Hi there, I am the base jumper appearing in the video, can you remove the catapult video PLEASE?
I guess you record it from the net, there was a LEAKAGE, this video was not supposed to come out before we release a full movie about the story.
Please can you erase it ASAP?
I am very annoyed people don't respect our work on this project by sharing a video with no rights and not even saying from who it is coming from. There was 30 people for one month to build the catapult and I worked 6 month to organise all project, we wanted to keep this secret before the official full movie is released...
Thanks for your cooperation
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Your video, Wingsuit Jumper Meets His Maker, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Cue arrival of base jumpers in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

Almost always the reason is an overestimation of their skills. They realize mid way up that they lack the strength to make it to the top on their own, and since back down is even more dangerous they get stuck. Especially without ropes.

My wife and I found a father and son midway up Echo Point in Katoomba, NSW once. They attempted to climb the cliff for a daytrip, and were only 2/3 of the way up when nighttime fell, so they camped on a ledge and started screaming when the sun came up.
We were on a hike for sunrise and thats when we heard them. Called in rescue and they showed up with helicopter and a team that repelled down to them. Got them up safely after a few hours.

Rescue team was actually happy about this one. Said 9 out of 10 they are called in to scrape up the remains of suicide jumpers at that location.

I thought he was pretty good in Jumper, but then again I didn't hate the star wars prequels as much as other people apparently. I mean, they were worth it for the Yoda light saber battle alone imo

If you have a look at this picture, the rock seems to be falling at a constant velocity, as it should if it was a meteor fragment - it should be falling at its terminal velocity.
It's hard to judge distance and speed, but might be falling at - say 1-2 meters per frame. If it is shot at 25fps, this would mean that it's falling at 25-50m/s (90-180 km/h, 55-110mph, 80-160 ft/s) faster than the parachute jumper, and would be very close to a probable to the terminal velocity of a falling rock.

I retract my earlier statement.

I'm not sure why you say that it didn't go much faster than the jumper. It only stayed in the frame about 1/3 of a second even though it's not really that close. It may be slower than you might expect a meteorite to be going, but if it's a fragment from after the disintegration/explosion of a larger one it easily might have slowed to just terminal velocity, which seems about right to me from the video.
What made me wonder was the lack of any visible smoke/trail. It could just be a rock dropped from the plane above, even a real meteor dropped from the plane (in case someone found it before the jig was up that it was faked). True, it would be a lot of effort for little pay off, but people do dumber things.
Still unsure...1/2 expecting this to turn out to be a commercial...but for what?

A bit skeptical - it didn't seem to go that much faster than the jumper - even with parachute deployed.

Well on the other hand you want to have some surface area to get more lift, so... =)

OK, I doubt opening your mouth actually provides enough area to do anything. But they used to have much looser and bigger suits before that were generating a certain wingsuit effect already, and fairly recently they ruled that the suits must be a lot more form fitting, so once again it's more up to the skill of the jumper instead of the level of equipment.

In this case, it is. Lift a 1 kg(mass) on earth 2 metres and drop it. If will hit the earth with a force of 9.8 Newtons. (F=m x a) That's its weight though we tend to use the kg instead of Newtons to express weight. To lift that mass, you would have to exert 9.8 newtons of force.

On the moon where acceleration due to gravity is 1/6 that of earth, that 1 kg mass would only weigh about 1.8 (9.8/6) Newtons. So it would take correspondingly less force to lift it.

So our astronaut should be able to easily push himself upright in theory.

The real reason he can't do it probably has more to do with the design of the suit (top heavy, not very flexible) and the loosely packed surface composition of the moon. Like trying to right yourself while wearing an inflatable sumo outfit in a McDonald's ballpit.

The high jump answer... when a high jumper clears 7 feet he is really just lifting his centre of gravity about 3-4 feet. He just twists his body horizontal to get his legs and feet over.

On the moon then, he would only lift his CofG about 18-24 feet (plus say 3 feet for his legs). So his record jump would be less impressive than you might intuitively think.

They are ok, but they ain't no Jazzy Jumpers. http://youtu.be/pKaCdz3l2LA
1985, Son! Ya feel me?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Close, Calls' to 'Close, Calls, wingsuits, parachutes, base, jumpers, extreme sports' - edited by kulpims

*beg

Ski jumpers do it too, but with less airspeed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfk8Nh-IBoI

Anything can produce lift (anything that isn't a sphere), some shapes are just more efficient than others. With practice, you kind of turn your body into an airfoil shape and with the perfect angle, enough speed and inflatable baggy pants you can get about a 1.4 glide ratio (1.4 meters forward for every meter downward).

It's an incredible feeling that is completely different from wing suits because your movement isn't restricted at all.

The narrowness of your definition of intelligence depresses me and is ironically not very intelligent

You talk about improving the gene pool yet you appear to lack a basic understanding of the fundamental importance of genetic diversity.

Even if we accept the premise that risk takers are idiots (which is so demonstrably not true I can barely be bothered to try but feel free to go read up on the Nobel laureates, plenty of "idiots" in there!) they are still essential to a healthy and diverse gene pool.

Mountain climbers, Motor racers, American Football players, Alligator wrestlers etc. etc. This is the same gene pool that brings us Astronauts, Fire-fighters, Soldiers etc.

Some of them may simply be "showing off" but
A. this is what they feel the need to do in order to feel stimulated and alive (they are wired up differently to others, they require higher levels of risk in order to feel the same level of stimulation you you might watching TV)

B. Watching such individuals perform or simply appreciating their existence is a source of untold pleasure for many of the rest of us (you dislike all dangerous sports? They are just as "pointless" by comparison)

But most of all

C. They all die in the end, just like EVERY HUMAN THAT HAS EVER LIVED. Putting all your emphasis in life on just staying alive and un-injured seems a little foolish in the grand scheme of things don't you think? The result is the same whether you spend your life racing powerboats or knitting jumpers in a padded room. You still die thus rendering any choices you made about how to spend your life entirely arbitrary and temporary (unless your religious but even then I'm not aware of anyone believing that risk taking alone sends anyone to hell or otherwise).

"Better to live an hour as a tiger, than a whole lifetime as a worm"
-The cat (red dwarf)


Also do you have a better way of getting an alligator out of a pool for a reasonable cost? The only alternative I can think of would be to tranquillise it but that would A. shift the risk of death and injury to the animal and B. be very hard to administer underwater. Nets and ropes seem like they would be prohibitively expensive and horribly impractical here also.

Hoisting the alligator above his head actually strikes me as potentially one of the safest way to carry the thing away, out of the water with no feet on the ground etc. but then I'm not an expert in dealing with Gators......crucially however neither are you and if i was going to take advice on how to get rid of one I'd be much more inclined to listen to people who have clearly spent their whole lives doing it than some random person who bases advanced genetic theories on a comedy film (for the record a very enjoyable one which was clearly not intended to be realistic).

All the walkable bridges around here have fences, though more to protect the people below from people throwing things down on them... except this one pedestrian bridge over rt 30 on my way to work... anyhow, I would guess most people didn't notice she was a possible jumper, just somebody stopping to look at traffic...