutaway handle upward. It was stuck between him and Shirley, and he couldn’t reach it. Worse, the other cutaway handle was blocked by her body.


    Excuse my ignorance - but what system has 2 cutaway handles - or is this an indication to the research done by the journalist!

    Full of 'my life flashed before my eyes' bullshit. My 11 year old son could write an article better than this.

    Journalistic flair aside, this is a remarkable story and I think it's worth recognising the efforts that Dave made to save his student's life at the cost of his own wellbeing.

  24. BigMikeH77

    Why don't you jump with some force-measuring equipment and tell US?

    Your name is a sham, I have bellybutton lint older than your registration date, and this is your first post. Contribute something worthwhile and inform US of your findings.



    Settle the fuck down. If you don't like people asking questions on forums then maybe you shouldn't visit forums.

  25. Downsizing because your container is too small doesn't sound like an ideal justification. Can you check off all of the skills from this article for your current canopy? http://www.dropzone.com/safety/Canopy_Control/Downsizing_Checklist_47.html

    I'm not going to pretend that I have any expertise in this area, but I've been told that you should have totally mastered your current canopy before even considering downsizing.

    Have you done a canopy course before? If you get the chance, you could take part in a canopy course and let the coach know that you're considering downsizing. They could then assess your skills and provided tailored training for your situation.

    Just some ideas!