Missing Mary Road

so over at the freakonomics blog for a few weeks now captain steve of a major US airline has been answering some FAQ about flying and the stigma and myths associated wth it. it’s fascinating going through the Q&A.

he initially starts off on a rant about airline safety, how and why it has degraded and what the cheap $99 flight means for you in the wake of the new york city water landing.

his first set of answers he goes on about whether turning off ipods and phones actually has any effects on takeoff and landings. whether you’re better off taking the cheap regional charter flight or going with a major airline for a few hundred bucks more,  some information about autopilot, and a bit more about weather delays and refuelling.

the next batch was a bit more interesting for me where he answers a bit more about being a pilot itself. some of the questions answered are how to find out more about the experience of a pilot who is flying your flight, how to get interesting air chatter information from flight control, how good are planes these days, how to become a pilot, more weather, and more.

it’s a fascinating read and an insight into a world where not much is known to the general public.

Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars.

The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The important point here is not that high finance is catching up with the sciences; it’s that the numbers we encounter everywhere in daily life are growing steadily larger. Computer technology is another area of rapid numeric inflation. Data storage capacity has gone from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and the latest disk drives hold a terabyte (1012 bytes). In the world of supercomputers, the current state of the art is called petascale computing (1015 operations per second), and there is talk of a coming transition to exascale (1018). After that, we can await the arrival of zettascale (1021) and yottascale (1024) machines—and then we run out of prefixes!

The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.

The August issue of Details magazine profiles Daniel Suelo, a college graduate (University of Colorado, Anthropology) who lives in a cave near Moab, UT.

On his website, Living Without Money, Suelo writes, “I’ve been living without a cent to my name since the autumn of 2000 (with a month’s exception during my first year). I don’t use or accept money or conscious barter, and I don’t take food stamps or other government dole.”

The 48-year-old Suelo has no credit cards, no mortgage, no bills whatsoever. He survives mainly by scavenging the streets and dumpsters for food and clothing. He also forages for wild edible plants and “ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill,” which he fries on a stove made from a cookie tin.

After graduating from college, Suelo worked for the Peace Corps in Ecuador and a women’s shelter in Moab. He lived in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand and joined the ascetic sadhus in India. Eventually, he became “enchanted” with the idea of living as “a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it” and moved back to the United States. Shortly after that, he stopped using money.

His FAQ is especially interesting (“What happens if you get sick or injured?” “What do you do if you find money?” “What about relationships? Don’t you get lonely?”). You can also read Suelo’s blog, which he updates whenever he hikes an hour to the public library to use the Internet-connected computer there. Here’s a short documentary about Suelo here.

ok so i got a beef. what the heck is wrong with computer software today. or rather to explain better, software made by companies.

adobe, can you please explain to me what the hell is in adobe reader? just the GD installer is 45MB for crying out loud?! for reading a damn pdf file?!?

real player? 7 mb for an installer FOR ANOTHER INSTALLER? really? i mean, REALLY?

nokia, i know you really want me to sync my phone to my computer every single day, but i won’t do it, i promise, especially  if its 70 MB just for the install file.

apple…where do i begin? quicktime is  75 MB just for the player. itunes, same deal. cmon, just to play some music. and your software just isn’t even that good.

vlc does all of the above in 15 mb as far as media playing goes. amarok is a bit bigger, but at least it’s a bit of a better player too.

even firefox is getting a bit too bloaty for my liking now, that’s why i switched to opera. go try it fools. it does everything and more that firefox and thunderbird combined can do!

please note my exclusion of ANY software produced by microsoft, they’re not even worthy of a rant. i’m too tired of all the bloat they produce and as most of my readers now, i haven’t dealt with any of their rubbish in a few years now.

oh yeah, and another note, get your shit out of my system tray. if i wanted it to start up everytime i boot my computer, i’d put it in the startup myself. thanks much.

p.s. (feel free to expand on this list in the comments).