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Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Alright well I guess if we're doubling up on numbers I'll go with 13. If we're not, then nevermind because all the plausible numbers are taken.

Faux-rear end Nonsense posted:

how did you people become like this?

Have you heard of the Titanic? You know how the ship has become the most well-known standard for human hubris? Like, you just have to say "the Titanic" and everyone who you say it to understands immediately that you're referring to a historic disaster that was completely avoidable and that happened because of supreme overconfidence collided with incompetence, and the whole affair was salted with a hefty dose of lingering Victorian-values class injustice, what with the rich people getting lifeboats and the poor people getting to drown?

Well, Everest is like if, after the Titanic disaster, thousands of people just kept on making more Titanics and blithely sailing them into a bunch of iceburgs, over and over and over, never adding lifeboats, never changing the design, never learning from the experience, and meanwhile most of their families and friends and co-workers and the media just praised them for their bravery and perseverance and ignored the enormous waste of money, resources, the litter of sunk Titanics accumulating in the north Atlantic, made movies about it, and the governing body, I dunno let's pretend it's NATO, kept charging an exhorbitant fee for Titanic sailing permits because the impoverished people of Greenland need that money pretty badly due to the ongoing injustice of enormous disparities of resources between the rich and poor countries of the world.

And in this extended analogy, the people posting in this threads are the ones standing around at the docs going "hey you stupid fuckers, stop building Titanics, no you idiots don't get on that boat! It's gonna crash into an iceburg maybe, you might die, there's not enough lifeboats!" But people just won't listen, and eventually the crowds just settle down and start making bets on which Titanics are gonna crash and sink and hoping that it's mostly the rich idiots paying for passage that die and not the poor cockney-speaking ignorant bastards manning the engine rooms because the pay from one round trip voyage will feed their extended families for a year.

And you, Faux-rear end Nonsense, are I guess just wandering up to the docks and seeing the jeering crowds and shaking your head in disgust at us, because I guess you're just completely missing the context and thinking that we're the ones with the problem, what with the death pools and the schadenfraude etc.

But no man, it's not us, we're just posting on a forum. Kindly reserve your disdain for the profitable, established industry of "tour guide" companies who take rich people's money in exchange for hoisting them up a deathtrap mountain in order that they can experience a few days of oxygen-deprived delierium and tedious walking through snow at night strapped to a safety line while two or three locals whose economic situation is so dire that $20 a day is worth maybe dying for. Direct your scorn, goon sir, at the conga-line of starry-eyed Westerners who have convinced themselves that walking to the top of this mountain, for $60k to $100k, will add meaning to their lives, give them a sense of accomplishment they can achieve in no other way, earn them the accolades and admiration of their families and peers, and present them with a worthy challenge, none of which they can achieve in their otherwise apparently meaningless lives by doing much less stupid and normal things.

Marvel at the incredible lack of imagination it must take, to come to the conclusion that standing at the top of a big hunk of rock is worth a ~10% chance of death and a small fortune, when instead they could dedicate their efforts and financial resources to accomplishing something perhaps less immediately spectacular to the casual observer, but in the long run far more worthwhile to all of humanity: like, say, joining a NGO and traveling to an impoverished third world country as a volunteer to help build clean sustainable water supplies, or going to school, getting some medical training, and joining Doctors Without Borders to travel to a war zone and save the lives of kids who got their limbs blown off by land mines. You know, the sort of personal challenge that takes years of training and dedication, selflessness, and raw human grit to face, the kind of achievement truly worthy of respect and admiration, an undertaking involving some degree of personal danger, a facing of internal demons, genuine human bravery.

Redirect your sneer, please, for the people who actually deserve it, for needlessly wasting their lives and resources on a completely pointless and meaningless journey that directly endangers not only their own lives, but the lives of the people who they must hire to enable them to accomplish something that, if they actually tried to do on their own, would require decades of accumulated experience that they're simply not willing to go to the trouble of acquiring. Why, after all, should they obtain actual mountain-climbing skills, when they can just pay some very poor foreigners to do all the heavy lifting for them?

Check yourself, oh goon. It is you, and not we, who appears the fool now.

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Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Nah, without the self-aware pretention someone might think I was 100% serious. You can't use florid language unless you deliberately make it over the top.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

King Vidiot posted:

Then people will just try climbing K2 and instead of a half-dozen dead out of 100 it'll be 88 dead out of 100.

Nah because the sherpas aren't that loving stupid and so there will be no impoverished third-world brown people to enable wealthy Westerners with next to zero alpine experience. The main reason the Everest tourist climbing industry exists at all is because, once the Sherpas fix all the ropes in place, it's an easy climb that anyone in reasonably good physical shape can potentially perform, regardless of experience level. K2 is not that.

Also, having defiled the sacred mountain by blowing its top off, the entire country of Nepal will be too outraged to continue allowing westerners to come poo poo up their mountains at all.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

ChaseSP posted:

K2 is on the Pakistan/China border. It's not part of the Himalayas at all.

Yeah there's still Sherpas that climb K2 though.

From Wikipedia, "On July 26, 2014, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, and Maya Sherpa crested the 28,251-foot (8,611-meter) summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world. In doing so, the three Nepali women have become the first all-female team to climb what many mountaineers consider a much tougher challenge than Everest. The feat was announced in climbing circles as a breakthrough achievement for women in high-altitude mountaineering. Only 18 of the 376 people who have summited K2 have been women."

You're right that officially, geographers and the locals refer to the Karakorum mountains (and the Hindu Kush) as being separate from the Himalaya, but they're part of the same uplifted massif formed from the Indian subcontinent crashing into Asia. I tend to just consider the entire sweep as "the Himalaya" and apparently there's a term for it: the "Hindu Kush Himalayan Region" or HKH.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Not... exactly.

If you're climbing with oxygen and you run out while you're in the death zone, you are pretty likely to die. On the other hand, if you climb without oxygen, while you'll have a much harder time the whole way... you either acclimate, and then manage in the death zone without that danger from running out if you're delayed, or you don't acclimate, and never attempt the final summit. I believe there is a minority of climbers promoting this strategy of not relying on oxygen who basically make this argument.

Probably the "best" way to go would be to climb without regularly using supplemental oxygen, but having a tank available as an emergency treatment if you develop HACE/HAPE high up the mountain and will likely die without immediate oxygen.

(the real "best" way to go is to not climb the loving mountain)

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Platystemon posted:

The best way to climb is to have a huge, luxurious team of Sherpas to carry all the bottled oxygen you could possibly need.

That's exactly how Gloria Shah-Klorfine died, though. She had far more bottles than she could possibly need, except she used them all up way too fast and then ran out and died in a traffic jam on the way down, despite her huge, luxurious team of Sherpas begging her to stop doing that.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

They should just run like, a huge tube up the mountain, with those little face masks that drop down from the overhead compartment in an airplane attached every ten feet, and just pump massive amounts of oxygen into the huge tube all the time. That way you don't have to carry bottles of oxygen and can just scrabble for a facemask anywhere at any time.

I mean. They're already running continuous ropes all the way up, how hard could it be? I'm sure nobody would ever accidentally cut or kink the tube, abruptly cutting everyone above them on the mountain off and thus killing them. Just like, make the tube really strong and thick.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Jim Barris posted:

Why go out to the woods to camp (and I mean for real not pulling up to a camp site in a state park)? The answer is obvious to put yourself in danger to prove you can overcome it.

This is really stupid. Most people don't go backpacking because of the danger. They go backpacking because it's the only way to find solitude in the wilderness and actually experience nature without all the other campers in the same developed campsite you're in, and all their noise and poo poo and drunkeness and screaming children and feeding the contents of their cars to the bears etc. etc.

Wilderness backpacking is fantastic and doesn't have to involve any significant danger. If you're well prepared and either experienced, or with someone experienced, it's probably less dangerous than driving your car for a few hours on the interstate.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

If anyone hasn't been there yet, Cher's Twitter feed is a national treasure.

Oh my god, it so is. I had no idea.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

At least if the Everest-hopefuls have done another 6500+m peak, they'll have had a chance at understanding what the oxygen deprivation does to them. Less likely to unexpectedly get HAPE/HACE on their Everest summit attempt.

Also it means actually bothering to do a mountain that your buddies, co-workers, family, and friends back home won't have heard of so you won't get all the (undeserved) praise and respect for doing it. Should weed out a lot of people who are only in it for a one-time easy path to peer approval.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

It just occurred to me that maybe some of you don't reflexively get this song in your head every time you see this thread, so maybe I should help change that so that you all can suffer as I do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG-wuWNIyzI

Like, I've been reading the everest thread for three or four years and only just now thought to post that. :shrug:

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Also sweet herniated disks in his cervical vertebrae

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

ArtIsResistance posted:

I used to think you guys were the cool type of people who laugh at people dying but now I see that's not the case

Haha man, I'd forgotten about that post I posted. Months ago. I guess you're just catching up to the thread?

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Arcsquad12 posted:

To you it looks Rad. To me it looks like:


raaargh

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007


quote:

My 16-year-old daughter was almost hysterical when I boarded the plane. She knew it was dangerous and she said I was mad. I told her I could manage the risk. I cited statistics, explaining that it was more dangerous riding my bike down to the local shops on a busy road.

Boy howdy is this lady bad at math. A 1% chance of death every time you get onto a bicycle! LOL

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

It's only one case but it does add credence to my belief that most people who go try to summit Everest have absolutely no idea how actually dangerous it is, because they're totally incapable of understanding the difference between a modest risk (chance of death: 1:10,000) and a high risk (chance of death: 1:100). It's all just heaped into the same category mentally. If skydiving is OK then so is trying to summit Everest, even though the two activities carry very very different levels of actual risk.

It's similar to people who can't really grasp the difference between buying a lottery ticket and buying shares in a penny stock, or the difference between the government spending a hundred million dollars on a food stamp program vs. spending a hundred billion dollars on four airplanes.


e. just in case anyone's wondering, according to the Boston Globe:

quote:

In 2013, there were 3.2 million jumps out of airplanes in the United States, and only 24 people were killed in the process. That’s a death likelihood of about 8 in a million jumps, which is one of the lowest death rates in the sport’s history, according to the US Parachute Association.

So, skydiving: 1:133,333. Everesting: 1:100. Basically the same in most people's mental estimation. Actually more than a thousand times more dangerous.

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:14 on May 25, 2016

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Ash1138 posted:

Why do I have the feeling that football has a higher death rate than skydiving?

Even if you include high school and college ball, probably not. But if you throw in former football players who played in the 70s and are now dying prematurely? Then yeah maybe so, but it'd be very hard to get those statistics. And they're suffering from the cumulative effects of years of football, whereas the skydiving statistic is pretty much a 1:1 correlation between a single catastrophically bad jump, and a death. E.g. not many skydivers die due to the build-up of affects from lots of skydiving successfully, I'd think.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

In all fairness that figure uses Everest deaths 1922 to 2012, which ignores the declining death rate.

That doesn't matter much, though, because it's still thousands of times worse than any other activity listed.

I also like the specific citation of traveling 10 miles by bicycle adds 1 micromort, so a ten mile bike ride is about one forty-thousandth of the risk of one Everest ascent attempt. Or, you have to ride your bike 394k miles before you've accumulated the same amount of risk.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Ash1138 posted:

I'm talking about deaths on the field, which are generally considered to be "something has gone horribly wrong" so much like a skydiving accident. I'm sure if early deaths from CTE-induced health issues/suicide are included, it would be worse.

And then include all those deaths in the early days that nearly got the sport banned in America :getin:

Well, football players dying on the field is extremely rare now. Most of the time it turns out to be something like a congenital heart defect or something like that, where they could have been doing any strenuous athletic thing and dropped dead. So I think what you'd actually be interested in are deaths caused by football, e.g., injury-related.

I'm sure we are all shocked to find out that there is a Wikipedia article about Health Issues in American Football.

quote:

Catastrophic injuries—defined as serious injury to the spine, spinal cord, or brain—and fatalities are uncommon in football; both have become less common since the 1970s, although a small number of them still occur each year. Both concussions and catastrophic injuries can be caused by helmet-to-helmet collisions as well as impact against the ground or other players' knees; in other cases, they can be caused by players who have sustained a head injury returning to play, which can place the player at risk of sustaining a severe injury. Despite the downturn in catastrophic injuries, a greater number of players at the NFL level reported major injuries and shortened careers from the 1970s onwards, in part due to the increasing size and speed of players and the use of artificial turf.

The section Catastrophic injuries and fatalities includes a table showing all deaths 2010-12, from "sandlot", high school, college, semi-pro, and pro, totaled 11, or a little under 4 per year.

I'm no statistician but I bet that's comparable to the number of injury-related deaths in virtually any contact sport. In any case we'd also need some kind of metric of the total number of hours of play in the country in order to develop a useful deadly-injury-rate figure which we could compare to Everest attempts.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Already linked to and discussed on the previous page, pr0k. That's specifically the metric I would be interested in calculating, but first we need to know how many hours (or days or whatever) of all types of American football are played each year.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Yeah just dig into that 70 degree slope of snow and put your tent there. What could go wrong?

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

It's important to remember that both that guy and his wife were severely mentally incapacitated throughout the entire climb and especially up near the summit. His decision to leave her behind is similar to the decision an extremely drunk person might make when given responsibility for taking care of another severely drunk person. Any story he came up with is plausible based on that, but similarly, his memory of events is extremely unreliable and ultimately nobody will ever know exactly what took place, because there's no such thing as a reliable witness at eight thousand meters.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

I think the death toll of six (or is it seven) is premature, there's still a tiny autumn climbing window that sometimes claims some more lives.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Yes nobody is going to have any sort of problem with putting a nuclear device on the top of mount everest, I'm sure

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Baronjutter posted:

Why are people getting the police (I guess their boss?) involved? Is there some law in india about bragging about made up poo poo? Can you go to prison if it turns out your uncle in fact doesn't work at nintento?

If people give you money or rewards or something on the basis of something you claim you did, but you lied about it, you've committed fraud.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

LOL well that's indisputable then. Hilarious.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

As a 12-year-old, my trip by car up to the top of Pike's Peak (~2,400m) was one of my most miserable childhood experiences. It felt like I had the mega-flu or something.

Last week, my wife and I drove over the Beartooth Pass in Montana (3,337 m) after spending two days in Yellowstone and staying in Cooke City (~2,300 m). We did a 7-mile hike to Grebe Lake (~2,400 m) in Yellowstone the day before. Neither of us had even the slightest altitude symptoms.

Acclimation makes a huge, huge difference.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Jose posted:

i've driven up pike's peak and was almost immediately dizzy once i was at the top. also wikipedia tells me that its 4302m not 2400

its cool you can just drive right up to the top

Whoops yeah it's 2400 meters... above Colorado Springs. So it's a lot higher than I thought, and less surprising that I got sick driving up.


djssniper posted:

Aww c'mon the only one worth a poo poo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKgeCQGu_ug

I was gonna say. If you're not watching Climb Dance, you're just wasting your time.

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Jul 23, 2016

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

There was only one true rally series. The purest, most refined essence of all motorsport. It was, for a few years, the absolute pinnacle of mankind's achievements on four wheels. But it was too fast. It was too dangerous, for the drivers and for the spectators... the yin and the yang, entwined in an embrace of equal parts horrifying danger and exhilarating thrill. The cars, oh, the cars! These were no track queens, nor were they computerized semi-robots. They were built to be insanely powerful, incredibly rugged, aerodynamic, but with maximum visibility, fast, but agile, nimble, quick, roaringly strong. The carmakers poured money into their designs, constantly innovating seeking any possible advantage, but they were required by homologation rules to sell at least 500 of any car built, forcing their spending to be at least marginally practical... while also dispersing bleeding-edge technology directly to consumers.

In the purifying crucible of that furnace, a daring manufacturer made a critical innovation. Until that point, one had to choose between two compromises: the excessive weight of the traditional six cylinders, which got you all the power you needed... or the anemic under-performance but far more compactly packaged and lightweight four. , but a weird and deeply unconventional configuration: five. Five inline, somehow able to be fit longitudinally in the compact compartment of a rally car.

Oh, how they sang.

There was only one true rally series, and it was called, simply, cryptically:

Group B

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrlhepfy9-I


Too fast to race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4v76y6A2fk

Quattro: the proof, instantly, that 4wd was an advantage despite the added complexity and weight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y0OkQ7RswQ

From both of those videos, you also see the introduction of women to motorsport.

And if you have hours to spare, here's a pretty great Group B playlist, which includes a couple of good documentaries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y0OkQ7RswQ

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jul 25, 2016

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007


Is this old man carrying all your stuff for you?

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

In all fairness, his camera is taking quite a long exposure. I'm sure that's the Pleiaides (M45) just above the edge of that mountain shot, he's resolving more stars than normally the naked eye is capable of (down to about magnitude 8 - see https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html). So very likely you're seeing more stars in the photo than he could see with his eyes, although I'd believe that that altitude is giving him about another half a point of magnitude, perhaps.


e. Side-by-side:




This is v<=8 on the right, and as you can see, far more stars are visible. I'm guessing this photo is going town to at least 9, maybe 10, which is definitely beyond human eyesight even accounting for the dark skies and altitude.

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Nov 3, 2016

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Outrail posted:

So in the space movies when they're looking out the window and there's a splash of a few dozen stars, should it instead be more like a metric poo poo ton of multicolored dots all over the place, or have they got it right?

A lot of good answers already, but I figure we can't talk about this without letting Neil weigh in:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...yZItS_blog.html

Anyway, I'll add an additional wrinkle.

Assuming you've never actually been to space, 100% of the images of starfields taken in space that you've seen, were photographs. And cameras (both film and digital) have an important feature called dynamic range. Dynamic range is basically a measure of how well the camera can handle a field that contains both bright and dim objects.

Consider those photos (on film) taken during the Moon landings. In those, the stars are not visible. The reason is because they're photos of well-lit things: the moon itself, astronauts, the lander, etc. The light from the stars is falling onto the camera's lenses, and the film inside: but the dynamic range of a film camera is too poor to both capture the very dim stars, and the very bright objects being photographed, simultaneously. Any camera can take pictures of the stars with any film, as long as the shutter is held open long enough: but if there's a brighter object in the field of view, the light from that object will just keep adding to the exposure more and more, and eventually you just get a huge blurry pure white overwhelming glow from that bright object. A little of its light bounces around and scatters inside the camera, so you don't even see the stars. It'd just be a blown-out mess.

Digital cameras use software to record the electrical signals sent by arrays of sensors (a CCD - Charge-Coupled Device). Modern CCDs and modern firmware in CCD digital cameras have become very sophisticated. The software can selectively record or ignore each impulse coming from the CCD, which means a camera can improve its dynamic range by limiting how much data is recorded in bright areas while maximizing how much data is recorded in dim areas. This is much harder than it sounds, and there are other factors at play - physical limitations of the CCD, light reflection within the lens and camera body, and so on.

But the result is that you can point a digital camera at a scene containing bright foreground and dim background objects, and get a photo out the other end that is neither overexposed in the foreground nor underexposed in the background.

So, the relevance of all of this is... what exactly are you supposed to be looking at, when you watch a space movie? Are you supposed to be seeing what a human observer would see, with the naked eye? In that case, any scene involving space ships (interior or exterior), people, etc. lit by much light, would have the star field be nearly invisible. Nearby or very bright stars might be visible, but your naked eye cannot accumulate data from a long exposure (well... your brain sorta does this, "remembering" what the eye just saw recently and combining it with what the eye is seeing now, which is why movies and TVs work by flashing successive images at you, but that's limited and not really the same thing) so the eye cannot discern dim stars while simultaneously dealing with much brighter objects in the same field of view. Your iris opens to let in more light when looking at dim things, but closes to protect your eye from damage when bright things are in view. It can't do both simultaneously.

On the other hand, maybe what you're supposed to be looking at in your space movie, is what a digital camera would record? If the crew of the ship is looking at a viewscreen that is driven by hull-mounted cameras, the camera software and hardware may have tremendous dynamic range. It could deliberately combine bright foreground objects with dim background objects.

Often though you're watching a scene as a disembodied observer - neither a character's view, nor looking at a viewscreen, but just an invisible ghost who gets to see what's going on. Should you see only exactly what a human eye could see, or more?

A film-maker has a responsibility to immerse you in the scene, usually, and so the filmmaker typically shows you what you'd see if you were there - a human viewpoint. In those cases, those portholes and glass windows in the spaceship should show maybe the nearby sun or a planet or something, and possibly a handful of bright stars, but nothing else, just blackness. If the camera moved right up to a window, so you no longer saw anything but the stars, than you should see stars down to an apparent magnitude of no more than about 8. Because that's the limit of the human eyeball.

Conclusion: in Star Trek, when they go to warp and you're looking at the screen on the bridge? The stars should be different colors and different brightnesses, but it's fine if they show way more stars on the screen than the human eye would see looking out a window, because the display can enhance the brightness of stars vs. whatever else is in the image. However, when characters are standing near a window and you see tons of stars out of it, that's too many stars to see.

In my experience most movies get this wrong, and also show only white stars, and also don't show a good mix of bright and dim, and also show stars in a nonrandom pattern (that is, mostly evenly spread out in the field rather than unevenly clustered into bunches and groups).

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Nov 10, 2016

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

connorrr posted:

Sorry lemme be camera nerdy about this.

What you've said isn't quite right - implying that modern film has a narrower dynamic range than modern digital sensors isn't correct (although film from the 60s and 70s did). Digital sensors on some cameras can capture "HDR" by exposing multiple times rapidly and combining the images - like, the RED motion cameras do this and achieve around 15 stops of dynamic range. Most pro-sumer camera sensors approach 12-ish stops of dynamic range (per exposure, not doing an HDR setting), while film reaches 13 or 14.

I'm also pretty sure that CCDs don't work the way you describe, "ignoring" overexposed areas of the sensor in software. At least I've never come across a camera that can do this - and if they could you can bet they'd be putting it all over the marketing materials. Overexposure on a digital sensor results in pure white, with no color or brightness data, all 11111111's. You can see this for yourself - a camera raw file is an unprocessed dump of every bit coming from the sensor. You discard your pure white pixels (11111111's or whatever) and you have no other data to replace them with. Just flat pixels.

But a wider point is that cameras don't use CCDs these days anyway because CMOS is cheaper and has over time become more efficient for most purposes. CMOS also doesn't selectively reduce the current flowing through overexposed regions though.

Thanks for the info, I'm not really an expert or anything, just talking based on my own flawed understanding. :shrug:

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Reminds me of the crocodile hunter gettng killed by a stingray. I always figured he was doomed but would have assumed a croc would get him.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

gohuskies posted:

creativity in his project
historic in nature
a visionary line
the great high altitude climbs

I don't wanna pick on you in particular because this is the language used for this sort of thing across a lot of different sports. But... let's try to keep in mind that what Steck was doing was personal recreation. High-altitude alpinists occasionally work with scientific missions to study things like HACE/HAPE etc. but that's not what Steck was up to and it's not what most climbers are up to. Setting records, finding new routes, exploring their physical limits, having a thrill, all of this is part of basically a sport. And not even really a spectator sport, although Steck certainly was famous enough to have provided entertainment to others.

So to me, it's sort of like... I'm really impressed by some dudes who play other sports to an impressively high degree of capability, and that career can be super rewarding if you can manage it. But there's huge flak being aimed at American Football right now because everyone can see that it's causing brain damage for players who take too many hits/concussions. There should be even more criticism aimed at high-altitude alpine extreme sports ropeless sports crap because at least American Football players don't routinely die on the field.

So yeah, Steck's death is a tragedy. But let's not kid ourselves, he was routinely toying with his own life doing one of the most ridiculously lethal sports mankind has ever invented, and his risk-taking finally caught up to him.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Epitope posted:

Na. Risk of death is an integral part of this endeavor. Also cutting edge sport is at least as valuable to civilization as many fields of research. Or do you think art is not worth funding?

My wife is an artist, I definitely support the arts. There's definitely a blurry grey area between performance art and professional sports, but I think it goes further into the weeds when you're talking about alpinists. Steck at least wrote books and presented, but most people engaging in the sport of high alpine climbing are not.

If you define it broadly enough, a person's art practice could extend to literally any undertaking, if they do so with artistic intent. And I support people doing that on their own, but... I don't think individuals engaging in personal (not shared) artistic practice need or deserve "public support" beyond general encouragement.

But this I think is a separate question. Should we encourage people to take insane risks with their lives, for art? I don't think we should. I think risks should be proportionate to rewards, and while many high-altitude alpinists report that their activity is extremely rewarding, the world is rich with extremely rewarding activities almost all of which are less crazy dangerous.

I believe people should have the freedom to throw their lives into whatever they do provided they're not hurting others. But I also think that we should advise people apparently suicidally reckless with their lives to pursue healthier activities, irrespective of whether their activities have artistic merit. I would oppose legislation barring high-altitude alpine climbing, I think people need to be free to ignore good advice and do what they want (again as long as they're not hurting anyone but themselves) but that doesn't equate to open approval and especially to heaping laudatory accolades on them.

Steck was undoubtedly a very cool guy and I wish he was still alive. He had so much drive and talent that I believe he surely could have found equally thrilling outputs for them that did not involve such a crazy high risk of death, and I wish the people around him had tried to convince him of that.

Xibanya posted:

Leperflesh's longass post is already incorporated into my dev build :unsmigghh:

Lol which ones, half of my posts are novels

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Epitope posted:

I hope you're talking about the titanic one, which rules, and not the latest. Muhammad Ali wasn't a visionary, just a dumbass who broke his brain on "personal recreation."

Spectator sports. And yes, I'm pretty anti-boxing too. At least at the time Ali got started, the full extent of the risk wasn't as well known or studied, but yeah. A brilliant and admirable sportsman, but our rabid desire to watch and enjoy combat sports leads to too many boxers and other martial artists destroying their brains for art. I don't think that's completely OK. At the very least I hope you can agree there's room for a serious debate on the subject.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Xibanya posted:

It's that one. :smuggo:

Leperflesh lol that you don't remember; I specifically got your permission to use that one.

I've actually given people permission to re-use posts of mine for various projects quite a few times (:smuggo:) so my apologies that I don't remember this specific instance. :shrug:

do you have a link to it?

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Epitope posted:

Well you say you aren't in favor of outlawing all of it, so sure I respect your opinion and think its totally reasonable

Yeah I don't like using laws just to discourage behavior we don't approve of. We can do that using social pressure while still leaving people's right (to be a dumbass) intact.

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Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

I think weather reports are also taken into account. E.g., it's more important to avoid high wind and bad weather than to be climbing during daylight.

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