Blind descent
This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find the deepest cave on Earth, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong. Tabor focuses particularly on the heroic efforts of Bill Stone in the vast Cheve Cave of southern Mexico and Alexander Klimchouk in the supercave Krubera of the Republic of Georgia. Stone -- Klimchouk -- Game over.
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What Hacker News says
- I highly recommend reading Blind Descent for the armchair caver.
- In 2018, I read James M. Tabor's Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth (pub. 2010), which particularly focused on Bill Stone's and ALexander Klimchouk's respective explorations. (Contrary to perhaps popular understanding, as evidenced by an answer I saw on Quora that asserted that the temperature got hotter and hotter the farther Klimchouk's team descended in "their" cave, Stone's and Klimchouk's teams started out high in the mountains and temperatures were freezing throughout the descents; furthermore, Stone's and Klimchouk's deepest descents still ended above sea level. [The Quora question had something to do with digging deep into the earth.])
Anyway, this was the first I'd read much about caving and, in browsing around the web, I discovered that Palm Pilots were(/are?) used by serious cavers for mapping caves. Auriga (https://auriga.top/) was the most frequently referenced Palm app I saw; its latest update was in December 2022. Obvious advantages as I understand them are: (1) long battery life coupled with replaceable AAA batteries; (2) a display that can be read in low light without battery-draining backlighting. Phone and wi-fi are useless underground. (I vaguely recall reading somewhere that ~80Khz radios for use in caves were being developed; equally vague memory: I believe initial prototypes were based around audio amplifiers that happened to reach up into that frequency. Okay, a 2018 Hackaday has links to more information, although not about what I [mis]remembered: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/11/ham-designed-gear-used-in-th...)
Also, sometime I saw an article about automotive performance afficianados using a Palm App to interact with their engines' onboard computers -- in the PalmOS Emulator (POSE) on Windows laptops. Obviously they liked the app and I imagine they had a considerable intellectual investment (e.g., historical experimental settings and performance results, etc.) that made them loathe to switch to more modern apps.
But yeah. I cleaned the battery crud out of my Palm M105 last month, put fresh batteries in, and the digitizer is shot. So, back to my phone ... :)
- I once got so claustrophobic just by reading a book about caving that I had to put it away: Blind Descent by James Talbot. It describes the quest of a couple of maniacs to explore the deepest caves on earth under hellish circumstances. No light for weeks, no communication with the surface, camping against vertical walls in the dark, hurricane level winds, tight sumps full of dark water, disease, panic attacks... Man, who in his sane mind does things like that?
- The parent comment has a typo in book author name. The book is actually "Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth" by James M. Tabor.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812979494
(Curiously, Google search for "James Talbot Blind Descent" points to this very Hacker News thread.)
- Have you read Blind Descent? One of the things that most struck me was that cave diving is more dangerous, fatality-rate-wise, than space exploration.
