Falling

Read a news article online this afternoon. It seems some woman had a seizure on a ski lift and fell thirty feet to her death. The headline was, “Woman Dies in Fall.”

Down at the bottom a reader comment caught my eye: “It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop!”

To which my immediate thought was: “Someone has to create portable personal inertial dampeners!”

Why not me? I’m a dreamer! I took three semesters of physics classes!

Rockefeller had Oil; Carnegie had Steel. Jobs had the iPhone. Gates has that operating software stuff.

Hopper has – the Personal Portable Inertial Dampener! The P-PID!

Now I got some heavy duty thinking to do. I don’t know how to beat classical Newtonian physics, but that wild-haired guy did it a century ago, along with a pack of twenty-somethings a decade or two later.

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All kidding aside, say a small prayer for this poor unfortunate woman. (And let’s hope this doesn’t cause all ski lifts across the country to be banned.)