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Under this heading Steve Day posted in May this year an article asking the question whether extreme sports are morally defensible, especially those that pose very high risks to an individual’s life or health. The post drew a number of interesting responses, for example drawing parallels to the defensibility of suicide or looking at how mass public thrill has morphed into fascination with xtreme adventure live TV. In my mind some issues certainly are:

• responsibility to those who are close to the adventurer and have to live with the consequences of his (and sometimes her) actions
• the adventurer’s reliance on others coming to his/her rescue (with the rescuers often having to endanger their own lives) and his/her expectation that the public will pay for possible emergency responses
• the general issue of who makes money out of extreme adventures and who pays for its various aspects
• what motivates the spectator’s desire to experience thrill and are there boundaries to what can be experienced
• the nature of dangerous adventure itself, e.g. its role in society (historically and current), gender aspects, the adventurer personality

There are most likely no straight forward answers. I personally tend to think though that people who undertake or participate in extreme high-risk adventures too often seem to be driven by their egos only and seem to care very little about any critical questions and especially not ethical ones. If someone though does give considerable time and energy to critical reflection, I would find it hard to understand how his/her ego still can win out.

The clip below shows stunt performer Dan Osman climbing without any gear a 122m steep rock wall in a few minutes (the clip shows 1:48 min of that effort). Osman apparently was later killed in 1998 while doing another stunt he was somewhat famous for, called “controlled free falling,” where he would deliberately fall hundreds of feet relying on the safety rope.

Daily Motion has a channel called Extreme Sports that not unexpectedly is a bit of a time waster. A handful of random checks didn’t bring up much interesting stuff for me except these two clips, showing a mastery of body control. I wouldn’t mind coming back next lifetime with those skill levels . Both clips demonstrate acrobatic skills - one as a more static and sometimes even sculptural expression while the other one shows the use of motion to master gravity.

… you are able to use a bit of trickery. My mate Harry found this clip, and I have to say I am very impressed, mainly because I sadly am lacking the core quality required to win when playing simultaneously against nine chess masters without being one myself .

Where else would people have a TV show dedicated to this kind of thing but - in Japan. The clip is nine minutes long, but I got used to it after a while. I am amazed though about the amount of effort people put in just to transport a marble from point a to point b … although: after the Wooden Binary Machine and another Japanese effort, the Honda Rube commercial, nothing really should surprise me anymore in this context.

Amazing what people come up with. Geekend reports that some math-and-woodcraft savant has built a binary adding machine made of wood and powered by falling marbles. Check out also the marble machine build by the same guy .