DAY EIGHTY EIGHT POST TWO

also, can i say how sad it is that it's a company that's doing this cool stuff instead of like... NASA? :(

DAY EIGHTY EIGHT

those of you who are loyal readers - and i know there's a ton, word up to the odd latvian follower! - will realize that i messed up the numbering of my days. whoops. SO CLOSE TO NINETY!!!!!!

a vacuum sealed pack of love!

let's just pretend that i blogged about aeronautics engineers. i read about them so you don't have to. if you've got questions, i'll field them, but otherwise, way too boring to write about.

Using sorta-slave/severely underpaid labor to digitalize documents.

i never use reader any more after they stopped the sharing option. do others agree?

people say life's a journey, but i'm tired of wasting mine in transit.

hey! wait! there's actually one of the people i'm interested in in the news! back to aeronautics engineers:

the boards of canada video dayvan cowboy features three very cool videos: a free fall from 19 miles up, a big wave surfer, and a clip from the film Chrystal Voyager. Each thing is as cool as the last - very, very cool. Joseph Kittinger's the dude who got me interested in all these back in the day scientists. He rode up 20 miles into the atmosphere and, wearing a specially designed suit and parachute and made to be in a sitting position, jumped out. As Wiki so helpfully summarizes:

He set historical numbers for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest drogue-fall (four minutes), and fastest speed by a human being through the atmosphere.

How cool is that?! He fell over four minutes straight and if you watch the video you'll see how incredibly far up he is - over four times higher than planes go. He reached speeds of over 600 mph!! Something malfunctioned in his suit and he passed out and his hand swelled to twice the normal size! Crazy!
And, he's training Felix Baumgartner, who's also done some REALLY cool stuff and - like in Human Target - is a specialist in small space targetted landings. Unlike the show, though, he's a real person, and also holds a bunch of records for BASE jumping and parachuting and all sorts of cool things. Felix is going to break the sound barrier without being encased by any sort of vehicle! the last and only thing to say is that the article doesn't mention that the reason for the delay is not for the years of preparation but instead because of some Red Bull lawsuit.

DAY EIGHTY SIX

Controversy surrounding Chrysler's new commercial, "It's Halftime, America." Myself, I like last year's imported from Detroit more (some of the same images are featured in both). Watching videos about detroit is more fun! Like this one, a gospel rendition of Eminem's One Shot. And, for my favorite street in the world, ever, see this video and read this and this discussing a bit of the history of the Heidelberg project (and watch this video). The last one's particularly good at showing Detroit through the last 50 or so years, a woman who really likes to say 'literally', some cool poi, and a man who thinks Greenwich is 'literally' pronounced "green-wich". Encouraged viewing for all, and i'm sad i haven't seen it in at least four years.
And, for a much more depressing view, watch this one about dismantling Detroit. "Why's it going to China? So they can make shit, send it back here and sell it for more."

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.

DAY EIGHTY SIX

well dubb ETHNIC (not dubb, as we found out on friday) is fantastic. excellent service and when it's 50% off, a great deal.

My recent interest in 1970s science fiction appears to have abated and has been replaced by an interest in 1940s-current aerospace engineers and various rocket tecnologies. This will be the WEEK OF THE ROCKETS AND SPACE AND PLANES oh my!

k a bit more history on murphy's law, which I think i posted about last week with almost no explanation. Read more about it here.

Murphy's law was not originally called such, but the concept has been there for over 140 years. There's reports of it in an 1877 journal, and it may have existed before that:

It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later.

- Wikipedia article's quote

Identified variously as an engineering, magic, and mountaineering adage, it was still not known as Murphy's law. In fact, the first instance of it being called Murphy's law was in 1949, when the name still vied with Reilly and Strauss for a figurehead. While the folks involved with Murphy's work at the time didn't really like him, his name ultimately won out as the winner for whom the law was named after - a fact which he may not have known:

Up until that moment, he’d [Nichols] always assumed Ed Murphy knew that he was the Murphy. Now he became convinced that Ed hadn’t a clue about it, and was completely ignorant of his legacy. “He didn’t even know about Murphy’s Law until Bloch published his book,” Nichols says firmly. “And until I told him he was mentioned in it, he didn’t even get a copy.”

Turns out, Murphy was not too happy with the depiction of the reason that the law arose with his name associated with it (a long story regarding a test run on a series of tracks used to test rockets).

The most interesting part of the story is why one name won out over another, and why, historically, one series of ideas or thoughts wins out over others over time. Why did Murphy's name win? And for that, I have no answer, other than that perhaps it was because there was a story associated with it that people could tell on, rather than Reilly's and Strauss' laws, where they just associated it with the already well-known adage?

AND! in other news:

make yourself a rug!

way to go NYPD. fantastic showing regarding sensitivity towards this trans woman. belitting her, mocking her, asking about her genitals - very poor taste. but really - chaining her to a fence for 28 hours?

DAY EIGHTY FIVE

Sadness is a blessing - what a wonderful song and video.

I am listening to every single remix of Gotye's songs I can find and fawning over him, my future husband and baby daddy. Every single one on soundcloud DONE!

Murphy's law is really interesting.

so tired. so very tired. tonight: first time i'll go to dubb, which is supposed to be one of the best indian food places in istanbul. given that there are only like, 5, it's not that hard, but whatever!

This is one of the most amazing covers to the Jurassic Park theme I've ever heard, and not just because it's the only one. Clocking in at like 15 seconds, listen up!

DAY EIGHTY ONE TWO THREE AND FOUR

haven't been able to post because of quiz - don't want you to know what it's about.

rapist freed because victim didn't scream.

gist of the article: rapist freed from jail after a forensic report shows that the partially retarded (30+% mental impairment) woman who he had been coercing to have sex with threats of killing her for over two years didn't yell out, so it wasn't rape. those who can read turkish can clarify if i got that wrong.

Moving from Korea to America, he thought his Americanized name choice was a really good idea. Sadly, John Doe was wrong.