brendanweinstein

yeah, my uncle is kind of a weird guy

first question: I led the android team at VSCO -- a photography company and social network -- for a year and half and poured myself into that job. I was laid off after getting charged with a felony for allegedly BASE jumping from the Hilton in downtown San Francisco., which goes to show how all-encompassing a passion BASE jumping can be. As part of the arrest, I had my phone confiscated as evidence for six months. I now fittingly do work for a privacy company called Keepsafe and lead development of the android app PhotoVault which lets you hide encrypted files on your phone in a number of clever ways. I am super passionate about that work -- we have some pretty cool projects in the pipeline. I almost joined the Nano dev team back in January, but decided to stay with Keepsafe, but am still passionate about Nano and a hodler. I am cautiously excited about the potential of crypto to solve problems around incentives. As a developer, I am eager to see some form of anonymous real identity token system. Would be especially great for communities like reddit and funding open source development.

second question: Pretty much everyone has hit a tree. I attended the World Wingsuit League in China for the first time last year. The first night at dinner with all the competitors at a round table, another competitor asked "hey Brendan, how many trees did you hit this summer?" The truth is I did not hit any trees that summer, but I paused because I knew it would be awkward if I said no and quite a few people would think I were a liar. And if I said yes, I would be lying and people would think I am a nutjob. While I was puzzling on what to say, the guy just stopped and said "ok ok ok raise your hand if you've hit a tree." Everyone at the table raised their hand.

Nope. Whenever the wingsuit turns you bleed altitude and a little bit of speed, the turns are to pump to stay connected. If I were flying max performance, I'd be flying in a straight line and would have no flare power at the end.

We had flown this line 5 times before as a two way vertical stack formation. I fly at least 20mph slower on my back than on my belly, so I knew I could get stick right off the ground for everything except the very end where we never quite went as deep on the backs, and you see that is where I pull up 30-40ft there -- that and I really wanted to check out those houses at the end of the line more than following the stream.

We use Google Earth to map out lines ahead of time and then profile the required glide ratio in 500ft segments. Depending on what the estimated required glide is for the segments we'll fly anywhere from 50 to a few hundred feet above the line for the first go. We wear GPS devices on every jump and look primarily at how our horizontal speed and glide ratio vary through the flight. We overlay the data on a map and see what performance was for exact points on the flight, and map that out to what you were doing at that geographical feature in the flight. When I race, I'll use a live readout of glide ratio in my right ear. I know roughly what glide ratio my top speed is associated with for varying headwinds and tailwinds in each of my suits.

Send me a DM and tell me where you are based -- always looking for pilots to partner with for backcountry missions.

Yes and yes.