Slashdot Mirror
Gliding Into the Stratosphere
iAlex writes "Apparently flying around the world in a balloon isn't enough for Steve Fossett. Currently he is attempting to exceed the sailplane altitude record of 49,000 feet. The intention is to fly a two seat glider into the stratosphere on a mountain wave while wearing a pressure suit. Later on the intention is to exceed 100,000 feet in a pressurized glider. There is also a Wired article." Here's a nutshell description of the plan and a primer on mountain waves.
beat it!
lol
First post
Life at VA Linux through the eyes of employees
These English psychologists, whom one has also to thank for the only attempts hitherto to arrive at a history of the origin of morality--they themselves are no easy riddle; I confess that, as living riddles, they even possess one essential advantage over their books--they are interesting! These English psychologists--what do they really want? One always discovers them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task, namely at dragging the partie honteuse of our inner world into the foreground and seeking the truly effective and directing agent, that which has been decisive in its evolution, in just that place where the intellectual pride of man would least desire to find it (in the vis inertiae of habit, for example, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and chance mechanistic hooking-together of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular, and thoroughly stupid)--what is it really that always drives these psychologists in just this direction? Is it a secret, malicious, vulgar, perhaps self-deceiving instinct for belittling man? Or possibly a pessimistic suspicion, the mistrustfulness of disappointed idealists grown spiteful and gloomy? Or a petty subterranean hostility and rancor toward Christianity (and Plato) that has perhaps not even crossed the threshold of consciousness? Or even a lascivious taste for the grotesque, the painfully paradoxical, the questionable and absurd in existence? Or finally--something of each of them, a little vulgarity, a little gloominess, a little anti-Christianity, a little itching and need for spice?
But I am told they are simply old, cold, and tedious frogs, creeping around men and into men as if in their own proper element, that is, in a swamp. I rebel at that idea; more, I do not believe it; and if one may be allowed to hope where one does not know, then I hope from my heart they may be the reverse of this--that these investigators and microscopists of the soul may be fundamentally brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who know how to keep their hearts as well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.--For such truths do exist.
Dammit monstah! You stop buggin' my children now! We work for our money in this house and we don't give money away!