Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The article is a good reminder why politics matter and why we can't keep on seeing climate change as some far-off issue that future generations will just bear the brunt of.
> and there was talk of dismantling NCAR altogether. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, had called the research center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
Also the fact that the turbulence models for design stressors, for planes manufactured today, were from those original measurements in the 60's. Science needs to stay at the forefront here with the earth changing, I only hope that the political situation improves to allow that to remain a priority.
I love flying for the engineering aspect, when I manage to turn off my scared animal-brain. It's absolutely mind blowing the technology and iterative designs these machines have gone through.
Winds aloft were 30-40kts and there is a pass in the mountains east of Asheville NC at Chimney Rock we would fly over regularly. On that day I caught what I assume was mountain rotor and it was like being on a mechanical bull.
Our technology regularly does ridiculously insane things, and achieves jaw-dropping reliability. So much so, that everyone just expects it to work. And we no longer recognize how amazing it truly is.
even with todays relatively good safety record i refuse to fly unless absolutely necessary, i don’t know how you could be willing to fly back then
Goes to show how good things can look when done right!
But maybe they're serving different content depending on the client.
I had no idea videos on mobile sites could look that sharp and well integrated… I guess I’m used to seeing them done so badly this one stuck out, so I thought it had to be WebGL
(Not affiliated, just saw their demo once.)
Looks like the singularity is coming just in time.
Probably not if the turbines aren't spinning, no.
But yeah once again it seemed to go over the heads of the oblivious around here...
> Turbulence is rarely that simple. It’s too scattered, too mercurial, too easily triggered by weather patterns that trigger other patterns in an endless cascade. “It’s not just one thing that’s going on,” Bob Sharman, an atmospheric scientist at NCAR, told me. “It’s not just atmospheric convection. It’s not just wind flowing over mountains. It’s everything going on all the time and interacting.”
> “It’s not a piece of farm equipment,” Larson said. “It’s a life-support system. At thirty-five thousand feet, you can’t pull over.”
The funny thing is that the passages that feel the most "AI-generated" come in quotes, when the author is quoting others. It could be that the author was communicating with those experts via email, and they used AI to generate their responses.
Otherwise, I think that AI language patters are diffusing into common use. Being so aware of them is a curse...
1. These are all from a single 850-word op-ed I saw the other day: "Presidents do not usually lose power because of a single speech. They lose power when a speech reveals something structural." "But the most important part of the speech was not the applause lines. It was the compression." "Markets can rise. But voters do not live inside charts. They live inside grocery stores and mortgage payments." "The issue is not whether a statistic was stretched. The issue is that the presidency becomes reactive instead of agenda-setting." "That friction is not theoretical — it is baked into the constitutional design." "Trump’s address was not a pivot to persuasion — it was a doubling down on confrontation as strategy." "They are not just another campaign cycle. They are leverage."
"For a moment, the plane quivered around them like a greyhound straining on a leash." - I don't think a LLM would write this.
But hell, maybe I'm just being naive. I think we're past the point of ambiguity, we just can't know anymore. Which feels poignant to me.
Fourth paragraph, sixth sentence: "Still, at best, only two-thirds of the occupants were buckled up after seventy seconds."
Fourth paragraph, final sentence: "Fully a third of the occupants were still out of their seats after seventy seconds."
In particular anyone who does 'mileage runs' and emits huge amounts of CO2 just so they have the 'privilege' to sit in a slightly nicer chair in a dull airport lounge.
I doubt anyone is doing this? At best they're grinding out flights so they can get free first/business class seats later.
Popular mileage runs were London to Honolulu with lots of sectors on the way iirc !!