To celebrate my two-year anniversary at Instructables, Eric W., Noah, Rachel, and I went to iFly to go indoor skydiving. Two vids are below. The lighting is terrible, but you get the idea. I go second in each video. At the end of the second vid, you can also see the instructor showing off what someone can do after a few hundred hours of experience.
I picked up the basics after about thirty seconds, stabilizing myself and even following the instructor around a bit. You’ll see him communicating with me via hand signals a couple times, though, telling me to make smaller, more controlled motions. Noah picked it up even faster.
I went yesterday. Here’s the Flickr photo set. The video’s below:
Logan’s on some sort of extreme sports kick, and he wanted a partner in crime to go skydiving with him. The jump itself was awesome, but it would be expensive to go often, so I’m probably not picking it up as a hobby.
There was an small selection of music we choose from, for our videos. I decided to leave all subtlety behind with Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” and Kanye West’s “Stronger.”
I watched a girl edit ten of these in an hour. They have the whole sequence down to a science, and everyone’s looks exactly the same. For example, stick a camera in someone’s face when they have a flight suit on, and they will give you a thumbs-up. It’s involuntary
My friends and I have spent an embarrassing number of hours reliving our adolescent days, coming up with these groan-worthy puns. Occasionally, a few will touch upon the absurd and, very rarely, the sublime. After the jump I present to you the current, canonical list of Er-jokes. Add more in the comments or in emails and I’ll keep the list updated.
Update: The best ones from the comments have been added to the canon as of 12/18/2009.
Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?
Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.
Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.
In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.
Instructables user GorillazMiko is… I don’t know what to say. He’s awesome. He’s on the site almost all the time, reporting bugs, putting encouraging comments on every new Instructable that gets posted (that can be up to a hundred, some days), and making cool ones, himself.
He does all this, and he’s 13 years old. He’s trying to get his parents to bring him to the office, the next time they have a family vacation in San Francisco. His parents must be a little confused as to why their son wants to visit some company while they’re on vacation.
In any case, he really topped himself, today, by painstakingly sketching out his suggestions for a redesign of our front page:
It is so. Effing. Cute. Plus, there are some fun ideas, here, like using the robot as an icon for help. For reference, here’s what the site currently looks like:
