Air France 447

Last week I awoke to the most disturbing of stories, that an Airbus A330 with 228 souls on board had disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. Having just broken out of a deep slumber, my first thought was that I was actually still dreaming. Having dismissed that theory after realizing that the information was emanating from my bedside clock radio, I then ascribed the narration to an author touting the merits of his/her new fiction novel. Sadly, neither prove to be the case. In fact, an Airbus A330 with 228 souls on board HAD disappeared somewhere between Brazil and France.

Instantly, I was overwhelmed by a tremendous sense of disbelief. I felt as though I had instantly been transported by to the early 1900s. Not that there is anything particularly significant about the early 1900s, but rather that somehow in my mind, had this event occurred in the early 1900s, it would have been more acceptable to me. At least, far more acceptable than it is for mid 2009.

With reality setting in, I naturally began to ask some questions.

#1. Given GPS technology, how can we not know where this aircraft is and/or was? For a mere $300, I can affix a Garmin GPS to my wrist and tell you where I am at any point so long as I have a clear look at any one of the numerous satellites that circle the world and contribute to our GPS mapping capabilities. One would have to figure that the technology available to a multi-million dollar jet being flown and serviced by a multi million (billion?) dollar company might have the same, or better, abilities.

#2. How is it that aircraft seats and life preservers are recovered in the area that the aircraft went down, but that they don’t belong to the A330. Keep in mind that this is 400 nautical miles north of Brazil, not a mere few miles offshore. Can I take this to mean that other aircraft are going down in this reason and are not accounted for? Or is there some aircraft wreckage yard somewhere in the world whereat citizens throw debris into the worlds’ ocean currents and watch them drift away – a modern version of the message in a bottle technique?

#3. There is chatter that the black box may never be recovered given that the ocean depths in the area in question are about 24,000 feet – a mere 5000 feet short of Mt. Everest’s height (~29,000 feet). So another question comes to mind. If black boxes are so vital to reconstructing accident events, and given the percent of the earth’s surface that is water, would it not be reasonable to make the black box buoyant? I fully recognize the durability requirements of the black box; after all, it is supposed to survive all manners of accident that involve tremendous G forces. I also recognize that there may be some value in having this box located in a region where it is well-integrated with other aircraft systems. HOWEVER, would it not be possible, at least on newer aircraft, to have it encased in enough buoyant material to offset its weight? And, furthermore, given its purpose, would there not be intrinsic value in having it easily break free from the rest of the wreckage at which time it would emit ELT like signals? In this way it could be more easily retrieved from the water’s surface, and would be easily located due to the signals it would emit.

#4. How is it that we hear absolutely nothing from the pilots before the aircraft went down? To me, this is SOOOOOOO bizarre. Theorists have suggested that the plane was travelling into an area with heavy storms. Fair enough, but suppose that this storm was intense enough to break up the aircraft. Even under those circumstances, the pilots would certainly have said something, at least a mayday call? To me, this simple piece of information alone suggests that whatever happened, it happened VERY suddenly!

At the end of the day, it will be some time, if ever, before we know all the details about the flight.

Appliance Makeover

Question -- what happened to clothes washing appliances?

For the vast majority of my life, washing machines and dryers were nearly perfectly square, squirreled away in the basement, and generally came in one of two colours: white or taupe.

In recent years, they have become sleek, colourful, and now adopt a position of prominence within the house. Consider for example that this is what greeted me upon entering a department store the othe day:

Was I in the appliance department? No. I was, in fact, in children's clothing and this applicance set was very prominently displayed at a T intersection I walked up to as soon as I came into the store. Look at these, I mean really look at them. The colour is fire engine red, the buttons are stereo like, and they come with drawers on the bottom.

So, my question is simply this. What in the H-E double hockey sticks happened to spur on this radical change in applicance appearences? More specifically, which designer woke up one morning and said "I'm going to make washing applicances sexy"? Something like that must surely of happened because clothes washing applicances could have evolved even moderately at any point in the last 20 years, but for some reason they didn't!

Anyhow, just another random thought to make up my two cents for the day

What do you “do”?

One thing I find odd about society is how much importance we place upon our professions. You see it all the time, people form virtually instantaneous opinions about others based on their profession. Even the greeting “what do you do”, how now devolved to the point that most people simply throw out their job as the answer to the query. Although most of us spend a lot of time at our places of employment, we truly are much more than the mere tasks we perform while at work.

For example, we adopt a variety of very significant roles as sons/daughters, fathers/mothers, brothers/sisters, mentors/mentorees, and volunteers. We also engage in a variety of extracurricular activities such as playing sports, joining service clubs, reading, taking/teaching classes, travelling, writing, drawing, singing, hiking, etc. etc.

I would argue that this collection of non-work activities are every bit as important, if not more so, than our chosen career when it comes to shaping the people we become. In fact, I would propose that many people seek stability in their employment, and as such, prefer not to face adversity and/or change. As such, for a significant portion of the population, I would venture to say that work becomes routine and rote. This is great from the point of view of knowing what to expect, being consistent, and getting a paycheque, but it does very little toward challenging you and seeing what kind of growth you are capable of. This kind of challenge is often delivered to us through our non-work activities. Perhaps a family member is truly taxing us, a course opens us up to a whole new world, or you develop a skill or ability you previously did not have. It is through these growth opportunities that we redefine who we are and become better people.
So, the next time someone asks you what you do, tell them you actually do a fair bit, and then proceed to tell them just what it is that keeps you busy all the time, not just during business hours.

Those are my two cents for the day!

Advent Calendar Payback – Hannah

This past week, I took another step toward being debt free from payouts for this year’s Advent Calendar Quiz. I met up with Hannah and she cashed in a drink – sadly, as I was in the midst of a month-long cleanse, no drinks for me L. Ah well, next time!

Only 30 more drinks and counting – now how to get to Calgary and Toronto to pay back the non-locals? The Stampede might work for Calgary ... and what for Toronto? Carabana? Only half a year left with only have a year left…..

Cleansing Time!

First day of the month and a blog entry already -- booyah!

The topic of today's blog is cleansing. I have a run later this month, and a trip on deck for mid next month. In prep for both, it is time to cleanse. In specific terms, I have thrown down the gauntlet. For this month, no:

Alcohol (yikes!).
Cola/soda of any kind.
Chips

Also, I will:

Run at least 40 kms.
Workout at least 10 times.

Black Swan - Initial Thoughts

After three attempts and about three years, I have finally finished the Black Swan. I can honestly say that this was the most challenging book I have ever picked up, and completing it became more of a mission than it was a pure pleasure. The published manifesto circulated to support the book is engaging, and the book starts off well enough before thrusting readers into the deep end.

As I sit back and reflect on the reasons for why it was such a challenge, I have come to the following:

· The vocabulary was too vast.
· To fully follow the book, you cannot put it down for any notable period of time.
· The topic threads at times don’t appear to connect.
· The concepts are a bit too challenging.

Allow me to elaborae further…..

Vocabulary

Nassim is clearly very smart, and unfortunately for me, his vocabulary is far more extensive than my own. As such, there were a great many words whose meanings I simply did not know. As such, my choice was to ignore them, or look them up. To give you a sense of what I am talking about, consider the following words that I jotted down for the purposes of looking them up later:

· Flaneur
· Sycophany
· Levantine
· Mercantile
· Hellenistic
· Byzantine
· Ethos
· Indelible
· Pyrrhic
· Iniquitous
· Bard
· Troubadour
· Epistomology
· Denizen
· Obscurantist
· Fideism
· Erudite
· Philistinism
· Verisimiltude
· Obsequiousness
· Hedonic
· Pontification
· Polyglot
· Wile
· Tomes
· Penurious
· Charlatan
· Aggrandized
· Fiat
· Unctuous
· Precocity
· Ad hominem
· Sui generis
· Quincunx
· Paucity
· Dialectic
· Unassailable
· Derisively
· In extremis
· Synod style

Concepts

Nassim introduces a whole host of concepts in the book, and continues to refer to them after their introduction. As such, it is important to get a handle on them. As a sampling of the concepts introduced, consider the following:

· Mediocristan versus Extremistan
· Great Intellectual Fraud – GIF
· Cheap Signalling
· Barbell strategy for investing
· Mandlebroatian versus Gaussian
· Preferential attachment
· Cumulative advantage
· Knightian risk
· Corroboration errors
· Negative empiricism
· Silent evidence
· Black Swan Triplet: Rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability.
· Epistemic arrogance
· Nerd effect
· Anchoring
· Ludic fallacy
· Platonication

Additional Notes

·He loves Physics as he views it as a pure science – couldn’t agree more!
·Laughs at game theory and people that try to apply rigid math to economics as he argues that we really can’t apply most models to economic issues. Also believes that Alfred Nobel would be rolling in his grave if he knew the types of people that were getting Nobel Prizes these days.
·Suggests that fractals are a good way to go about predicting as they maintain their symmetry at different scales. He then ties this to the need to use Power Laws in our predictions, but suggests that knowing which specific power to use is a very difficult thing to know for sure.
·His sarcasm is costic as can be, but that makes reading amusing.
·He has an interesting history, and is clearly very bright.
·He thinks the bell curve is the Great Intellectual Fraud in that people try to apply a normal distribution to data that can’t fit that type of distribution.
·Mediocristan is a world where data doesn’t vary widely within a given data set. While the individual data points might vary from one another, no single data point can influence the average value of the data aggregate. For example, if you randomly collect 100 people and take an average of their weight, you will get a value X. If you were to replace any one person in the sample with the heaviest person in the world, the average of that sample would not change appreciably. Extremistan is a world where data can vary dramatically one point to the next. An example of an attribute from Extremistan is personal wealth. If you repeat the above example with personal wealth, substituting one person in the sample with Bill Gates would have a huge influence on the aggregate average.

Things I Learned in May

I will be the first to admit that I have an addiction. I can't help but learn about people and things ALL the time. Sometimes I think that work and life don't ever seem to engage your mind as much as shool does. At times though I realize that the problem may just be that I don't realize the amount of learning that actually happens. So, this month, I have decided to look at what I learned in the month of May.

First, a qualifying statement. Everything listed in the immeidiate section below came to me thanks to listening to Ted talks available from http://www.ted.com/. There you will find amazing speeches on a variety of topics including, business, science, politics, etc. I truly encourage you all to hit the site today! If any of these topics are of interest, please let me know and I will point you to the specific speech.

Quorum sensing in bacteria (Bonnie Bassler). It turns out that the study of bacteria has come a loooong way since I studied the topic in school. Specifically, scientists have learned that bacteria communicate by exchanging small molecules, not unlike cytokines you find in immunology. The concept was initially discovered by work on a certain type of nocturnal squid found off the coastal waters of Hawaii. Turns out this squid has pouches filled with bacteria that glow. The purpose of the bacteria is to light the animal from its underside, thereby eliminating its shadow as it patrols the shallow coastal waters using moonlight to see. Brilliant! So, the bacteria collectively turn on their glowing mechanism only once there are enough of them in the area – the measurement being achieved by the concentration of these communication molecules. If the concentration is not sufficient, the bacteria simply do not glow. When they reach quorum, presto, glowing! Amazingly, there are intraspecies communication molecules and interspecies communication molecules.

It is believed that it is quorum sensing that is used when they take over a host such as a human. Another interesting aside is that 10 trillion bacterial cells can be found on you and/or in you at any time compared to about 1 trillion of your own cells. Similarly, you have 30000 genes in your genome, but in your life about 3,000,000 bacterial genes influence your life via the bacteria on

AIDS in Uganda. Uganda is often cited as one of the only successes at reducing AIDS infection in sub Saharan Africa. This has always been attributable to the launch of an aggressive campaign entitled ABC for its pillars of Abstinence, Being Faithful, and Condoms. Recently, however, a social scientist has made a very interesting observation. It turns out that the incidence of infectious disease in a country is correlated to the amount of exporting it does. So, in the case of Uganda, its primary export is coffee. Precisely over the years that AIDS infections decreased, the price of coffee went up. When prices goes up, export go down, and by extension, maybe the incidence of infection goes down.

Decision Making. I learned some interesting concepts about how we make decisions. It turns out that introducing an innocuous choice to people may well sway their way of choosing. For example, imaging choosing between the following items:

· All expense paid trip to Rome
· All expense paid trip to Paris

As both are fairly equivalent, participant choices can be expected to be fairly even. But, if you introduce a third option, All expense paid trip to Rome, save your morning coffees. As expected, this shifts the choices made from the coffee deficient trip to Rome to the complete trip to Rome. Interestingly, however, it also shifts the choices away from Paris altogether. Applied to dating, this means you should be seen with a slightly less attractive version of yourself. In that way, you will seem comparatively more attractive.

Texting Google (David Pogue). You can text google for information and it will return a reply is sub 5 seconds. For example, text “New York weather” to Google and presto, you get the day’s weather. You can do the same to get local restaurant listings and many, many more things.

Also, at present if you have a wifi enabled phone, you should make your calls while on wifi instead of the carrier because wifi calls are free. Better yet, even if your signal switches the paid carrier later, you won’t be billed as the carriers haven’t figured out how to track this transition yet!

Twitter (Evan Williams). 47 members of US cabinet members have twitter.

NOAA (Robert Ballard). – The ocean equivalent of NASA, this body explores the features and creatures found in our ocean. Sadly, 160

Sheep Castration (Mike Rowe). Host of the TV show “Dirty Jobs” describes how the Human Society and PETA confirmed human way of castrating sheep leaves them trembling and suffering for a far greater period of time then would if the more traditional method of having the testicles bitten off by a human (no joke) was employed. Mike goes on to say that we as a society have waged a war on work, that an honest day of manual labour is something that few people want to do, yet is something we still vitally need.

Brain Science (Jill Bolte Taylor). Probably one of the best talks ever, this talk provides amazing insight about stroke by a neuroscientist who underwent a stroke. She describes how her left hemisphere would cycle between being online and offline with crazy results. While online, she was aware of her stroke and what needed to be done (i.e. get help), but when offline, she was in a state of euphoria thanks to functioning of the right brain. The right brain she describes was unable to process boundaries to objects; everything appeared to be connected and at peace. She struggled to place a call for help, but the concepts of numbers simply did not register with her – she resorted to looking at them, trying to identify similarities in the “numbers” on her business cards and those on the phone. She was successful in dialing, only to hear her colleague speaking to her in what she interpreted Scooby Doo type talk. To her amazement, when she spoke, what came out was equally unintelligible. After eight years she has recovered and has an amazingly unique story to tell. If you listen to one talk, may this the one!

These kernels of knowledge have been drawn from the book Social Intelligence by Karl Albreght.

· New Expression: Ballistic Podiatry! – Nice way to say shooting yourself in the foot.
· Social Flatulence – acting and/or saying something inappropriate.
· Social Dandruff – when your behavior directly impacts those around you, and you are entirely oblivious and/or don’t care, much like if you flicked you dandruff ridden hair all over nearby passengers on a bus.
· Social Halitosis – When people talk, and talk, and talk without regard to giving other’s a chance to contribute.

African Aid (Dambisa Moyo). While we think that aid that the western world has provided to Africa is a good thing, the reality is that it may not be. Overall, Africa has benefit only marginally from the millions of dollars that have been shuttled its way through foreign aid, despite the well-intentioned efforts of highly visible celebrities like Bono. In her book, a very outspoken and knowledgeable Dambisa Moyo makes the argument foreign aid actually supports the dictators in power as it gives them little incentive to change anything for the betterment of their citizens.

Game Theory. Not that I aspire to grandeur on the poker stage, but I have started to study Game Theory. While it isn’t overly complicated, it is twisted at times. For example, there can be a solution to a problem that would provide the best results for both parties, but sadly will never be selected. An example of this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Suppose you and I committed a crime and were sitting together in a restaurant sometime after the event. Sadly, we had never discussed our stories, and suddenly two cops approach us and separate us. Held in our individual cells, we are asked what happened. Our choices and results are as follows:

· Neither of us implicate each other – we both get off.
· We both implicate each other – we both serve three years.
· One of us implicates the other, but not the other way – the implicator gets off; the one implicated serves 5 years.

The question is, not having chatted, what do we do? The result is that we implicated one another and serve three years. Although saying nothing would have served us better collectively, not knowing what the other would do, left us with the best option of implicating one another.