h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: The Ratchet Ride to the Ravine or How Not to Cure your Acrophobia - A12045151
Author: CayteLin - U3656992

Guess the title says all

This is a fine piece.

I was going to suggest it could be adjusted to become Edited Guide material, but then I saw you've been there.

An intelligent essay espousing personal ideas. Alternative enough, I reckon, and certainly well written and thought-provoking.

Thanks for sharing it. Let's see what others think.

Pin

Thank you. Originally, I put it in the EG but they said personal experiences belong in the Alternative Workshop.

Well, strictly speaking it's alternative writing that belongs in the Alternative Writing Workshop.

The Edited Guide is supposed to be strictly factual, and for that reason personal opinion is not allowed. Bit of a problem that, really, seeing as how a very high proportion of human thought is opinion. The only things that are pure fact are...well, things. And why would anyone want to write about things?

The day will come, eventually, when the Edited Guide accepts fine writing in all its guises. One of the first bastions to fall, I'd guess, will be this more reasoned form of the opinion-piece - the essay.

But for now, at least, welcome to AWW. Do you want crit? If so, do you want it on style or on thesis?

Mostly I'd like to see some researcher( the official kind ) take me up on it. A better understanding of biomechanics could save falls.

I have no need for recognition. My parents have passed away and who else but your parents would care?

I hope others with more experience show up and give you the right feedback. I'm having a little difficulty getting away from the piece of writing, It's actually very good in that respect - the torrent of tangential ideas (eg : the sudden analogy of credit card spending limits) is just right for an essay on the way your mind works in a panic attack.

This is pretty specific stuff, though. The motion control engineering angle is a neat coincidence, because I'm sort-of in it too - only with very large machinery and a much more humdrum PDI controller treatment.

For my own acrophobia, I've found I'm rubbish at big drops under tight ceilings (like up on the crane-track in a factory) but relatively unaffected if there's open sky above my head. I'm not really a peerer over canyon-edges, though. And a colleagues pastime (sky-diving) strikes me as pure insanity.

The horizontals and verticals thing surely has validity. Lines perpendicular to the horizon are characteristic of civilisation though, aren't they? Maybe in hundreds of generations, our minds will evolve so that we find steepling cliff-faces subliminally reassuring, because they remind us of the world man controls.

What we need here is a rock-climber. My own experience of the reflexes you're exploring is (I'm glad to say) a bit trivial. I did fall about six feet off a ladder once, and landed light on my feet in a way I couldn't explain or even recall. Or at least I thought I'd landed light. After a few days, I started developing foot pain. It turned out to be a thing called plantar fasciitis (delamination of the sheets of muscle in the sole) and I couldn't drive for six weeks.

Passing rock climber.

Well, there are some well documented stories of people surviving big falls, just as there are some of people being killed falling a handful of metres.

Joe Simpson (another Sheffielder...) describes some of his close scrapes in his biography (not the Touching the Void epic - he's had many). I met a climber who went over 50M into a snow drift and survived - he was a lucky boy, mainly because of the soft landing.

I would personally put your survival chances down to more luck than biomechanics. I have had some falls of a few metres onto a rope, and my personal experience is that it all accelerates so fast, before you know it, you're hanging in your harness, or on the deck. Of course, when you fall onto a rope your reflex action is (or should be) different - you push off, to avoid contact with the rock face. If your feet catch, you generally cartwheel, which can end up in head meeting rock...

Interesting piece and discussion,

sprout

>>My own experience of the reflexes you're exploring is (I'm glad >>to say) a bit trivial. I did fall about six feet off a ladder >>once, and landed light on my feet in a way I couldn't explain or >>even recall.

The spectacular cases are the stuff of thrillers but I suspect the trivial cases are what got us through the Pleistocene bottleneck.We teetered on extinction at one time. A reflex that saved a hunter here and a hunter there from a 6 foot fall would have allowed him to breed. The strategy may have helped us gain the numbers to make it through the Stone Age.

>>What we need here is a rock-climber

I invite input from rockclimbers and others. It touches on neurophysiology, motion control, biomechanics and evolution.
Some chaotics may want to check how the eye movements, muscles and gravity converge on the attractor, the best path down the cliff. Nobody said it had to be a good path. At times someone who is ""just surfin'" can connect the dots in a way a specialist cannot.

Will all this lead to insight relevant to safe hiking and climbing? Don't rightly know.

Thanks for the lead.

>>I would personally put your survival chances down to more luck than biomechanics. I have had some falls of a few metres onto a rope, and my personal experience is that it all accelerates so fast, before you know it, you're hanging in your harness, or on the deck.

My husband has a memory of slowed time and of full concentration on balancing. Thats how the autonomous takeover kicks in. You lose consciousness altogether or your consciousness is in a twilight state where time goes slow and you cease to care.

Your inner autonomous system can manage balancing and jumping but that's about it. But since it knows only a few simple tactics, it can do these at blindingly fast speed. It doesn't tie itself in knots over who to marry, where to invest or what field to study.

I remember a tactic from my days in motion engineering. To speed up processing, we'd punt real-time calculations, precalculate the data and hard code a fast high speed algorithm. In my model the visual cortex precalculates navigational data and fires it to the autonomous system.

One time, driving home from a class in April I hit some black ice. It had been a rainy day and unbeknownst to me, it cooled and ice started to form. I remember time suddenly going slow and watching myself heading towards a tree. After an eternity, a voice within me seemed to say, OK to break now, and I gently pulled off the road. Then the terror struck and I shook violently for 15 minutes.

MPORTANT DISCLAIMER: These ideas are pure speculation. IN NO WAY should they be construed as medical or safety advice. Consult specialists in these areas for advice.

I can't contribute anything based on real knowledge - wish I could. I enjoyed reading the entry and was interested also because my mother believes she survived a fall from a third storey window. But if I ask anything about it, she backs off and says she just dreamt it because it's not possible.

Thing is, she's very level headed, sensible, that kind of thing, and for her to even suggest it is significant.

If she could have steered her fall in some way - to move away from the building, she'd have fallen on a grass slope possibly up to a storey higher than the concrete immediately below.

The wall of the building would have had various things sticking out - old meat safes, pipes, window ledges. Perhaps they could have given a route down.

She just says she remembers falling, picking herself up and coming back up the stairs and me opening the front door to her.

Thank you for sharing your story. Do you remember opening the door for her?

She may not remember because she may have been in some twilight consciousness that folks report in emergency situations. They don't remember or they remembr events as if in a movie.

No, it was a long time ago. I was around 9 and I'd just have tthought she'd been out in the yard ... if it happened and she didn't explain at the time. Which, as she remembers or dreamt it, she didn't.

The first I ever heard of this was about five years ago, and it's when I said I didn't remember that she started thinking she just dreamt it. Until then she'd taken it as fact.

I didn't post earlier on this thread because I waited to speak to her about it again. But her memory's not what it used to be and she's just accepting the common sense view that it was impossible now. I'll pass the twilight consciousness idea on though.

Regarding 'safe hiking', I've come to the conclusion that on narrow paths, it's maybe best to concentrate on positive actions to take, like thinking "If anything happens, I'll scramble/fall up/into the slope".

I'm not sure the lower brain handles negatives very well - if thinking "I mustn't drop this delicate object I'm carrying" rather than "I must put this object on the table over *there*", I get the feeling that a sudden shock or stumble would make me more likely to drop the object, since dropping it is something I'm already partly visualising.
Similarly, thinking about the things you *don't* want to say in a social situation can make them more likely to happen if you get nervous and feel the need to say *something*.

On slippy/uneven/exposed ground underground, I'm usually thinking of escape/recovery actions, or simply where I want to be next - on slippy ground, often simply running/scrambling will work if walking or standing still is leading to an undesired motion downwards.
When cave-digging (excavating), though I do try and work out what is and isn't stable, I don't dwell much on what might happen, but tend to think more about where I can go if things start to go pear-shaped.

I have only had one small fully-automatic-pilot descent underground, but that was a 2-3m jump and sideways spring to avoid a rock I'd dislodged which *seemed* to be right above me, but which I ended up getting far enough ahead of to see it land after I stopped moving. There was definitely no conscious 'me' involved in the whole manouvre from hearing the rock move to stopping - neither time nor need for consciousness except as a passenger.

Your article is fascinating. I'm just back from a trip to Switzerland and Italy. When I've unpacked and fully returned to reality, I'll send a more detailed replt.

Hi CayteLin, the Ratchet Ride has been picked for the <./>underguide</.>. Congratulations ! Perhaps being featured on h2g2's front page will bring more discussion.

One of our UnderGuide Polishers will create a UG copy of the entry to be linked to from the Front Page and will contact you over any final polishing to be done.

It's an interesting piece, thank you for posting it here.

UGeds