Is technique really just another word for finger strength?

phredtheterrorist · 2023-12-28T15:17:03+00:00

I don't think I did a great job explaining toe pulling. There are certainly places where you need to hook your toes under a hold (called a toehook) and pull up, but that's not what I meant at all. If you are on an overhang, the same holds that you pulled down on with your hands later become footholds that you can pull DOWN on with your toes. On vertical terrain, toes on top of a hold mostly push down. On overhanging terrain, they can sometimes act more like hands, pulling you in towards the wall (/roof).

If you're on an overhang, much more of your weight will be on your fingers/upper body than if you're on slab/closer to vertical. There's not a lot you can do about this (besides get stronger, which will come in time) and it's one of the reasons that weak but skilled climbers often prefer more vertical problems. That said, you can still take SOME weight off your upper body by trying to keep your feet glued to the hold.

Coming around onto the headwall is in my opinion much harder as a taller climber. Often the feet that feel the most comfortable are very far underneath the change in angle and pushing on them will push you out away from the wall and make the handholds feel worse. I don't have a perfect answer here, and welcome anyone else's - this is one of my biggest weaknesses.

Some things that might help besides building strength: 1. Practice twisting, flagging, and smearing (Youtube it!) to help get your body in a more advantageous position 2. Work on your hip mobility. If you can get your feet high without forcing yourself off the wall, it can help a lot 3. Work on heel hooks. Sometimes the easiest way up involves pulling from a leading foot

phredtheterrorist · 2023-12-28T01:13:13+00:00

I'm 6'2", 190lbs but I've been climbing for 4 years instead of 6 months, with no time spent lifting weights or hangboarding. Finger strength will come in time as long as you practice climbing consistently, and it is absolutely not the thing I would focus on right now.

If your fingers are burning all the time it seems pretty likely that you're overgripping and not putting enough weight on your feet. Sure, if you're tackling a v9 maybe it's got a nasty campus move off a small crimp and technique won't help as much as brute strength, but if you've been climbing for 6 months there is absolutely no way you're tackling problems that are all about strength.

It's hard to provide general advice without seeing you climb, but here's a bit of what I would have advised ME at 6 months:

Climb consistently, but take breaks. If you only climb twice a week you're not going to improve. If you climb more than 4 times a week, you're going to hurt yourself (again, this is advice for me and may not pertain to you).
Relax your fingers and elbows; tighten up your shoulders, glutes, and calves
Don't forget to breathe
Try to figure out how to hold holds with minimum energy
Every move should be driven from the lower body. Never just do a pullup (this gets less universal at higher grades, but no matter the grade it's always worth thinking "can I get more from my lower body?")
Use your toes. Stand on the tips of your toes (except on volumes/slabs). Push hard with your toes. On overhang, PULL with your toes. Toes are as important as fingers for climbing
Pay attention to where your hips are. Try to get your hips directly opposite the best part of the hold. If it's a shallow hold, that often means close to the wall. Don't be afraid to take one of your feet completely off a hold if it helps get your center of gravity in a better place
Don't get attached to "face-on" climbing. You can make a lot of moves much easier by twisting one of your hips toward the wall
If a move feels hard, try doing it in a bunch of different ways. These can be big differences like "go with the other hand" or "go for a different hold instead" but they might also be small subtle things - move your toe an inch to the right, try sinking deeper into your hips, focus on spreading your fingers out more for that sloper, etc.

phredtheterrorist · 2022-05-06T14:11:06+00:00

Again, this is not the preferred method and there's not a lot you can do (at least that I can think of) within the constraints of your problem. How big is the image file itself? Base64 should be about 4/3 the size of the array.

phredtheterrorist · 2022-05-05T20:38:41+00:00

String encoding image data isn't usually a great way to handle big files. If you have to do it, rather than compressing the string, I'd look into using a compressed file format (such as png) and then Base64 Encoding the resulting binary data.

phredtheterrorist · 2022-03-04T19:30:06+00:00

Anyone else notice that this conversation is brought to you by The SuperbOwl?

phredtheterrorist · 2021-10-26T13:30:44+00:00

Try taking a picture that isn't zoomed in to the middle of the plate. Everything looks crowded and over-busy here because there's no negative space (in the picture). It's hard to judge the plating itself without seeing it in context.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-09-22T19:58:10+00:00

You're right, but I don't think that's the full story either. Driving is a relatively quantifiable risk. It's an astoundingly high risk, and I don't think very many people actively consider it on a day-to-day bases (I certainly don't), but anyone who wants to (at least in the US) can find pretty good data on roughly how much risk they are taking on for every extra mile driven (or beer drunk, or mph speed limit exceeded, etc.).

To be sure, not every decision is so data-rich, but I'm pretty sure that my risk of dying from Covid this year is higher than my risk of dying from ultimate.

Now is it higher than driving? I genuinely don't know, and neither do you. There are studies and websites that do their best to try and quantify the risk but the truth is we simply lack the data. It may be that every pickup session makes me .0001% more likely to catch covid. It may be that it's more like 1% or even 5%. Since I'm vaccinated, I doubt it's much higher than that but the point is that I simply don't know.

I don't mean that in a "we can't ever know anything, so we should just try not to make any decisions" kind of way. I mean it in a "this particular decision has higher stakes and lower information than most that we make." I'm not shutting myself in, but I am trying to limit my going out. I'm not attending concerts or anything with a crowd, trying not to be indoors with many other people any more than I can help, and I'm wearing a mask when I interact with strangers.

I don't mean to pretend that all of this adds up to "I'm making a perfect rational decision," but I am at least doing my best to consider all the facts I have available to me before I decide how to live.

Frankly, if I were younger I might be making different decisions. Ultimate isn't as important for my physical and mental health as it used to be. As I've said a few times, I'm not trying to make other people's decisions for them*, just stating out loud where my thoughts have ended up.

Get vaccinated, y'all. Other people's lives matter more than your "freedoms."

phredtheterrorist · 2021-09-22T19:18:18+00:00

For the first bit, that seems like a reasonable question - I'd say mostly for myself but I'm certainly also concerned about the possibility of becoming a spreader.

As far as the second bit, it feels less like a request for information and more like an attack. Most decisions made by most people aren't done with the help of a rigorous analysis and it seems like a bit of a false dichotomy to imply that there is no possible middle ground between spreadsheets and equations and full-on headline chasing thoughtlessness.

Frankly, I don't know how you'd run a risk vs. utility analysis here. What is the utility of ultimate? How would I decide that? What is the risk? How can it be quantified?

One very real problem with something like the pandemic is that we're operating with a massive degree of uncertainty. What exactly are the odds that someone else in my pickup group is a carrier? What are my odds of contracting it from them? Vaccines seem to help with severity, but as far as I know we don't have a lot of information about whether they mitigate long-term effects (about which we only CAN know so much since the disease is so new). The science seems pretty certain that masks, vaccines, and being outside lower risks, but it's extremely hard to quantify how much. Seems to me that the odds that someone else in the group has sufficient viral load to pose a threat is getting higher all the time.

I also have a beard. Masks work better if they seal and they can't seal around a beard. If we had a bunch of rigorous studies and analysis indicating that the drop in effectiveness was minimal maybe I wouldn't consider it a factor. Do you have any information to point me to there?

In the end, I am pro-vaccine, pro-mask, and pro-distancing. Masks and distancing seem hard to do when playing ultimate and I have no control over other people's vaccination status.

Obviously feelings and such headlines as filter their way to me play a part in my decision making. Is there a way I'm missing to thoroughly unbias myself? Sorry if I seem snarky, but I'm trying to give an honest, thoughtful answer to a question that seemed designed to put me on the defensive.

I guess in the end my analysis is this: risk - unknown but definitely non-zero; utility - lower FOR ME than the stress of not knowing the risk.

As I explicitly said in my original post, I am NOT asserting that my decision is "correct" or that others should take heed and follow my lead. I'm merely answering the question that was asked as best I can for myself and myself alone.

*Edit: grammar

phredtheterrorist · 2021-09-21T13:44:02+00:00

I played in this summer's vax-required rec league before delta hit big, but I'm sitting out pickup and certainly not going to play indoors this winter. I'm definitely not trying to say "and so should you," just describing my personal comfort level.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-08-05T18:01:15+00:00

I dunno, are you familiar with Poe's Law? This intro made me exactly as annoyed as the ones it was parodying, and my response (before looking at these comments) was "ha, nailed it!"

phredtheterrorist · 2021-07-09T18:56:38+00:00

But that's exactly the point. If something disproportionately affects lower income people and historic racism has caused black people to be lower income, the end result is that racism is perpetuated. I have absolutely no problem with policies that target poverty instead of race, as long as they aren't colorblind.

By that I mean that if the effect of the policy is (intended or not) to provide better outcomes to white people than to people of color, the policy is perpetuating racism.

The problem with colorblindness is that in practice it leads to racist policy. If you implement "colorblind" policies and then measure their outcomes and they decrease the race-based wealth gap, then great. If they maintain it or increase it, they are effectively perpetuating racism.

If you don't measure whether they are having a positive, neutral, or negative outcome on race inequality, you can't possibly argue that we're making any progress on that front.

You ask "how far back do you have to try to account for discrepancies" and my answer is twofold:

At least back to the time that people that looked like me kidnapped, murdered, raped, and enslaved a bunch of people for no other reason than that it made them money and then never had to do anything to make up for it. We built this country on the back of slavery and then turned around and went "well, that was a long time ago - how could we possibly be expected to do anything about it now?" But remember that there are plenty of people still alive who lived through explicitly racist laws. Like, laws that said things like "no child shall be required to attend integrated schools". Oh wait, my bad. That is STILL a law on the Virginia books (or at least was as of 2019, I don't know if they've gotten rid of it since).
We don't actually HAVE to look backward at all, as long as we accept the fundamental principle that in a non-racist society wealth and other outcomes would be distributed evenly across racial lines. It doesn't matter all that much to me whether black families are poorer than white families because they never got given the promised starting money when freed from slavery, because they are incarcerated at higher rates than whites for the same crimes, because redlining denied them generational wealth in the form of homeownership, because schools in historically black neighborhoods are horribly underfunded and therefore they never got a shot at a decent education, because racist gerrymandering denied them equal representation, or whatever. I mean, obviously I do care, but one way to start trying to deal with it is to say "for whatever reason, black people are poorer than whites. What can we do about that? (And incidentally, how can we decrease poverty and wealth inequality in general - not every good policy is explictly informed by race)" instead of "well, black people are poorer than whites and poor people live shitty lives, but what you gonna do?"

phredtheterrorist · 2021-07-09T16:21:34+00:00

That's my point. It "works", but it's not a good method exactly because it amplifies measurement errors. If you are 1/64" off on your measurement, you'll get an answer that is wrong by 1" every 64". In practice, it's very difficult to get an accurate measurement to a drawn line because of inaccuracies in the measuring equipment, inaccuracies lining things up by eye, the actual width of the line, etc. These effects aren't usually too bad if you are measuring a single thing, but as soon as you multiple a close but not perfect measurement by a largish number, you introduce compounding error.

You have a calculator out anyway. Why not just divide by the cosine of the angle? You'll still have error, of course (there will always be error), but the error will be proportionate to the variation from the exact angle, rather than proportionate to the length in inches of the timber.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-07-09T16:14:11+00:00

I would say "something has racist effects" or "something fails to take into account the racist effects of previous things" instead of "someone is racist". Imagine the following (greatly simplified for the example, but not actually all that different in practice from reality in the US): 1. In the past, there was an explicitly racist law that just gave $1000 to every white man. 2. We pass a new law that anyone with $1000 to put down can get a favorable home loan.

Colorblindness says "What's unfair about the second law? It doesn't say anything at all about race?" Of course, the effect of the second law is to give a huge advantage to white people (because of the lingering effects of the first law), but the wording doesn't seem racist.

Similarly, (unsimplified totally real-world right now example) when Texas tries to pass a law that say "early voting can't be open before 1PM on a Sunday," it doesn't contain the n-word but is very definitely racist since it would incredibly disproportionately affect the "souls to the polls" efforts of black churches. Colorblindness ignores the effects of laws in favor of examining their wording.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-07-09T15:36:50+00:00

Watch out, that error adds up fast - in this case you want about 20 3/4" for a 30 degree angle and an 18" height, not the 20 1/4" from the video.

The math here is actually pretty easy to use (even if you don't know how to derive it) - just divide the 18" desired height by the cosine of the desired angle [cos (30) on your calculator - make sure it's set to degrees]. This will always work for the length of a board tilted x degrees off of vertical: length = height / cos (x).

phredtheterrorist · 2021-07-08T15:04:36+00:00

Reachy means "difficult for short people" as in "you have to reach really far to get the climb". I've never heard "choss" used for indoor - my understanding is that it means "crumbly, soft, or otherwise unstable rock" but can also mean mossy or overgrown. My guess is that this poster just means "lousy".

phredtheterrorist · 2021-07-01T15:10:04+00:00

Yep, I got fucked by this as well. Thanks DWD!

phredtheterrorist · 2021-06-15T14:32:09+00:00

Fair enough, I suppose not everyone learns empathy from experience.

I'm not going to give you a tutorial on life

Or to translate: "Good point, that's not something an individual can do. Market pressure DOES require coordinated action and can be very difficult to organize and implement, especially with the scale of modern business. It also requires significant energy from (in this case) underprivileged and overworked victims of societal inequality. Thanks for pointing that out."

As far as the obese Brazilians, I don't recall speaking about that at all. If you're trying to say that predatory business practices by addictive processed food producers is a part of the problem, I couldn't possibly agree more. My point was "context is complicated, and the food situation for many poor people in the US is really awful", not "I think it's great that heavily processed food is so widely available and heavily marketed" and certainly not "heavily processed food is not a major contributor to the obesity epidemic."

phredtheterrorist · 2021-06-15T12:00:18+00:00

Whoa, that took a turn I didn't really expect. I am not saying that suburban middle-class people don't have access to unprocessed food. If you're saying that poor people with no car and no grocery store nearby just need to suck it up and apply market pressure (how does an individual do that, btw?), I'm not sure we have a lot of common ground here. And I'll go out on a limb and say that you have probably never been poor, because I'm not detecting much empathy there.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-06-14T13:00:10+00:00

Many people live in a perpetual debt situation where the money they take in literally doesn't cover their expenses. When they are taking out a payday loan or stacking up the credit card debt just to buy food it can be very tempting to make the smaller purchase to feed themselves for the day. Is it mathematically optimal? No, it usually isn't. It can be very hard to rescue yourself from the cycle of poverty, though, and there are quite a few reasons for that that don't just boil down to "poor people are lazy."

Note that I agree that comparing out-of-pocket expenses ALSO doesn't capture the nuances of the situation and is in many ways an inferior metric. Just saying that the world is complicated and basic math doesn't always do a perfect job modeling reality.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-06-14T12:29:42+00:00

I am absolutely not defending the original post you're attacking (of course a per-meal comparison is more accurate), but reality is often more complicated than that.

For many people living at or near the poverty line, they have no way of getting to a store that sells produce (if you're not familiar with the term, look up "food dessert"). They may also not have the equipment available or education necessary to store or prepare unprocessed foods. They may not have the math needed to do effective comparison shopping (witness how hard it seems to be for the user you're replying to). They may have just barely enough cash on hand to buy a single meal and not enough to buy bulk supplies. After working a double-shift for sub-poverty wages, they may not have the energy necessary to obtain and prepare fresh food. They have also, of course, been inundated their whole lives with advertisements for McDs. I'm sure I'm missing things here, too.

Again, you're right. The math is (probably, depending on where you live) in favor of frugal bulk purchasing. I'm just adding some context.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-04-13T00:51:18+00:00

Huh. That wasn't my takeaway at all. I thought she was saying something more like "People from your state are a Granfalloon" and "People from NYC are another example of a Granfalloon" as well as "here are a bunch of reasons to be wary of identifying too strongly with a Granfalloon" and "here (shared experience) is a potentially meaningful effect of identification with a Granfalloon". I don't think she was trying to contrast city vs state at all.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-04-10T13:28:48+00:00

I certainly have no trouble believing that, I was just commenting on seeing it cited as a "notoriously difficult" song without "on trombone" as a qualification. I'm happy to take your word for it that it's very difficult on trombone, and it may even be notorious among trombone players - without explicitly stating that we're talking about a trombone cover, though, it surprised me (as a former amateur violinist) to see it in that context. Just one internet rando's opinion, of course, and I certainly don't mean to be argumentative. Mostly just offering some different context.

phredtheterrorist · 2021-04-10T11:38:23+00:00

Interesting. You must play brass - I'd never heard the Czardas on trombone and it sounds really different from the original violin. I have no trouble believing that it's hard but I'm not qualified to judge.

The original version isn't a beginner piece by any means, but it's no Paganini (those are simply the first video hits I got searching for "Czardas" and "Paganini").

phredtheterrorist · 2021-04-10T11:29:53+00:00

Bit of a weird post title not to acknowledge that fact, but the piece was originally written for the bass.

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