<slightly OT>
I was lucky enough to ride on the Concorde from Heathrow to JFK when I was about 12 (the 747 (seats ~400) we were supposed to take broke down, and they only had a 737 (seats ~300) and a concorde (seats 100) available; my dad, having many tens of thousands of airline miles and super double platinum status on basically every airline, including british airways, was able to get our family of four as part of the hundred that got on the concorde for that flight).
The cruising altitude of the concorde at mach ~2 is between 60 and 65k feet, basically double a normal airplane (wikipedia says 60k, but I distinctly remember the monochrome LCD in the plane that said we were traveling 1350 mph at 64k feet)
I'm curious, now, what my cosmic radiation dosage was at that altitude. Surely, given the nature of atmosphere and radiation, the dosage at twice the normal altitude is considerably more than twice what it is at 30k feet. I wonder what that did to my chances of getting a radiation induced cancer now ;)
As an aside, that happened well before 9/11, so I was actually able (/invited by the flight attendants) to go to the cockpit and talk to the pilots while were cruising along at mach 2. I remember asking the pilot what the actual takeoff speed was (he said about 175 mph, if I recall correctly. Given the glued-to-the-seat acceleration we experienced on take off, sounds about right), and all sorts of other nerdy questions about the technology.
I'm gonna pour one out for the pre 9/11 days when curious kids could visit the cockpit of an airplane and be a nerd with the pilots.
I'll pour another one out for the Concorde.
I still remember it pretty vividly (though memories can of course be deceiving ;), but we made it from heathrow to jfk in 3.5 hours. I believe, also, that with the time change, we landed about 15 minutes before we took off.
</OT>
I've now been living in NYC for ~15 years (moved here about 3 weeks before 9/11), and have watched the NYPD develop it's various anti-terrorism tactics. From the weird aluminum devices I've seen in penn station next to the armed-with-assault-rifles national guard folk on major travel days, to the stickers on the street food carts citing their affiliation with some NYPD anti-terrorism program, I've been concerned for years about the NYPD overstepping reasonable bounds on their behavior.
Where does this end? How do we encourage the police to actually be reasonable? I do have an acquaintance in the NYPD (we went to college together), but conversation on this topic is more or less not possible. The thin blue line is very much a thing, and it appears to be impenetrable for us 'civilians' (the general attitude I got from said acquaintance is "you wouldn't understand").