Opera CEO Prepares to Swim across the Atlantic 432
rRogta writes "Previously reported on slashdot here, Opera CEO boldly promises to swim across the Atlantic should the new Opera browser be downloaded a million times in the first four days after it's release. Well, they reached their goal and in this press release it says he's now preparing for the long swim."
Tragedy in the making (Score:2, Informative)
Without even considering the difficulties posed by currents like the Gulf Stream, the water exposure will dehydrate him severely and the constant cold temperatures will push him to hypothermia.
I wouldn't want to be him. At least unless I was swimming in a pool aboard a luxury liner.
How He'll Do It (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.didyouknow.cd/aroundtheworld/swimmin
Possibly the greatest triumph of endurance is Benoit Lecomte swimming across the Atlantic ocean.
Lecomte, born 1967, immigrated from France to Austin, Texas, at age 23. When his father died of colon cancer in 1992, it spurred him to do something extraordinary to raise awareness of and money for cancer research. With the help of Edward Coyle, director of UT Austin's Human Performance Lab, and dieticians, Lecomte trained to build his endurance, swimming and cycling 3 to 5 hours a day, six days a week for two years. On 16 July 1998 he set out from Cape Cod with 8 wet suits, a snorkel and some flippers into turning weather.
Navigated through the 40th and 50th latitude by two French sailors on a 12m (40 foot) sailboat and protected by an electronic force field, Lecomte swam 6 to 8 hours a day at two-hour intervals. He mainly used the crawl stroke, switching occasionally to a mono fin and using an undulating dolphin kick to carry him over the 5 600km (3 736 nautical miles) of relentless waves. 72 days later, on 28 September, he swam ashore exhausted but heroic at Quiberon, France.
Re:Seems fishy to me (Score:2, Informative)
Fishy? It is absolutely impossible that he could swim across the Atlantic, a stop in Iceland or not. This is so over the top that it's amazing that anyone doesn't get the joke. Quite apart from the cold, and the giant waves, there's the little problem of the massive distance [google.com].
Obviously it's a marketing ploy (albeit all he managed to do was jack up their bandwidth bill - most of those Slashdot downloads went to
Re:Seems fishy to me (Score:3, Informative)
Sometimes you have to think outside the box!http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/opera_ch05.sv gz [opera.com]
Re:How the heck? (Score:5, Informative)
From this surface temperature map [wunderground.com] it would appear that if he swam at a latitude of 30 degrees North, the temperature is around 70 Fahrenheit or 21 Centigrade all the way to Spain. From Spain to South America it's even warmer (85 Fahrenheit/28 Centigrade). Up beside Norway, it's only 55 Fahreheit (12 Centigrade), so he would probably need a survival suit.
RTFA! Its a joke! (Score:5, Informative)
Jeez. It's a joke.
He's not really going to do it; he's figuring out a way to honorably get out of it.
Re:I hope he has thermal underwear... (Score:3, Informative)
Hella lotta reading, but essentially it does exist.
http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/Sisneros/Sisn
Re:How the heck? (Score:5, Informative)
Pictures are up (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RTFA! Its a joke! (Score:5, Informative)
I blatantly admit that my promise was based more on joy and enthusiasm than my swimming abilities and physical health, I will do my very best to keep it
Re:Tragedy in the making (Score:4, Informative)
If he can swim 2 miles per hour for 12 hours every 24 hours (12 hours per day), it'd take him 125 days.
Long-distance Swimmer Tammy Van Wisse holds the World Record (fastest person) to swim 1515 mile length of the Murray River in Australia. It took from 5 November 2000 - 18 February 2001: 106 days, and she's a professional, and it was a river, not a cold and turbulent ocean.
Re:Two Words of Advice (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How He'll Do It (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not. Read the spec [w3.org], and you'll find that this is completely correct.
The MIME type for SVG is "image/svg+xml" (always). And the extension for gzip compressed SVG files is ".svgz". And gzip is the only compression type which the spec allows for.
Re:download it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:download it (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.opera.com/company/ [opera.com]
http://www.trolltech.com/contact/index.html [trolltech.com]
Re:They're planning on a loooong trip (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I noticed that as well the first time I read through the article.
However, when I went to go post this, I noticed your post. When I double checked the article, to be sure that we weren't mistaken, here is what it had been updated to:
Maybe they read your comment and noticed the typo? Perhaps he will try after all? Ha!
-dave-
Re:What about sales? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two Words of Advice (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, IIADS (I Am A Distance Swimmer).
Re:wetsuits drysuits (Score:3, Informative)
things to keep in mind:
- traditional wetsuits, and especially drysuits are made for diving, not swimming. they are too stiff to swim for more than a few minutes (read: extra effort going nowhere) and cause abrasions / chafing in lots of places (neck and shoulders especially). there are suits made especially for swimming (try Quintana Roo [rooworld.com] or Ironman Wetsuits [ironmanwetsuits.com]), but von Tetzchner is wearing a diving suit.
- you can't stock enough supplies for two people in a rubber inflatable.
- sharks. you'd probably want to swim in a shark cage.
- currents. unless you were totally insane, you'd rather swim with the currents than against them.
by the way, here's a guy [bbc.co.uk] who actually did it.Re:not sure about that (Score:3, Informative)
That's part of one of the reasons, but there are others a bit more important:
The most important reason is the huge heat capacity of water: you can shove a little bit of heat into a given mass of air, and it'll warm up a huge amount, very quickly, to the point that it's often very very near the temperature of whatever it's in contact with (and no more heat, on average, will flow into it once it's at the same temperature as the heretofore warmer thing). However, if you do the same thing with the same mass of water, the water will just keep sucking more and more heat from whatever is warmer than it, as it will take much longer to heat up (generally).
The density argument is *somewhat* applicable, because it means that a given patch of skin will be in contact with a lot more water than it will with air, and so there's better thermal conductivity away from that patch of skin. However, that's the only thing I can see which would connect density to this issue -- the specific heat capacity of gold (at 19.3 times as dense as water) is only about 3% of that of water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capaci
60 degrees can kill you pretty quickly (Score:4, Informative)
Temperature Fahrenheit | Exhaustion/Unconscious | Expected Survival
32.5 | <15 min. | 10 to 45 min.
32.5 - 40 | 15 - 30 min. | 39 to 90 min.
40 - 50 | 30 - 60 min. | 1 to 3 Hours
50 - 60 | 1 - 2 Hours | 1 to 6 Hours
60 -70 | 2 - 7 Hours | 2 to 40 Hours
70 -80 | 3 - 12 Hours | 3 to Indefinitely
Over 80 | Indefinitely | Indefinitely
From: http://www.walrus.com/~belov/hypothermia.html
Re:North Atlantic current does the "swimming" forw (Score:3, Informative)
Re:not sure about that (Score:2, Informative)