PeakOil is You
Celebrity Deaths (merged)
Re: Hillary Dead...
by fireplaceguy » Sat 12 Jan 2008, 17:22:17
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jboogy', 'H')i Plantain , I didn't know that. Every photo I've ever seen of Hillary climbing the mountain shows him and his party not wearing oxygen masks , even the ones with him at or near the summit, I wonder how he knew he'd need bottled oxy. since he was the first to go that high. Were previous attempts failures because the climbers couldn't breath properly? How do the sherpas do it without oxy.? Can you condition your body to perform at significantly lower oxy. levels? I wonder if NFL teams that travel to denver to play are at a disadvantage.
You wonder how he knew he'd need oxygen? He was far from the first to go that high in our atmosphere. Think about where aviation was by the 1950's...
For that matter, balloonists had climbed well past that altitude (and lost consciousness in the process) by the 1860's. This was nothing new for mountaineers to discover. From my flying days I know all about hypoxia, which imparts euphoric feelings and has a profound effect on judgement. The meaningful measurement is called "time of useful consciousness" with the emphasis on useful. Without adequate oxygen your judgement would be almost as bad as a politician with taxpayer money and the power to spend. Almost.
I've climbed Pike's Peak (14,110 feet) and felt the same hypoxic symptoms I felt in the chamber when I was a student pilot. (Had a great instructor who owned a vertigo chair, got us into Longmont FAA Air Traffic Control and an altitude chamber!)
Your endurance IS a little better if you train at altitude - that was a factor in locating the original Olympic Training Center here in Colorado. And yes, we see NFL players sucking wind here sometimes, particularly the chubby ones on sea level teams...
The Everest pictures you've seen without masks were partly due to the fact that the masks had to come off in order to operate the camera. Hillary wrote about removing his mask to take pictures from the summit. I have a book of photographs from that expedition but there are none of Hillary atop the mountain because his Sherpa Norgay didn't know how to use a camera! My bet is the masks went right back on after pictures, particularly given the work their muscles were doing. I'm all about adventure and calculated risk, but scaling Everest without oxygen is a bit much!
I've admired Edmund Hillary since childhood. He had an innate sense of adventure that I relate to. He went on to summit many other mountains and eventually become the first human to stand on both poles and Everest. I liked his mind as well - exemplified by the modesty and understated Kiwi pluck in his first words upon descending (to his friend George Lowe) "Well, George we finally knocked the bastard off."
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Re: Hillary Dead...
by Graeme » Sun 13 Jan 2008, 00:54:38
How about this as a tribute for Hillary!
When a Mountaintop Might as Well Have Been the Moon
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')DMUND HILLARY, short of breath in the freezing wind, took “a few more whacks of the ice ax” and surmounted the top of the world, Mount Everest, as high as anyone can aspire and still be rooted on terra firma. At the time, May 29, 1953, it was a magnificent achievement of human daring and endurance culminating an era of crossing oceans, penetrating continental interiors and reaching the ends of the earth.
The world’s tallest peak, which had defeated all previous climbers, killing several, had seemed not much less forbidding and unattainable than the Moon. But who was seriously thinking then about flying to the Moon? That was the stuff of science fiction, and the drawing-board dreams of rocket scientists who were hard pressed to come up with intercontinental missiles. Sputnik, the first man-made Earth satellite, was four years away. Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn were still flying airplanes.
It is tempting to think of the conquest of Everest by Hillary and Norgay as the moment we reached the crest of a divide in exploration. In the spirit of the lone pilot and hardy band of yore, this was an undertaking by two heroic individuals. But the successful Everest climb, with its team of a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 porters, anticipated Mission Control at Houston and the mobilization of aerospace contractors on this side of the divide.
Echoes of Hillary can be heard in the astronauts who followed. They are kindred spirits speaking the same language of awe. Hillary, describing the view from the summit: “The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map.” Glenn, as he approached the end of his orbital flight in 1962: “I can see the whole state of Florida just laid out like on a map.”
There is also a shared fluency in the matter-of-fact tongue of those who accept the risks of their calling. Hillary, encountering a widening split in the ice underfoot: “It was a nasty shock. I could look down 10,000 feet between my legs.” An Apollo 13 astronaut after an explosion in the rear of their spacecraft: “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
At least once the two who epitomized exploration before and after Sputnik held a summit meeting of sorts. In 1985, Sir Edmund and Neil A. Armstrong, the man of the “giant leap for mankind,” flew a twin-engine plane over the Arctic and touched down at the North Pole. Oh, to have listened in to the man on the Moon with the man atop Everest, together in a cockpit, again looking out on a stunning but forbidding landscape.
When a Mountaintop Might as Well Have Been the Moon
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')DMUND HILLARY, short of breath in the freezing wind, took “a few more whacks of the ice ax” and surmounted the top of the world, Mount Everest, as high as anyone can aspire and still be rooted on terra firma. At the time, May 29, 1953, it was a magnificent achievement of human daring and endurance culminating an era of crossing oceans, penetrating continental interiors and reaching the ends of the earth.
The world’s tallest peak, which had defeated all previous climbers, killing several, had seemed not much less forbidding and unattainable than the Moon. But who was seriously thinking then about flying to the Moon? That was the stuff of science fiction, and the drawing-board dreams of rocket scientists who were hard pressed to come up with intercontinental missiles. Sputnik, the first man-made Earth satellite, was four years away. Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn were still flying airplanes.
It is tempting to think of the conquest of Everest by Hillary and Norgay as the moment we reached the crest of a divide in exploration. In the spirit of the lone pilot and hardy band of yore, this was an undertaking by two heroic individuals. But the successful Everest climb, with its team of a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 porters, anticipated Mission Control at Houston and the mobilization of aerospace contractors on this side of the divide.
Echoes of Hillary can be heard in the astronauts who followed. They are kindred spirits speaking the same language of awe. Hillary, describing the view from the summit: “The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map.” Glenn, as he approached the end of his orbital flight in 1962: “I can see the whole state of Florida just laid out like on a map.”
There is also a shared fluency in the matter-of-fact tongue of those who accept the risks of their calling. Hillary, encountering a widening split in the ice underfoot: “It was a nasty shock. I could look down 10,000 feet between my legs.” An Apollo 13 astronaut after an explosion in the rear of their spacecraft: “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
At least once the two who epitomized exploration before and after Sputnik held a summit meeting of sorts. In 1985, Sir Edmund and Neil A. Armstrong, the man of the “giant leap for mankind,” flew a twin-engine plane over the Arctic and touched down at the North Pole. Oh, to have listened in to the man on the Moon with the man atop Everest, together in a cockpit, again looking out on a stunning but forbidding landscape.
nytimes
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.
Fatih Birol's motto: leave oil before it leaves us.
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Re: Hillary Dead...
by jboogy » Sun 13 Jan 2008, 03:40:42
Wow , that's some good stuff, I'm a little ashamed I've been so ignorant about such a milestone achievement. I had been under the impression he had climbed it well before he actually did. It really is amazing that nobody could do it before '57. It must be much more formidable a feat than it seems, at least as it seems to a layman.I wonder if one or more Sherpa's actually summited before Hillary and it's conveniently been forgotten.
Perhaps the population would be less swayed to socialism if we had fewer examples of socialism from our "Free Market Capitalists". -----fiddler dave
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Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by I_Like_Plants » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 15:50:21
R.I.P. Bobby Fischer.
I loved the book "Searching For Bobby Fischer" and fund it inspiring. He expressed his views about TPTB in the US strongly, but then he was affected by them strongly. And being self-educated, he'd not learned the essential lesson of US education: to learn to be protectively camouflaged and to parrot the teachers' view back to them.
His endgame in life was well-played, avoiding the US's thoughtcrime police, avoiding extradition and torture, and breathing his last as a free man. Even if you find his views repugnant, the US's attempts to extradite him, imprison and torture him were more so, and it says something about the behavior of our Empire that in contrast Fischer's spitting hatred and subterfuge come out as noble.
He was probably the best chess player, ever. We have the word of today's best on that, and comparisons to history's best - chess is a very well-studied game.
R.I.P. Bobby, I wish I'd been able to shake your hand (especially as for the last several years it'd have meant I'd have escaped the US as well) you made it, you made your mark as a freakish genius, in a country where anyone who doesn't fit in is supposed to end up begging in front of convenience stores. If there is a Heaven, you're surely up there with Morphy and Tal and the rest, playing games, playing a game, out of the reach of we McConsumers.
I loved the book "Searching For Bobby Fischer" and fund it inspiring. He expressed his views about TPTB in the US strongly, but then he was affected by them strongly. And being self-educated, he'd not learned the essential lesson of US education: to learn to be protectively camouflaged and to parrot the teachers' view back to them.
His endgame in life was well-played, avoiding the US's thoughtcrime police, avoiding extradition and torture, and breathing his last as a free man. Even if you find his views repugnant, the US's attempts to extradite him, imprison and torture him were more so, and it says something about the behavior of our Empire that in contrast Fischer's spitting hatred and subterfuge come out as noble.
He was probably the best chess player, ever. We have the word of today's best on that, and comparisons to history's best - chess is a very well-studied game.
R.I.P. Bobby, I wish I'd been able to shake your hand (especially as for the last several years it'd have meant I'd have escaped the US as well) you made it, you made your mark as a freakish genius, in a country where anyone who doesn't fit in is supposed to end up begging in front of convenience stores. If there is a Heaven, you're surely up there with Morphy and Tal and the rest, playing games, playing a game, out of the reach of we McConsumers.
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by Narz » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 16:58:06
RIP to a man who couldn't handle his own light. The guy was an embarrassment to chess and a coward for not defending his title against Karpov. It's too bad he was so messed up. He could have perhaps been an even greater player (instead of running away during the height of his talent) and become a fine human being who used his fame & wealth for good. Instead he become reclusive & hateful. Very sad.
“Seek simplicity but distrust it”
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by zzzpeakoil » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 20:52:57
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', '
')He was probably the best chess player, ever.
')He was probably the best chess player, ever.
I happen to agree with that, he is my favourite GM. But I'm no expert, only CM.
Bobby Fischer was a chess genius..at 13 his games were already making great impression as he played as a GM since he was at puberty.
I wonder what was his elo at his peak. He probably would have gotten in the 2900's if events in his career didn't hold him back.
A great chessplayer, a great man, his legendary games will always be part of the fantastic chess histrory.
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by greenworm » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 21:17:26
The truth is hard to come by and the rabbit hole is warped. Compare these videos and tell me this is not a war for your mind. Here is the first.
[video width=400 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/v/QryuMf8qZ0g&rel=1[/video]
[video width=400 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/v/QryuMf8qZ0g&rel=1[/video]
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by greenworm » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 21:19:17
And here is the second one.
[video width=400 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/v/DbtWuwQX8Is&rel=1[/video]
I smell me a rat.
[video width=400 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/v/DbtWuwQX8Is&rel=1[/video]
I smell me a rat.
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by TheTurtle » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 21:33:09
Who put that second one together, greenworm?
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” (Ted Perry)
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by greenworm » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 21:52:17
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by I_Like_Plants » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 21:57:08
Hey, in the 2nd one, notice just before he says "Cry you bastards" a moment before that, there's an overlap between his talking and his laughing, a guy can't do that not even Phil Hendrie.
The voice sounds like him, sounds like a drunken rant, and when you look at how he was treated by some Jewish people, you can understand how he built up this complex, but still, on the 2nd video, the rant sounds faked.
And of course in the beginning that faked rant is dubbed over the video of him talking on the plane, the lip movements don't begin to match.
The voice sounds like him, sounds like a drunken rant, and when you look at how he was treated by some Jewish people, you can understand how he built up this complex, but still, on the 2nd video, the rant sounds faked.
And of course in the beginning that faked rant is dubbed over the video of him talking on the plane, the lip movements don't begin to match.
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Re: Bobby Fischer R.I.P.
by greenworm » Fri 18 Jan 2008, 22:04:17
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he guy was an embarrassment to chess
Credible this is not, the guy could lay you out in 8 moves or less.
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). And IQ online doesn't make someone a role model, Ted Bundy likely had an higher IQ than yours, doesn't mean you should make him your personal hero.