Man tries to go over water from Florida to NYC in makeshift human hamster wheel | Hacker News Reader

Man tries to go over water from Florida to NYC in makeshift human hamster wheel

nytimes.com

33 pointsrdines27 comments

This guy is a prime example of not being in contact with reality. I am not against people trying new things, but you better understand the medium you are trying to accomplish something through.

This documentary https://youtu.be/eTkj-e82RQk goes over his first attempts to go to Bermuda. It's obvious that he does not understand the sea at all. For his first attempt he didn't have food or even GPS to know where he was going.

I’d cut the guy some slack. He’s clearly invested in this journey, literally spending thousands of dollars and decades of his own time.

Personally, I think he should be free to do something reckless if it’s only his life at stake. After all, stores sell paint and there isn’t a law against drinking the stuff. It sounds like the only thing he needs to complete the trip is an escort vessel in case the trip goes poorly. Maybe one of us can convince him to take us on his trip.

> I think he should be free to do something reckless if it’s only his life at stake.

It's never only the one guy. There's rescue people and equipment, taking their time from other rescue work and possibly putting their lives in danger. And tax dollars.

That's a weird objection. Maybe you will fall on your bathroom today, break a bone, and fixing this might end up being expensive to society. However, we don't generally ban activities because of their societal cost; whatever you do in your own bathroom is your business.

Bathroom business being a normal life activity. Risking your life in a reckless activity, when you were warned? Yeah, such idiots should pay for the full cost of their own rescue.

It is a valid objection. The cost of SAR resources is high and should not be wasted on repeated ill conceived ideas. This is his 4th or 5th attempt.

I wouldn't. I also wouldn't give him any credit just because he's dedicated to the idea. If someone spent millions of dollars trying to recreate the balloon house from Up, I would certainly call them insane.

https://youtu.be/pCkgAelO3og

Haha ok fair enough

I think he is endangering himself, I don't think he should be prohibited from doing it.

to be fair, it looks like he's iterating:

> It was equipped with a satellite phone, a water filtration system, a solar array, neoprene wet suits and a stockpile of granola and ramen noodles for when he embarked from St. Augustine on Friday for what he expected would be a three-week trip.

> a stockpile of granola and ramen noodles

Ridiculousness aside, are these good choices? I'm inclined to think not. Ramen is a good ratio of calories per dollar, but what he really needs are nutrient dense foods, probably with a lot of protein given how physically difficult this is likely to be. I would think dehydrated meat or something.

There are two camps about runner foods.

The Keto crowd, they tend to eat nuts.

The rest, eat high carbs foods, think bananas, oats, gummies.

Both of them need a huge amount of fuel. A marathon burns about 2,500 calories from exercise alone, for the average person their TDEE is about 2000. So 4,500 calories a day to break even, without taking into account the heat.

At 4.5K calories, that's 94.5K calories for 3 weeks. The average granola bar is 132 calories, let's pretend he chose a nutrient dense one for 150. That's 630 granola bars. It's not impossible, but not ideal.

You also need to deal with mineral deficiencies for 3 weeks worth of travel. Sodium and Potassium are both needed for intense exercise, which two marathons a day definitely counts.

Like I said, he has as crazy idea, but he is not in touch with reality.

Dehydrated meat would probably be good....now I wonder how he goes to the bathroom.

At about 1k nautical miles between NYC and Miami he'd need to do ~50 nm a day to make it a 3-week trip. That's two marathons per day, a fair stretch even if he managed to make the same propulsive efficiency with his paddle wheel thingy as he would on land.

If he had gotten a bit farther out the Gulf Stream would have picked him up and given him a big speed boost so a little over 3 weeks doesn’t sound unreasonable

The gulf stream maxes out at about 5 knots, but that does not mean it has that speed everywhere. For a surface vessel without much draft, wind probably has a more significant impact than currents and he'd be very dependent on the changes in the weather. A stiff breeze from the north could easily end up with him further south than he started.

And of course, the further out you go to try and pick up the gulf stream, the further you have to go to get back to shore.

The article mentions he'd hoped to get a boost from the gulf stream.

The gulf stream moves at about 5 miles per hour.

A family member of mine is in charge of search and rescue in the coast guard to in south Florida and I remember him telling me about this guy. He was warned but ignored it all and they had to tell him the resources they would have to pull to help him anything happened. I think they made him sign a paper saying “I’m an idiot and I won’t call the CG if something happens”

"Out of touch with reality" has connotations of hallucinations or psychotic episodes, which I don't think he's demonstrating.

This guy is simply not doing appropriate levels of prior art/background information/competitive research before embarking on a project.

At some level, that's good, because for something that's not been done yet research can be interpreted to suggest it can't be done. But yeah, he takes it much too far.

I think society needs some people who aren’t in touch with reality.

Thr outdoor scenes in the first ten seconds are in my old apartment complex. We were out of town when it was shot. I am good Friends with the guy in the blue hat at 4:24, he is friends with 'bubble boy', his words. He thinks he is nuts too.

Is it moral to let this guy kill himself this way if he insists on it?

He may be fine with dying, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't want to be rescued. Since he is relying on the coast guard to rescue him, he has to play by their rules. If he had a real boat following him, that would be a different story.

Moral where? Morals is not the same everywhere. But regardless why wouldn’t you have the freedom of doing whatever if you’re not killing someone else?

https://archive.is/F9tZt

I like this guy. Everyone is making fun of him for "not understanding" but what better way to gain understanding than direct experimentation. Yeah, he could study other people's work, and recreate it...but following a recipe, well, you end up baking someone else's cake.

There used to be a lot of these sort of things in the early days of aviation and automobiles…1890s-1930s. The magazine “Modern Mechanix and Invention Magazine” had some great covers with similar retro future schemes. Nineteen silly one-off ideas for every brilliant one is still great odds for a society, even if the death rate among experimental aviators was distressingly high.

Let me also make a nod to “Everyday Mechanics” magazine in the 1910s for similar ideas…for kids. Build your own small gas engine by casting your own parts. Build a wireless torpedo. Build a radiotelephone. Build a fan-driven snowmobile…

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