this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
491 points (96.4% liked)

Microblog Memes

5714 readers
3968 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
491
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I have scrolled for a good minute and found no genuine answer...

Presumably because the effectiveness of parachutes is pretty self-evident and no one has done a formal study on the subject because why would they.

It's not like they're going to find that parachutes actually aren't needed and the humans just float gently to the ground on their own. Or that a sufficiently tall top hat can be just as effective.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Parachute effectiveness is a very reasonable thing to study, it's pretty important to know how one parachute design performs compared to other designs and the obvious baseline is no parachute. A lot of things which appear to be self-evident have been extensively studied, generally you don't want to just assume you know how something works.

Though throwing people out of a plane at altitude with no parachute probably isn't the most ethical way to study parachute effectiveness.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think we know enough about aerodynamics that we can probably simulate it in the computer if we really cared to. My point is more that it's probably never been studied at an academic level, I'm sure parachute manufacturers ans various militaries have studied all sorts of things. But none of that would have made it into a research paper.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Here's a study on cadavers to determine whether people have the same number of nose hairs in each nostril. In academia there is no such thing as too trivial.

There's plenty of studies on parachutes for spacecraft (eg, here's one on aerodynamics of parachutes for mars landing) so if you follow the references somewhere down the line you'll probably find studies on general parachute effectiveness.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

You have to search using language that papers might actually use though. "Parachute effectiveness" means what the satirical paper is exploring, whether it prevents death or not. The only serious studies that might have used that language would be old WW2 studies that threw people out of planes with different parachutes to see how many survived.

If you want to know how to design an effective parachute, you should be looking at reference books like Parachute Recovery Systems instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

This is a good point I didn't think of. It's possible that the answer is so obvious, that the only articles made about it would be jokes.