Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Nice work.

"prove cold treatment"

"proveN cold treatment"?

Big fingers & a little keyboard for my iPad, and I’m always racing to get back to my RSS feed to find the next interesting piece.

By happenstance, I started off as a climber, spending most of my time on the granite an hour north of Madison, WI found at a place called Devil’s Lake. When I moved down to the flatlands around Champaign, IL, there wasn’t much rock to climb up so I took up with some cavers and began climbing down instead.

Caving was a revelation, project caving, at least, as opposed to recreational caving. As a project caver there was a goal: collect data, draw maps, survey biota, etc. Climbers just get to the top, usually of something umpteen others have also topped, reach around to pat their own back, before starting down the rock face. Cavers are often the first into a section of cave and are establishing the baselines various disciplines will then use to tie their science to space and time.

Anhoo, check out all these climbers, trotting on down the Everest assembly line, relying on the lines and ladders sherpas and far better climbers of which the sherpas are a subset of provided, getting to the top, planting the flag, patting their back, checking whatever ego box that drove them to tread the nylon and aluminum highway laid down by sherpas, quaffing the O2 others humped up there for them, and then heading down until … the unexpected occurs, unsupported climbing skills are needed lest the ego parade stall in front of the fallen cornice.

Scary stuff, the attraction to which I no longer get as if it isn’t adding to a body of knowledge it no longer feels worth doing. Check out the post-collapse pic of the ~28,000 ft. traffic jam:

Terrifying Footage of Mount Everest Cornice Accident Aftermath
GearJunkie.com - Outdoor Gear Reviews / by Angela Benavides / May 23, 2024 at 2:51 PM
(Photo/Vinayak Malla)

IFMGA guide Vinayak Malla summited Mount Everest at 6 a.m. on the morning of May 21, the busiest summit day, with Elite Exped clients. On their way back, they videoed just after the snow cornice couldn’t stand the weight of hundreds of climbers and gave in, dragging a number of people into the void.

This article was originally published on ExplorersWeb.

The video doesn’t show the actual collapse but its aftermath. Still, the footage is mind-blowing for its clarity and for depicting the mad sight of an overcrowded summit ridge. Dozens of climbers inch across a narrow snow arete, which couldn’t bear the weight and eventually crumbled. The image above shows a climber desperately trying to lift himself back to safety after the collapse.

“The Everest summit ridge felt different than my previous experiences on the mountain,” Malla said. “There was soft snow, many cornices, and rocky sections covered in snow. Even the weather station was half buried in snow.”

Climbers jam the narrow snow ridge to step on the summit of Everest
Dozens of climbers shuffle along meters from the summit of Everest; (photo/screenshot from video by Vanayak Malla)
Sudden Disaster on Mount Everest

“After summiting, we crossed the Hillary Step. Traffic was moving slowly. Then suddenly, a cornice collapsed a few meters ahead of us,” Malla recalled. He and his clients were on another section of that cornice, which happened not to give way.

Malla’s video shows the broken cornice section and climbers clinging to the fixed ropes and desperately trying to lift themselves back to safe ground.

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Vinayak jaya malla (@malla.mountaineer)

“As the cornice collapsed, four climbers nearly perished yet were clipped onto the rope and self-rescued,” Malla wrote. “Sadly, two climbers are still missing.”

Then Malla recounts how he saved the situation — and perhaps many lives. “We tried to traverse, but it was impossible due to the traffic on the fixed line. Many climbers were stuck in traffic, and oxygen was running low. I was able to start breaking a new route for the descending traffic to begin moving slowly once again.”

The situation resembles other mountain accidents where a broken rope leaves climbers trapped behind. Something similar occurred on Broad Peak in 2021 when the fixed rope on a ridge broke, stranding Russian climber Nastya Runova and, a little later, Korean Kim HongBin.

Above them, over a dozen climbers waited, not skilled enough to progress across that section without ropes. Several suffered from frostbite. Runova was rescued, but Kim died.

However, the numbers on Everest’s summit ridge on May 21 were larger than on any other mountain.

https://gearjunkie.com/climbing/mount-everest-cornice-accident-aftermath-video

Interesting 

Reminds me of the observatory on the mountain top at Picacho del Diablo in Baja Calif ornia.   Badly out of date now, but the starting principle of altitude in an area of low human light pollution is in play.

Am I correct to assess that this passage is quite congurent with Lorenz's work?

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With extensive imaging of the brain, neuroscientists today agree that consciousness emerges from the brain’s wiring and activity. But multiple theories argue about how electrical signals in the brain produce rich and intimate experiences of our lives.

Part of the problem, wrote the authors, is that there isn’t a clear definition of “consciousness.” In this paper, they separated the term into two experiences: one outer, one inner. The outer experience, called phenomenal consciousness, is when we immediately realize what we’re experiencing—for example, seeing a total solar eclipse or the northern lights.

The inner experience is a bit like a “gut feeling” in that it helps to form expectations and types of memory, so that tapping into it lets us plan behaviors and actions.

Both are aspects of consciousnesses, but the difference is hardly delineated in previous work. It makes comparing theories difficult, wrote the authors, but that’s what they set out to do.

Meet the Contenders

Using their “two experience” framework, they examined five prominent consciousness theories.

The first, the global neuronal workspace theory, pictures the brain as a city of sorts. Each local brain region “hub” dynamically interacts with a “global workspace,” which integrates and broadcasts information to other hubs for further processing—allowing information to reach the consciousness level. In other words, we only perceive something when all pieces of sensory information—sight, hearing, touch, taste—are woven into a temporary neural sketchpad. According to this theory, the seat of consciousness is in the frontal parts of the brain.