Anachronist

Not that odd. I've seen a RPro and a Sbird pick up a tracker and I can fly with trackers in a Colugo2 (picking them up requires considerably more finesse than I have). Our plan for a botched exit and a lost rider has always been "track the pattern and we'll come fly with you." After that became easier, it was changed to "track really hard and we'll try and pick you back up." Have seen pickups where the the exit went bad and they flew down and the rider got back on, where the rider got off on purpose and then got back on, and where they exited separately and the rider got on. Worth noting, none of it was happening low. I wouldn't use the word "easily" either, perhaps "with some practice" is a little more realistic. Going steep and fast takes a bit more caution than flying level though, more separation, more gradual changes in direction and speed; I could definitely see if one person pulled out of a dive like that, the other wouldn't even have time to react without considerable separation, or they could come at an angle where they wouldn't even see the other wingsuiter (a lot like corking on a head down jump). Whoever is in back has a great deal of responsibility to ensure adequate separation and have full situational awareness. And whoever is "not in back" and can't see everyone has a great deal of responsibility to not start moving in any direction or change velocity too quickly. All of that is pure judgement, like what was discussed earlier.

Yep, rapid wingsuit upsizing is starting to have a lot of the same problems as rapid canopy downsizing, but there is more air up there so injuries are less common. I've seen a few uncontrollable flat spins that required the wingsuiter to pitch their main to stop it, generally they had no business jumping the suit they were on. The swooping equivalent would be a femur. But they walk away from it unhurt and think "I got this." In a bizarre way, escaping a failure without injury emboldens them.

I found myself in a similar situation, jump 96 on a Nav 220, got in a little bit of a rotor and didn't PLF, exploded my ankle. Anyway, been several years and several hundred jumps since. Don't sweat it. The best supports are strong muscles, work out hard, and having less weight on them helps to (i.e. lose weight if you can). Shoes and ankle braces help prevent tiny crap like twisting your ankle, if the force is great enough to snap bone, a little bit of leather and rubber aren't going to do anything. Put your faith in landing and PLFing well, not protective gear.

Wow you guys are old. I'm no spring chick but I have no idea who almost all of those people are. Most famous - probably Jeb Corliss (as much as that pains me to say) (excluding D.B cooper for not being a "skydiver" but making one famous jump and celebrities who've made jumps but that isn't what they are known for)

I've definitely seen some close calls from people flying up jump run after exiting and the next person out flying (or tumbling) past them. Also, big suits may fall slow enough to not fire an AAD even with an unconscious jumper (has already happened at least once with a recorded vertical speed of like 30 or 40 mph until impact, there is a thread on here somewhere). What probably contributed to the last one and what I've seen a lot of myself are people who rocket up the wingsuit progression and don't learn to control big suits or appreciate how fast they can accelerate or change direction with very little input. "Just hucking it" will always eventually get people killed. There's this whole three dimensional appreciation and awareness that has to be built up with wingsuiting and angle flying, and a lot of it is not intuitive. I'd also argue time in sport helps develop judgement more than raw jump numbers, but you get these kids that have been jumping 3 years and pound out 1,000 jumps who may have developed considerable skill but lack the judgement to go along with it. Seeing and hearing about close calls and having friends get killed or injured are generally sobering experiences, but you don't get much of that in your first couple years jumping. I happen to know one of the people involved in one of the collisions and would not jump with him due to attitude and sketchiness. EDIT: I'm a terrible speller...

Yeah, last comment is pretty accurate. Civil cases are costly to wage and personal injury attorneys usually work hoping to get a piece of the settlement, insurance is in itself a liability. If you have a $10,000,000 insurance policy, attorneys will droll over the chance to sue you, if you don't have insurance then their incentive goes away (unless you also happen to be a millionaire or something). There is also the whole "I'm not suing the TI, I'm suing their insurance company" psychological aspect, people are less inclined to sue other people over frivolous stuff, but insurance companies are fair game (no one cares about them). It also depends on where you are, a lawsuit against Skydive Deland over a Porter crash (2005-ish) saw the waiver be upheld even under "gross negligence." So at least in FL the waivers are holding up in court, but every state is different.

Pretty aggressive downsize there, but not absurd. Just make sure you put 200 jumps on that 190 before you go sniffing around for a 170. You probably "could" handle a 170, but you "shouldn't" until you get a lot more experience. It's not easy peasy landings you have to worry about, it's the accidental low pull with line twists that puts you in a downwind or rotary off landing that will bite you. According to the old rule of thumb of 100 jumps per 0.1 increase over 1:1 in wingloading, you shouldn't be jumping a 190 (1.3 WL as you stated) until you have 300 jumps. A bit conservative perhaps, but just make sure you don't make it worse by jumping to a 170 with only 150 or 200 jumps.

Just a heads up, I too bought a A6300 and the magnesium body is pretty soft (softer than aluminium), should be fine with most mounts but when attaching an XShut it damaged the body around the tripod mount some. I picked up a cage from SmallRig for $50 to fix the problem and it is working well so far.

I appreciate your humor Jarno. Yeah, they cost too much. I bought a Cookie G2 when they were pretty new for a little over $200. Made of carbon fiber with metal grills. The injection molded 20 cents of plastic ones are now $380, and have creeped up, from 340 to 360 to 380, nothing has changed, inflation has not increased 100% since 2010, and R&D should have been recouped by now, if not then they have a terrible business model. I even ordered a replacement liner and after the first wash all the seams came undone and I had to glue them back together. The G2/G3 decent helmet but the liner is garbage, not designed to be removed, and the helmet is worth $200 at best. Vanity pricing is a terribly annoying problem, but skydivers are retards so I don't see it going away any time soon. More examples all from the last five years. Viso2, $220 to $290 (roughly a 25% increase) Altitrack $300 to $400 (33% increase) Optimum $1,300 to $,1600 (roughly a 25% increase) But mains have stayed the same... weird... Viso elastic wrist mount $10 to $30. Power packing tool $10 to $20 If primadonna dumb asses would stop shelling out outrageous amounts of money for gear then manufacturers would have to stop inflating prices.

Interesting thanks, yeah I suppose if the shutter speed is closer to being in time with the vibration it reduce the jelly-cam action (kind of like a timing light works); I had never thought of it that way.

Could you explain how a ND filter accommodates rolling shutter? Vibration makes sense because the rate of image capture isn't fast enough to capture even frames if there is a lot of vibration, but I don't understand how a filter would change that at all. Not doubting you, I just don't understand.

Arbitrary retirement ages are just that, Govt bureaucracy trying to put one shoe on a whole population. Military style thinking at its worst. You're a better judge of your capacity than anyone else, just don't delude yourself when you start to notice problems. There are plenty of 30 and 40 year old fat TI's just waiting to have a heart attack or stroke (or the roided out guys begging for the same thing). It's only been documented a couple times to my knowledge, a couple times vs. literally millions of tandem jumps is statistically zero.

You screwed up because you didn't get a license. That pretty much obligates you to repeat AFF, especially after 10 years. Sorry bro. Also you could die, and you haven't jumped in 10 years, so you'd be stupid not to repeat AFF. 30 jumps is a credential for nothing. 500 or 1,000 and haven't jumped in 10 years, one instructor refresher followed by some solos would make sense.

Not a photo expert by an means so take what I say with a grain of salt. So lens flare is caused by intense light bouncing around inside the lens. Usually occurs when you are shooting in a very bright environment (e.g. skydiving) Makes sense since I can see the edge of the Sun in your photo. As far as I know there is no internal setting that can change lens flare. You could try using a filter for the GoPro, lots of companies make them, even polarized ones, or avoid shooting into light. Otherwise, Photoshop. Lens quality also affects flare but not much you can do about that with a GoPro. Those hoods you see on cameras are designed to reduce flare but I haven't seen any that look feasible for skydiving for the GoPro. P.S. Also clean the lens and housing, dust, oil, and condensation make it worse.

Just so everyone is a little less stupid... What they are referring to are trophic levels, in retard terms, "who eats who." There is some variation but the rule of thumb for each ecosystem is an order of magnitude (thats times 10) of consumption from a lower trophic level to create the same amount of biomass at a higher one. Some animals interact with few trophic levels (e.g. cows go straight to grass/corn whatever), others like apex predators go through several (e.g. game fish and sharks). Anyway, using the rule of thumb (I'm sure it has actually been experimentally quantified somewhere) for a cow that weighs 1,000lbs, it would need to consume 10,000lbs of grass/corn or whatever. You only get about 600lbs from it so 600lbs of steak costs 10,000 lbs of corn. Take a tuna for example, say it eats anchovies, that eats some smaller fish, that eats plankton. Thats 10 times 10 times 10 lbs of food consumed per lb of tuna produced. So a 1,000lb tuna "costs" 1,000,000 lbs of plankton. So you can see where eating critters or plants at the bottom trophic levels is more efficient. i.e. less energy consumed. *Did a little bit of reading about cows, it depends on how you define "beef" but the x10 rule is roughly correct from birth to slaughter.

Bone picking time, if you have 3 BS degrees and are working as a medic getting $12hr you sir are the most altruistic person I've ever met or a complete idiot. I outlined my experience in detail for the purpose of allowing people to understand my perception and limitations, please read the preceding threads before commenting. Thirdly, I am right, because scientific data is the only thing that can be presented as "evidence." "I talked to a bunch of people," hell even "I've done this for 40 years" is worthless. A single person's experience is absolutely irrelevant. If you don't understand the statistical implications of that then you need to go back to school. Thats why I sparingly mention my personal experience and refer to established training and scientific literature. I don't care if you have a PhD in every biological science, without scientific literature to back it up, your opinion is worthless. You should know that if you have 3 BS degrees. Fourthly, sorry, I went straight to tampon because maxi-pad seemed so blatantly obvious that I never considered it part of the question. It is like asking "so you can break a window with a rock, can you also break a window with a stone, or perhaps a brick?" Yes, you can use whatever you want to try and stop bleeding via the direct pressure route, cleaner is better. Lastly, this is on topic because someone asked if you could use "women's sanitary products" which I wrongly interpreted as tampons, to stop bleeding. There is a massive misnomer that this is a great idea among the general public. I felt it necessary to dispel that with the most authoritative and complete means possible, scientific literature. You also made an incredibly inaccurate assumption about the effectiveness of XStat, which you don't seem to appreciate, though you should if you have the education you claim and it is not horribly outdated.

Science??? That crap is super biased. Doesn't give a damn about your opinions. Yes, she is a cruel mistress, and her friend statistics. Whoops, there goes my male bias

I don't have a problem with NPR, I like them a lot actually, even have a preset in my car But as you stated "left of center" is a liberal bias, regardless of "how much" or "how far" (which appeals to me because I am extremely liberal). Just because a news source has a bias doesn't invalidate it. When they start to distort information for the purpose of promoting an agenda, then you have invalidation. e.g. FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and Co.

I agree with all of your points, and that quote is what I meant by "thought provoking." I also prefer the word "data" or "information" to "fact" because fact implies certainty and few things are certain (for certainty to exist, there also have to be several other certainties to support it), data implies nothing. But I'm all sciencie and stuff so I know most people don't care about nuances like that.

Speaking about politics only, which I think is the focus of this thread... There is no such thing as unbiased news, if there were it would just be raw data with no interpretation. NPR has a liberal bias, the Wall Street Journal has a conservative bias. The BBC leans to a slightly conservative Briton which corresponds to a slightly liberal United States. The key is to gather info from several sources and use your powers of observation and reasoning to try and pluck the meaningful information out of it while understanding the motive of the authors. FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and the like are purely "infotainment." Television in general is of poor quality, though I do like PBS and can tolerate the BBC. To add to the list of worthwhile reading are Reuters (minimally biased) The Atlantic (liberal bias) The New Yorker (liberal bias) and Al Jazeera (difficult to describe bias). I like Al Jazeera because of a low level of censorship, I really don't care about the opinions of the writers, though it does give an insight into how non-westerners think. US news is very "sterile" by comparison. (edit: they still publish in English, and did before they launched the "America" version.) I like to find things that are "thought provoking," regardless of bias or topic. If the argument is sound and the information not hugely distorted, I'll read it, even if I'd like to tell the author how much of a jerk they are. You can learn a lot about other people and issues you thought you knew by reading material that you strongly disagree with. "It takes all kinds," in a manner of speaking.

Just to illustrate the importance of conveying accurate information and part of the reason why the tampon thing is such a widespread idea. I spent a lot of time looking for scientific literature on EbscoHost as well as Google Scholar and other databases for using any type of plug to treat a puncture or gunshot wound. I found literally nothing, the data simply doesn't exist (including articles for treating gunshot wounds published by the military and authored by military doctors, tampons or "plugs" of any kind were never mentioned). Feel free to enlighten me, I obviously didn't search every scientific article ever written. (There were some papers on using gels or other specialized materials internally during surgery, but is not applicable for what we are talking about). I also spent time searching for XStat specifically, which is easy because it is a proper noun. The only papers I found (the total of which were 3, one in French) only established that yes, it absorbs blood in a dead pig, and that the sponges aren't inherently toxic. So my point is, "apparently it works pretty well" has no evidence to support it. The FDA is basically allowing an experiment for a new treatment that might or might not work, or maybe stops bleeding but the little sponges cause other problems. XStat is also not good for use out in the bush without rapid transportation, protocol requires that it has to be removed within 4 hours, I can speculate as to why but I'm not 100% confident so I wont, and none of the info I found specified why. Long story short, when we evaluate something for effectiveness it requires references and citations. Assumptions are often incorrect or at best only partially correct with considerable and numerous exceptions. I think the propagation of the tampon idea and XStat is that it seems logical at a surface level of evaluation, is simple, offers a quick fix to a big problem, and is kind of funny (the tampon part anyway). Those are all things that make urban legends spread. Could XStat be an amazing new tool for treating bleeding? Maybe. Could it be a disastrous failure? Maybe. There is simply not enough (zero) data to support either of those assumptions. I would posit XStat has very limited applications and is more a clever marketing scheme to try and sell millions of units to the US military. Even if the military says "lets try it" the XStat company will make millions, even if it is a failure in the long run. The hype is almost certainly greater than the actual benefit. The fact that they got FDA approval without clinical trials raises my eyebrows. But I am more familiar with the FDA process of approving pharmaceuticals, not mechanical devices, so it could be normal, I don't know. What I do know is that the FDA is not an altruistic organization and a tremendous amount of lobbying by private interest is involved making the validity of FDA approval questionable all together.

I have seen a few gunshot wounds and none of them and none that I have heard of were not controllable with direct pressure. The ones I saw didn't bleed externally enough to even require gauze. The military has apparently played with the idea and a device called XStat has been approved for use, but it is far from a tampon in actual function. The bottom line is direct pressure. The second bottom line is don't shove anything into a puncture wound. I spent about an hour looking for scientific literature on the use of tampons (or anything else) to plug a hole to stop bleeding, I found none. I also looked for scientific literature on the use of XStat, found very little and none on use on humans. (Basically they just established, yes it does absorb blood and isn't inherently toxic). But Xstat has limitations, it has to be removed within 4 hours, can only be used on extremities and the armpit or groin. As far as I can tell the tampon in a bullet hole is an anecdote from an unknown number of nameless medics in the military. I have no doubt that it has been tried, but it apparently hasn't been evaluated by any medical authority. It is also not part of any EMS training I am aware of, not to include military who's medic training I have very limited knowledge of.

Yeah, I think I know the answer too, and it is no, but feel free to crunch the data. XRW exists at the minimum speeds wingsuits can fly and the maximum canopies can, only recently have the two extremes met. Wingsuits have been flown with planes (powered and not) because they can achieve a IAS of well over 100kts. Canopies (in straight line) struggle to hit 50kts. Even in a diving turn I think the IAS is somewhere around 80kts. Wingsuits also have a great deal of pitch control, comparatively, canopies have essentially none, in a straight line anyway. But good luck dude, would be cool to see, just beware of wake turbulence Out of curiosity, what is the minimum IAS you would be able to attempt that kind of thing with in your aircraft, regardless of glide ratio or descent speed?

I think a lot of the issues come from the difficulty of communicating complex ideas over text and the assumptions made on part of the readers. Also within that is the assumption that an individual represents a larger group, or that the group is inherently valuable. There are a lot of psychological phenomena that deal with both of those issues. For instance, people tend to think what they are good at is important for everyone, because that is their perspective of reality. For instance, people who are really smart think intelligence is very important, people who are very fit and athletic think that athleticism is very important. Diversity is what makes a collective strong, if you have a population of homogeneous specialists then their capacity to adapt and overcome is limited outside of that specialization. We all think "we" represent America, but really no one can make that claim. It is impossible to construct an ideal person that accurately represents 51% or more of the population of the US. So really we are a bunch of minorities all claiming to be a majority and that our perception is the most common. Take me for instance. White male, I'm not a woman so that takes me down to 50% or less. I'm white, that takes another 15 or 20% of what is left. I'm an atheist, that knocks me down by another 50% or more of what is left (the same can be said for any religion). I also have more wealth than the median, so knock that down yet again. So as about as stereotypical as one can get as a well to do white male, I easily represent less than 10% of the US population. So what defines who I am and how I perceive reality is a fraction of what makes the US population, the same can be said for everyone. Is my opinion valuable and worthwhile, I think so, but then I am elevating my 10% or less share above everyone else, all of which can make an equally powerful claim of validity. For cooperation to occur on a mass scale, we all have to appreciate what the other groups, which are collectively many times greater in number than our own, have to offer. The name of the game is compromise, no one should be completely content. It is the same as in any relationship, you make compromises for the benefit of your SO, but at least you get to see the immediate effect of those compromises. On a societal level one has to appreciate that compromises being made will not be visible to them, which makes them hard to justify in our tiny primate brains that aren't equipped to handle anything on a macro scale. Our own perception is heavily flawed (every one of us) and to function efficiently, we have to try and understand how and why. Or you know, we can just keep throwing rocks at each other. Whateves

Back on topic-ish I like Bernie, he like any pres, wouldn't be able to do most of the things he wants to, but he is asking important questions and is the first candidate in recent history to ever take a real stand as opposed to being a product of Dem or Rep marketing. Trump is just bats**t crazy and a testament to the weakness of the two party system. The Rep are busy "finding themselves" and have basically imploded, the power vacuum has allowed someone who is more laughable than Palin to be a serious contender, scary. If there were more than 2 serious parties then the Reps would just be sitting this one out, but instead the Trumptastrophy has emerged. I would take any pres over the last 70 years over Trump. Bernie's age is a little concerning but not a deal breaker in my book, but yeah, he needs a solid running mate that I would be comfortable with as pres. But really, if Trump is the other choice I'd take any Dem with any other VP, Rep or Dem. The idea that Trump could be pres is just plain bonkers.