More Subtle

Tomorrow, on Friday the 13th, I will travel over the north pole on my way to Hong Kong.  It’s a Boeing 777, operated by Continental, an I’ve got a window seat.  From the New York Times:

For decades, the North Pole routes were scarcely used, partly because of the cold war, a time when the Soviet Union was suspicious about aircraft of any type flying over its far northern airspace.

Now it’s pretty common, but there’s 3 things I’m thinking about:

1. I’ll be exposed to solar and cosmic radiation close to the magnetic north pole.  I also might see some aurora activity.
2. Compasses are useless, and geo-stationary satelites near the equator are not available, so airlines rely on GPS and inertial navigation.
3. It’s a 16 hour flight, so the earth rotates two-thirds of the way around while I’m flying over it.  But the plane also has to compensate for extremely powerful winds, so the route won’t be a straight line, but probably curvy, depending on weather.

airplane, navigation, travel

The C-SPAN website.

• You can’t go fullscreen with the archives, and the video is so small!
• There are audio problems with some White House press briefings: questions from the press are loud and clear until they are on camera, and then the mic sounds muted.  Huh?
• Robert Gibbs uses meandering and his blandness to dodge questions.  Isn’t Obama’s Press Secretary supposed to be transparent?
• C-SPAN still beats the news websites and sometimes even youtube for content and quality.

audio, government, media

I started using Pandora today, and my station is based on Bread.  You know, that soft rock band from the 70’s?  Does the virtual DJ understand my taste as well as the previous generation’s AM radio?

Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features a subtle use of vocal harmony, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality, a clear focus on recording studio production and a smooth male lead vocalist.

Yep.  Sounds about right.

bread, music