This was shot in New Jersey over 20 hours. It’s no wonder why over 2,000 flights have been cancelled!
Ever wish you could fly?
While I have not tried sky-diving yet, this looks like something I’d like to try as well. The wingsuits make jumping out of a plane look more like flying than simply falling.
The article this video comes from gives a great overview of what these wingsuits are all about:
A modern wingsuit is a full-body outfit with wings of tough nylon sewn between the arms and the torso, and between the legs: think Las Vegas-era Elvis crossed with a flying squirrel. During free fall, the airflow inflates the wings to form aerofoils, creating lift and turning a one-dimensional drop into a three-dimensional glide. While skydivers usually fall at terminal velocity - about 195 kilometres per hour - a wingsuit flier falls at only 80 to 100 km/h while travelling horizontally at 115 to 160 km/h. Skilled fliers can perform surprisingly precise aerial manoeuvres, including briefly slowing their vertical descent to zero and even gliding upwards a short distance at the end of a swooping dive. Daring individuals have skimmed as low as 5 metres above sloping ground.
But the current use of wingsuits isn’t the real point of the article. With these suits as they currently exist, parachutes are needed to make the final landing, just as with normal skydiving. So, I suppose you could say these suits simply allow one to fall with style (acknowledgements to Buzz Lightyear). The main thrust of the article is devoted to the idea of developing a suit that would allow someone to jump out of an airplane and land safely on the ground without a parachute at all!
A crazy idea? Maybe. But there are plans in the works for tests to be run…
But I’m sure ignoring proof is much more convenient
Sure, NASA “doctored the moon photos,” but it would have been impossible to fake a series of moon landings, no matter what the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. Luckily, most of the nutjobs have moved on to being birthers, or similar nonsense, but there’s still people out there who think that the government faked the Apollo program.
No matter what you say, they won’t believe you. But you can try this: the picture above SHOWS THE APOLLO 12 LANDING, STILL ON THE MOON.
Labeled arrows on the new image show where spacecraft parts still rest in a vast lunar lava plain dubbed the Ocean of Storms. Arrows with no labels point to the dark trails of footprints that surround the descent stage of the Intrepid lunar lander, from which the astronauts conducted two spacewalks. …
In addition, a faint trail skirting Surveyor Crater marks the path the astronauts took to collect hardware from the unmanned Surveyor 3 craft, which had landed two years before, about 1,500 feet (450 meters) from the Apollo 12 site.
“Birther” proponent gets remixed
by Amy Breen
I haven’t seen the original interview, or even know who this woman is, or even care because the whole “birther” movement is nuts, but this remix is just too funny.
Crazy free-climber pushed the limits, and paid for it
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, where they were having a “climbing” theme day, I just learned about climber Dan Osman. That’s him, in the video above, basically running up a cliff. Intense.
But, speed-climbing didn’t always provide the rush that Osman was looking for. Instead, he started jumping from the top, using a self-designed system of ropes and pulleys to keep him free-falling right to nearly the very bottom. Intense.
So intense, that it killed him.
There’s a bit of a eulogy as a story in Outside magazine, which I found mesmerizing:
“I had a bad feeling about it,” says Daisher. “He was jumping from a different angle than we usually did, which meant he had to jump over the retrieval line, which he wasn’t even going to be able to see, as dark as it was by then. And he’d added 75 feet to the rope, which was about three times more than he usually added from one jump to the next. So he was jumping on a thousand feet of line, which meant he was going to be only about 150 feet off the ground when he stopped. I was really skeptical. I kept saying, ‘I don’t think so, Dano, I don’t like this.’”
I know it’s dangerous, and I know it’s risky, and I don’t know if I could find the courage to do it, but there’s something I find really attractive about the concept of hurtling yourself into the void.
Crossing the Atlantic with a tiny little fishing boat
Ralph Brown and his brother Robert Brown are taking the boat that you see above (picture and info from a post at Wired) and tooling themselves across the Atlantic.
They sound crazy:
“Robert usually sleeps while I drive and vice versa,” Ralph Brown told Wired.com via satellite phone as he approached New York. “We’ve been averaging about 16 knots and ran into a storm a few days ago with about six foot waves and 25 mph winds. Other than that nothing major to report. But at some point, we hope to run into a lot worse weather so we can really put this baby to the test.”
…
That’s risky to say the least, considering a 15-foot wave (a mere ripple in the open sea) could easily swamp the 21-foot Intruder.
“To be honest, we’re not really concerned about the weather,” Brown said. “We don’t really care. Here comes the rain now. Or maybe it’s just fog. I don’t know.”
Should the vessel capsize, a buoyant roof will keep it from flipping over. Brown says the hull is buoyant enough to keep from sinking as well.
“I have full confidence in my boat,” Brown said. “I’ve also been eating a lot of cereal and fruit cocktail. Those two things have all the nutrients you need for when something goes wrong at sea.”
See? Crazy. And yet, I can’t help but think of things like the Kon-Tiki. People have been crossing oceans with rickety boats for thousands of years — that’s how we got places. And yes, it’s dangerous, and yes, things could go awry. But I wonder what the chances are, really. Eight in 10 that they’ll make it? For some people, those might be pretty acceptable odds.
Death Race — where the waiver you sign reads only “I might die”. This is real.
Only the creator of a 24-hour endurance competition that is fiendishly difficult for both mind and body would be disappointed when he completes it in 12.
What fearless looks like
by Amy Breen
This video has been making the rounds on the interwebs because, well, it’s awesome. Just watch:
That guy (Danny MacAskill) is nuts. But amazing. And the video is wonderfully edited. The song choice is great (The Funeral by Band of Horses), and it really makes my insides happy when actions are synced to the beats and strums in a song.
Resolved: All music videos should be this ridiculous
A buff and bare-chested Gorbachev — wielding a double-bladed Teutonic axe — saves busty Soviet peasant girls from an army of zombie Stalins. And that’s just the beginning of this fantastic Russian music video.
It’s from the website of the Stalin vs. Martians game that I posted about earlier. Apparently, this too will be part of the gameplay.
Poor dog!
by Amy Breen
I’m sure this video is going to make the rounds on the interweb in the days to follow. The poor dog and her owner being hounded by the crazy goose is both funny and sad!
After being repeatedly bitten, I’m surprised that dog didn’t go in for the kill. I’m even more surprised that the owner didn’t throttle the goose one of the many times he had its throat in his hands.
(hat tip to Boing Boing)
The truth behind John Lennon’s muder!
by Amy Breen
John Lennon and Stephen King. Can't you feel the hate?
The truth, you say? Why, it was Mark David Chapman! He was arrested and is in jail! Case closed!
Not according to Steve Lightfoot.
Lightfoot claims that the real murderer is Stephen King. Yes, Stephen King the novelist.
Apparently, King spends some of his time in an area of Florida called Casey Key, and recently Lightfoot decided to attend a city council meeting in Sarasota to “reveal the truth.” There’s a link to the council video of Lightfoot trying to make his case. The video shows the mayor patiently informing Lightfoot that Casey Key isn’t in Sarasota’s jursidiction, his claims have no relevance to the city (his reply is hilarious!), which results in Lightfoot being escorted peacefully out of the building.
He also has a website, which currently says “Service Unavailable” possibly because of high traffic after Boing Boing linked the site.
After googling it, I was able to get to the index of the website, and everything is still visible.
Oh boy. Crazy.