Someone emailed me this morning and in his email sig he has a derivative of what was supposedly an ad by Ernest Shackleton for his 1908 Nimrod Antarctic expedition:

I was intrigued, did a little googling and discovered that the ad seems to be a fake and the first published appearance of the “Men wanted for hazardous journey” ad is in a 1948 book by Julian Watkins “The 100 Greatest Advertisements” – published 40 years after the actual expedition.

Funny how this surfaced recently and Watkins never caught any flak for it in 1948. I’m curious what other literary murder authors got away with back then before information was set free.

“You don’t write because you want to say something: you write because you’ve got something to say.”

~F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Next time I’ll have something to say.

Since I relaunched my blog on Saturday I’ve had 432 page views. So if I’d been really smart and put AdSense on the blog…

At 0.30 CPC

with a 2% Click thru rate

I’d have earned a grand total of $2.59.

Almost the price of a latte.

UPDATE: I installed adsense. My goal: to earn one latte every 2 days, which is about how often I support the local coffee shop.

Google don’t want to do any evil, but they also don’t like free speech that much, so according to the adsense terms I’m not actually allowed to tell you if I earn enough for a latte. But if you see my posting rate drop then click a few ads, I’ll buy a coffee and output will improve.

I just noticed one of my youtube videos has over 20,000 views. I put it together a while ago using windows movie editor and a flash ripper. The soundtrack is Breaking Benjamin, Blow me Away. The tube is at Teahupoo and is one of the biggest ever ridden. The human glider is in Verbier, Switzerland and is Loïc Jean-Albert cruising 15 ft above the snow. The train surfer is unidentified and is in Germany surfing a bullet train at 330Km/h. The skater is Bob Burnquist in his own back yard on a $250,000 ramp of his own making. The climber jumping off the cliff is the late great climbing legend, Dan Osman.

One of the comment threads on youtube wonders if there’s an air cushion that helps Jean-Albert stay so close to the ground with such accuracy. The phenomenon is called Ground Effect and pilots are taught to add a little extra downward pressure to counteract it when landing. It’s also very dangerous on takeoff because your plane can become airborne before you reach takeoff velicity and as soon as you climb away from the ground you stall and crash.

Ground Effect is caused when a wing’s height above the ground is less than it’s span. It’s caused by a reduction in induced drag. Wing-tip vortices are reduced and there’s also a reduction in upwash and downwash. That means that when you’re experiencing ground-effect, the amount of thrust required to produce lift is reduced.

If Jean-Albert is in fact experiencing ground-effect, then the amount of altitude he has to trade for speed is reduced. But I doubt it. When a wing is at a height equal to it’s span, the decline in induced drag is only 1.4%. When it’s at a height equal to one fourth of it’s span, the loss of induced drag is about 24%. So if Jean-Albert is 6ft tall, he would have to be 6ft from the ground to begin experiencing ground-effect and 2ft from the ground to get any real benefit from it.

At that altitude, he’s probably going to get smacked by a mogul on his way down.