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Opera CEO Prepares to Swim across the Atlantic
rRogta writes "Previously reported on slashdot here, Opera CEO boldly promises to swim across the Atlantic should the new Opera browser be downloaded a million times in the first four days after it's release. Well, they reached their goal and in this press release it says he's now preparing for the long swim."
Swimmers with lots of experience have trouble crossing the relatively narrow English Channel. Attempting to swim from Europe to North America is out of the question, for the most part.
Without even considering the difficulties posed by currents like the Gulf Stream, the water exposure will dehydrate him severely and the constant cold temperatures will push him to hypothermia.
I wouldn't want to be him. At least unless I was swimming in a pool aboard a luxury liner.
I figure he's going to swim from the Norwegian Embassy in Iceland, go to his mum's house, then swim to the US Embassy. Like this: http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/opera_ch05.svgz
Somehow I don't think he will be able to complete it:
g .h tm
http://www.didyouknow.cd/aroundtheworld/swimmin
Possibly the greatest triumph of endurance is Benoit Lecomte swimming across the Atlantic ocean.
Lecomte, born 1967, immigrated from France to Austin, Texas, at age 23. When his father died of colon cancer in 1992, it spurred him to do something extraordinary to raise awareness of and money for cancer research. With the help of Edward Coyle, director of UT Austin's Human Performance Lab, and dieticians, Lecomte trained to build his endurance, swimming and cycling 3 to 5 hours a day, six days a week for two years. On 16 July 1998 he set out from Cape Cod with 8 wet suits, a snorkel and some flippers into turning weather.
Navigated through the 40th and 50th latitude by two French sailors on a 12m (40 foot) sailboat and protected by an electronic force field, Lecomte swam 6 to 8 hours a day at two-hour intervals. He mainly used the crawl stroke, switching occasionally to a mono fin and using an undulating dolphin kick to carry him over the 5 600km (3 736 nautical miles) of relentless waves. 72 days later, on 28 September, he swam ashore exhausted but heroic at Quiberon, France.
This seems incredibly fishy, as if it were a marketing ploy.
/dev/null). He'll sit in a pool on a luxury yacht while it crosses the Atlantic or something.
Fishy? It is absolutely impossible that he could swim across the Atlantic, a stop in Iceland or not. This is so over the top that it's amazing that anyone doesn't get the joke. Quite apart from the cold, and the giant waves, there's the little problem of the massive distance.
Obviously it's a marketing ploy (albeit all he managed to do was jack up their bandwidth bill - most of those Slashdot downloads went to
Sometimes you have to think outside the box!http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/opera_ch05.sv gz
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
I'm not sure it is possible to pull this off. Isn't the north Atlantic cold at this time of year?
From this surface temperature map it would appear that if he swam at a latitude of 30 degrees North, the temperature is around 70 Fahrenheit or 21 Centigrade all the way to Spain. From Spain to South America it's even warmer (85 Fahrenheit/28 Centigrade). Up beside Norway, it's only 55 Fahreheit (12 Centigrade), so he would probably need a survival suit.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Read the press release!
Jeez. It's a joke.
He's not really going to do it; he's figuring out a way to honorably get out of it.
Hella lotta reading, but essentially it does exist.
http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/Sisneros/Sisn
Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.
Actually that would be way too warm to swim in. I swam in high school and while you hate to get in a cold pool, within about 5 minutes being in a warm pool is much worse. Probably the best temperature he could hope for would be around 60 Farenheit
Don't you hate pants?
http://opera.com/swim/ - Pictures have been posted. Next update at at 10:00 am CET (4AM EDT)
In the north atlantic, life jackets just make your corpse float.
2^5
I'm not 100% sure, but I remember reading somewhere that Opera employs a Debian Developer. Might help a lot for sure. :-)
It doesn't hurt the linux support that Opera and Trolltech have offices in the same building in Oslo, Norway either.
http://www.opera.com/company/
http://www.trolltech.com/contact/index.html
Yeah, I noticed that as well the first time I read through the article.
However, when I went to go post this, I noticed your post. When I double checked the article, to be sure that we weren't mistaken, here is what it had been updated to:
Maybe they read your comment and noticed the typo? Perhaps he will try after all? Ha!
-dave-
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
A press release written by Eskil Sivertsen, he included von Tetzchner's statement as a joke. Don't know if you understand Norwegian, but here is more on the swimming trip. Sivertsen is actually rowing beside Jon.
Actually, "wet suit". A life jacket floats your face up and drags your legs, which means a lot of resistance to swimming. You'll get exhausted before swimming a mile in a life jacket.
Yes, IIADS (I Am A Distance Swimmer).
things to keep in mind:
- traditional wetsuits, and especially drysuits are made for diving, not swimming. they are too stiff to swim for more than a few minutes (read: extra effort going nowhere) and cause abrasions / chafing in lots of places (neck and shoulders especially). there are suits made especially for swimming (try Quintana Roo or Ironman Wetsuits), but von Tetzchner is wearing a diving suit.
- you can't stock enough supplies for two people in a rubber inflatable.
- sharks. you'd probably want to swim in a shark cage.
- currents. unless you were totally insane, you'd rather swim with the currents than against them.
by the way, here's a guy who actually did it.for some reason being in water saps the heat out of you much more quickly than air will.
t y
That's part of one of the reasons, but there are others a bit more important:
The most important reason is the huge heat capacity of water: you can shove a little bit of heat into a given mass of air, and it'll warm up a huge amount, very quickly, to the point that it's often very very near the temperature of whatever it's in contact with (and no more heat, on average, will flow into it once it's at the same temperature as the heretofore warmer thing). However, if you do the same thing with the same mass of water, the water will just keep sucking more and more heat from whatever is warmer than it, as it will take much longer to heat up (generally).
The density argument is *somewhat* applicable, because it means that a given patch of skin will be in contact with a lot more water than it will with air, and so there's better thermal conductivity away from that patch of skin. However, that's the only thing I can see which would connect density to this issue -- the specific heat capacity of gold (at 19.3 times as dense as water) is only about 3% of that of water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capaci
For short time periods 60 degree water is fine, but when swimming trans-atlantic, you want something a bit warmer.
Temperature Fahrenheit | Exhaustion/Unconscious | Expected Survival
32.5 | <15 min. | 10 to 45 min.
32.5 - 40 | 15 - 30 min. | 39 to 90 min.
40 - 50 | 30 - 60 min. | 1 to 3 Hours
50 - 60 | 1 - 2 Hours | 1 to 6 Hours
60 -70 | 2 - 7 Hours | 2 to 40 Hours
70 -80 | 3 - 12 Hours | 3 to Indefinitely
Over 80 | Indefinitely | Indefinitely
From: http://www.walrus.com/~belov/hypothermia.html
But he actually specified he's going to swim from Norway to America by way of Greenland. i.e. against the North Atlantic current. Since said current flows slightly faster than the fastest swimmers swim, this whole disscussion is silly, because he's not actually going to do it.
Who says he "got mixed up"? He didn't specify temperature scales, and most of the civilized world aside from us 'Merkins don't use Fahrenheit. 100 degrees Celsius is the boiling point of water.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM