lurch

Its fun beyond all ability to communicate. The most fun part of it is the swoopy "going over the top" soaring, launched-from-a-cannon feeling that goes with it. First time I did one of those I -knew- I'd just got the suit to climb even before I saw the alti and GPS results. If you've never experienced it, there's just no way to really describe it, but when you get it, oh, BOY do you know it. Its a very visceral, "WHOA, HOLY SHIT!!!" sort of feeling you can't mistake for anything else. You can get the eerie silence at speeds around 29 and below... maintain it and all you get is a very quiet hissing sound in your ears... no windblast at all. Its tricky to get the suit to hook up properly and stabilize under 30 mph but when it does, things go quiet and STAY quiet and you're just floating around up there all day. I love it...

Ok perhaps this information could be of use to you then because I still haven't figured this out. There is a tremendous amount of slop between alti-track and GPS. What I don't get is why the slop works as it does. My standard has been "reads a climb" at will as an arbitrary repeatable performance goal. So long as my speed is high enough in one direction or another, it works every time. But no two are alike. Sometimes I get a clean sharp climb on GPS set to 2G, but nothing on the alti, planeouts to single digits. Sometimes I get both- On playback the altimeter rewinds dramatically, shows climbrates as high as -29 mph, regain of about 70-150 feet and the GPS shows a track that agrees with it give or take about 50 feet, maybe 100. (alti: says +120, GPS says +50, very small hump on the graph.) Sometimes I get a clean rewind on the altimeter but not on the GPS which may show a flatline 0mph planeout but no real climb. Where is the majority of the error, here? GPS? Alti? I'd think, if anything, air pressure transient effects should damp out, muffle, true climb readings, increased pressure under wing surface. About the only significant variables I can think of are wrist angle and overall suit angle of attack. Aside from that, both devices experience the same conditions. What else influences this? GPS isn't seeing it, erratic data rate? Number of satellites? How long it was on, on the ground? How can I tighten this up? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well Robi, I got one private "thank you" and two public smackings for that one post so I cut that mess in half for benefit and sanity of future victims- er, readers.

That's quite alright, Murf. Although Robi is inarguably correct, I am too wordy, if a page and a half, maybe two is too taxing for you, you're quite free to spend 2 years and about $20,000 in gear, travel, training, effort and experience to work all that out for yourself. I'm sure it will take less time than reading a couple of pages of -my- nonsense. Have fun! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ow, tough crowd. In my own defense though Robi, I get a lot of feedback from people who -want- descriptions in that level of detail. And there's just so much to describe. But, duly noted. I'll work on it. Hows this post?

Some observations and notes: This year I've been having some difficulty with my audibles and accuracy relative to the flysight's idea of where exactly the entry gate is. Last year training for Hungary and all through the event, I never missed and had been fine-tuning the apex of the planeout +/- about 75 feet to see where was the most efficient place to put the peak of the energy exchange, vertical speed/horizontal speed. I had been building an attack setup in which the highest scores in distance or time I could get were dependent on a rather elaborate series of events detailed below, with accurate planeout as the foundation. This year my old pro-track started beeping 500 feet too soon and in training I was planing out 500 feet above the gate. Frustrating. At first I blamed it on my altered dive attack but the inaccuracy is way bigger than the change in timing implied. Something else was going on here. I figured maybe the alti was dying of old age... it dates from 2003. I bought an N3... tried it... seemed accurate... then started getting the same effect: Beeper was going off somewhere around 10,500 ft even when set to go at 9,900 so the same timing that was accurate last year missed repeatedly this year. I still haven't found out precisely what is causing this effect but it ain't the alti's fault cause both of em are doing it. Cost me $300 to troubleshoot this only to get a negative answer and no real solution but it almost certainly has something to do with deleting the full-freefly element from the setup attack. Something about a slightly slower approach throws off the beeper. Air pressure? Angle of airflow? Unsure. Finally, in training I set the thing to go off lower, only to find that when the effect intermittently vanished, now my planeout was 500 feet too LOW. In the end with it costing me 1 run per data point just to debug this and only 3 weeks to train for Hungary I set the beepers in between the two extremes of its' variance and started introducing my own delay, shooting by a mix of instruments and intuition... *beep* (one...two... HIT IT.) It worked in Hungary anyway. Then I focused on other elements of comp attack. First: A full-on headdown freefly in the Apache XRW/Rebel suit. This is like trying to drag race in a dump truck. The suit is designed to be the slowest possible wingsuit and will fight you if you try to drive it hard. It required a whole set of management tricks to keep it under control for this stage. Top speed vertical: 178 mph. Second: Assuming perfect planeout timing the next step is efficiently converting the built up speed. My first year at Spot's game I was used to having 3000 feet to set up the attack and tune it at my leisure and found the 1000 foot runup restriction cramped my style a bit. Played the game anyway of course. I love a challenge. In the 2 years between, I got better at setting up and dialing in a max attack quickly and no longer really needed the luxury of the full runup anyway. In testing awhile back I eventually discovered the 178 headdown terminal was excessive and unnecessary. First year winning in Hungary was a binary attack, all-or-nothing, this year I made it more analog and began working on in-between variations, learning a boatload of detail I knew nothing about the first year in the process. I got the same distances and times at a slight angle and topping out no higher than 140-ish. All the rest of the energy was lost in the planeout. But when I did this and began using it as my technique, my accuracy at the gate suffered. I'd been doing it as a very very fast move with 100 feet notice from full headdown. Gate@ 9800, beeper at 9900. (as high as a Protrack goes.) Reaction time was a major factor. Beeper goes off, release the suit and bring up the nose, sweep back and pick up the grippers, (let anyone observant figure out what the hell I was doing with my hands if not holding the grippers, which I never do for that part... Hint: anyone who saw how I exited for my second speed run will have seen this trick, I threw it back in there just for the hell of it) then drop the hammer on it while holding the nose down hard to restrain it from flaring off into a climb... all in 100 feet starting from 178 mph. The G force was intense... like a full-body shockwave punch. Kick off the shock at the right angle and its all but invincible... -if- you do it right. The timing was repeatable and precise. At a given speed this ninja move was pinpoint accurate. But only from a consistent arrival speed. Slow down some and it threw me off wicked, but bought me more time to fine tune in other areas. In training last year I had this down so perfectly that when I came up with a dive attack that let me keep the grippers in hand AND a leash on the suit, it shaved ~750 mS off my planeout timing, deleted the "sweep back and pickup grippers" move, the different arm and airflow angle caused my armwing zippers to pound loose, come undone and my wings to blow clean off, and caused me to repeatedly planeout 50 feet above the gate. Disgusted, I went back to the older, cruder, but more accurate way I'd been doing it because I neded to put that precise delay time back into the attack for it to work right. Hey, what the hell, it worked. And reassembling my suit in midflight when my wings blew off was a bitch. The one time I decided to let that slide, the first time it happened, unsure quite what to do about it, the right wing waited till deployment to unzip entirely, THEN blew off, right when I let go of the gripper to go for the pull, making for a rather interesting deployment sequence. As I made the throw, one wing vanished. (!!!) I fell over heavily headdown and toward the right just as I released the PC. Avoided line twists and/or barrel roll though my own lines only via an insane split-second hail-mary corkscrew left-wing and tailtwist move with the remaining 75% of the suit to get back level under the canopy before the risers loaded up. After that one, I always took the trouble to go back, hand one gripper to the other hand, and rezip the wings in between gate exit and deployment while I was experimenting with that set of moves. When I ditched the grippers-in-hands approach as a failed line of research this zipper effect went away on its own anyway. Interestingly, making runs with my wings partially or fully unzipped didn't cost much performance. But it did get windy in there. Third: converting from either steep or full headdown to boosted distance and time. With a fully overcharged suit this is trickier than it looks. Very easy to overdo it and the trick was in keeping the nose down and gradually applying power so as not to blaze away most of the energy in a recoil climb. After winning a couple of these events I felt I could experiment some more so I've started trying to see how close I can shave this move and it shows clearly in the results. I got a clean accidental climb in Time run 2... I let the suit slip the leash a little too much, there. A pity I wasn't more accurate, I'd have quite liked to see how the software would deal with it if I climbed back out of the gate and had 2 gate entries in one run. Damn near got it this time, too.

A recent tandem student, showed up at my dropzone, with an eye to the future, and dressed for success. Fuck, yeah.

To date, no device I've ever tried could accurately and reliably detect the real freefall time. I've had a Protrack, a Neptune 1, Neptune 3, Altitrack... Any seriously long flight, the device is going to mistake a slow burst fallrate for a deployment. The 35 is fairly accurate, enough for our needs anyway, when I've done flights right at the threshold of deployment detection error the math, (time of flight vs altitude descended) worked. The cutoff threshold is inconsistent, I don't think its just a number, I think its an equation tied to rate-of-change but gets repeatably screwed by the low-30's and below. With a suit the size of an Apache you can go low teens and single digits just by digging in your wings the right way and all my gear records deployment the moment I seriously spread my wings. That suit makes it easy to do flights in which the fallrate never broke high-30's the whole way down. Altimeters think it was a hop-n-pop. The only gadget I've found truly useful for recording freefall times fallrates 40's and below has been the Altitrack. It detects, or misdetects deployments just as easily as the others do, but its' key feature is, it records fallrate not in just a few samples like a Neptune or Protrack, but sampling 4x a second all the way down, including a clock timer and it will play it all back for you in slo-mo or realtime. It lights up a little parachute icon at the point in the jump where it thinks you deployed, and states your freefall time based on that point, but it just keeps recording all the way to the ground. You can speed up and slow down the playback at will to see moves played back frame by frame, and identify the end of the jump by approximate pull altitude and observing the speed changes- I'll be cooking along at a steady 25-28 mph, go to pull at 3500 and the altitrack shows sudden fallrate jump to 40's, 50's, followed by a sudden slowdown to a solid 16 mph and stays there... canopy speed. Identify what your own canopy speed is. Label the first 1-2 seconds of that speed "jump end" and compare the results to video. I've found it consistently agrees with video down to about 2 seconds... sometimes takes it a second or two to detect your exit, for example, so the altitrack might tend to leave out a few seconds, video shows flight was 3:55 exit to opening, altitrack counts 3:52 because it took a bit to notice it was descending... sometimes if I delay wingspread, it'll detect freefall sooner and it agrees with video down to the second. Anyway its the best way I know to get a halfway accurate freefall time, and for flights of 4:00-4:30 and beyond, plus or minus a few seconds is close enough anyway. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Just to illustrate the point... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You want to... manage, the wingsuit population? I'm with Bluhdow. Good luck with that. Wingsuiters are notoriously unmanageable. We're even worse than freefliers because we rather stubbornly refuse to fall straight down like we're supposed to, except for those of us that choose to, just because they happen to feel contrary today. And we're nonjudgemental... we're all about choices, we don't give them a hard time, we usually just look at em funny. As for how many of us there are? Well, its really one of those zen questions, like "How many birds can you fit on a phone line?" Did you ever watch birds trying to resolve that question? Worse, did you ever try counting them? One bird lands on the line, two fall off. They circle around, land, knock off two or three more. One or two fly away, one lands, knocks two more off. Three more come from somewhere and try to land, knocking off five more and causing the others to start arguing. While three of the five start trying to land, they push a few more off trying to make room, those five all land but there's still four or five circling around for another go. Then they land, without waiting for the others to clear some space and cause an avalanche, knocking off eight to ten at once, who will all flutter around for awhile heckling the ones still on the wire for being a bunch of dinks. The ones on the wire will helpfully make more room, but when eight birds try to land three succeed, five fail and knock off six more while they're at it. Those six circle around but discover there are somehow now thirteen birds still without a perch because two more came from who knows where and jumped on the load without asking. Three more leave the wire voluntarily and fly away, probably to go hassle manifest about all this, while ten birds try to land on the space left by three, and five of them hassle the purple one for not being ready and rigging his feathers up on the line. Seven succeed, knocking off four more in the process, leaving seven birds without a perch, one big yellow one clinging to the side of the phone pole waiting for everyone to go at once, and six of them arguing about whether we're supposed to go on 3,2,-1-, or 3,2,1, go. While they're arguing, four of the seven all bunch up near the big yellow one and fit five birds in the space normally occupied by three, leaving three more still without a perch, knocking off two more and blaming the new birds for it. A little red one starts trying to get about a hundred of them to all go at once, but they have to register in advance. Two of the new birds agree to stay at the edge of the line while five others all think they're qualified to decide despite the fact that the older birds don't think they're ready for that yet, and three prove them right by fumbling their grip, falling off, and taking two more birds with them. Six more think that means its time to go and bail voluntarily without checking the spot, at the same time seven are trying to land, knocking off three more and landing five, while two more sink out, the ones who knew what was going on all laugh at them, and a blue and yellow one tells them they really needed more training for this. Two of the three that left earlier return and try to land on the wire but there's no more room, until the blue and white one decides to try to solve the problem by perching upside down on the underside of the wire with a big grin, three of the others who don't know how many birds there are on the line stare at him wondering why he's doing that and two others pull out Gopros and start taking pictures of that one and putting them up on Facebook, while two more try to land in the space he's just vacated. One of the new ones decides the upside down one has the right idea and tries it too but gets burbled by another who just failed to land and falls off, taking two more birds with him, making five laugh while three more land, none of whom know what the dive plan is. A black and white one known for leaving flaming wreckage behind him starts doing magic tricks while a navy blue and yellow one goes almost straight down spinning rapidly just for the hell of it. Three more land. Finally an orange one and a blue one offer lessons in acro, distracting several new ones from trying a perch they aren't qualified for yet, while the blue and yellow one with lots of spare feathers starts teaching the newer ones in a standardized fashion, five new ones follow the purple one and land out, and the upside down blue and white one drops off and flies away very, very slowly. Three more new ones follow that one for lessons while six others try it themselves with oversized feathers they weren't ready to fly yet and don't really get anywhere with it. Meanwhile another slightly bigger red one starts renting red feathers to the new birds who haven't decided what color and size feathers to get, yet. Three more fall off. Seven more come out of nowhere and land. Now. How many birds are on the phone line? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I always find it amusing, the gap between what people think machines are capable of or could be, and the reality. The robots we DO have really ARE amazing... and I love working on them. But the act and process of diagnosing and repairing them is far, far more complex than the robot itself. It is so analog in nature that having one you could sic on another and say "fix that", and it goes over, pokes at the dead one, evaluates its function, identifies the failure, and acts to fix it, whether that be dusting off a sensor, or tearing down the z-axis pinion drive, replacing the +limit sensor, and getting the lines back into the cable trays all buttoned up... or like I said, finding and fixing a leaky pipe, say, a coolant line, just isn't happening. It'd require full-blown sentient or near-sentient human-grade AI, bare minimum. Something so smart, and so fully immersed in reality and capable of coping with reality that it knows a cracked pipe or stripped threads when it sees them. It'd need hearing... to hear the sound of compressed air that is the only sign of the failed air cylinder and the reason that cylinder just doesn't push things as hard as it should. Mechanicing robots is subtle. More, it'd need to be able to know the other machines so well that it could recognize a sporadic failure of X stage to function as possibly caused by said erratic sensors, or loose brackets or whatever, and investigate until it finds exactly what is interfering with the other robot, whether thats a failure or just plastic shavings accumulating in the wrong place. In any case, by the time we do have human-grade AI, we'll be so far along the technological singularity that being out of a job would be the least of our problems. When we hit full human-grade AI, something that really passes the Turing test, (ability to hold a conversation so that you can't tell if its a machine or a human you're talking to) the acceleration of the singularity event immediately goes critical-mass chain reaction nuclear and blows everything we know about technology out of the water. Fast. Machine as smart as a human: ask it to design its own replacement. Its own replacement, designed by a machine, is 200x as smart as IT is. It, in turn sets off several generations worth of this. In a handful of generations we'd have machine intelligence so far beyond our own that we will never, ever understand it or catch up. It took 20 years to go from 60 mhz 486's and early Pentiums to today's quadcore 3.6 gHz stuff. An AI capable of designing chips that it then uses to think harder to design better ones, and write the software for itself to use them, could do that entire 20 year sequence virtually overnight, and COULD soon learn to cope with reality well enough to spot things like stuck bearings and failed sensors. From there designing a physical shell, a robot, for it to use to fix things... not so far. More, let it design the robots it'll be fixing in the first place, design it for IT to fix, not built around human engineering, and we're just weeks or months away from The Matrix. We'd be looking at technology so advanced we couldn't recognize it and literally could not be educated to. Materials technology, designed by machines, used to make parts and functions dependent on phenomena we can't and don't know anything about... the ultimate Von Neumann machine, machines able to make more of themselves, upgrading with every generation... its already happening... how was the last generation of processors designed? On computers, running on earlier processors. Its just that we are still the brains behind it all, and it is all still dependent on us. When it gets as smart as us, it won't be anymore. We'll make ourselves obsolete. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords! Good news is, we're still so far away from machine sentience and all that it will bring, that we can't even see it on the horizon. Machines are really good at following instructions but making one that can actually think, is so hard that the smartest stuff we've got now can still be outsmarted by the average cockroach. I'll have a job for awhile yet. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Early steam engines, man. Early ones.

"In the future, robots will repair robots. I don't think that's even speculation. Simply a fact that hasn't happened yet." (Laughter) Quade, what is your experience with industrial robotics? Do you have any idea what the state of the art in industrial robotics actually IS? I do. Have you ever seen one? Operated one? diagnosed or fixed one? This IS my line of work and it is the reason I can even afford to skydive. I've worked on hundreds of them in dozens of industries. I AM one of the guys that fixes the robots. I used to design and build 'em, too, but that job got outsourced to Tijuana. These days I get paid the same for FAR less work at a much smaller factory with really small cruddy robots. To everyone else in the plant, they're scary mystery boxes with arms. To me they're simple tinkertoys. 6-axis basic programmable jobs without even any serious machine vision or REAL high technology... junk I could have thrown together back in high school. Heathkit stuff. Say what you will about the state of the art in technology itself and how nobody can predict it, because of how fast it advances, but 99% of that advancing is in information tech, chips, surface mount technology and so on. Manipulation of electrons, not the machines' ability to manipulate physical reality. Physical technology develops much, much slower, which is why you can buy a smartphone lightyears more advanced than the last one every 2-3 years most of which can be serviced by plugging it into a computer and having the computer talk to it but things like plumbing and cars are still serviced the old fashioned way by a guy with a wrench. I'm very familiar with most forms of industrial automation, enough so that when I come across a new type I haven't seen before I already automatically know mostly what it is, what it does, and how to fix it just by looking at it. Sometimes to diagnose the deeper subtler failures I have to cycle it a few times to get the idea, but to this day after a nearly 20 year career in industrial machine technology I have yet to encounter a piece of gear I couldn't understand within minutes. Once you've worked on enough of these things, despite their fantastic variety of form and function, fundamentally they're all built the same. As if they were built of Legos. Ten thousand times as much variety in possible parts than Legos have, but still, its like complex legos for grownups. It all goes together the same way. For every possible need or function there are dozens of manufacturers making components to fill the need, various levels of interchangeability. Same basic parts. Servos. Stepper motors, their drivers, and the computers that tell those drivers what to do. Conveyors. Air cylinders that push and pull things. Solenoids controlling those cylinders. Sensors... optic, fiberoptic, magnetic, proximity, capacitive. I/O boards to take info from sensors, PLCs (programmable logic controllers) or dedicated computers to decide what to do, and more I/O boards to take the resulting instructions, trigger solenoids or stepper motors and act on those decisions. Now, cars have grown amazingly reliable... and yet they still fail and wear in ways the computer in the car does not and cannot understand. To actually teach a car to monitor and report its own health... say, to detect and report a worn ball joint, universal joint, or pittman arm, would require the vehicle to be 200X as complicated as it is already. Vast areas of sensors and computing apps would be required, all of which would need to be refined to nearly 100% reliability before it was deployed as a model you could buy. 99% of a car is still stone-age stupid with zero awareness of itself. The ONLY part of a car with serious awareness is the engine, and at that, everything the engine computer says has to be interpreted and taken with a grain of salt because the computer cannot tell one failure from another. As it is, almost nobody appreciates or understands just HOW smart our engine monitoring systems are these days... my Jeep can largely troubleshoot itself... but thats because its got a single-purpose, highly evolved system, designed for an extremely high-demand application whose development was driven by a virtually unlimited consumer market demand. Everybody needs one, and one way or another, 4, 6, 8 cylinders, twin cam single cam whatever, within a certain relatively narrow range, all cars are essentially the same. This is not true of robots. They're -built- the same, (PLCs, air lines, belt drives, etc ad infinitum) but they do NOT take roughly the same form and perform roughly the same function. Not everybody needs a gantry robot that can take 32 parts out of a mold, detect their presence or absence, decide to either dump them down a reject chute or an accept chute, verify the chute is clear, take intervention action if it is not, detect, stop and set off an alarm if its intervention fails, move to the next slot, and repeat. Every last fraction of a step in even that little process needs all kinds of custom, one-off application specific physical tech to do that. A basic blind robot is simple. Giving that robot the ability to just detect a stuck chute gets MUCH more complicated. Giving the robot the physical ability to ACT on that one, static laboratory controlled-condition state multiplies that complexity X10, giving it more than one option for action and the ability to decide what to do multiplies that another 10 times over. And thats just for one simple small subfunction. Now what happens if the air cylinder it uses, wears out its seals, and responds slowly or not at all? Its easy to make the robot detect that somethings wrong, and where, but not WHAT. Same as engines. When I had issues with my jeep's engine, the computer knew about it and could tell me it was misfiring sporadically on cyl.3 but not what the failure was or why. It COULD detect things like a burned ignition coil or failed injector, IF the failure was electrical. If the problem is physical, and the engine has no means to see it, the computer is utterly helpless to know or do anything about it. The engine computer knew something was wrong with that cylinder by analyzing crank rotation timing and detecting the faint lag in 1/6th of a power cycle, but since electrically it all checked out, all it could do was tell me "something wrong in cyl3." The problem turned out to be a worn lifter and cam lobe... and we are still 20-50 years away from anything like engine technology that could have understood that for itself, and even further from anything that could FIX itself. And this, mind you, is the pinnacle of a technology with all the world's automakers and uncounted billions driving it. A relatively restricted application. Just cars. (trucks, etc. 4 wheeled engine driven stuff.) And that's just the engine. Try implementing a system that could detect a worn out balljoint. Or tie rod. Or control arm. Each separate possible failure would need a subsystem developed for it and dedicated to it, able to detect most or all possible states, and tell you about it. Giving the car the ability to DO something about it introduces orders of magnitude more complexity, cost, etc. And again, thats for a common, universal, restricted application with virtually infinite money driving its development. Doing the same for something as fluid as manufacturing robotics, the complexity required goes up exponentially... and thats -physical- complexity not software, so no shortcuts via software upgrade. No, you have to design and build the sensors, brackets, actors... A very limited form of self-repair ability CAN be done, mostly by modular, yank-and-replace modular construction, but again, the robot to DO that would be 200X as complex as the robot its designed to fix... and as soon as it encounters a failure it has not been taught to deal with or has no means to see, understand, and act on, it just sits there blinking. And 99.99999% of industrial automation is NOT amenable to being designed for such automated self-diagnosis and repair, because of how custom every app is. Its hard enough to design a smart enough robot to simply detect and unjam itself, having one that understands the other well enough to tell what is wrong, and act to repair it... its not impossible but the ROI on the investment to build one IS. Physical technology always develops the slowest because it is physical. Making physical technology smart, is even slower. Software tech is easy... fundamentally its a lot of typing and telling software to write other software. New things can exist just by declaring it to be so. A mere few billion instructions, gates on a chip changing states. To do the same things physically, every last pixel of it must be MADE... in a machine shop... milling. Adding threads to a hole so you can screw in a push-connect fitting in turn allowing you to plug in an air line. Bottom line is, we are far, far, FAR away from robots that can fix other robots. Not years, try many, many decades. Right now we could spend a billion dollars, on a simple pick-and-place bot, giving it self awareness, 99% of its complexity would be in that awareness and action ability not in its actual function, and the moment something happens where the ability to detect or act on it was not engineered into it, it will simply stop, helpless. One blown gasket in a solenoid, one loose hex cap screw causing a loose and floppy bracket in turn causing erratic readings from the sensor mounted on that bracket... (how do you teach the bot to tell the difference between a failed sensor, a blocked sensor, and a sensor on a loose bracket?) one slightly leaky push-connect fitting, one dry bearing causing resistance, slow response, servo miscounts... the robot might be able to tell that its happening, but not what or why... why is my conveyor not responding properly...? Stuff stuck in it? Motor drive blown/not responding? Power surge tripped a breaker on the motor drive power supply subsystem? Belt broke? Dry bearing? Something blocking a sensor making me think there's parts still on it or not clearing the gate keeping me from giving the OK to start the conveyor in the first place? A robot able to diagnose any and all possible failures of just that one conveyor, would be more complex than the entire factory it lives in... more than ten such factories combined... Now try building a robot capable of dismantling the other one, and changing out the bearing. Now try making a robot that can figure out which sensor is failed/obstructed. Not too hard... but now try making a robot that can DO something about it. A billion dollars worth of the finest automation man can create can and will be defeated by dust on the business end of a single obscure fiber optic sensor. Or say you build a bot that can do all that... did you know fiber optics can fail? Vibration causes microcracking... affecting light transmission... the yes/no starts degrading and giving "maybe" answers the bot can't deal with or understand... the sensor behind the fiber starts showing erratic signal returns. Gets decalibrated. Gives a yes when reality is a no. Robots only see and know what their sensors tell them. It takes a human to understand all this. Giving a robot that ability... every possible failure needs awareness and action capability engineered into it. To deal with every possible state the robot can experience. The more complex the robot the more failure states it can experience and the more complex the robot to detect and fix it needs to be. The complexity rapidly ramps up to infinity. Just creating a robot that could detect, and change out a dry bearing, (massive complex disassembly procedure) would cost thousands of times what the basic robot it is fixing would cost. I'm not gonna say its never gonna happen, but it sure as hell isn't going to happen in my lifetime, or my grandkids' lifetimes. The distance from here to robots fixing robots is about the same as the distance between early steam engines and airliners with autopilots and ILS. Its strictly science fiction and its why I don't worry about the machines rising up a'la The Matrix. If they could design, build and fix themselves, it'd be a problem. If there were a robot, even on the 80-year distant horizon, that could spot a leaky pipe take apart the plumbing and fix it, I'd be nervous. But now and for the foreseeable future, all robots in existence need constant help from humans, and the moment we stop dicking with em they grind to a halt within minutes...hours... days at the most. The industry to design and build the robot-fixing-robot isn't even nascent, it doesn't exist. Its like worrying about self piloting airliners when we can't yet build a steam engine to run for 5 minutes yet. You'll see rosie the housecleaning robot, (a "simple" task, comparatively) decades before you'll see a robot capable of coping with industrial troubleshooting and repair, and Rosie is still a century away or more... think Roomba and how helpless THAT silly toy really is. If you know machines, you're not gonna be out of a job anytime soon. If you don't, well, good luck in the bread line. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Consider this: When I got started jumping I was of course terrified. Shaky, pale, scared shitless. Proceeded anyway. Spent a great deal of time in the plane observing the other, experienced jumpers, taking my cues from them... and observing that none of the old hands appeared scared in the slightest. To them, this was NORMAL. I wanted to be THAT way. I still got butterflies and bad nerves for my first 30-40 jumps, but it got easier after AFF, easier still when I'd finally got my A license and started to feel like maybe I knew what I was doing at least a little, and by jump#50 I was -almost- calm before a jump. The thing that kept me going and gave me a sense of perspective on the risk vs my fears, was the observation that all the multiyear veterans do this, day in and day out, and although injury and death are possibilities on any given jump, none of them seriously expect to get hurt on any given jump. They expect to just do the jump, land, repeat. They expected to be able to do this without getting hurt, all the time. Thousands of jumps' worth of it. And obviously they were right, because thats exactly what happened... every once in awhile somebody butches the landing and sprains an ankle or something, or jumps in winds they shouldn't and takes a bit of a tumble beating on landing, but for the most part, using good judgement and not-jumping when its questionable, you can have a long career at it where injury is a seldom occurrence. So I followed that. Studied them. Did my homework. Played it conservative till I felt I knew what I was doing. Continued to play it conservative after as well. Got into wingsuits in '03 at 200 jumps about a year and a half after I started AFF. Applied the same rules to it. Dedicated my career to it. Fast forward 10 years of nothing but wingsuits... now flying the giant suits, 4.5 minutes of freefall at a whack, and still flying on a daily or nearly daily basis whenever time and finances permit, which isn't as often as I'd like anymore since my job is now in another direction so I'm mostly a weekend jumper these days. Taking it easy, is still jumping every weekend. And after an 11 year career at it including competitions, world records, wingsuit night jumps and all manner of events big and small, I jump as casually as most people drive. With a great deal more caution and care, as befits an activity in such a high risk environment, but still, its no big deal and just like the veteran jumpers I once envied and emulated, I, too, do this all the time with a reasonable expectation of not-getting-hurt any given jump, or any given season for that matter. Keep pushing and this can be you, too. After the first 3 to 5 years very few people will bother doomsaying you anymore since its obviously not happening. The thing to remember is that this IS a fantastically hazardous environment and you must never, ever let down your guard, but you can live in it, thrive, and be happy. Worked for me. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

You're doing it right. Keep doing it that way. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

No. Wrong. Discussing actual causes of diseases is discussion of -facts- and requires no belief. That is how you tell the difference between belief or faith, and reality. Reality is real whether you believe in it, or not. There WAS no "first person to have a disease" as if there were once a form of humans that had none... disease processes existed before there even -were- humans to have them. This is why that is such an astonishingly insane belief... completely disregarding all evidence to the contrary... animals and all other forms of natural life are also subject to diseases and have been since life first emerged and began competing with itself for resources. Viruses hijacking cells to make more of themselves... bacteria finding living tissue to be a good source of habitat and nutrition, and immune systems keeping them in check lest they come to dominate and consume the lifeform they inhabit. Claiming you'd have to prove disease isn't a product of sin is as nonsensical an assertion as claiming we must prove gravity is not caused by invisible blue unicorns under the earth before we will consider things like mass and spacetime and subatomic physics and forces from which effects like gravity emerge on a macroscopic scale we can see. Understanding and knowledge come from facts, not fantasies. Reality is what it is regardless of what you believe about it and often in direct defiance of and contradiction to, those beliefs. These things existed since before there were creatures like us with minds capable of inventing ideas like this in an attempt to explain that which they do not understand. And since, "sin" is supposed to be an act of willful disobedience to this nonexistent supernatural entity, and disease processes existed long before there were minds capable of such, the idea is so utterly laughable as to not even be worth considering. Unless somebody is ready to make the claim that, for instance, the poor tobacco plants suffering tobacco mosaic disease, or the trees suffering fungal disease, or the polar bear dying of bacterial sepsis from a cut 56 million years ago long before sentient life emerged, or any of the trillions of lifeforms that suffered diseases before we came along were all somehow committing "sins" against some creator, (how exactly does a plant "sin" anyway? All it does is sit in the sunlight and grow) then the logical conclusion is that disease processes are and always have been inherent to living things, whether those living things had minds capable of "sin" or not. This entire discussion reminds me of various people I've known who were into paganism and witchcraft and would assert that they knew magic words that could cast "spells"... and do things. Cause things. If and when any of em got in my face about it I'd invite them to go ahead, prove it, cast a spell on me, please... chant magic gibberish, wave sage at me, curse me, command the elements to strike me down... nothing will happen no matter how badly they believe and want it to, just to spite my lack of belief. Because there isn't the faintest breath of reality or fact behind it. Behaviors based on belief rather than knowledge are as absolutely guaranteed NOT to work as a child trying to build a TV, knowing nothing of electricity, by randomly twisting electronic parts together in total ignorance of the mechanisms behind their function. Only when that child understands the actual facts of reality and builds something that manipulates actual physics, will they succeed in building a TV. Only when an individual lets go of their "beliefs" and educates themselves about reality, will they understand disease processes and how to beat them. Human beings used to go about tackling disease the same way the child tries to build a TV... random flailings... chanting... praying... sticking pins in themselves, acupuncture, traditional chinese medicine, codified nonsense... Humours, fluxes, "chi", bear gallbladder, tiger penis and eye of newt... making random mixtures of substances... with about the same level of success, barring the occasional serendipitous discovery such as the greeks noticing chewing willow bark relieves pain, I.E. discovery of aspirin... then we as a species figured out evidence-based medicine. And started rapidly developing actual treatments for disease... treatments that WORK... because it was understanding of FACTS, not belief... Why, oh why, does this species have such a hard time accepting facts and reality? I'd MUCH rather go for a course of antibiotics than try prayer, or witchcraft, or rubbing holy mud on it, or whatever... The president of Gambia believes he can cure AIDS by rubbing herbal slime on people's heads... he has an unsurprising zero percent cure rate... there's a reason he is a laughingstock among world leaders... The mind of a child... and this man is in charge of a country... I can't believe I'm even having this discussion, in the 21'st century... I'm out. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Normally I only lurk here... but... every once in awhile I see something so wrong I have to speak up and call bullshit. "Disease is a product of sin. " This is SICK. And by that I mean in the sense of actual evil... psychologically diseased thinking that believes itself good and righteous. Beliefs like these are where religion crosses the border from harmlessly irrational comfort to downright destructive, full-on psycho, disconnected-from-reality mental illness. It is the worst possible manifestation of religion's habit of trying to induce guilt and shame in its' adherents/victims. Go ahead and tell a 5 year old child "You were born with Cystic Fibrosis as punishment from god for something you did... its a product of your sins." Do that in front of the kid's parents and you're likely to find yourself bleeding on the floor. Most parents recognize a threat to their child's health and well-being when they see it and will act, violently if necessary, to defend their offspring from it. If I saw a parent punch out somebody who said that to their kid, I wouldn't stop them, I'd applaud. There are some beliefs that qualify as infectious diseases in and of themselves and should be quarantined to prevent their willful spread to the helpless. This belief is one of them. Disease is a product of a wide variety of causes from viruses, bacteria and fungi, to various built-in failure modes of cellular life such as errors in replication (cancer) due to random environmental toxin exposure, or just the random roll of the dice that occurs every time a cell reproduces itself. Every once in awhile that cell will happen to have taken a hit from a charged particle... cosmic microwave background radiation...most of the time the damage to the genetic code triggers apoptosis... cellular self-destruct sequence due to nonviable corrupted code... but every once in awhile the cell's error-checking code is itself damaged and the cell successfully replicates, including the damaged regulatory code... replicates out of control with increasing disorder, no longer serving the purpose of the organism's survival... eventually a significant portion of the individual's cells are descended from these... the accumulation of nonfunctioning wild cells with out of control reproduction rates forms masses of useless tissues which begin to interfere with life functions...and bit by bit the organism dies... It is a natural, if unfortunate, process. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the delusion you call your god, or anything the unfortunate individual experiencing it may have done or not-done in their lives with the exception of the obvious well-known and documented factual lifestyle risks... smoke too much you may induce a lung cell mal... drink too much, and you may cause yourself a case of liver cancer or just plain old cirrhosis... all well known cause-and-effect. And nowhere in that sequence is the supernatural involved. Or how about the Bangladeshis? As a people they suffer from high rates of arsenic poisoning... and a wide variety of diseases caused by it... because they happen to live in a place where there is a lot of it in the ground, and their groundwater is contaminated with it... and they have no choice but to drink it... what was THEIR "sin"? "Being a Bangladeshi"? Again, nowhere in objective reality is the supernatural, or being judged and punished by it, involved. Believing it is, and trying to guilt the victim to serve the interests of that belief system, is the most disgusting, disturbing, delusional, self-righteous and revolting lack of mental hygiene human beings ever have on display. It is a disease process in itself and should be kept away from children lest they be exposed to it and infected with it. Ech. Nuff said. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Amen. I was there for that, and the thing I will never forget is the fact that he faceplanted so hardcore his face bounced off the surface and his head snapped back. He actually ricocheted his face off the ground. Absolutely no effort to shield or deflect the impact, total commitment, just 100% bellyflop, facefirst facedown off the skid and into the lawn. I was pretty awestruck. I had never seen anyone do that before. I don't think anyone is going to repeat it anytime soon, either. Here's a man willing to break his own nose to amuse himself and his friends. They just don't make em like that anymore. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If you think the technical data is a hoot, you should see the visual effect when you do it on a cloud. Scooting UP the side of a cloud and clearing the top will blow, your, mind. For just a few seconds, the cloud and landscape below it are receding. At the top, during the +...0...- transition you get 5-7 seconds of total silence and a reacceleration curve equivalent to a still-air BASE or balloon exit. I've been mapping the physics of this for about a year and a half now. Establishing a working fallrate range in the negative numbers. The instrumentation gets flaky this far outside design parameters... there's a huge amount of slop built in. On the borderline, a weak climb, my alti and GPS often disagree... sometimes the alti reports a climb, GPS reports a 0mph planeout, and sometimes the exact opposite, GPS shows solid climb, alti shows fallrates in the low single digits. There's also error in the GPS software. If you really look close at that graph you'll see the plot technically contradicts itself in several places... the red "altitude" curve shows 4 distinct climbs, one of which barely qualifies... probably got 20-40 feet at best... but the fallrate display only shows one spike to a solid "-5" mph the rest show around zero give or take 3-5 mph. But when you do it dramatically enough, the instruments will disagree as to the magnitude of the climb but both will agree that a climb happened. GPS will report +75 feet, fallrate -5mph, Altitrack will playback a -29 mph climb and show a regain of more like 150+ feet. Watching the Altitrack playback the altitude and fallrate in realtime is surreal... altitude loss slowly tapers off to zero, then the numbers start ticking back up for a few seconds. Both instruments have hard-to-measure inaccuracies inherent to their nature. GPS is most inaccurate on the Z axis, and an altimeter can be somewhat fooled and its results exaggerated or muted by airflow transients, so neither can be taken as an absolute, but combined and then compared to actual freefall time from video gives a very solid idea how roughly accurate it actually WAS. Last all-out flight I did, Altitrack showed freefall time 4:21 exit to opening from 13.5-2800-ish. I kinda doubted this till I played back the video... which showed exactly 4:21 till the canopy stood me up. So although there's slop and inaccuracy, that inaccuracy is limited and a certain amount of faith can be placed on it. So when you see BASE guys claiming to outfly impossible-looking terrain, they ain't lyin'. They've got short burst glide ratios available that spike out the same way that graph does. I'm far from the only bird to be able to do this. It has become almost common, now. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

3mpire: This is no longer true. Ever since the advent of the Tony suits "Apache" and similar suits, regaining small but significant amounts of altitude went from fantasy and joke to reality. It's not even particularly difficult once you get used to the suit and practice the move. All that is needed is either forward speed or down speed around 100 mph, and the necessary skill. The attached image is a screenshot from a GPS plot captured during a demonstration of the effect. I managed four of em in one flight. Feels like a roller-coaster complete with zero-G float going over the top, partial stall followed by a shallow recovery drop... when you've got the speed built up, you can repeat it at will once you've got the trick of it. Later tests showed the minimum recharge time is only about 500 feet and you can do it again. As a side effect of mastering this trick you no longer need a true "High speed exit" to gain altitude from a tailgate aircraft, either. "High speed exit" used to mean firewalling the engines, 160-200+ knots, or as close to Vne as the pilot will give you. Last time I exited a skyvan I was given a warning that they were not slowing it down and we'd all be getting a 120mph exit. The pilot had refused to give me a "real" high speed exit when requested about a year prior, because he had flown a suit, once, a decade ago, and was convinced "You'll rip your arms out at the shoulders" and no amount of "I've done this at least 30-40 times at over 200 knots without harm in the biggest of suits" would convince him otherwise. When people decide to hold opinions out of ignorance it is futile to argue with them so I did not bother. He was our pilot. Sometimes it is better to be diplomatic than to be "right" or win an argument. However I got the last laugh because I no longer require that kind of speed to climb, anyway. A mere 120 in a heavy Apache-class suit was FAR more than enough to produce the effect. The resulting video from my helmetcam looked like I'd been shot almost straight up from a slingshot. I was looking way, way down at the skyvan within about 4 seconds. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Eh, I think it depends on the build of the pilot. Amy seemed to be exactly my height and weight, maybe a little lighter... (she's fantastically gorgeous and fun to be around, too, girl has a smile like a new day) and standing side by side the suits appeared near-identical in wingspan, overall size and gripper length. So much so that it wasn't easy to tell em apart till you looked close at the detailing. The one significant difference I did note was the shape and depth of the wing cutout... Apache has a little more filled in, wing cuts behind the grippers have a few more square inches of material which probably accounts for the little extra I was accessing to be able to move around or float on the group. But it also depends which Apache you're talking about, although at first glance they all more or less look the same, there's quite a bit of variation where Tony pushed material around or varied the wing sweep and total length from model to model. He sort of renames and blends suit generations together, periodically solidifying his latest variant into a formalized production model, and there have now been 3 to 5 generations of Apache depending on how you define em. There's the original basic base model Apache, call it Apache Classic. I first saw one in a pile of suits Justin had around early 2011, scariest lookin' suit I ever saw, few months later when I got to a comp in Germany the things had bred like rats, every serious competitor already had one, there must have been half a dozen of em with various mods to make em skydivable because the chassis itself was unbeatable. Then there's "Apache X", then I got one of a series of 6 preproduction prototypes labelled "Apache XRW" the model Gary landed in boxes. I modified mine for skydiving, used it in comps and fly it to this day, (still hands-down the most perfect, euphoric suit I have ever flown) which he then formalized and split into 2 models, "Rebel" and "X3" for BASE and skydiving respectively... then he branched off a slicker speed BASE variant series he named "Jedei" based on the current Apache platform but fine tuned for steeper faster flight, (I tried one... doesn't hangtime like my XRW but unlike my suit this thing flew like it was on rails in any sort of dive... very very fast... a very specialized and fine tuned instrument, single-purpose suit for the speed BASE guys) and spun off another popular variant the "Apache Scorpion", a slightly downscaled version for the mass market who want a powerhouse without having to go THAT extreme with it which I haven't had a chance to sample yet. So I think the Aura is bigger than some, smaller than others of the same suit class, probably leaning toward the lighter nimbler end of the spectrum in that class. I know this, properly used that suit is amazing. I'm still holding out for Tony's next-gen heavy cruiser, though. I'm hoping for something as perfectly balanced as what I got but even more brutal in scale. I know it'll probably fly like a tank, but I'm all about sheer distance and time potential so I don't care how it handles, just whether or not I can use it to fly even slower and longer. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Haven't flown an Aura (yet) but have flown with one being flown well, holding my own with an Apache Rebel. Amy Shaw. Fantastic pilot. She'd asked me to fly along and review her flight technique. Which led me to expect she might not have a handle on it yet. So it was with an enormous grin that I watched her take off like she was on FIRE with it. She wasn't just "not-bad" with it she utterly DOMINATED with it. Maxed out, flat, fast and far, very low fallrate. I opened up my suit to basic max...she kept gaining on me... I started stacking tricks and techniques together till I was gaining on her, and then sorted through my bag of options till I put together a combo that allowed me to both keep up -and- command the scene with camera, orbit around the flock from above and to the sides. I had very little headroom...was using the Apache at about 90% just keeping up. I think I still could have outrun her, I still had a fair bit of additional power held in reserve and available if I needed it but it would have taken most of the flight to creep ahead. I did not try. Was having WAY too much fun. My verdict: There is very little difference with suits like these. Scale of suit and skill of pilot matters more than make or model. The Aura is easily a solid competitor to the Apache class, and put up against each other its the pilot, not the suit, that will be the decisive factor. I still think perhaps the Apache has slightly more low-fallrate potential, which can be converted into slightly more distance in the right conditions. But then I'm a bit of a fan of Tony's designs for the last 4 years or so, so my opinion will be slightly prejudiced. But even for a Tony fan, I gotta admit, having gone up against one in action the Aura's one hell of a suit. I'm eagerly awaiting Tony's next model, myself.

How did it stall? I can offer a few observations. 1: That bad marketing. Nasa did everything so very checklist-slowly that they actually managed to make space exploration BORING. Nothing ever happened in space missions on TV... just beeping, people talking, occasional shots of things moving glacially slowly in space. Yawn. 2: Internal confusion, bureaucracy-bound thinking. When they committed to a moon program they pulled out all the stops, quit dicking around and -built a goddamn moon rocket-. FAST. They weren't concerned with mutual backscratching or endless who-gets-what defense contracts or who was gonna quibble about ooh this isn't safe... they just...fucking...built it. They were only concerned with getting the damn job done. But after, when they'd succeeded... NASA became a jobs program not a space agency. Turf wars and no budgets and ridiculous inflation of costs... I read somewhere the entire Apollo moon landing thing cost about 24 billion. For the research, the infrastructure, the rocket itself, the entire mission... Now, they'll waste 24 billion developing and testing half a booster that never even gets finished anyway, ends up cancelled, and all they have to show for it is maybe another model engine they can use to lob satellites, but only after a 20 year certification process. Its like the phenomenon I see with public works projects... a bridge is declared unsafe and in need of overhaul or replacement... article says bridge cost 2.7 million to build from scratch in the first place, but will somehow cost 24.5 million just to repair and 79 million to replace. And this makes sense...how? You'd think, with THAT kind of cost that it'd make more sense to try to recreate the conditions that allowed it to somehow be built with less than 3 million to begin with... don't tell me labor and material costs have gone up 30X in a 40 year bridge lifespan... its more important to the bureaucracy that 56 different contractors make out like bandits than it is to actually do the fucking job. 3: Between a safety culture that simultaneously prevented anything from actually getting done while creating disasters like Challenger and the public's shrinking-violet approach to risk, (Omigod we actually lost an astronaut, stop all space travel for the next 7 years while we try and fail to make it safe as mall parking) Hello, space travel is risky... For 30 years Nasa has produced paper, not spaceships. You could CLIMB back to the moon on the stacks of pretty glossy press release photos of cancelled spacecraft programs that never even came close to getting developed or built. How is it, that when it mattered, with primitive 60's technology they were able to do it before the decade was out, but last time Bush talked about seriously returning to the moon they were talking about a 20+ year timescale? Have we gone backwards? 4: Reality bites. The moon shot is the only space activity that ever lived up to the hype and delivered a result that made people believe in it. Most real space applications are a lot more gritty tentative and limited. And even IF we ever do anything real again like get some guys to Mars, as soon as people realize that A: Its costing 400 billion a month to keep them there and B: there's not much for them to actually DO there besides BE there and putter around looking for water the public will lose interest faster than last season's failed reality TV shows, and the plug gets pulled anyway so we can focus on what really matters, you know, like the superbowl and "deadliest catch" and similar TV meant for the lowest common denominator, idiotic celeb culture and fucking Snooki. Face it. We've peaked out. The "heroic age" is ancient history. Apollo brought us a generation that wanted to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, fighter pilots, astronauts. MTV and "hip hop" brought us a generation that want to be "Ballers" "DJs" and "Gankstas". We've gone full retard. And no, I have no solutions to suggest. Ya can't fix stupid. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk6Ij-KrvPk My suggestion'd be to use the first 1.5-2 seconds or so to settle on the air before hitting the gas. Simply snapping wings open hard is an abrupt and destabilizing shock in a higher airflow than most birds are used to. Hit the air flat, settle, get a feel for it for just a second, then smoothly dig in and hit it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Perry never told me this one, Chuck. What was the suit and how did it blow? Armwing? Tail? Could you describe what was left of the suit? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.