A couple of unbelievably bad ideas

If you click on the icon in the bottom righthand corner and watch this video in fullscreen of a two Russians breaking in to climb the world’s second tallest building (in Shanghai) you’ll undoubtedly think, as I did, that 1) wow, that’s pretty amazing and 2) that looks like one of the most ill-conceived ideas imaginable.

Take a moment to catch your breath because that won’t even be the worst idea you see today, once you watch this video below of rock climber Alex Honnold climbing a sheer vertical rock face in Mexico without ropes or harnesses. To be clear, he is 2,000 feet in the air on a rock ledge an inch or two wide held up by his fingertips. It is so insane I feel complicit, somehow, just for admiring his courage in doing it.

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My guess is the Alex Honnold video was shot with a drone, an application I had not anticipated when I talked in a previous post about how to use drones to cover street protests.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2014 at 12:12 am. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

2 Responses to “A couple of unbelievably bad ideas”

  1. Flying things as you have never seen them before | Sean Rocha says:
    February 20, 2014 at 1:06 pm

    […] just posted cool videos about flights (in that case, airplanes) and nature (involving all sorts of insane risks) it was with some delight that I came upon a video on the Atlantic that combines the two in […]

    Reply
  2. Adrienne says:
    April 4, 2014 at 9:16 am

    Whew! What a way to start my day… Anything I do today will seem easy. From the opening photo, I thought the free climber was YOU lol. We watched free climbers on Yosemite’s biggest stone face… It is the long periods of time when they just hang out there, not moving, that are heart-stopping. No second thoughts allowed (this, from the Queen of Second Thoughts). Hope you are having fun, wherever you are in the world! Adrienne

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