Thursday, January 26, 2006
Spin and Puke
In the afternoon of Wednesday we did the MSDD. It probably wasn't a good idea to have that double cheeseburger and spicy fries at the Oaks club.
It was predictably anticlimactic. You sit in a dark tube which is on a huge circle with nine other tubes that spin independently of each other. A computer voice walks you through the program and you respond using the joystick and a bunch of buttons. As the program is running, confusing visual images are moving in front of your eyes in an effort to throw you off. For the most part I made the correct responses but once or twice they were confusing.
The biggest head screw was when we had to turn these small dials on the left and right sides of the instrument panel in front of us. To see them you have to bend forward and look to your right if you are looking at the left one and vice versa for the right. When you are in a turn, this really screws with both your semicircular organs and your otolith organs at the same time. When you sit up, the effect gets worse. We were told to put the "number of the day" in the left one and then the number minus 101 on the right. I had the most trouble figuring out what the hell 2006-101 was. Then we were told to sit up rapidly from the right side, which magnifies the effects. When I sat up I felt like I was tumbling uncontrolably through space.
All in all it was fun, but not as bad as advertised; nothing in the military is. Everybody builds stuff up to be harder and more intense than it is. At one point, dissapointed that I hadn't become nauseous yet, I started looking rapidly to the right and left. That did the trick and I stopped that quickly.
It was predictably anticlimactic. You sit in a dark tube which is on a huge circle with nine other tubes that spin independently of each other. A computer voice walks you through the program and you respond using the joystick and a bunch of buttons. As the program is running, confusing visual images are moving in front of your eyes in an effort to throw you off. For the most part I made the correct responses but once or twice they were confusing.
The biggest head screw was when we had to turn these small dials on the left and right sides of the instrument panel in front of us. To see them you have to bend forward and look to your right if you are looking at the left one and vice versa for the right. When you are in a turn, this really screws with both your semicircular organs and your otolith organs at the same time. When you sit up, the effect gets worse. We were told to put the "number of the day" in the left one and then the number minus 101 on the right. I had the most trouble figuring out what the hell 2006-101 was. Then we were told to sit up rapidly from the right side, which magnifies the effects. When I sat up I felt like I was tumbling uncontrolably through space.
All in all it was fun, but not as bad as advertised; nothing in the military is. Everybody builds stuff up to be harder and more intense than it is. At one point, dissapointed that I hadn't become nauseous yet, I started looking rapidly to the right and left. That did the trick and I stopped that quickly.
// posted by Josh @ 1/26/2006 03:45:00 PM 
