I don’t understand. The cite said almost exactly what I said.
So you’ve just decided to totally ignore the content of the cites I linked to and quoted from.
Do you think you are being a little bit literalist and small-minded here?
If I say “everybody likes cheerios,” the appropriate response is not “please present a signed affidavit from every single person alive showing they like cheerios.” When the other person fails to present it for you, you really haven’t won a point, you know? You’ve missed one.
I think you need ankle support and safe shoes in conditions that warrant it. You don’t want to be doing construction in sandals.
That being said, millions of years of evolution designed your ankle to articulate. Immobilizing that joint is not something to be done lightly. If you put your arm in a cast, it atrophies. Same with your foot.
I know nothing of your situation, but consider the possibility that ankle support weakened your ankles, and left them more vulnerable to the injury you received.
You’re not paying attention. Two on one rope fell. They hit the rope strung between two people who were below them. It pulled one of them loose. Another person in an unspecified relationship than fell.
The remaining climber held the wait of all five. Heroic and miraculous it is a different thing than what I have described.
The physics of the scenario I described show an irrestisible force hitting one climber all at once. We allowed only one foot of rope expansion to spread out the impact (which is generous for 10 feet of line.)
In your cite, we do not know how much rope was involved. We do know that they hit the line between the two climbers so that the shock was distributed between the two climbers. No one climber had to take the entire force. We can guess that they did not hit absolutely simultaneously, so that there was actually two impacts. We do not know how much line was between the two climbers on the wall and how much line was on the two who foul. As this fouled though and stretched it will also spread out the impacts.
At some point in this, not clear from the cite, two other climbers became dislodged. The remaining climber held all their weight for a period.
It’s different because the physics of this situation spreads multiple impact forces between two bodies and line, spreading it out both in intensity and time (which is why, two lead climbers horizontally represented a superior safety measure in an earlier post.)
We can estimate that holding the weight of five bodies and equipment will be somewhere around 1,000 pounds. This is heroic, but not impossible. The earlier scenario shows a 35,000 impact which is impossible.
If you don’t get the physics try this:
I could easily lower 200 pounds that was hanging on a line 40 feet below me, using a belay. You could too, I’m sure.
However, you tie 50 pounds to a line with 40 foot of slack and throw it over an edge, it will generate enough force to pull you over with it. There is no way you could arrest it.
Not Mount Hood “vertical,” the line “vertical,” meaning one end towards the summit, the other towards the base (The incident occured just under the shelf at Hogsback ridge.)
That’s not an actual argument. It’s an emotion. Here, you need an argument, you know, like I’ve offered.
My scenario demonstrates a 35,000 pound impact that a climber would need to absorb to arrest, which is impossible.
Your scenario shows an unknown impact of unknown duration, divided between two climbers, and then a 1,000 dead hang that a climber needs to arrest.
In order for you to elevate your argument above emotional obstinence, you will need to provide facts and reasoning to support your stance.
How is this different from the ascent of K2? I know you tried to spin my cite as being roped “horizontally”, but we both know that climbers do not ascend K2 in a horizontal line. Clearly, the K2 climbers were roped “vertically” and became entagled with the lower climbers when they fell.
Therefore, the only way you have offered an arguement is by mistating my cite. I disagree with your interpretation. I think it is silly to think that seasoned climbers with years of experience would engage in a practice that exposes them to a 100% guarantee of disaster for the entire party in the event of a fall by any one of them.
When your physics contradict reality, it is time to reconsider your physics, as well as your oppostition to unversal healthcare; it is likewise on shaky ground.
That would be impossible. Let me see if I can make a picture:
-
l
l
l
*
If each asterisk represents a climber, and the dashes and the lines represent lines of rope, than it is impossible for the two falling climbers two impact the rope without first hitting the lead climber below them.
In order to impact the line, as your cite says they do, it would need to look like this: -
---------
Or some angle close to that. Hence, the two climbers could not have been climbing, one directly ahead of the other, which is the main feature of my original scenario.
No. You have neglected the implications of the fact that your cite says the two falling climbers impacted the line of the climbers below them not the climbers.
Again, that’s not an argument. How then, can two climbers be ascending one beneath the other with a line between them and have a falling obect fall, missing the lead climber but catching the line directly beneath him. Do you posit magic line? Did it teleport through the lead climber?
You need to read my scenario again. I think you’ve mistaken what I’m saying. If you have five climbers (it can be any number) roped together, one beneath the other with 10 feet of line and 2 feet of slack, what happens if a given climber in a given position falls? If we call #1 the lead climber and # 5 the last climber, than it looks like this:
If climber 2,3,4 or 5 fall, they fall two feet before the slack pulls tight with the climber above them. That climber has an excellent chance of arresting the fall. The weight has not had time to accelerate and build up momentum to generate an unrecoverable impact force. So far, so good.
However, if climber 1 falls he falls 8 feet to the point where he is even with climber 2 (10 feet of line, minus 2 feet of slack.) He then falls another 10 feet before the line snaps tight against climber 2. A back of the envelope calculation shows 35,000 pounds of impact force allowing for one foot of line stretch (assuming free fall in a vacuum.) The real # will be somewhat less than that due to friction against the surface, slope, air resistance, bouncing off of rocks, what have you, but it doesn’t matter. Even if all these things add up to a 90% reduction in impact force you still have 3,500 pounds of impact hitting that line. It’s not even close to a realistic number to arrest.
The key here is that the climber in position 1 is in a completely different position physics wise than all the climbers below. All the others only fall 2 feet before arresting. He falls 18.
As crazy as this sounds, it’s true. It’s basic math and physics. Climbers know this, or they should.
Another issue is that Mount Hood is considered an accessible beginners mountain. Not everyone who tries to climb it is world class. everybody who climbs K2 is world class.
The reason your scenario supports my conclusion is that your article suggests that these world class climbers had taken steps identical to what I had suggested as solutions to the vertical line problem.
If you put aside the debating for a moment and think it through, I think you’ll agree with me. I apologize if I’ve explained it poorly.
Well, this is pretty basic stuff, I’m not positing string theory, and nothing in your cite contradicts anything I’ve said once you understand the forces involved and the differences in the scenario.
But your examples just don’t hold up. Mountain ascents are never perfect, vertical paths, with one climber directly in front of another. Climbers do not fall like toy soldiers toppling backwards, one into the other. Ropes do not stay in perpendicular planes. All sorts of weird things happen in the chaos of a fall. The ascent of K2 is never a horizontal line of climbers that would easily catch a plummeting climber on the rope between them. Something else must have happened that resulted in the real scenario; your asterisks and dashes just do not represent it.
This example demonstrates the fundamental weakness of your whole OP. The subtle truth is, climbers are not asterisks, and ropes are not dashes; and for that matter, feet are not stone arches. You have attempted to oversimplify very different physical objects to make the point that UHC weakens or endangers our system. I get it.
But by oversimplifying, you have created examples that really don’t have any relevance to UHC. If my grandma had wheels, she’d be a streetcar.
I certainly wouldn’t wear boots 24/7, or even 16/5. You won’t catch me not wearing boots, though, while negotiating rough terrain or while at my active outdoor job.
I’ll admit that less than .01% of the population does the sort of things I was doing when my ankles rolled.
You can’t have it both ways. My arguments, are examples or metaphors for my larger theme. You’re ignoring my larger theme to make ridiculously picayune objections to details of my examples. Now, when you’re losing on the details, you try to argue that it’s not a perfect world, and I’m focussing too much on the details.
Nice try.
I’ve climbed a mountain or two, but I don’t that experience to tell me that ropes hang according to gravity, and that people do not plummet at right angles to gravity.
Unfortunately climbers do topple backwards, one into the other. We have examples of that. It even has a name “The sandpile effect,” and it’s always on the mind of good climbers climbing in groups. The lead man issue is one you can ask any experienced climber about, and they will likely lecture you at length.
One of the reasons why Mount Hood is so dangerous and one of the reasons why people rope up stupidly is that the apparent safety is high. It’s not that steep or difficult. It’s considered a beginner mountain. People forget that whether or not the mountain has a vertical or technical sections, the kinetic energy is the same in a fall.
You, Blake, Bricbacon, and Blather have insisted on diving into what are the meaningless details of my arguments while ignoring the substance of their larger meaning. I suppose that’s fine. You are welcome to attack an argument however you like it. However, don’t complain to me that you’ve taken this out of the real world and turned this into an abstract physics problem after you’ve brought there and find the implications don’t favor you.
Thanks, buddy. You know I was confused on that point.
No. I don’t think you do. I think like the original climber scenario, you haven’t really tried to understand my argument. This is not really about UHC, it’s about the underlying problem. A fix could involve UHC or not. I’ll try again:
We wear shoes to protect our feet. But, we design those shoes poorly and they end up potentially damaging them.
Some attempts to increase airplane safety actually make planes more dangerous.
Mountain climbers will often rope together in configurations that increase the danger to themselves rather than decrease.
Why do those things happen? Because they increase the apparent safety. Increasing apparent safety without increasing the actual safety is foolhardy. It’s a feel good psychological decoration and a route to moral hazard.
Take another example: Michael Jackson. The man had virtually unlimited funds for healthcare, private Doctors, the whole shebang. He could afford the best of the best.
What happened? Plastic surgery made his nose fall off, and turned him into a cartoon of a human being. Constant overmedication left him damaged mentally and physically, took him out of touch with reality, and he was ultimately killed by attempts to give him health care. It’s not a unique story either. It’s not much different from Doctors with leeches and laudunum, prescribing mercury and bleeding their patients to death to fix their humors.
It’s not funny, and it’s not just with the Michael Jackson’s and Heath Ledgers. I know people and I’ve read plenty of stories here of folks with moderate or minor problems who get totally fucked up by the medical system.
This is not UHC, it’s about Healthcare reform. The answer is not to make sure that everybody has access to Michael Jackson level healthcare. We can’t afford it, and why on earth would you want it?
Look at the Tarahumara. They have an advantage due to the scarcity of modern technology and healthcare. They don’t have Michael Jacksons. Their lifestyle is conducive to good health and they tend to be phenomenal athletes vigorous well into old age. Many of the maladies that plague us are non-issues for them.
Look at us. We have an advantage in that we generally have access to healtchare. An infected wound, or appendicitis is not the death sentence to us that it would be to a Tarahumara. My grandmother spent the last two years of her life in a bed. She was perfectly sane and sharp as a tack when the broken hip put her into that bed. A year later she was gone mentally. It wasn’t senility. It was spending a year in a bed in a nursing home. We spent $6,000 a month to basically torture her into insanity.
There is something to be gained by looking at the Tarahumara and looking at us. There is a happy medium. Thinking about it, the best example of it I could find was Veterinarians. We provide good, high quality, appropriate health care at a reasonable cost and convenience to our pets and afford them a high quality of life throughout their lives.
Our pets get the best of both worlds. Ultimately, I think our pets enjoy better health, healthcare and quality of life than we do, or the Tarahumara (it’s a WAG for an example, don’t ask me to cite.)
I think the debate now is focussing on the wrong issue. “We have to cover everybody.” Maybe. I don’t know. Getting them insurance isn’t the issue. Getting quality healthcare is. Our system isn’t broken because of insurance, it’s broken because of expectations and dependance.
A large part of our health is our personal responsibliity and the result of lifestyle choices. Modern medicine cannot compensate for failings in this area. It can’t fix them. When it tries we get Michael Jackson.
The focus should be on healtchare first, not insurance. Screw the apparent safety! Focus on the real safety. If we do that, then the insurance problem will go away, or, if not, it will be a smaller problem.
We spend what? 1/3 of our money on healtchare? That’s ridiculous. The answer is not to make sure that everybody gets to spend that much. The answer is to bring the cost back to reality, and make sure it’s available to everybody.
It shouldnt cost that much. It should be doing a better job. The answer is not to buy it for everybody, but to fix it.
That’s what I’m arguing.
My examples are ones of focussing on the wrong problem, and of ignoring real safety for apparent safety and that’s what we’re doing now with the state of healtchare in this country.
No. She’d be in a wheelchair. If she had wheels, a passenger compartment, an operator/ticket taker and a an scaffold to connect to overhead power lines than maybe she’d be a streetcar. And you accuse me of oversimplifying?
If you’re climbing telephone polls, working construction, or chainsawing trees, I am a huge advocate of strong footwear.
Surprisingly though, a big old pair of Wolverines is a disadvantage in rough terrain. I was all about hiking boots and whatnot. Ultramarathoning changed my mind. They are often run on trails over very rough terrain.
You want contact with the ground so you can feel where you are stepping. Than, your ankles and feet and knees can articulate well.
I wear very thin bottomed trail shoes, and I where them loose on rough terrain.
I think where you get problems is this. If your boots basically anesthetize your feet and remove all sense of contact with the ground than your ankle rolling catches you be surprise where it otherwise wouldn’t. In that case, the ankle support had better be very strong indeed.
If you had good contact and articulation than it’s not going to be an issue.
I’m not saying go minimalist in that situation. What I’m saying is that it’s an all or nothing sort of deal. Half measures’ll get you fucked.
So I’m guessing you’ve never been caught out after dark without a headlamp on a rough trail. It’s a safe bet you’ve always kept your eyes on where your feet are going next and you’ve never been distracted by wildlife, the scenery or anything else. Because if you had been, you might have ended up crippled for the next 2 or 3 weeks.
With all due respect, twisting my ankles has never been a big issue for me. You should trust your own judgement concerning your own circumstances and do what you think is best.
My suggestion is based on my own personal experience, and what I’ve read. As I’ve said before you have the same kind of sensitive nerve endings in your feet as you do in your genitals. I’ve found when my feet are able to sense the ground, I’m a lot more surefooted.
When I used to hunt, I hiked quite a bit in the predawn over rough terrain, without using a flashlight, and I know what you mean.
Oh, and that last cite I offered also points out that our cushioned supportive shoes cause a shortening of the achilles tendon and calf muscles making us more prone to injury.
Okay, Scylla I gotta know, what reforms to western life are you advocating with this thread?
Your cited story, unless I missed it, only mentioned a kind of corn meal mush, and alcoholic brews ( IIRC some corn based) as dietary sources. I don’t know about alcohlic brews of various kinds, but I do know Native Americans had to supplement their diets with the three sisters (beans and squash in addition to corn, all planted togather), and European introduction to heavily corn based diets lead to malnutrition without the other two sisters.
Is there other data available on what they ate?
I ask because while I strongly disagree with your stance on healthcare I do strongly agree there is something wrong with the nation’s food supply. People balloon up when they come here, and people already here have some a highest obesity rates in the world. I mean just take a trip Canada, it’s like night and day because our fellow Americans are blocking out the sun.
This really says to me American food has something very bad about it.
Just to nitpick, European malnutrition on corn was based on them not using a base to unlock the nutrients. Traditionally, corn was boiled with a bit of lime or ash.
At any rate, Syclla has a good point, and we really should open up a whole thread on just barefoot running (I started myself a few months ago). However, I find his argument avoids the hard question of how much control we really have over our own health. Some, certainly. But genetics is a huge component of health, and that we have no control over. Same goes for the chances of bad health due to pure random accidents. So the question still remains whether we have a moral obligation to help those sick, given that they may well be sick based on factors out of their control. I think we do have that obligation, which is why I support universal health care.
Interesting thread. I do agree with some of the principles expressed by Scylla. However…just a cautionary anecdote for those tempted to strip off their clothes, burn their orthotics, and start kicking around wooded blocks:
When I was a kid, my feet started to hurt when I ran. I was given arch supports and they felt better. After a few years, I stopped wearing them, mostly because I liked going all summer with bare feet and wearing cheap sandals (maybe not discarded pieces of tire, but close) for as much of the year as I could. My feet felt fine for many years and I assumed they had strengthened or toughened up from my Tarahumara-like existence. Recently, however, my big toes started to hurt. The pain worsened until it hurt quite a bit to walk. Turns out, all those years of not wearing arch supports had put additional stress on my big toe joints, and they had developed bone spurs. So now I wear arch supports. Hopefully, I will avoid surgery.
It is my understanding (I believe somebody stated this earlier) that arch supports don’t simply hold the foot up; rather, they position it so that it can better support itself.
I’m not sure why my feet had this problem – they appear normal to the eye, I am far from overweight, and I have participated extensively in numerous sports and forms of exercise throughout my life. In any case, I wonder how many people might have bodies that the Tarahumara approach wouldn’t work out so well for.
I’ll say. When I was training for my 100 miler I was on a pretty careful diet. You burn a lot of calories training for something like that, and nutrition was important. After eating basic whole vegetables and proteins and fruits prepared simply for 6 months or so, I was seriously ripped. My skin glowed with health.
After the race (I didn’t finish,) I went back to a more “normal” western diet. The first thing I noticed was how long it took me to get acclimated to it again. It literally made me sick. You know how if you eat 40 chocolate chip cookies in a row, your stomach will turn? I felt like that all the time. The processed food we eat contains so much unnatural fats and sodium that it will make you feel ill unless you build up a tolerance to it.
The first few times I had fast food, or restaurant food, I was amazed. I could taste the rancidness and the chemicals of the oil that the french fries were made in. I could taste the batter and the chemicals from the McNuggets and “fish” patties that had also been fried in that oil. Any time I ate institutional type processed food, I could taste all kinds of nastiness and I’d feel sick after a few bites.
After a couple of weeks I stopped feeling sick and stopped tasting all that stuff. Then of course, my skin returned to its normal western pallid greasiness, the little fatty deposits came back, and I looked a lot less healthy.
Scylla, thanks for this link, great to see the running community there. One factor I note: the Tarahumara are small, well, about my size, 5’3’, and you might weigh that with wear and tear on the body, and feet. I’ll support Scylla in my own experience with footwear, not as runner, but being on my feet on gravel all the time, very physical at work… I switched from running shoes to Keen’s, which don’t have a padded footbed, and my footaches vanished. I’ve wanted to check out Vibrams to go further; can see the advantage of having flexibility and development of foot muscles.
The Tao’s Revenge, scroll down on that link, and there’s a photo of a guy with a basic Tarahumara meal, looks pretty healthy. As Scylla’s last post says, diet is really key to good health. I’ve been off the Standard American Diet for 25 years, and feel sick when I eat that stuff. So, how do we get people to do that? It’ll take education to offset all the advertisement for crappy food, and, with any healthcare system, rewards for eating well. I have paid into BCBS for 8 years, and haven’t needed to use much care, and pay close attention to diet and exercise, but they don’t give me any points for doing that.
And, Scylla, I’m going to read your Tarahumara book recommendation, because it sounds interesting , but what factor do you think stress has on health? You touch on it a bit in contrasting the Tarahumara who are outside their culture (Your term was “welfare”, and I understand that, but look at the other term), and those who live within their culture. If you scroll down to the very bottom of the above linked page, there is an absolutely beautiful story describing the integration of Tarahumara culture and place.(Note here, Blake, that I’m not idealizing a back to nature simplicity)
In so many ways, our culture lacks in that, which causes stress and loneliness, which can lead to many bad habits that cause bad health. In light of your experience with tha , Scylla, what to do in the area of nutritional education?
Calling the foot supporting bone system an “arch” is a complete misnomer.
What an arch does is convert the vertical (downwards) force in the middle of the arch into horizontal force at the two ends. The horizontal force is then taken by the ground. An arch works only and solely because the two ends of the arch cannot move apart from each other. If they could, the arch would collapse.
This is most evident in a classical masonry arch. If you put one end of a masonry arch on roller skates, the arch will collapse immediately. The arch is only held up by the solidity of the two ends. The reason it does not collapse is because the ends are fixed, they cannot move apart. If they can move apart, the arch collapses.
This constraint is obviously not true in the foot, where the two ends of the “arch” are free to move apart from each other, and yet the foot does not collapse. Thus, in the foot …
IT’S NOT AN ARCH, IT’S JUST CALLED AN ARCH!!!
As a result, all of your comparisons and claims and “vertical force” arguments are meaningless. “Arch supports” may or may not be good for the foot, but you’ll never show that by a nonsensical comparison with a masonry arch.