Marc's Public Blog

Video summary:

prediction said 14%

and I arrived with 13%, not bad at all

a bit of fog around the end

road was pretty clear

tiny bit of snow at the end

Made it there without stopping with 91% used, not bad. About a foot fell in the last 24H:

it snowed all day but it was too warm so all that snow melted when touching my car

pretty watery at the base

waiting for 6 to open, which it did by 10:15 after avalanche safety

wet powder, but still powder

there were a few water holes though

I came down this, a bit bare :)

this one seemed like too much of a jump into the unknown, so I climbed that one back up

Day 2 had another nice cover, even if it was pretty thick and only felt like 2 inches at most:

Got to meet Tim from snowpals

nice snow :)

the top of the wall ridge re-opened

so I was able to reach my favorite rock

The drive back was easy, Carson Spur was nice and clean again and I got home by using only 45%:

Silver Lake was already all melted

The lake still looked great

Festival Grounds

don't get lost :)

Beyond really wins for the decors, the Insomniac crews do amazing work every time:

where else can you have a stuffed animal race? :)

And nice booths as always:

I also have to point out that this is likely the best Passport of any Insomniac festival I've been to:

The cool thing about Beyond are the hidden rooms and stages:

And it gets better at night, as always:

They had a few fireworks and a short drone show, those were nothing by EDC standards, but still nice:

took me a while to read 'I shall be late'

One change this year is cell phone service did not improve. I technically had signal, but the cell towers weren't really passing any data. However, they added a lot more wifi, which I must say worked actually quite well (especially compared to some prior festivals where it failed pretty badly):

don't need to write them down, they change every year :)

3 different wifi networks

People

And people brought very nice costumes too:

I also took a few more pictures with DJs :)

Day #1

Trivecta

Tiesto was last and it played a nice set with good trance:

And then this happened, Tiesto stopped his car to take a picture of me and with me on his way out :)

Day #2

very cool B2B

Infected Mushroom came back

so did Gareth

Good times were had :)

After the event ended at 02:00, went to the after party (onsite), which was better than being stuck in traffic or wait hours for an uber, but it was kind of basic EDM, so I got bored after about 30mn. Still, it was nice to have this for those who wanted to continue to party:

Video of Days #1 & #2:

Thoughts/Conclusions

'Till next time:

Links

I'm a bit fan of this genre, this is what it can look like if it's done right. Classical Trancelations in Concert 2018:

Now, I'm reasonable, I knew it was not going to be anything close to those, but I also knew how good it could be when done right. It was clearly a smaller version of it, and maybe not ironically they played a fair amount of tracks from classical Trancelations, but the sound was positively horrible:

Often times, the sound was just painful, which was such a shame.

A few pictures:

sound was so bad that my friend Seb left after less than 30mn

I got some of the more bearable sound bits here:

Science and research, matter

Anyone interested in HBOT probably has seen Mr Jason Sonner's videos on youtube (from HBOT USA). First, I want to be clear that he is not a medical doctor, and he calls himself Dr Sonner to give his voice more credit/importance. I do find that annoying, but in the US there are many ways to call yourself a doctor without being a real doctor (medical doctor). Basically, with a PhD in computer science, I can call myself a doctor too, when I'm obviously not a real doctor, in this case any more than Mr Sonner. Now that this pet peeve is out of the way, let's carry on.
Since real credentials do matter, instead of fake doctor credentials, I will state that have a dual major in electronics and computer science (which is relevant for the cell phone issue), I'm also a nitrox water diver (relevant for dive tables, altitude diving and flying after diving), and I'm also an airplane pilot (so indeed I know about how planes are pressurized). Sadly Mr Sonners talked about all these topics and was wrong about all of them. Actually I have one more "certification", I'm also an RC plane builder and pilot, so I have plenty of experience with lipo battery crashes and fires, personal experience even that I will give below.
And now I also have to add that I'm not actually a fire in enriched air environment expert, so I used google gemini AI to fill in my gaps in expertise and have updated this page to better explain the much higher consequences of fires and flamability in 30% O2 rich environment at up to double the normal pressure.

Mr Sonner puts a lot of youtube videos to generate income from youtube and advertise his program/services. Honestly, that's fine and I'll even say that a fair amount of his content is helpful and useful. I also do believe that at times, he is careful about what he states, but my personal opinion now is that he has started to overdo the amount of videos he does to keep getting more youtube traffic and does not sufficiently research some of the claims he makes. He then states completely incorrect things with the same convincing straight face, which is a problem. More annoyingly I have never seen him take any of the factual corrections given to him when he makes mistakes, and never seen him correct or amend a video. As a result, this completely eroded the trust I put in him initially and I can't just believe anything he says anymore and I do believe he cares more about getting traffic and selling his course, than giving correct advice at all times possible or being honest if he does not know instead of making things up.

So you're going to ask me to give a few examples of very wrong claims he made:

The risks with lithium/lipo batteries

I crashed this RC plane into a pole in flight, it damaged the front of the plane from the impact:

I drove the plane home, took the battery out, and worked in my garage. The battery self ignited 10mn later while I was thankfully there to throw it on the floor and let it burn out. Yes, this means had this happened at the wrong time, that fire could have been in my car. I have also read about RC pilots having their fridge destroyed by a lipo fire (we store lipos in the fridge as it extends their life).

So what went wrong? It was a cheap lipo battery, the heavy deceleration (flying speed to immediate stop) compressed the battery internally, caused a failure of its protective envelope, air got in, and air causes lithium to self ignite, which it did.

Now let's look at another example, this RC plane crashed into the ground at terminal velocity. Its more expensive lipo was heavily impacted, but the protective envelope did not fail and it never caught fire. I did keep it a few days for confirmation, then discharged it and got rid of it since I don't want my garage to burn down in case it still failed later, I was honestly positively impressed that this lipo survived the crash:

Now, let's look at the well known Samsung Note 7 what would catch fire. There is a full analysis on the accident chain and what happened is Samsung tried to fit a bigger battery to improve runtime, they tested that, and before shipping their vendor didn't have enough batteries so they used a second vendor to help, but that second vendor had slightly different batteries that would bulge under certain charging conditions. Then Samsung did not leave enough breathing room around the battery and left a sharp edge on the circuit board which could puncture the battery when it bulged. And there you go, battery fire:

So, how about you and your phones/electronics in an HBOT chamber, is it safe? Mr Sonner says "no way, don't do it". Obviously no one can sue him for saying that, but at the same time, people are less likely to do HBOT treatments if they have to with special clothing and with only a paper book or pencil and piece of paper, like full O2 chambers require. I'm writing this page for people using long term HBOT at home, so it has to be bearable for long term use.

Flamability of 100% O2 chambers vs 30% O2 soft chambers, risk of clothing may be higher than phones

For everyone else, including all the soft chambers and generally any chamber where you are breathing around 90% O2 via a mask, some of that O2 will leak in the chamber, but the chamber air is also constantly being replaced. What this means is that while it won't be 21% O2 in the chamber, the math to calculate the actual O2 concentration in the chamber is a bit difficult, but when I had gemini google AI do its best estimate, it guessed that the Olive compressor may only output around 70lpm in the chamber (due to back pressure) and that the chamber will end up with 30% O2. I reviewed the AI's math and assumptions, and they look correct (sadly in the direction of a higher risk that my gut feeling originally perceived)
This is were I will avoid making the same mistake as Mr Sonner, as I was going to say next that 30% instead of 21% doesn't feel so bad, but research showed me that there is some kind of runaway effect for fires past 23.5% O2 that makes things burn much better, and materials that won't burn in normal air will suddenly start to burn well. The other factor I almost forgot is that you have to add 0.7 ATA of extra pressure over sea level, which means 70% more air molecules which in turn contain 7% more oxygen. If you add those 2 together, you more or less have twice as many O2 molecules available in the chamber to make things burn. This is "not good" as far as fires go.

At this point, I have to correct my original feeling that fire risk in a soft chamber wasn't nearly as bad as a 100% O2 chamber and say that in a 30% O2 chamber, the risk still seems bad enough that a fire in a 30% O2 soft chamber can end up being just as fatal as in a 100% O2 chamber. The difference between the two is how likely a static electricity spark is to ignite your own clothes (which now has nothing to do with electronics or phones anymore). Because I have never heard of a single fire in a chamber due to self ignition of clothes in a 30% O2 chamber, for now I'm going to assume that it remains very low, but please don't bring in your sweater that makes sparks.

And now, I will give the longer answer from Gemini AI:
Yes, the risk of static electricity sparks igniting clothing remains a severe and highly regulated hazard at a 30% oxygen concentration. While 30% is less concentrated than 100%, it still falls well above the 23.5% threshold that international safety organizations (like OSHA and the NFPA) use to define an "Oxygen-Enriched Atmosphere" (OEA).

Because of this, the strict clothing restrictions applied in 100% O2 environments generally still apply or should still apply to environments hovering around 30% O2.

The Physics of Static Sparks and 30% Oxygen: To understand why static electricity is still so dangerous at 30%, we must look at a metric called Minimum Ignition Energy (MIE). MIE is the smallest amount of energy (like a static spark) required to ignite a combustible material:

The "Slight Enrichment" Hazard:
It is a common misconception that fire risks scale purely linearly from 21% up to 100%. In reality, the most drastic changes in flammability happen in the initial jump from 21% to 30%. Research on hyperbaric safety indicates that materials only require slight to moderate enrichment to support violent combustion. If a static spark from a polyester shirt ignites the fabric at 30% oxygen and 1.7 ATA, the resulting fire will burn significantly faster and hotter than it would outside the chamber.

That last bit went against my initial gut feeling, so I am duly corrected. I will however add that the air cooler for my chamber tends to pump moisture in my chamber, making the air more wet. The Gemini AI forgot to consider that bit until I prompted it, and basically the wetter air makes it much less likely for my clothing to generate sparks (while I do remember in California's Tahoe snow resort hotels, the dry air is so dry that I've seen lightening sparks between bed sheets at night when moving them the wrong way, both cool but slightly scary to see in the dark at night).

Managing and containing fire risk

From here you can apply common sense:

Basically the very small risk of a lithium battery failing (remember it is extremely rare because each time this happens in an airliner, it's still a big deal) is almost always after one of:

So when taking phones into a chamber, stick to these rules

This is a lipo safe pouch that you can stick your phone or a lithium powered device in if it starts getting hot and/or making smoke, while you get the hell out of your chamber ASAP:

And I'll end with being honest and giving the worst case scenario which ironically is actually the one I'm in. I have the Olive Oxyair 2.0 ATA capable soft chamber (read my report here on why I bought it and why I think it's the best soft chamber on the market)

This chamber:

So in my case if I had a catastrophic situation, it would likely take me at least 20 seconds to get out, by damaging the zippers and chamber by doing an emergency opening without equalizing first, and then unclipping 3 seat belts before I can get out which I can do that while holding my breath if smoke is an issue. I initially stated that 20 seconds was fast enough to get out in case of an actual fire, but now I have to amend that to say that actually in that up to 30% O2 rich environment, those 20 seconds will actually be very long, so I really don't want an actual fire to start while I'm in the chamber.

Conclusions

Is taking your phone in the chamber 10000% safe? No, nothing is, but my perception of this risk is that it's in the 0.001% range or less. No, I can't back up this number, but hopefully the info I gave in this page can help you decide if that risk is smaller than being in a car accident, which I personally believe it is. I hopefully also conveyed my personal opinion is that risk of fire from the wrong clothing is higher than risk from a phone, and if your clothing or hair do catch fire, even in a soft chamber at 30% O2 and up to double sea level pressure (hence twice as many O2 molecules available for burning), it's very bad news.

I'll also add that the lipo guard bag is more an additional safety for something that really should not happen to start with, taking your phone in a soft chamber without a lipo safe bag is not completely stupid, the odds of anything happening to your phone are just super low, but given how catastrophic a real fire can be in a chamber, I would definitely have the lipo safe bag to shove your phone in and close it if anything starts looking bad with the phone.

Like each time, we are very grateful for our Trancefamily SF reunion

Yes!

So last year, Dreamstate SF was a Cow Palace with 2 rooms until 03:00. The first obvious question, is which was best? Honestly mainstage was good at both, but Bill Graham definitely had better lasers, maybe because of Gareth :) As for the 2 stages vs 1, I'll be honest that mainstage last year had a fair amount of music that was not my favorite, including Eric Prydz/Pryda which I've never really enjoyed, and some DJs that sounded more like techno than trance to me. So last year, I spent a lot more time at the smaller Vision stage for my favorite trance sounds. Given that, I was delighted to only have one stage this year that was mostly music I enjoyed and on a much better stage. Also, it's kind of nice not to have to move stages and occasionally have to worry about set conflicts ;)
The one downside of Bill Graham was what I assume was an earlier curfew of 01:00 (Cow Palace last year ended at 03:00 instead of 01:00)

Did I mention that we got a few extra lasers likely thanks to Gareth? :)

Day 1

Olly James

Nilsix

Jeffrey Sutorius

The absolute highlight of the day was Ferry Corsten playing a new Gouryella. Strangely he was not the last to play, which was weird as his set was guaranteed to be the best, and he sure delivered. It was another religious experience that surpassed the previous ones I had seen:

and yes, I caught the backwards easter egg :)

This really was the best set of the night by far, not that the other ones were bad, but this one was that good. I even caught the easter egg (clickme)

I did record the full set, although it wasn't with my best camera, apologies for this, but the music is still there:

W&W was last, but Ferry was a tough act to follow:

And that was it for Day 1. Here is the video summary:

I'm not sure what was going on after party-wise, nothing major I think, but given that I had just gotten back from 4 days ASOT, I was happy to get some rest to be there bright and early for day 2 :)

Day 2

our local TFSF boy, Sony opened day 2 again

TFSF represent!

Talla 2XLC was next, great set, great to see him again after just one week in Rotterdam :)

then Roman Messer, I also had seen just a week prior

Aly and Fila

Aly and Fila's full set:

Paul Van Dyk

Paul Van Dyk's full set:

And the night ended with Gareth, with muchos lasers, beautiful:

Yes, I have Gareth's full set here, enjoy:

Gareth was a great ending to day 2, here is a summary:

People

A few pictures for fun as always:

Dave Dresden came to visit :)

shout out to the ground control teams, thank you

my heroes

and Gareth!

Thoughts/Conclusions

Links