I Believe Two Things

The JetBlue blog is a mixture of press releases, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, corporate culture, and occasional bragging. It won some major points on February 11th, when JetBlue canceled its flights in the Northeast in advance of the latest big storm to hit the region.

With the forecast calling for icy conditions throughout the day, we decided to cancel flights rather than wait-and-see with our customers in the airports.  Why?  Because on the suckiness scale, getting a call that your flight is canceled while you’re still at home, at a hotel, or at your family or friend’s house is a lot better than getting up early, going to the airport and waiting for hours with the possibility of flight cancellation to come. Still sucks. Just a little less.

I liked in particular this explanation for why aircraft are out of position at the beginning of the day:

That would work if we could park aircraft overnight in the cities affected by weather, but we try to avoid that.  Ice would build up on the wings overnight and it would take hours to deice all of the aircraft we normally start the day with at New York’s JFK, let alone Boston, Washington’s Dulles and the Mid-Atlantic cities.  So we put those planes in warmer weather ports for the night to get them to the frozen North first thing in the morning the day after the storm, then start the operation from that point.

I love logistical challenges like this, and I’d probably enjoy figuring out how to reposition aircraft in this manner to have the least impact on operations.  I don’t envy the planners who have to endure (albeit indirectly) the ire of stranded travelers who are entirely too willing to blame their airline for the weather, though.

Google generously sponsored free wireless Internet access at 54 airports during last year’s holiday season, including Boston’s Logan International.  This made hectic holiday travel a little more fun, and surely got Google a metric boatload of ad impressions on all the “wireless jail” pages we see when first connecting.

I don’t mind terribly paying for the resources I consume, as a general rule, but the pricing model for Internet access at airports is a terrible fit for most people.  At Logan, the cost was $7.95 for 24 hours of access.  On its face, that’s not bad.  But of course, most people aren’t spending 24 hours in the airport; they’re just checking their e-mail in the one hour buffer surrounding their flight.

Well, good news, citizens of Boston: Massport has arranged to keep the Internet free at Logan — indefinitely!  Unsurprisingly, use of the wireless network grew sixfold during Google’s sponsored access, and Massport is finally ready to continue offering the third basic element of human survival at no cost.  Excellent decision.

Logan Wireless Internet

I love the number of shared libraries that appear in iTunes at the airport.  My favorite selection this time: “Stud Beefpile.”  I didn’t dare look to see what was in that one.

I stumbled upon The Four Quarters on YouTube this morning and immediately had to play every video they’ve made.  Among my favorites: Downtown, Lullaby of Broadway, and the “Teenager in Love, Lollipop, Earth Angel, Sh-Boom” medley.

Don’t be surprised when you open the “National Anthem” video and hear an off-key “Oh” at first.  It’s actually on key, it’s just followed by “Canada” instead of “say can you see.”  (That was a discouraging little realization of some intrinsic assumptions I apparently make about the universe.)

In the Business section of this morning’s Boston Globe is this blurb from the Associated Press:

A New Jersey company says it has developed “the world’s first sex robot,” a life-size rubber doll that’s designed to engage the owner with conversation rather than lifelike movement.

So many punch lines and so little time!  Reading on:

The dark-haired, negligee-clad robot said “I love holding hands with you” when it sensed that its creator touched its hand.  Another action, this one unprintable, elicited a different vocal response from Roxxxy the robot.

Oooh.  Saucy.  Now, talk to us about the “sex” part of “sex robot” a little:

It has sensors at strategic locations and can sense when it’s being moved.  But it can’t move on its own, not even to turn its head or move its lips.

No further questions, your honor.

I’m reading You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard.  It’s a fascinating study of how humans and other animals navigate, from simple tasks like moving across a crowded room to complex feats of worldwide and celestial navigation.

One section describes Karl von Frisch’s research with bees in the 1920s.  After finding food, bees return to the hive and perform a “waggle dance,” which von Frisch deduced was a way of communicating the food’s location to other bees.  Perhaps understandably, some skepticism met this claim.  Ellard writes:

[O]nly very recently have advances in technology enabled researchers to provide what seems like ironclad evidence for the key role of the waggle dance in bee navigation.

In 1989 a team of researchers at the University of Odense in Denmark built a dancing robotic bee.

I love my chosen profession, but I do sometimes think meetings would be more fulfilling if, when someone disagreed with my point of view, I could say something like, “You’re wrong, as I shall now demonstrate with this dancing robotic bee.”

I recently finished Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers about World War II.  It’s an interesting read throughout, but my absolute favorite story comes from the introduction.  Ambrose describes the Lieutenant Waverly Wray of Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, commanded by Colonel Ben Vandervoot.

Lt. Waverly Wray

After jumping into Normandy, he began crawling through the sunken lanes to reconnoiter the German positions surrounding them.  He came upon a group of eight German officers surrounding a radio — officers who turned out to be leading the counterattack.  Wray jumped through the hedgerow and ordered them to surrender.

Seven instinctively raised their hands.  The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him instantly, between the eyes.  Two Germans in a slit trench 100 meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him.  Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right ear.

Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seven officers, one at a time as they attempted to run away.  When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each.

Wray made his way back to the company area to report on what he had seen. At the command post he came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing.  “Who’s got more grenades?” he demanded.

…

Vandervoot later recalled that when he saw the blood on Wray’s jacket and the missing half-ear, he had remarked, “They’ve been getting kind of close to you, haven’t they Waverly?”

With just a trace of a grin, Wray had replied, “Not as close as I’ve been getting to them, Sir.”

Ambrose’s Band of Brothers (on which the HBO series of the same name was based) is more compelling overall, but because it tells the story primarily of a single company of paratroopers it necessarily offers a limited view of the war.  Citizen Soldiers gives a more complete overview, but naturally at the cost of some finer detail.  Clearly the only reasonable plan is to read both.

The picture of Lt. Wray comes from The U.S. Airborne During WW II, which came up in a Google search for Wray’s name, and which I now must absolutely explore in greater depth.

Jim Denevan carves enormous art pieces in the sand of deserts and beaches.  On a canvas that nature is prepared to wipe clean with wind or water the moment it’s been filled, he creates artwork so large it can only be appreciated from the air (at least in a lot of cases).

One basic example is this pattern on a beach with a tiny person poised in the center:

Other pieces are abstract, simple, or just daunting.  My favorite has to be this one.

I can never pass up a good Apollo documentary.  I should probably credit the 1995 Apollo 13 blockbuster for sparking my interest in the Apollo program, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Ron Howard’s 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon was so appealing.

The standard route through an Apollo documentary begins with Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things” speech, mourns the Apollo 1 tragedy, shows pictures of Earth from Apollo 8 and video of the moon from Apollo 11, and if there’s time applauds mission control in the context of Apollo 13.

The hour and 39 minute documentary In the Shadow of the Moon takes the same basic trip, but refreshingly from the personal perspectives of the astronauts themselves.  With extensive interviews with the astronauts (and none with mission controllers that I noticed), we get an entirely first-hand telling of the events as they happened up on the moon and en route.

Alan Bean of Apollo 12 describes, for example, the strange feeling of stepping out of the Lunar Module onto a deserted world:

When you land on the Moon, and you stop, and you get out, nobody’s out there. This little LM, and then two of you, you’re it. On this whole big place.

What sold me entirely, though, was the Apollo 11 landing sequence.  Everyone’s heard the radio exchanges and watched video of barren lunar surface streaming past a Lunar Module window — and I’ve listened to those tapes a dozen times now.  People worldwide can recognize the exchange first spoken when the lander touched down: “The Eagle has Landed.”  “Roger, Tranquility.  We copy you on the ground.  You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue; we’re breathing again.”  Charlie Duke, acting as CAPCOM, can barely get the words out.

In the Shadow of the Moon plays the same tape, but shows the video feed from inside mission control — video I never knew existed before.  There, when Charlie Duke replies, “Roger Tranquility,” are the very real bunch of guys about to turn blue, some clearly about to burst with excitement.

It took a lot to surprise me with what looked like a routine Apollo history flick, but this absolutely did the trick.

I’m finally watching The Middleman: a delightfully campy take on the Doctor Who premise, with a style vaguely reminiscent of Rocky and Bullwinkle and 180 words per minute of dialog (at least in the one random sample I took).

Like The Doctor (or Batman, if you prefer), The Middleman relies on gadgets and training to fight evil rather than any mysterious superpower.  Where The Doctor uses psychic paper The Middleman has a box of fake IDs, and a 1968 Ford Fairlane 500 replaces the TARDIS, but fans of Doctor Who will recognize the basic setup: a mysterious expert in all things paranormal, supernatural, and “juxtaterrestrial” teams up with a seemingly average sidekick to save the world repeatedly.

My favorite line so far comes from the pilot episode:

Middleman: If there’s one thing I hate more than scientists trying to take over the world it’s scientists who twist innocent primates with computer-enhanced mind control to live out their sick and perverted fantasies of criminal power.

…

Wendy:  Is it true what you said?  That if there’s one thing you hate more than scientists trying to take over the world it’s scientists who twist innocent primates with computer-enhanced mind control to live out their sick and perverted fantasies of criminal power?

The Middleman: Why would I lie about that?

Wendy: It’s a very specific thing to hate.

Unfortunately, watching this show has left me with a strangely strong compulsion to start wearing an Eisenhower jacket everywhere (as does the title character).  That’s probably not wise.

I don’t know how I missed this back in September (unless it just didn’t make the print edition).  Travis Andersen wrote on boston.com about a new rule at Tufts this semester barring sexual activity in dorms in the presence of roommates.

The policy – which took effect this semester – reads, “You may not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room. Any sexual activity within your assigned room should not ever deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time.”

It’s actually a good policy in that it provides an avenue for students victimized by nearby sexual activity to complain and inflict consequences on the perpetrators.  It’s also hilarious.

If nothing else, let’s note that sexual activity deprives at least the participants of privacy (at least between themselves), study time, and sleep time, however respectful they might be of their roommates.

(This came up in a story about Quidditch being played at Tufts.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that wasn’t even the most unusual story I’d see today.)