Its worse at night.

Looking out the window as we make final approach I see all of the organized chaos of the city lights below and it is a reminder of man’s constant attempt to tame the Universe.  An attempt to control what is uncontrolable.  When you are down at street level its easy to be lulled into a sense of security, a sense that your species has finally conquered.  But from a few thousand feet up it all seems pretty feeble and all I can think of are the tsunamis and earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes that are the planet’s way of putting us in our place again if only for awhile.

15 minutes from touchdown and the thoughts have started.  The first image of a fireball crash flicks across my mind and I try to block it out by looking at the passing city below, trying to pick out familiar landmarks.  Trying to remind myself that they land these things hundreds of times a day with no problem.

The pilot makes his first decent and my stomach tightens. For two seconds I envision that drop continuing unabated for about 45 seconds and I wonder if I would have the time and composure to call Donna and tell her I love her before we hit.  10 seconds later the descent flattens out and my body tells me we are safe.

A minute later the plane starts stretching itself out, catching more air on the flaps so it can slow down.  It does this grudgingly because planes, like all technology, were built for a purpose and the plane’s purpose is to fly.  I can feel the whole structure around start to complain like a whiny kid who’s just been told to turn off the TV because its bedtime.  We shake a little and the clouds start passing the window slower.  Now I begin to wonder about the flaps.  Are they sound?  When were they last inspected? Was the inspector having a fight with his wife that day?

If I’m lucky, there is only one turn for final approach.  But one is too many.  The plane heels over to the right and I watch the city disappear from the left windows as I stare down chimneys on the right.  Now my imagination takes over and I remember the computer simulations I’ve seen of other crashes.  A 737 tipping up on its wing and then falling like a frisbee thrown vertically.  Commercial airliners are not fighter jets.  I imagine that the turn will continue into a half roll.  I can almost feel the seatbelt taking my whole weight as I am suspended upside down, waiting for the sensation of freefall to hit.  But 20 seconds later the world pops back into the left windows and all is well.

Another descent and another drop in speed.  This time the plane is more vocal.  The wings shudder as the servos push the flaps to full and the floor underneath me rumbles out the landing gear.  Now she’s pissed off and just to voice the displeasure, she rocks side to side and her ass drops below the nose like a petulant dog who isn’t going to get in the car thank you very much.  The engines kick up several thousand RPMs to compensate and even this seems like a rebuke.

“See, we could have gotten here twice as fast if you had opened up the throttle.  But no! You just had to poke along and NOW you tease me with this crap?”

Now we are in the chute, the ground is rushing up and out my window I can see individual details in the pools of light.  Parked cars, a McDonalds that’s still open, a commuter waiting for a bus.  The ground is both too close and too far away.  If we drop out of the sky now we are all dead but we are so close that I wouldn’t have time for even a Hail Mary or an Oh Shit depending on when I noticed it.  I wonder what the scar on the city would look like if we lost engines right now?

More speed sloughing off and the plane can clearly see the runway. I can’t though and that makes everything worse.  What I can see are freeways and houses and parks.  Seriously, where’s the damn airport?  The plane is tail down now getting ready to screech to a halt like an oversized vulture.  Wings spread out as far as possible and speed dropped to just above a stall.  Too slow for me to feel comfortable but to damn fast to stop something this heavy in time.

Just as I’m sure we are going to start knocking people’s satelite dishes off the roof, the scenery whips by like an old 8mm film spinning off the reel and there is blessedly flat ground.  I am relieved for about three seconds until I remember what’s about to happen.  Once my brain catches up with me I plant both feet on the floor and brace for impact.  Noone around me notices.  I have a calm enough expression.  Maybe a little tight jawed but otherwise just another weary passenger too tired to be excited about the trip.

Before we touch earth I run two things through my head.  First I give thanks to the gods of physics and luck that we made it this far.  There is only one fickle property of gas under pressure that allows planes of any type to get off the ground.  From paper flyers we made as kids to this damn beast and everything in between.  Gas, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Move an object through the air and the air parts around it and rejoins behind it.  Make the air traveling around half the object travel farther and it rushes to get there on time.  As it does, it forgets that it is supposed to be pushing on the object its encompassing.  The pressure lowers.  On the other half of the object, air is taking its normal leisurely stroll around things and pushing just as hard as always.  But without its compatriot’s efforts, the object moves away from it.  When all the air gets together again behind the object I imagine they have some pretty interesting conversations:

“Phew!  That was a haul, I thought I’d never get here in time.”

“What are you talking about? That was cake.  Fun to push on though.”

“Oh MAN! I knew I forgot something!  I didn’t push at all.  I was too woried you would get here before me.”

“Didn’t push?  So I was doing all the damn work?  Just like you.  I leave you alone for two seconds and you forget what the hell it is you’re supposed to be doing….”

And so they argue into the night without knowing that mankind has just cheated a little and gotten away with it.  I learned the physics of flight when I was seven but they are no less amazing to me now than they were then.

The second thing that runs through my head is the fact that no matter how good the approach, how gentle the pilot’s hand on the stick we are about to drop several tons of Boeing engineering onto six wheels that would have been better used on a dump truck.  And we are going to do this at speed.  Great.

Now the ground is close enough to touch but we still haven’t landed.  My teeth are clenched and my feet planted firmly for what I know will be a jarring hit.  I can already tell what will happen.  The plane will come crushing down on those three spindly struts and the landing gear will buckle like someone stomping on an empty Coke can.  We will slide out of control until we finally clip a radar tower or something and the fuselage will distinegrate hurling me into a field where I will hopefully not be crushed by other wreckage.

The impact.  I wait a full heartbeat for the disaster which never comes.  Instead the plane is enraged.  I can feel it skidding a little left, now a little right trying to shake off the pilot so it can get back in the air where it belongs.  Pissed off bull with 130 cowboys on its back and no way are we going the full eight seconds.

One last slide to the left and the pilot wrestles it back to center.  Now the brakes kick in, the engines reverse and everything is a roar and a shake as all of us are forced forward into out belts.  Isaac Newton is in my head looking a lot like Doc Brown telling Michael J Fox he’s never going home.

“AN OBJECT IN MOTION TENDS TO STAY IN MOTION UNTIL ACTED UPON BY AN OUTSIDE FORCE!  FORCE EQUALS MASS TIMES ACCELERATION! YOU GOT A LOT OF MASS THERE BOY, DO THE MATH! AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN! ONE POINT TWENTY ONE GIGAWATTS?!?  ONE POINT TWENTY ONE GIGAWATTS?!? GREAT SCOTT!”

And I know he’s right.  I know that the engineers missed a decimal point somewhere or that they had an intern retype the plans and the kid was sloppy.  Or perhaps one of the riduculously small wheels that is now bearing our terrific mass is going to give it up today and try to find out what life is like as a tire swing instead. We are all dead and its too late to call anyone.

Five seconds, ten, at the tweleve second mark (or is it seven seconds? or a minute? I’m never sure but there is no way the runway is really this long) things start to sound like we might stop in time.  The bucking and shaking has stopped. The plane is docile and now we are all rolling along in the world’s most impractical bus.  Just looking for a handy gate where the plane can vomit us all out while it gets fed and cleaned in preparation for its next torture session.

Flying I am ok with. Landing is a bitch. Only two more trips this summer.  But one of them is with Donna and if anyone can convince me that my life is not ending in the next 15 minutes, its her.

 That didn’t take long.  Luckily, the case sited still has some time to play out.  The businesses in question have a few other recourses first.  Worth reading the article since it raises a lot of questions.

Eminent domain on the move – The Supreme Court broadly expanded eminent domain in Kelo V. New London last Thursday. The city of Freeport, TX wasted no time. City attorneys are preparing legal documents to seize three pieces of waterfront property from two seafood companies for construction of an $8 million private boat marina.

Coming to a city near you soon?

(Via Metafilter)

For instance, there is this snippet:

Gore said Western Seafood’s 30,000-square-foot processing facility, which sits on the 300-by-60-foot tract, would be forced to close if the land were seized.

That facility earns about $40 million annually, and Western Seafood has been in business in Freeport since 1946, he said.

So let me get this straight, you have an economically depressed small town and your solution to this is to hassle a business that does $40M in annual revenue and has been in the town for 60 years?  Cause I’m sure they are just deadbeats who put nothing back into the local economy.

 Score one for the good guys (sort of).  I have no problem with the 10 Commandments, but at a time when the countries rhetoric is dangerously zealous it is good that the court remind us that seperation of church and state is a concept to protect both sides of that statement.  When did we as a country lose our belief that spirituality was good and plurality was better?

Justices reject Ten Commandments at courthouses (Reuters) – Reuters – A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Kentucky cannot display framed copies of the Ten Commandments in county courthouses.

(Via Yahoo! Top Stories)

 I was afraid of this.  Looks like the Supreme Court – in a frighteningly unanimous decision – has sided with MGM against Grokster.  Returining the issue to the lower courts for trial.  The war’s not over but this was a big blow to the cause.  The danger of a trial is the precedent it will set for future technologies.  I think the comparisons drawn to the VCR battles in the 80s are apt.  When VCRs came on the market, the only thing you could do with them was record television shows.  There was a small percentage of folks making home movies but your average user would be doing something ostensibly illegal.  Now the VCR is a mainstay.  The same will happen with P2P unless the courts squash it through adding liablility to the software designers.

Cross your fingers folks.  This is gonna be a tough one.

Court: File-Sharing Services May Be Sued (AP) – AP – Internet file-sharing services will be held responsible if they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, rejecting warnings that the lawsuits will stunt growth of cool tech gadgets such as the next iPod.

(Via Yahoo! Top Stories)

 I am a big fan of public WiFi but I’m not quite sure what this project is trying to accomplish.  It seems like an interesting idea but the description is thin and the language smacks of grad school posturing.  Hopefully they will come up with some interesting application of the project.  Like having everyone who sits in the chair write a blog entry about what they were doing just prior, thus building up an interesting story about the lives of those passing by this chair.

Free access from the yellow chair! –

RCA Interaction Design Show, II.

With the Yellow Chair Stories, Anab Jain opened her WiFi network to neighbours and passers-by.

She placed a sign "advertising" the offer and a yellow chair outside her house, extending the boundaries of her home to encompass the boundaries of my wireless network. Both the sign and the chair defined a "real world blog space" which challenged the idea of "open network".

This "grass roots" design approach illustrates how wireless technologies could become interfaces to recreate transient spaces for conversations at the threshold of the public and the private, the physical and the electronic.

Anab and Viktoria Klinker are also showing Sketch-a-move.

(Via We Make Money not Art)

This gets my "Too much time on his hands" award for the day.  Having said that, I can see the appeal.   I wonder though about the strange Pavlovian conditioning of waking somone with a yummy smell only to deny them the food.  What monsters of humanity might we be creating with such a device.

Wake n’ Bacon –

Wake n’ Bacon is an alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

Once the alarm goes off, it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. The signal is re-routed by a microchip that responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power a halogen lamp in the "baker module" that slow-cooks the bacon in about 20 minutes.

By Matty Salin.

(Via We Make Money not Art)

After a long week of work, tied to my office by the invisible leash of cell phones, voicemail and laptops, it’s nice to have the weekend to unplug and relax, away from the stifling environment that modern technology can bring us. Why, just last week I was out at lunch one day and had two cell phones, a PDA, a laptop and an MP3 player with me. Now it’s the weekend and I can relax without all those distractions. I’m out getting an iced coffee, looking forward to reading a bit and ignoring the world around me.

And I know how to cut myself off from it all, too. All I have with me now is one cell phone, a laptop, an MP3 player and a PDA. See? I left one of the cell phones at home. I’m not afraid of the analog world, baby.

God. I don’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud of myself.

The thing about technology is that when it’s done well, even in small ways (particularly in small ways, to tell the truth), it makes me almost giddy to be alive. I like living in a world where I can carry 50 books in a device that weighs like 5 ounces. I love that I can get a call from my mom telling me to google her maiden name (Jostedt) and find that my cousin Erica is the first “Jostedt” listed in the results, all while I’m sitting here drinking an overpriced coffee.

I also dig the fact that after rating something like 300 songs through their web service, my Yahoo LaunchCast radio station has discovered my tastes well enough to play the following recently:

Tim O’Brien, Long Way Gone

Toad the Wet Sprocket, All Things In Time

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Scar Tissue

Lisa Loeb, Wishing Heart

Live, The Distance

Tori Amos, Hey Jupiter

Catie Curtis, Magnolia Street

The Smiths, Miserable Lie

Tenacious D, Kyle Quit The Band

What’s truly taking the cake today, though, is the fact that the internet, for all its limitations, makes it possible for guys like Cory Doctorow and the dude from Waiter Rant to get noticed for their writing. As I have made several half-assed efforts to do something creative and maybe collect a few bucks at it, I have grown all the more impressed with people who can actually accomplish this task. I hope Doctrow makes millions, and I hope more folks discover that Wil Wheaton really is just a geek like them, and I hope that the guy from Dogblog closes whatever interesting book deal he’s trying to solicit interest in. And if Randy from Something Positive never has to work a “real job” again (as if writing, illustrating and updating three comics a total of 15 times a week isn’t work), I will have more faith in the world.

And just maybe maybe I hope that someday a few souls will see a copy of one of our creations – maybe This Game Sucks or Boy Meets Girl: A Tragedy at their local geek store and think, “Sure, what the hell?” Is that really so wrong?

I’ve started using my Palm for things other than playing cribbage. At the moment, other than the handy calculator and notes features, I am a using it for eBooks. I finally got around to downloading several of Cory Doctrow’s work today and am making some progress through Eastern Standard Tribe at the moment.

I like eBooks well enough. I thought I’d miss having pages to turn and the heft of a book, and I do, but there are benefits as well. No need for a book light in bed, and it’s a hell of a lot lighter. It’ll definitely be easier come time for my next business trips. There are some definite advantages to be had here, though most of them are the ones I’d already anticipated.

There is, however, one important one that I’d missed before: I do feel a little bit like Captain Picard when I’m lounging around reading books on the little screen.

I recently bought a Palm pilot, which has incredibly cool tools for productivity. I can use it to edit Office files, organize my life in a myriad of ways and read classics I never managed to pick up when I was younger.

I use it, naturally, mostly to play games. It seems that I am addicted to cribbage on my PDA. The current tally looks much like the outcome of the last presidential election – that is, 51-48 in favor of the dark side. I swear I caught up at one point but a late surge from the Evil Palm Pilot, much like the inexplicable results from Cuyahoga county OH, have made my recent comeback efforts seem futile. Still, I persevere despite the fact that my flash memory-based opponent racks up 20 point hands to the tune of two per game.

Like all card games, there is an obvious element of randomness to cribbage. And like all card games (“War” excepted), there is an element of strategy. Not so clearly in the early going, but as the midgame approaches it’s good to see where you stand in relation to your opponent. And in the homestretch in particular, you need to count the remaining hands and plan accordingly.

For example, consider this hand with six cards dealt by the opponent, meaning I must give away two to “his” crib:

JJ 66 8 4

A whopping four points here. Two for the pair of Jacks and two for the sixes. I can toss the 8 & 4 away and not give anything away to the bad guys. Four points is a meager total (the “perfect” cribbage hand is 29), but it’s all I’ve got.

Well, almost. In cribbage another card will be turned which is added to all players’ hands. So now I have a choice, because if that turn card is a 7 my hand looks totally different. Likewise a 5, which is always a huge card. Consider:

JJ 66 (7) still gives me 4 points

JJ 66 (5) would yield 8 points

But…

66 8 4 (7) gives me 12, and

66 8 4 (5) also gives me 12

In the last two examples, though, I’d be giving points away in the crib. If a 7 turns, I’m losing 2 points in the pair of Jacks, and if a 5 turns I’ve just handed 6 points to my opponent.

I could also compromise, going with

66 J 8 or 66 J 4, which would give me a chance at a solid hand without giving away anything.

Realistically, the best hand I can hope for is 12 (well, 13 if I hold a Jack and get an extra point for Nobs). At best, that 12 points is a long shot. But my choice here isn’t based so much on the odds as it is on the position in the game. If I have 118 points right now (with 121 needed to win), then I keep the Jacks and Sixes, because that pretty much guarantees a win. On the other hand, if I have 110 and my opponent is close to the finish, then I have to go for it. Toss in the Jacks and pray for a 5 or 7 on the turn. If I get it, I win. If I’m unlucky, I’ve given my opponent points – but who cares, because I would have lost anyway.

So the point is what, exactly? Just this: you play the situation as much as you do the cards in your hand. The cards are what they are, and you can’t change them. Even so, sometimes you have to assume that you’ll get lucky. You have to PLAN to get lucky on the turn because if you don’t, you’re going to lose anyway, so what’s the point in planning to be unlucky?

Likewise, sometimes you have to plan on being unlucky. Take the points in your hand and assume that there are no more to be had. If you’re comfortably ahead the most important thing to do is keep getting points steadily and not play into your opponent. Don’t toss a pair into his crib hoping for a big hand because there’s always a shot he’ll throw in another matching card and suddenly that 10 point lead is down to 3 or 4, not so comfortable after all.

Again, what’s the point? Cribbage is like any game, in that it only makes sense in terms of itself. There is nothing inherently “good” about having 8877 (7) in your hand if the game is, say, Spades. But in poker, it’s a full house. In cribbage, it’s a 20 point hand, a gamebreaker.

But despite its utter subjectivity, like all games, cribbage’s lessons apply to life. Sometimes we take risks because the odds are in your favor. Sometimes you bank on the long shot because without it, it’s moot anyway. There’s an old axiom that suggests you should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. To me this doesn’t really hold water much of the time. Sometimes the only thing to do is prepare for the best, and other times you hold onto a low-value position because it’s good enough to accomplish your goal.

And sometimes you’re going to lose no matter what, and all you can do is save the skunk. But that’s a goofy parable for another day.

 Interesting stuff here.  A topic near and dear to my Dad and a site well worth perusing.  Seems like such a simple concept and yet its met with some pretty extreme reactions.

Put your money where your mouth is – Operation Yellow Elephant is an attempt to shame young Republicans into enlisting in order to prove their commitment to their leaders’ military objectives.

(Via Metafilter)