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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> At one point, Robson says he was left upside down on a tarmac, literally sitting on his head for 24 hours because there wasn't enough room in the crate to turn around.

I'm surprised he survived this. I remember when David Blaine hung upside down in Central Park for 3 days – but every few hours he had to take a break: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1060038/Cheati...

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And they actually thought slapping a "fragile" and a "this side up" stickers on the crate would help. It shows a naivete. It's sort of like the "do not copy" prohibitions embedded on a set of keys.

When shipping sensitive equipment, you can use these tilt and tip indicators: https://spotsee.io/tilt

How about a little computer with an accelerometer and a speech synthesizer, that yells and complains bitterly whenever the box is mishandled or turned upside down, simulating somebody inside?

That might lead to an undesired response. When car alarms were novel, I wanted to make mine speak different phrases. Well, that can cause attention to be brought to the car as people will want to see what else it would say. The same could be said for the box if indicated its displeasure with being handled roughly.

That might be even worse. Those car alarms were always very irritating as it was. Eventually, you learned to dismiss it. If there's too much variation, it could continue to cause a big distraction with false alarms, and you couldn't learn to tune it out

As an aside, I was interested to see these devices tucked into the waybill pocket on a shipment of vaccines (see photo):

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-expect...

I presume that they are continuously logging temperature?

Back in the day when labor was cheap and they didn't have to be stingy it was not uncommon to honor these sorts of things. Nowadays the employee would be yelled at for wasting time.

Isn't labour cheaper now, since wages haven't kept up with inflation?

Labour is cheaper, but margins are smaller.

I went to ~6 different hardware stores in NYC before I found one in LES that did not bat an eye on the "do not copy". So, I guess, YMMV.

I think the somewhat better ones use blanks that are in theory only sold to locksmiths (not to your typical hardware store/kiosk), but that's unlikely to matter all that much. These days you can get keys made from a photo or two, or you can just spend some time watching Deviant Ollam's videos and likely have several other options for opening doors.

Popping the pins is probably not a great approach for daily use though.

There are some ones that use mechanical features, rollers usually, that require access to either a good machine shop or OEM blanks.

Or a bent screwdriver and a spring steel hook

Yeah, back in the day you'd have to go to a crappier store and (over)pay for the new key with cash. Putting a piece of strong tape over the words and having a decent story didn't hurt either.

Nowadays you can just use the kiosks in grocery stores though.

Yeah I wonder if there is a better build so that it could only sit properly with one side down.

Or at least prevent siting upside down. Add a triangular roof to the top side?

they sell disposable pyramids intended for palletized cargo, the purpose is to prevent people from stacking stuff on top. In a modern cargo movement system if you have something on a standard pallet I think there's a low chance of anyone turning it on its side or upside-down, since that's just making more work for them vs. handling it with forks as intended.

https://www.leamancontainer.com/product/no-stack-pallet-cone...

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/ccfje7/t...

We get pallets that use these that unfortunately come in crushed occasionally, though they do make inspection at the dock a lot easier. Another one that might worth similarly here is a tip-m-tell, which is basically some beads that will stick to adhesive if the package is tipped.

https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-866/Damage-Indicators...

Maybe having a few smaller suitcases instead of one larger would allow for a sokoban-style rearrangement while inside?

Luggage has changed a lot since this happened. I can still remember when the now-ubiquitous overhead bin–sized luggage with retractable handles and wheels came out and that was a couple decades after this event. I don't think that would have necessarily been an option. My recollection of my family's luggage when I was a kid was that there were pretty much full-sized suitcases and toiletry cases and nothing really in-between, plus everything was a rigid hards shell.

Bags existed.

Yeah or round it off, or... get a plane ticket, guess if you don’t want a vaccine maybe shipping ourselves will become viable.

Typically the way to handle this is to use metal bands to affix it to a pallet. It will be very top heavy if stored upside down, and it's easier to just move it with a forklift anyway.

Agree, and I just saw that caving docu-movie (The Last Descent) about that poor guy who got stuck upside down deep in the cave and couldn't move. He died in under 24 hours I believe.

Why would hanging upside down for 24 hours kill you (serious question)? Doesn't the heart pump blood with the same efficiency regardless of its orientation?

The heart isn't responsible for pumping blood through your body all by itself, it's supported by the skeletal-muscle pump - but that only works when your're moving. Hanging the right way up is in fact even worse and can kill you in less than an hour through something called a "suspension trauma".

Thats why you need foot straps on your fall arrest harness. https://www.nationalsafetyinc.com/mobile/ReliefStep-Fall-Pro...

I thought that happened with fall arrest harnesses as the leg straps cut off the blood supply through your inner thigh. It's not so much the suspension, but where the straps cross.

No,that's not true. The femoral vein is too deep to be cut off. The position of the leg straps is relevant because proper leg straps allow you to hang in a sitting position.

Huh. I suppose thinking back the guy that told me that generally didn't know what he was talking about. I never bothered to double check. I don't do anything that I need a fall arrest system anymore, but maybe I should do some reading.

I wonder if this is why sitting at a desk is so bad for us. Half way to torture.

Yes indeed.

The word for paid work in French is travail, which has the same Latin base as the word torture.

I didn't know about that but you are right. Not only French, also Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, and maybe other language. It comes from a torture instrument called "tripalium", literally "three sticks".

That's not true, I've definitely spent more than an hour hanging around in a rock climbing harness.. and that's just two thigh straps + waist.

It absolutley is true. The thigh straps are exactly what prevent suspension trauma because they allow you to take a sitting position rather than having your legs hanging straight down, so there is much less distance to overcome. Besides, you generally move around while rock climbing, so the skeletal-muscle pump is engaged.

Your lungs can get squished (as was hypothesized to be the case with the aforementioned caver), bursting blood vessels in the brain, and (news to me) according to the article below, your heart eventually has trouble pumping when you're inverted.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questio...

Perhaps his legs were folded down in that crate, so blood pressure wouldn't increase that much.

He might not have been completely upside down, although I’m not sure if there’s a difference.

Also it might not have been 24 hours

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