DAY EIGHTY SIX

For those of you, who like me, love Turkish Airlines, you'll find some humor in this blog post. But make sure to read this post too, where you'll learn about how THY sometimes misses the right airport. Whoopsies!

How to fight the man! Turns out, the NYTimes thinks you need a grand world vision - rejecting the status quo isn't enough.

SO! onto aerospace engineers. Dr. John Stapp, also known as 'the fastest man alive' (differentiating him from comic book characters and also differentiating him from Kittinger, whose review is forthcoming), was a US air force officer and surgeon.

One of his most important works was where Murphy's law really got its name. Conventional wisdom was that pilots could only survive 18Gs of force. Stapp believed that people could withstand more than that - a lot more, particularly since Chuck Yeager (forthcoming) had just broken the sound barrier without dying.

To test how many Gs a person could survive, the scientists used a rocket sled track - a track used to test objects being hurtled at fast rates without actually flying them. This sort of track had previously been used by the Germans to launch rockets from underground during WW II. Such a rocket sled was set up in California. Equipped with a crash test dummy named Oscar the Eightball on a rocket named Gee Whiz, Stapp decided he wanted to do it himself. Before he could, the scientists needed to adequately test the tracks to make sure Stapp wouldn't fly off into the desert or fly out of the harnesses. Enter Murphy, who messed up the harness readings. Stapp pronounced such at a press conference (or did he?) and the name slowly took over human consciousness.

OTHER fun facts about Stapp include that he helped create modern crash test dummies. He also was one of the main reasons that cars now have seatbelts - his work on how many Gs humans could survive demonstrated that when adequately strapped in, the forces survivable were much higher (after the rocket experiments, the standard was raised from 18Gs to 32Gs). The military was all like "oh no Dr. Stapp, you can't research automobiles when you're supposed to care about pilots", but Stapp pointed out, rightly so, that more pilots were killed in automobile accidents than plane crashes.

Finally: remember how Ralph Nader's all known for being green and liking the environment and helping Gore lose the election? He first became famous for his work about Corvair. The tagline? UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED. The cool car my sister got many years back? The Corvair. (Hidden in my dad's blog is a picture of a car. Looks like we don't have a picture of the Corvair?) Stapp and Nader worked together to pass a series of regulations into law to improve safety of cars - roll bars and seat belts - while capitalism helped to change the composition of crunch zones from nice crunchy metal to cheap plastic.

And this concludes the most boring blog post ever. I may stop with the scientific blog posts and go back to pirates soon.