What's new
By:
USCHO Fan Forum

This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

  • The USCHO Fan Forum has migrated to a new plaform, xenForo. Most of the function of the forum should work in familiar ways. Please note that you can switch between light and dark modes by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right of the main menu bar. We are hoping that this new platform will prove to be faster and more reliable. Please feel free to explore its features.

That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Kepler

Kepler

Cornell Big Red
A thread for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else and which is, well, neat.

I was listening to a Philip Marlowe radio play on XM Radio Classics today and a plot point involved a "baton sinister," a charge in heraldry which is a bar from the top right to bottom left. A couple neat things about this:

1. One connotation of this mark was bastardy, and in French the term is "barre sinister." Hence, Simon Bar Sinister in Underdog slipped past the censors for "Simon the Bastard."

2. A related connotation, at least as far as the radio play was concerned, was fraudulence (in the show, a bar sinister is added to a tapestry as a clue that it's a fake). I can't prove it, but we've all seen that mark used in what to me appears to be a direct lineage meaning.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Kepler said:
Not really in the spirit, but it does seem like it was a really interesting operation.
Click to expand...

Well, you said it was where things don't fit in, and it didn't seem like one of the planet things, or the political stuff...
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

FlagDUDE08 said:
Well, you said it was where things don't fit in, and it didn't seem like one of the planet things, or the political stuff...
Click to expand...

I would have called it headline news. But my rights and duties as Poser of the Year do not quite extend to Totalitarian Control.

Yet.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

A discussion of a perennial neat dilemma.

once our machines acquire a base set of human-like capacities, it will be incumbent upon us to look upon them as social equals, and not just pieces of property. The challenge will be in deciding which cognitive thresholds, or traits, qualify an entity for moral consideration, and by consequence, social rights.
Click to expand...

I say we use the test of the gom jabbar.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Wow.

Alex Honnold, a celebrated 31-year-old rock climber, on Saturday became the first person to scale Yosemite's El Capitan, a nearly 3,000-foot granite wall, without using ropes or other safety gear

...

The climb ... may be the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport
Click to expand...

They taped him doing it, which is good because he's obviously going to die one of these climbs.
 
Last edited:
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Kepler said:
This isn't fake. Holy f-cking f-cksh-t!
Click to expand...

I know guys who can climb like that. They just won't do it. Setting protective gear - cam anchors, wedges, and such, and running ropes through them are what keep you alive if there's an unexpected wind gust or some foothold unexpectedly breaks away.

I have photos of my at the top of some 100+ ft. tall cliffs, and I'm wearing all the gear because falling hurts. And I was never that great of a climber. That said, even good climbers fall, usually because they're pushing themselves to try harder and harder rock walls.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

There's a great documentary about a couple of guys who tried to set the speed record on El Capitan. It's frightening but a good watch.

"Am Limit" is the German title. Translated to "To The Limit"
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

St. Clown said:
Free climbing El Capitan? Nope, not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent.
Click to expand...

not ****ting on you, but people always mess up climbing terminology:

Free climbing = using gear only for safety, not to aid your progress up the climb, several routes up El Cap have been free climbed
aid climbing = using gear to aid upward progress (the Yosemite big walls were originally done as aid climbs starting in the 50s/60s, so pretty much every Yosemite route started as an aid climb, and many are still climbed that way by average climbers)
free solo climbing = free climbing with no safety gear (this is what Alex did)
solo climbing = climbing without a partner, but with gear (often solo aid climbing).

Previously Alex had done a solo ascent of El Cap (the Nose route), and while he free soloed all the "easy" stuff, he did some solo aid on some of the harder sections. He got famous for his super fast solos of big walls, including his Yosemite "triple" soloing Mt Watkins, Half Dome, and El Cap in a single day. Later he blew people away when he free soloed Half Dome (he had made a name for free soloing hard climbs, but no one had tried anything as big as Half Dome). This is a whole other level.
 
Last edited:
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

dxmnkd316 said:
There's a great documentary about a couple of guys who tried to set the speed record on El Capitan. It's frightening but a good watch.

"Am Limit" is the German title. Translated to "To The Limit"
Click to expand...


Alex has a bunch of speed records in Yosemite, often with Hans Florine, a speed climber. I think Alex and Hans [EDIT: nope, it was with Tommy Caldwell, of Dawn Wall fame] set a new record on Freerider (the route Alex just climbed free solo) a few weeks ago, probably a stealth bottom to top practice run for Alex's free solo. Alex just blew that record away. There are dozens of different established routes up each wall (El Cap, Half Dome, etc). Each route has it's own records. The speed records usually involve some free and aid climbing (with a leader and a belayer that follows the pitch after the leader reaches the anchors at the top) and simul-climbing where both climbers are roped together but are climbing at the same time, often without any protection between them, so if one falls he will probably pull the other climber off with him.
 
Last edited:
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

I honestly don't see how what he's doing is physically possible. Even though he's rail thin his center of gravity has to be a couple inches out from the rock face. The angle of incline on El Cap averages 80 degrees, so there must be places where it is virtually a perfect right angle. There don't appear to be ledges of greater than fractions of inches, so even if you get great purchase with your fingers you would have no assist from your legs -- you would be doing a pull-up using your finger tips. Is that even possible?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top