Plane Thoughts: flying craziness, Bertrand Russell
Saturday, 27 May 2006 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI made it.
8:30pm EDT. Dusk, over eastern Alabama. Passed under a plane's slipstream, totally beautiful. Something I'd not seen outside movies or video games. When we took off in Atlanta, there were a set of eleven planes queued up behind us on the runway, which we zoomed past. They seemed to be arrayed in largest-to-smallest order. I wish I could've gotten photos without breaking rules.
Speaking of breaking rules, somebody's phone just rang. On the plane. In the air. No idea WTF.
This has been one crazy set of flights. BUF -> Cleveland -> Atlanta -> Sacramento. I have a fondness for Cleveland's airport, solely for the huge paper-airplane sculpture in the underground passage between the terminals. However, the Cleveland -> Atlanta flight took off an hour late, with most of the slippage spent on the tarmac. I was sitting one row back from two women who'd never flown before, and were frankly just on the edge of hysteria. I still thought I was lucky, because the screaming infant was at the very far end of the plane. ...Then its mom moved back to the empty pair of seats one row behind me. Grr.
And so we arrived in Atlanta nearly an hour late, where I had 15 minutes to make my connection. From Continental to Delta, in different terminals. Cue mad n-yard dash. I had a short rest in the middle, on the shuttle-train. Big airport, Atlanta. Grr.
8:45pm CDT. I think over Kansas. The TVs aren't showing our route any more, unfortunately. The only thing that would make my laptop more awesome would be built-in GIS. The awesome bit I'm happiest about right now: it's telling me I have four and a half hours of battery left. I'm amused how its light-sensor (under the speaker grille) affects the battery estimate. I have the scren at lowest brightness, but the screen gets even dimmer when I cover over the light-sensor. So the battery lasts 10% longer.
I was just reading today's Globe and Mail. There was a rah-rah-Canada article about... Buckminster Fuller. Connection? Globalization. The claim was that Canada is one of the most global countries, backed up with recent business data. Along with wacky stuff like weighing houses and the proper regular polyhedral shape for an accurate global map, Fuller wrote about globalism in the early 60s in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Only he called it 'desovereignization' and he went further than globalism, which merely wants to reduce barriers. He tossed those barriers out the window entirely. He was keen on abolishing nation-states and allowing human progress via discovery and invention. Get government out of the way and eventually we'd have five billion billionares.
So... I didn't like this argument when i read his book in highschool, and I still don't. But this article does a crap job of assessing the problems of techie utopianism. Philosophically, I think democratic nation-states are the way to go; democracy is the best defence against fascism. Technology can be a key element of progress, certainly, but eliminating all barriers to tech progress sounds like a recipe for the abuse of power and a shift away from a foundation on democracy.
I've never been particularly enamored of libertarianism, and 'desovereignization' certainly sounds like more of the same.
I think I may re-read Operating Manual, it's been... well, 15 years at least, and I'm certainly a different person now than I was then. It was an influential book on me at the time. As much as I don't think technology's the only answer, I do think if humanity will survive the next century without a global crash, science, and globalism, will take major parts.
9:25pm PDT. Maybe over Oregon? My flight karma has been temporarily restored. The 4-hour leg to Sacramento has one of the few empty seats next to me. No crying babies, no annoying seat-mate.
I'm not sure whether this is something bad or not: in the bathroom, there were packets of handy-wipes. I took a few, and I wiped my hands with one when i got back to my seat. Then I read the label. It says: "Celeste Sani-Com 3025" on the front and on the back: "Cleans and freshens communications and oxygen equipment". Er. "Contains: Benzalkonium Chloride, Octoxynol 9, Fragrence, SD Alcohol 40, water."
So I'm keeping my hands away from my eyes and mouth. WTF?
8:30pm EDT. Dusk, over eastern Alabama. Passed under a plane's slipstream, totally beautiful. Something I'd not seen outside movies or video games. When we took off in Atlanta, there were a set of eleven planes queued up behind us on the runway, which we zoomed past. They seemed to be arrayed in largest-to-smallest order. I wish I could've gotten photos without breaking rules.
Speaking of breaking rules, somebody's phone just rang. On the plane. In the air. No idea WTF.
This has been one crazy set of flights. BUF -> Cleveland -> Atlanta -> Sacramento. I have a fondness for Cleveland's airport, solely for the huge paper-airplane sculpture in the underground passage between the terminals. However, the Cleveland -> Atlanta flight took off an hour late, with most of the slippage spent on the tarmac. I was sitting one row back from two women who'd never flown before, and were frankly just on the edge of hysteria. I still thought I was lucky, because the screaming infant was at the very far end of the plane. ...Then its mom moved back to the empty pair of seats one row behind me. Grr.
And so we arrived in Atlanta nearly an hour late, where I had 15 minutes to make my connection. From Continental to Delta, in different terminals. Cue mad n-yard dash. I had a short rest in the middle, on the shuttle-train. Big airport, Atlanta. Grr.
8:45pm CDT. I think over Kansas. The TVs aren't showing our route any more, unfortunately. The only thing that would make my laptop more awesome would be built-in GIS. The awesome bit I'm happiest about right now: it's telling me I have four and a half hours of battery left. I'm amused how its light-sensor (under the speaker grille) affects the battery estimate. I have the scren at lowest brightness, but the screen gets even dimmer when I cover over the light-sensor. So the battery lasts 10% longer.
I was just reading today's Globe and Mail. There was a rah-rah-Canada article about... Buckminster Fuller. Connection? Globalization. The claim was that Canada is one of the most global countries, backed up with recent business data. Along with wacky stuff like weighing houses and the proper regular polyhedral shape for an accurate global map, Fuller wrote about globalism in the early 60s in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Only he called it 'desovereignization' and he went further than globalism, which merely wants to reduce barriers. He tossed those barriers out the window entirely. He was keen on abolishing nation-states and allowing human progress via discovery and invention. Get government out of the way and eventually we'd have five billion billionares.
So... I didn't like this argument when i read his book in highschool, and I still don't. But this article does a crap job of assessing the problems of techie utopianism. Philosophically, I think democratic nation-states are the way to go; democracy is the best defence against fascism. Technology can be a key element of progress, certainly, but eliminating all barriers to tech progress sounds like a recipe for the abuse of power and a shift away from a foundation on democracy.
I've never been particularly enamored of libertarianism, and 'desovereignization' certainly sounds like more of the same.
I think I may re-read Operating Manual, it's been... well, 15 years at least, and I'm certainly a different person now than I was then. It was an influential book on me at the time. As much as I don't think technology's the only answer, I do think if humanity will survive the next century without a global crash, science, and globalism, will take major parts.
9:25pm PDT. Maybe over Oregon? My flight karma has been temporarily restored. The 4-hour leg to Sacramento has one of the few empty seats next to me. No crying babies, no annoying seat-mate.
I'm not sure whether this is something bad or not: in the bathroom, there were packets of handy-wipes. I took a few, and I wiped my hands with one when i got back to my seat. Then I read the label. It says: "Celeste Sani-Com 3025" on the front and on the back: "Cleans and freshens communications and oxygen equipment". Er. "Contains: Benzalkonium Chloride, Octoxynol 9, Fragrence, SD Alcohol 40, water."
So I'm keeping my hands away from my eyes and mouth. WTF?
