If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

- George Washington

Monday 8 February 2010

Fear of falling

If you're like me, and 'not too good' with heights, you won't want to read this:

How to Fall 35,000 Feet - And Survive
You're six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale. Here's PM's 120-mph, 35,000-ft, 3-minutes-to-impact survival guide.

Interesting read, although the author doesn't seem to be too clear on the effect of weight on terminal velocity. As a heightophobic, I read the entire piece through clenched eyelids.

H/t to my scientific friend.

4 comments:

  1. thanks for dropping by my blog, Richard. The motorbike thing is interesting. My grandfather wrote a book, in the early sixties,when he was a journalist on MCN, called "How to start motorcycling". Those new Japanese jobs were just becoming available then.

    Many happy Sundays were spent at Cadwell Park.

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  2. One of the best days of my life was spent at Cadwell - I will write it up on the blog one day. I love the old motorcycling books, though. I have one from the early 50s called 'Motorcycles And How To Manage Them', which is a complete scream. I'll have to post some extracts for the delectation of the cognoscenti :)

    'These new Japanese jobs' - heh.

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  3. Weight per se does not affect terminal velocity: consider Galileo's experiment at Pisa.....

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  4. Exactly. The writer was asking why children had a better chance of surviving a fall, and concluded that, amongst other things, "lower body weight reduces terminal velocity". Of course it doesn't. What he perhaps meant to say was that children have a greater surface area per kilo of weight compared to adults and, as aerodynamic drag is a significant factor in slowing you down, they will be travelling more slowly.

    JBS Haldane, in an essay On Being The Right Size:

    "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes."

    ReplyDelete

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