mre

Could someone please explain what I am supposed to see in the pictures? Maybe even draw some arrows like "Cold air here", "Wave propagating in this direction"? Sure, I see some big wavy thing, but can't quite connect it to the LCF or whatever. Is a "gravity wave" like a wave in the ocean, or what is it?

Thanks! I can't quite visualize it, though. What other parts go in the sight apart from the birefringent material? Is there a sketch somewhere?

Could you perhaps explain the two phenomena and how they differ?

Ryan services Skavsta airport, which is the dropzone of our ultra-friendly Nyköping skydiving club. Just give us a call when you have landed and we'll pick you up at the terminal and drive you to the club house. But don't fly with Ryan too often, or they'll crowd us out and shut down our operations...

Which Sony lens do you use? I couldn't find anything that seemed right on the Sony webpage. / Martin

I'd still say it's the partitioning that changed your drive letters. You probably created one or more partitions on your C drive while installing Linux, and that pushed up the drive letters of your other drive. If you are using lilo; once it is in control of your boot sequence, dual boot is usually just a matter of typing something like the below into /etc/lilo.conf and running lilo. Not that it is of any use to you, now that you are going to stay away from Linux for a long time... other=/dev/hdb1 label=windows / Martin (not an expert)

Ehm, no, Linux did not do that. The partitioning tool you used to make room for it did! Sorry. / Martin

There is a short sequence in the movie titled "High up there", on headdown.net. It can be found under Movies--Film Festival 2002. 3rd person perspective, two minutes into the movie. / Martin

That's a lot of long words! I'm glad there were some pictures!

Tom, I was puzzled by your reasoning here. Perhaps you could explain it a little bit further? You write: And then: What about the 20% for whom the benefits outweigh the risks? Should they not be in BASE either? Is there, in your opinion, some other reason, beyond the benefit-risk calculation, that people should not do it? Perhaps the effect on other people, or the "addiction" part? / Martin

When billvon replies to my post, I feel I must take up the challenge! This is true; space is not at thermal equilibrium, hence it does not have a temperature. You could also say that it has several temperatures. In other words, depending on with which heat source you exchange energy, you will assume different temperatures. If for instance you were to exchange energy only with the sun, as is approximately the case for the focal point of a solar oven, you would reach the same temperature as the surface of the sun. If you were to interact only with "empty" space, you would reach 3 kelvin. An asteroid will reach much the same equilibrium as does a planet. This does not mean that being in the sun will make it hot, though. The earth is warm mostly because of the greenhouse effect (which in effect makes the surface interact more with the sun, less with empty space in the above picture). The moon is much colder: http://www.monstein.de/astronomypublications/MoonEnglishHtml/Moon2001V2.htm Exactly as Bill writes, temperature varies greatly between day an night. The average, which should be similar to the approximately constant temperature of a small body close by, is quite low however: -56 C (according to the above article). In conclusion, meteorids (= a meteorite still in space) are quite cold when close to earth. I'll stop here. To be continued only in the unlikely event of public demand.

Actually there seems to be some controversy here. If there is a consensus it seems to be that meteorites are generally cold, but that some special circumstances could be conceived under which they would be hot. Here is a thread discussing the exact incident reported above. http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=sv&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=akh01m%24man%241%40news.efn.org&rnum=11&prev=/groups%3Fq%3D%2522hot%2Bmeteorite%2522%26start%3D10%26hl%3Dsv%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26selm%3Dakh01m%2524man%25241%2540news.efn.org%26rnum%3D11 Here is an informational page. http://branchmeteorites.com/metmyths.html And the topic is also discussed here. http://www.meteorobs.org/maillist/msg21389.html

I understand that just like a skydiver, a meteorite would not be hot when reaching the ground. Of course, the story may still be true, just that she was imagining the part about the stone being hot. / Martin

I understand what you mean; this makes a discussion in terms of "who is the boss?" and "why would you care what they think?" rather irrelevant. This may be a long shot, but what if your parents are simply being rational? They may have accepted that you will skydive for a while and then quit, but now it looks like you may continue for your whole life. Assuming 100+ jumps each year, the expected risk exposure from skydiving will then increase substantially, even approaching ultra-high risk activities such as smoking. Everyone has a right to form their own opinion. Your parents have a right not to be very happy about your skydiving. As others have pointed out though, they would probably be less unhappy the more they learned about the sport and why you love doing it. It is however not clear what you mean by "not being supportive". One thing is if they are not very happy about your skydiving and are discouraging you to continue. This is what I assumed above, and my point is that they may well give that up once they see that you are continuing anyway. Another is if they are not speaking to you anymore, in which case I sure don't know what to do... / mre

Oh-- now I see what that is in your picture. It is "la vache", right?