skr

98% vegetarian. Sometimes out in the world I'll eat other stuff, but at home it's all plants. DJan is about 99.5%. If I were out in the woods in survival mode, I'd eat whatever it took, but here in day to day mode plants seem like a better idea. They're easier to catch for one thing. Skr

Topic drift from another thread Subject: Do you believe in God? Kind of hard to articulate what "God" means so it's hard to know whether we are in the same conversation or not. But maybe "belief" is not a useful approach, except for generating threads and stuff. If I drop a brick and watch it fall, and if a horse steps on my toe and it hurts, then I can add it up and believe that if I drop a brick on my toe, it will hurt. That's belief. If I actually drop the brick on my toe and it hurts, then I no longer have to believe, I have first hand, direct experience. Isn't that what the spiritual traditions point to? They don't say what God is, they say do these things and you will have first hand, direct experience. Concrete steps that lead to predictable, repeatable results. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Of course the organizations that grow up around this can get pretty fucked up, and you also have people running around killing anyone who doesn't believe what they believe, and that gives the whole deal a bad name. But it doesn't change the original insights, do these steps and get these results. I had a couple problems with this. One is that the steps and techniques and whatnot didn't fit any model that I had learned up to that point. I wanted to figure it out, write a paper on it, turn it in, and make an A :-) :-) Failing that I wanted to just take acid for a couple weeks and be there. The idea that who I was and how I was going about it wasn't ever going to get me there, and that I had to change my approach and start becoming a different person was a long time in coming. It's like a bunch of radios standing around the parking lot talking about their belief in a radio station. The idea to stop talking and start turning the dial, start tuning in, isn't obvious. I remember one simple summary I heard once on how to turn your dial - Quiet your mind - Open your heart - Tell the truth - Help others That certainly didn't fit anything I had learned in grad school! Sometimes I think this stuff is one reason I had such difficulty writing resumes for job hunting back then. "So tell me, Mr .. uh .. Skratch(??) What have you been doing the last few years?" "Well, uh .. well, living in my van at the drop zone, and .. uh .. taking a lot of acid and jumping out of airplanes and thinking about god and .. uh .. uh ..." Jeez, that was the most main stream stuff I could come up with - I never had a chance :-) :-) Skr

Just made a pass through rec.skydiving (I've got to get a life :-) :-) and found this from Tom B: Subject: Time to change your shorts http://lightning.pwr.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/lrg/temp/plane.html Ever heard God snap his fingers? Tom B Skr

Welp, with travel plans in place and the Board meeting only a couple weeks away, DJan's having been elected is starting to become real. I had mixed reactions, interest and trepidation, while she was running. I was around Board meetings in the 60's and 70's, but I pretty much walked away from "official" skydiving after the Nationals in 1972. I am not an official structure kind of guy. Sky, clouds, ground, human nature, and the human experience of jumping out are more along my line, that and the gratification of showing new jumpers some of the stuff. So I'm looking forward to connecting with old friends, and making some new ones, and seeing how things have changed, in ways that I've sort of noticed, but not really followed. I'm a little mixed about some of the things she'll probably want my opinion on - should we have a museum, should the Nationals be here or there, should the group membership program be whatever ... How do I know? That's one reason I never ran for the Board. But she's the one on the Board, not me, and she's going to do whatever she's going to do. Probably the only thing I really dread, knowing that she is interested in Safety and Training, is that I'm going to have to plow through another five tons of that awful SIM sludge .. Yuck! :-) :-) So all in all this is going to be pretty interesting. Skr

> It's interesting; I keep hearing about how dangerous rounds > are, and how tough the "old timers" were and all that. Ah, but remember that all those round stories are greatly exaggerated for the jump story effect. It wouldn't do to tell everybody that we mostly stood up. And we shouldn't mention that all those spectacular crash and burns in the movies are because who's going to show movies of regular landings? I had 1,800 jumps before I got a square. Rounds are very peaceful and quiet. > But, you know, in those days "femured" was not a verb. I'm sure we would have if we could have though. I think that is more a statement about today's lack of training on canopy flight. That young, testosterone poisoned human nature hasn't changed a bit. Skr

America Mexico Norway Sweden Denmark Finland Germany Yugoslavia Australia New Zealand It seems like there were some other places, but I drank more beer in those days than I do now, so I'm a little unsure. Skr

> What type of gear > What type of training? I used military surplus gear. I did 3 static lines and then went on to freefall. Jack Pryor, the guy who put me out, put some people out directly on freefall. Others he took up higher and went out harness to harness (holding on to their harness). I must have looked like a flakey college kid to him because he made me do 3 static lines before he let me go free. My first jump cost $2 (1962). That included the rig, some training and the ride up. We went up to 2,500 ft over a farmer's field in a little Piper Cub with Jack in the front and me in the back. He told me to climb out and go, so I did. Life has not been the same since. Skr

> The first batton pass was between Steve Snyder and Charlie Hillard. That was the first one in the United States. I believe the first one was by Jean Louis Potron and Jackues Chalom on September 16 at Sens Air Force Base in France. Skr

> I have no idea why, but Headdown goes first at Zhills. Brian Germain and (xx - spacing his name at the moment, but he was a really good freeflyer who got hurt a few years back) both told me that they sat back by the door because it was cooler there in the summer. When the uppers picked up to some magic number they would switch the exit order and put the slow fallers out first. John Kallend wrote a modeling program to help people think about this which is here http://www.iit.edu/~kallend/skydive/ Winsor wrote an explanation which I last saw here http://www.koyn.com/clouddancer/ I put my best effort to explain it here http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/sg_skr_coach_weekend.html http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/index.html also has Bryan Burke's three orginal articles plus a couple from Bill Von from when we were talking about it on rec.skydiving around 1995. The one I wrote, Separation Explained for Students, is about 1/3 the physics of why and about 2/3 learning how to do it (get separation at opening, which is the motive for all this). OPEC changed the oil prices in 1973. Shortly after that we started putting out multiple groups per pass. That's almost 30 years and we're STILL not teaching people why and how to do it. Sorry, but that's been bugging me for a very long time. Skr

> It was the only way to be really sure of what you were going to end up with. Ah, I hadn't thought of that. I have always assumed without thinking about it that we used assembly language because those IBM 7094's only had 32K worth of 36 bit words for main memory. Every time we added / changed features for a new mission we had to find room, delete this bit, rewrite that bit, overlay another bit. Every mission was a time of excitement and terrified anticipation. What if the parts that I wrote Don't Work!! ?? :-) :-) Skr

> (very old) programming on the shuttle's onboard computers Nostalgia .. I worked at JPL in the 60's in the trajectory analysis group. We did the trajectories for the first moon, mars, venus and other missions. I wrote the midcourse maneuver program and some other stuff. We did the whole thing in assembly language. Skr

60. Now that I've discovered senior discounts, I'm considering starting a movement for senior discounts on jump tickets. Skr

> I'm guessing that it didn't turn out how you had formatted it, huh? Pretty quick on the trigger :-) :-) I was still trying various markup edits when you saw it and responded. Skr

> I think that when it's time to be signed off > for the A license, that jumpers should go through > another canopy class Even more than that the first 30 or 40 jumps should be mostly about canopy flying and general parachuting, with a little freefall stuff tossed in for entertainment. Not as in hold them back on the freefall stuff, but don't let them loose until they show some signs of flying their canopy without scaring anybody. Canopy flying and landing are complicated and people really need a good, systematic introduction. I re arranged the order and emphasis of the coaching part of the ISP at our drop zone to reflect that attitude. The details are at the bottom of the page http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/ but it looks something like this: ------------------------------------------------------------- Jump | | | | Numbers | Canopy | | | | Control | | | | | | | | | Exit | | | | | Separation | | | | | | | | | Packing | | | | | | | | | Manifesting | | \ / | Gear Rental | | | | | | | |-------------------| | | | | | | Freefall | Cessna | | | | Recess Playground | | | | | | | | | Spotting | | | | Tracking | | | | | | | | | | \ / | (Moving students from being told) |-------------------| | (every little move to being able) | | | (to take care of themselves ) Freefall | | | | Docks | | | Swoops | | | | Exits | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------------- \ / | ----------------- > ----------------- > ------------------> A License | Proficiency card requirements + Calhan enhancements Skr

> It is two-way - there are some stills from the film in Bud Sellick's Aha - I didn't see this post down here when I replied to the one above. One further bit of arcane knowledge that probably no one will ever need again is that that meadow on the mountain in the background disappears at 1,800 ft. It was one of the visual clues for when to pull. Skr

> shot of someone going through an open canopy I was on that jump. It was Willy Manbo and Ken Vos going through Bill's(? spacing his name out) canopy. He had gotten below us and then gotten scared being down there by himself and had pulled. It was right at the end of the jump. Carl didn't even know he had it until he developed the film (16 mm gun camera). It was at Elsinore and I'm pretty sure it was summer 1966. Skr

Well that caused my heart to lurch .. > "Why do I choose to not rekindle a passion that was so deep?" The first answer that bubbles up is to point to the pain now associated with skydiving. The second is that maybe you don't believe you can learn to jump without hurting yourself. Both parts are fixable if you're lucky and no one answers your gear for sale ad and you hang out with the right people for a while. Posting this here was a good start at finding some of them. Of course there are no guarantees, and maybe your path in life really is somewhere else, but there are no guarantees on any other path either and that's not a question we are ever going to answer. I got hurt once, actually a couple times, but only once really bad. In 1980, after 18 years and 2,500 jumps, I hit under a spinning long story mess on some hard packed Oklahoma dirt, the concrete runway would have been softer. Should have died but I laid out flat and made it. The bounce didn't hurt, but after I came to it sure as hell did. That and some other life caused me to pull way back during the 80's. In 1992 I met DJan (via rec.skydiving) and in 1993 I found myself standing around Skydance while she was going for her AFF rating. Dan O'Brien, whom I had known since he was a young sprout, saw me standing there. He knew my story and basically said two words to me. He took one of his own rigs, put a bigger main in it, walked out the door, handed it to me, and said "Rig.". Then he pointed to a King Air with people getting on it and said "Airplane ... Go.". I guess it was actually three words, and he turned around and walked off. I was scared shitless. I had made maybe 40 jumps since 1980 and none at all in 5 years. I had lost all my emotional callouses. My conscious mind couldn't cope with what I was doing, I made it out the door at 13,500 using ancient neural path ways that still knew how. Freefall was very familiar but I felt surreal. At about 10,000 ft this rush of primal fear came up out of my deepest gut and up my body and just about blew my helmet off. At 5,000 I'd had enough and pulled. We're mammals, not birds, fear of falling and learning from pain are wired into our deepest physical being. It's kind of miraculous that our soaring of spirit, and friendship, and expression of art and creativity can be even more powerful. Now if I'm getting your story right one key log in the emotional log jam is the fear of canopy flying and landings based on not knowing how to do it. We have an epidemic of that because student canopy training hasn't been worth shit for a long time. I see it all the time, I jump with lots of new jumpers and canopy control and general parachuting is about 80% of it. I see lot's of "experienced" jumpers who were never taught these basics. I saw DJan at 2,800 jumps make a bad move to miss a barbed wire fence, break her pelvis in 6 places, sever an artery and almost die on the flight for life helicopter. 300 jumps later she's getting pretty good, thinking ahead up high, talking about nuances and fine points in her flare, and so on. So, aside from empathy with your current state, the point of all this is that there is another alternative, which is to find the right people to hang with and learn the canopy skills that you were never taught. I'm going to email you an article called "Wings Level" to mull if it's not too late. We can all screw up and hurt ourselves, but with any luck it can be some exotic set of moves that nobody has ever thought of, and not some day to day blunder that anybody with 10 jumps could have done :-) :-) Skr

When I have a particular thread displayed is there a way to toggle between display all posts and display only unread posts? In my display profile I have set it to jump to the first unread post, but it always goes to the root post anyway. Maybe my more general question is about window management and keeping track of where I am in the hierarchy of forums and threads. (Life was simpler 10 or 12 years ago on rec.skydiving when there were maybe 5 or 6 posts a day :-) Anyway, right now I use 3 mozilla windows. First, on the left side of the screen, is the list of forums. Second, displaced a couple inches to the right, is a particular forum with the threads collapsed to one per line. I started with all threads expanded but that would take a long time to display. Also, after hanging out here for a bit I see that there is way too much traffic to try to read or even scan it all, so now I just look at a few threads in a few forums. Third, displaced a couple more inches to the right, is a window with a particular thread in it. Here is where I would like to toggle between just display unread posts (the default) and show all posts in case I need to backtrack for context. With the list of threads in window two I can also tell whether to hit next thread in window three, or close that window, scroll down the list of posts in window two and open a new window three with a new thread in it. So how do you guys approach this? Have I wedged myself into a really clumsy technique? Is there some way I can skip lightly from thread to thread like tracking through a sky full of puffies? Skr

I voted for Winsor. I agree with his views on lots of skydiving topics. Skr

I've always thought tracking meant what you do to get maximum horizontal distance, so I'm not sure what people are getting at when they speak of flat tracking, but in any case I put a description of tracking here: http://indra.net/~bdaniels/ftw/rwg_skr_pvpr_track.html Skr

(45 degree rule discussion) Then John says > There is no basis in math or physics for this method Hi John - I sometimes get the feeling that I could be on the far side of the moon and run into people talking about exit separation :-) :-) You're right, the 45 degree rule is the airspeed half of the old airspeed/groundspeed discussion. There is a basis in psychology and history for it though. After GPS came along and several generations were taught to stare at the green lemming light while counting some arbitrary number of seconds it was real progress to get people sticking their head out the door looking into the situation they were about to jump into. Being an idealist I think people should be taught how to look down and tell when they have covered enough ground, but I have accepted that that's not going to happen. So maybe the real answer is to put some kind of GPS digital readout thingy back by the door so people can get separation without guessing. One day here in Colorado the King Air out at Brush showed 12 knots ground speed on its GPS. Skr

A few months ago I sat through the ground school part of an AFF certification course that Rick Horn gave here in Colorado, and I asked him about that. Unstowing the brakes with both out seemed like a really bad idea - you are taking a touchy situation and making it even more touchy. He said that shouldn't be in there, it was a mistaken copy and paste from some possible moves an experienced jumper might think about. (He also said the maximum performance turn one way and then the other on the A license proficiency card was another accidental copy and paste that shouldn't be there.) I've never had two canopies out, well not since the 60's when I was experimenting with things, but, after talking to a number of experienced people, seeing a few two outs, and thinking about it, if I ever have one I plan to: - If it's a biplane then steer really gently with the front canopy and try to get on the ground before anything weird happens (leave the brakes stowed and steer with the rear risers of the front canopy). - If it's a down plane then chop the main. - If it's a side by side then sweat bullets of indecision while I try some really gentle steering and see how it feels and then either land it or force a down plane and then chop the main or maybe something I haven't thought of yet. Skr

> Just looked at his web site Uh oh, I better get busy and get some more content up there .. I was just upgrading my system. Sometimes that's easy. Sometimes it's like stepping into a black hole. Being in over my head as root is as scary as jumping out of an airplane. I'll be back. Skr

DJan http://www.esig.ucar.edu/HP_jan.html will probably be holding one in Colorado around March. Her contact info is on that web page. skr

> Ok, folks. Scratch started this idea in another thread, Just for clarity I want to point out that Scratch with a "c" is not the same person as Skratch with a "k". As to the question of paying 25 $/yr I don't know. It's a reasonable question, I just don't know what I think. skr (Skratch with a "k")