Death Wall Research Articles

Horizontal running inside circular walls of Moon settlements: a comprehensive countermeasure for low-gravity deconditioning?

Long-lasting exposure to low gravity, such as in lunar settlements planned by the ongoing Artemis Program, elicits muscle hypotrophy, bone demineralization, cardio-respiratory and neuro-control deconditioning, against which optimal countermeasures are still to be designed. Rather than training selected muscle groups only, 'whole-body' activities such as locomotion seem better candidates, but at Moon gravity both 'pendular' walking and bouncing gaits like running exhibit abnormal dynamics at faster speeds. We theoretically and experimentally show that much greater self-generated artificial gravities can be experienced on the Moon by running horizontally inside a static 4.7 m radius cylinder (motorcyclists' 'Wall of Death' of amusement parks) at speeds preventing downward skidding. To emulate lunar gravity, 83% of body weight was unloaded by pre-tensed (36 m) bungee jumping bands. Participants unprecedentedly maintained horizontal fast running (5.4-6.5 m s-1) for a few circular laps, with intense metabolism (estimated as 54-74 mlO2 kg-1 min-1) and peak forces during foot contact, inferred by motion analysis, of 2-3 Earth body weight (corresponding to terrestrial running at 3-4 m s-1), high enough to prevent bone calcium resorption. A training regime of a few laps a day promises to be a viable countermeasure for astronauts to quickly combat whole-body deconditioning, for further missions and home return.

Roaming Charges: Death Wall

Journal Article Roaming Charges: Death Wall Get access European Journal of International Law, Volume 31, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages 285–288, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chaa049 Published: 07 August 2020

Karl Barth, das Manifest der 93 und der Isenheimer Altar. Ingolf U. Dalferth in Dankbarkeit!

Abstract Without the contemplation of the Isenheim Altar, Karl Barth would not have achieved a certain theological breakthrough in this radical and precise manner. It can be assumed that his theological linguistic doctrine for the turn from the first to the second version of the Commentary on the Letter to the Romans was promoted by the pictorial contemplation of the Isenheim Altar (caused by the disappointment about his theological teachers). The thesis is that Barth presented his theological metaphor of the ›death line‹ (17 October 1920) in derivation of the ›death wall‹ (17 April 1920) of the closed representation of the altar, which had previously been viewed by Grünewald, so that Barths with his Grünewald reception also and decisively initiated and carried out his theological reorientation.

Orientations and Identities

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the much-loved Images Festival was remarkable in scale: hundreds of media artists from all over the world showed their work at over twenty venues around Toronto as part of North America's largest celebration of moving image culture. This year's theme, Radical Otherness, was certainly an apt (albeit broad) characterization of a festival whose mandate directs the display of work that agitates, expands, and rejects the mainstream practices and pedagogies of moving image culture. Two increasingly relevant themes emerged as central preoccupations across a wide variety of screenings, installations, artist talks, and performances. First, a concern with the spatially influenced nature of identity and culture was foregrounded in works about landscape, the nation-state, and built infrastructure. Second, a related interrogation of the technologically mediated relationships we experience with the aforementioned surroundings was enacted through experimental film and video's long-standing concern with their materialities. The festival's opening night featured John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses (2011), whose examination of contemporary issues in global migration and cultural adaptation was filtered through rich, slow-moving pans of a snow-covered mountainous landscape in Alaska intercut with archival footage of mid-century immigration to the U.K. (tenement neighborhoods, migrant laborers, the arrival of passenger boats, etc.). Accompanied by readings from James Joyce, John Milton, and William Shakespeare, among others, the question arises whether this work unproblematically reasserts the dominance of the Western literary canon or engages with it to question the narrowly defined aesthetics of (Western) cultural history. Ultimately, Akomfrah's methodical and lush landscape film, whose mysterious protagonist always wanders the icy milieu with his back to the camera, highlights the ephemerality of cultural identity. As an unnamed man in the archival footage points out, one thinks a new cultural milieu is strange until one acclimatizes oneself to it, thereby also becoming strange. The kind of haunting spatial disorientation created by Akomfrah's barren landscape is echoed in other works, such as the shorts Depart (2011) by Blake Williams and Wall of Death (2011) by Adam Rosen and John Creson. Depart uses geospatial positioning software to destabilize the illusory mastery of viewership. As a handheld camera wobbles while shooting a lizard, the software leaves a digital trace of the lizard's slightly moving eyeball in the form of a lingering white line. Relinquishing control of the viewer's perception by so overtly prioritizing the camera's movements and traces is a disarming experience for the audience, and the work underscores the ruthless automation of positioning software. Wall of Death shows indiscernible footage of a careening carnival ride at night. Lights flash while thrilled attendees shriek with delight, and yet, much like in Depart, the viewer's destabilized position engenders a disturbing and uncomfortable sense of dizziness. In this context, the delighted shrieks we hear begin to seem ominous, even terrifying. Wall of Death was shot on July 22, 2011, as a response to the horrifying act of mass murder committed that same day in Norway by a racist far-right extremist. How do we understand our own viewing experience-terrified, disoriented, and confused, as a sympathetic reflection of the experience of those who have fallen victim to the unyielding certainty of violently racist acts of cultural warfare? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Johann Lurf's short Kreis Wr. Neustadt (A to A) (2011), the filmmaker circles roundabouts in the rural-industrial landscape of Austria on a Vespa, his camera pointed at each roundabout's center. Like the aforementioned works, the initial feeling here is one of disorientation. Lurf's work, however, transitions into a kind of hypnotic magic trick, as absurd pieces of public art and advertisement begin to appear in the centers of roundabouts. …

Player vs. Played

Dark By Marco Brambilla Santa Monica Museum of Art Santa Monica, California May 21-August 20, 2011 Entering the darkened maze constructed to house media artist Marco Brambilla's survey exhibition The Dark Lining at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, viewers had the opportunity to walk through a carefully choreographed presentation of seven time-based works. Each piece was isolated and viewed either on a separate wall or in a perfectly proportioned room where the viewer had no distractions or sound bleeds, enabling their undivided attention. works demand attention and careful scrutiny. Brambilla is a master of montage, and most of his pieces result from hours of compositing found footage. earliest work on view is Wall of Death (2001), a single-channel video projection that documents a motorcyclist standing on the pedals of his bike with his arms raised as he endlessly circles a spinning wooden drum. Through precise editing, Brambilla has created the illusion of a continuous stunt by repeating short clips of the biker in constant motion despite changes in perspective and point of view. vertiginous motion is dizzying and disorienting. While Wall of Death is fascinating to watch, Brambilla chooses not to reference the history of the stunt or its potential danger; instead the video becomes a visually engaging formal study based on a smart editing concept in which the series of loops become progressively shorter while creating the illusion that each sequence could have gone on indefinitely. Much of Brambilla's work purports to be more than it is. He frequently uses found footage, yet beyond overwhelming the viewer with a bombardment of imagery, offers very little commentary on the source of his extractions. Cathedral (2008) is a perfect example of Branibilla's skill at combining and mirroring imagery to enhance visual impact. Shot during the Christmas shopping season at the Toronto Ealon Centre mall, this nine-minute video loop juxtaposes fragmented shoppers crisscrossing the screen as if in perpetual kaleidoscopic motion. doubling and layering of the shoppers and the architecture creates a dense visual Held. accompanying soundtrack, with its digitized dinging and the ringing of distant bells, is as abstracted as the imagery. Amid the camera's slow-motion pan one can make out many of the store names as well as the cathedral ceiling of the space. These elements coalesce in a sophisticated array of dynamic imagery whose patterned effects are reminiscent of stained glass windows. piece neither celebrates nor criticizes consumer culture at the height of the holiday shopping season, but simply uses it as colorful, vibrant, and richly textured source material. Sea of Tranquility (2006) is Brambilla at his most minimal and poetic. It is a portrayal of decay as Brambilla imagines the disintegration of the lunar module, Eagle, placed on the moon by the astronauts of the 1969 Apollo spaceflight. Through accelerated time lapse as the video is just over i hree minutes in length the lunar module and the American flag placed by its side are slowly eaten away, becoming a pile of rubble. soundtrack, based on the actual communication between mission control and the lunar pod, has been digitally manipulated, foregrounding beeps and blips and eliminating dialogue so that both sound and image are devoid of human presence. work becomes a vivid fantasy portrait of the isolation and harsh conditions of the lunar landscape, while simultaneously a statement about the vulnerability of our creations and the limits of technology. three-channel installation HalfLife (2002) is a thoughtful meditation and commentary on online gaming-specifically the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike. …

The wall of death: Newtons, nerves, and nausea

What really happens on the “Wall of Death”? We ride it (by motorcycle and car) and find out … and put the resulting video on a website!

Worldwide wall of death

Worldwide wall of death

More physics on the Wall of Death

First Page

The Wall of Death

Much to everybody’s surprise, it was recently demonstrated that according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, very close to a compact star or a black hole the centrifugal force may attract towards the center of a circular motion. We show here that Newtonian theory predicts exactly the same effect, and that the geometrical reason for it is identical in both theories. The centrifugal force always repels in the local outward direction. However, in a curved space (or on a curved surface) in which the perimeter of concentric circles decreases with the increasing diameter, the local outward direction points towards the global center of the circles, and thus the centrifugal force attracts to the center.

Barricaded

The earsplitting vibrations, the hurricane force, the monstrous, pulsating shock waves had finally dissipated, although the men could still hear and feel the echoes through their ringing eardrums and the soles of their booted feet. The five of them were finally back on their feet, rising from the cowering, fetal position which they had assumed for the previous few eons. They had all expected death from the very first rumble of the distant explosion . None of them had ever been in a mine explosion before, but all of them had enough imagination to conjure up the images of a runaway tornado ripping through the confined, narrow entries. They saw bodies and pieces of bodies flying the entries as if they had a logical destination, as if the subway would spew forth their bodies on Central Avenue. They left horrible red streaks as they glanced along the ribs of the entries on their final trip. Some of their cap lights 27 were still working, and it appeared as if gigantic white tracers were shooting down the entries until they crashed sickeningly into a face or a post or whatever they happened to explode upon. There were several of these shooting stars, dying in their blaze of glory. These things had happened so quickly that there had been no time to think, to panic, to do anything. The force of the explosion was past, but every microsecond was etched indelibly into the brains of the five quivering men as they crawled from the crosscut which had somehow managed to take less force than the rest of the entries. The dust was so thick it seemed solid. The men fumbled for their self-rescuers and managed to get them in place. There was no smoke, only dust, but the men's senses were too numb to even attempt to make such distinctions. The self-rescuers were meant to stave off carbon monoxide poisoning and were definitely to be used in case of an explosion . In the case of these five men, the self-rescuers helped filter the dust so that they could at least take gasping breaths of air until the dust began to settle like the dust in a gray, underground tomb. Even the men appeared as gray ghosts to each other as they stumbled down the escapeway together. The dust settled on their bodies and rose again in dreamy clouds as their bodies moved in silence. The whole thing would have seemed part of a strange dream to an observer: five gray men walking through a spacious tomb. Complete silence reigned now that the explosion was done. Only the rustling of the men's clothes and their strange, raspy, self-rescuer muted breathing broke that silence. They sounded like men already dead instead of merely dying men. A gray cloud followed each of the five men, as if an evil aura emanated from these gray ghosts. There had been no words exchanged among them since the first vibrations of the distant explosion had fallen on their bodies. One of them had exclaimed in a half-whisper, "Damn!" That was all the time there had been. Now that they were moving hurriedly down the escapeway , the self-rescuers forbade their talking, so they heard only each other's breaths and grunts. They came to a wall of rubble, tons and tons of rock stretching they knew not how far. They crossed through a blown-out stopping to the return. The same wall of impenetrable chaos greeted their anxious eyes. There were only four entries on the section, so when they discovered the belt in the fourth entry covered by that same wall of death, they sat among the tangled wreckage of belt, stands and bed rails, their heads hanging, each saying a silent prayer to whatever he conceived his deity to be. Zeke Smith was the first to raise his head and remove his self-rescuer. He took a deep breath and looked around him at the huddled men and the twisted steel. It felt good to take an unhampered breath. The thought that he was perhaps shortening his life had of course occurred to him. Even though the air seemed fresh...

Is This Naomi? And Other Stories by L. D. Clark

68 Western American Literature improper not to employ them since these phrases are masterful ones which have become one with the poet’s mien. Jeffers would not have minded since these usages are neither imitative nor obsequious. They are derivative and gain here a new life of their own. But what is most pervasive in The Masks of Drought is a mature and often noble sense of the passage of time; not a tamed poet here, but, like Jeffers before him, a religious poet venerating the “mystery of worship” of the natural w’orld around him. At their best, some of these poems (as from “Jay Breed”) do well To reveal from beyond the screen of Nature The life of God. MARLAN BEILKE, Amador City, California Is This Naomi? And Other Stories. By L. D. Clark. (Tucson: University of Arizona, Blue Moon Press, 1980. 98 pages, $4.95.) L. D. Clark gives us the inner life of man, his growing up through diverse stories, with different protagonists and viewpoints. But unity of outlook prevails from childhood to senility. Why has he called the book “Is This Naomi?” The Lord had sent her out full but she had returned empty. The five-year-old boy in the first story has not even arrived “full.” His father has died before his birth, a loss he finally conquers through his imagination and the help of Uncle Hob, the one dominant male in his environment. Next, a child confronts fear, through the long dark night of his grand­ father’s death, and the familiar family wrangling over religion. Early he has to make his peace both with the “wall of death” and the inconsistency of organized religion. The young man has two dreams — his first involuntary sex release which leads into a terrifying sequence of nightmare (a preview of life) and finally, exhausted, happy sleep beside his beloved. He goes to sea, to war. Intermingled with the heat and stench of the passage, the futile wandering on the rainy, inhospitable deck, comes recollec­ tions of a mad dog, dead but not dead. Symbolically, the war, a rabid creature, seeks to destroy him. In the Pacific isles he finds love (sex) with a native girl, his first experi­ ence with women. When he returns home, suffering a confused identity, he meets the girl who has been waiting for him. Propelled by family and friends — himself not altogether unwilling — he enters marriage with her, a marriage which mingles in his mind with the girl on the island where love had no responsibilities. He chooses community solidarity and contentment. The next story deals with an adverse feeling about going to funerals. Whereas he has enjoyed attendance, now, in one moment, he realizes he has Reviews 69 no desire to be with the dead. He resolves never to attend another burial. But his old friend, Paul, dies and he cannot separate himself from Paul’s experience. He goes to the funeral, chats with old friends, and faces old age and death. The last story finds an old man, only partially sure of w'hat he does, astride a paint pony (is it real or imagined?) escaping boredom and defy­ ing death. The story sequence holds the attention, grips the imagination, and involves the reader’s own life. The author indicates that one lives with what he encounters — with or without hope. The book treats one to a sensitive exploration of the circle of life. The included photographs add to the veracity of the tale. The author reveals a wide knowledge of the human heart. The boy watches the preacher, “dipping his smile at the comers into a sorrowful grimace as they limply shook hands, a grimace like the ones the boy had noted once in a while on the faces of all the preachers he’d ever seen.” MILDRED R. BENNETT, Red Cloud, Nebraska Blue Sunrise. By Bert Almon. (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1980. 57 pages, $6.95.) In a poem called “Bodhisattva’s Head. Cameron Library,” Bert Almon says, “. . . This figure of compassion / a British major with a hyphenated name / bought in the Khyber Pass — a rifle paid / to a tribesman . . . / Bodhisattva’s career / of kindness descends to...

Women in Management

I shall never forget a spectacle called «The Wall of Death», performed by two young cyclists: a man and a woman, each driving a motorcycle. The riders pushed the motorcycles from the ground up a huge, cup-shaped wall and let it glide spirally, until they reached the top from which they slid downward to the point of departure. The least hesitation, the least failure, preventing their hands from taking a firm hold of the handle bar, meant to them instant death.