From a Mexican’s point of view, American counter-service restaurants and ice cream stands do something completely unsanitary: the person handling the cash is also the person handling food.
At least in the Shanghai region, I noticed that the Chinese usually separate food-handling from customer-handling (not really “cash handling” since WeChat is the typical method of payment.)
I’m wondering if Americans will get fewer colds as we transition to a cashless economy. If everyone who goes to a counter pays by inserting a credit card into a machine or waving a phone, shouldn’t there be less chance of an infection being passed from customer-to-clerk-to-customer?
I couldn’t find good research on this subject. China would be an interesting case study since they have gone mostly cashless in a short period of time. Anecdotally, it was rare to see someone (Shanghai in November) suffering from a cold and I never got any hint of food poisoning.
But maybe this isn’t interesting because the effect will be small and swamped by increased transmission of disease due to increasing population density (from (a) population growth, (b) migration and urbanization).
Related:
“Catching Flu From Money” (NYT): “The influenza virus can survive on paper money for 10 or more days”
African Americans work hard to help others while white people use their privilege to sip cocktails and stretch out in the expensive seats. Walking down the jet bridge at Logan Airport to catch the Bermuda flight…
Friends have been asking me about the Sikorsky S-76 helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant today. weather.com says that the crash occurred on January 26 close to 10:00 am and that conditions were cloudy/foggy.
Calabasas, California is between the Burbank and Camarillo airports. Here are their respective weather reports from around that time (10:00 am California time is 18Z). Burbank was right on the edge between visual and instrument flying conditions:
Translation: Burbank airport, 26th of the month, 17:53 UTC (9:53 am Pacific Standard Time), wind calm, 2.5 miles of visibility (“statute miles”), haze, temperature 12C, dewpoint 9C, altimeter 30.06. The nearly adjacent Van Nuys, airport, …
Camarillo, closer to the coast, was slightly better:
KCMA 261755Z 03003KT 4SM HZ OVC017 15/11 A3019
26th at 1755Z (9:55 am), wind from 030 (NE) at 3 knots, 4 miles of visibility, haze, overcast clouds at 1,700′.
Over the hill at the Santa Monica airport that Californians are always getting into fights about?
KSMO 261751Z 12003KT 5SM HZ OVC018 14/09 A3018
(Translation: Santa Monica airport, Jan 26 at 17:51Z (9:51 am local time), wind from the southeast (120) at 3 knots, 5 miles of visibility in haze, clouds 1,800′ above the airport, temperature 14C, dewpoint 9C, altimeter setting 30.18.)
Assuming that it was bad weather that led to this accident, the engineering question is “Why couldn’t the $10 million helicopter fly itself away from obstacles, the way that a $400 DJI drone can?”
A Sikorsky is equipped with multiple computer-readable attitude sources so that the onboard processors know whether the machine is pitched or banked. It has multiple GPS position sensors so it knows where it is. It has at least one terrain database so it knows where the obstacles are. It has autopilot servos capable of maneuvering the aircraft. Why doesn’t it have the intelligence to say “You’re about to hit something, would you like me to take over and fly away from these obstacles and park on the ramp at the Van Nuys Airtel so that we can all relax?”
The track log shows a rapid climb during the last minute of the flight, perhaps an attempt to climb away from terrain (ignore the “PM” after the time; FlightAware translated to Eastern time):
Note the red circle indicating a temporary flight restriction around the crash area. Also note the “5.2” above the red circle, indicating that one has to be 5,200′ above sea level in order to clear all of the obstacles in this part of the chart. (Google Earth shows that the highest terrain near the media-reported crash site of the 4200 block of Las Virgenes Rd. in Calabasas is around 1,100′)
An alternative presentation of transponder (ADS-B) data from flightradar24:
A YouTube video puts together the flight’s track with Air Traffic Control communications (presumably from liveatc.net). The pilot reported being at 1,400′ or 1,500′ above sea level. The Burbank and Van Nuys airports are 800′ above sea level. So this was 600-700′ above the ground (low for an airplane, but within the realm of normal for a helicopter) and thus, if the cloud layer had a flat bottom and the weather reports over 1,100’+ ceilings were accurate, the helicopter should not have been in a cloud.
The pilot had held an instrument rating since 2007, though it can be difficult to maintain instrument proficiency in helicopters, which are seldom flown IFR:
He also held a flight instructor certificate, which has to be renewed every two years. He was qualified to act as an instructor for instrument flying in helicopters:
One of the biggest arguments for paid leave for new parents has been an economic one: Research has repeatedly shown that women with paid time off after childbirth are more likely to keep working.
But a new study, the largest to be done in the United States, found the opposite. In California, which in 2004 became the first state to offer paid family leave, new mothers who took it that year ended up working less and earning less a decade later. They averaged $24,000 in cumulative lost wages, it found.
For first-time mothers, there was a clear negative effect. After 10 years, the new mothers who took paid leave right after they gave birth were 5 percent to 7 percent less likely to be employed, and those who were employed earned 5 percent to 8 percent less. The researchers said the earnings decreases could be because they worked fewer hours, moved to jobs with lower wages and more flexibility, or became self-employed.
These patterns held no matter the age or prior earnings of the mother, and were true for both unmarried and married mothers, though the decreases in employment were slightly larger for unmarried women
Not too surprising. Pay people to refrain from work and they discover how enjoyable it is to hang out at home!
Usually it takes a while for a welfare program to be co-opted by rich white Americans, but this one was immediately latched onto:
Despite the large sample, the effects were limited to women who took leave immediately after it became available. Only about a fifth of women who gave birth then did so, and that group might have been more inclined to step back from work in the first place.
A variety of research has found that this group was more likely to be older, high-earning, white and college educated than those who took leave after the program had been in effect for a while. Even later, awareness of the program was low, particularly among low earners — exactly the group that research has shown gets the most economic benefits from paid leave.
Good news and bad news for a friend’s 12-year-old…
Bad: he was sentenced to read a book by his teachers in the Brookline (Massachusetts) Public Schools.
Good: One of the choices was on an aviation theme. Maybe this won’t be a painful distraction from video games and learning about technology. Perhaps it will be Fate is the Hunter?
Reality: the assigned book, Fly Girl, turns out to be more about skin color than aviation.
From the Amazon page:
All Ida Mae Jones wants to do is fly. Her daddy was a pilot, and years after his death she feels closest to him when she’s in the air. But as a young black woman in 1940s Louisiana, she knows the sky is off limits to her, until America enters World War II, and the Army forms the WASP-Women Airforce Service Pilots. Ida has a chance to fulfill her dream if she’s willing to use her light skin to pass as a white girl. She wants to fly more than anything, but Ida soon learns that denying one’s self and family is a heavy burden, and ultimately it’s not what you do but who you are that’s most important.
Related:
Bessie Coleman, a non-fictional pilot who identified as a black female
The new female prime minister’s coalition government was formed with all five party leaders being women – the majority being under 40-years of age, … Feminists across countries applauded and congratulated the new prime minister inspired what might promise more change and innovative solutions to come. … Research from the past 30 years suggests that quota provisions and the type of electoral system are good predictors for women’s representation in parliament across countries.
The Eskimo/Inuit world, however, reached this milestone decades ago. During our Northwest Passage cruise, I commented to an anthropology professor on board that all of the people we’d met in Nunavut with steady government paychecks were women: the mayor of every town, the teachers and other school employees, etc. She said that it was like that everywhere in the Inuit region of Canada: “Women are the ones to go to college and they run all of these towns, from the mayor on down.”
Traditional Eskimo society, which includes people from the Bering Sea through to Greenland, involved a strong gender-based division of labor (and there were only two gender IDs available). Men were responsible for hunting and making tools. Women were responsible for having babies, taking care of children, technical sewing, and cooking. This was a sustainable way of life for at least 2,000 years.
Europeans barged in with cheap industrial food and factory-made tools, thus devaluing the traditional role of men. Except for the sewing activity, the Europeans made the traditional female role more valuable. Where children had previously been a burden and a woman would have to find a man to help her feed the extra mouths, the government now frees women from all of the costs of child-rearing. As in the U.S., the Inuit woman who gives birth is entitled to government-supplied housing, government-supplied food, and government-supplied health care. What if she has 10 kids? “Every time a child turns 5,” replied a single mom, “the government has to give me a bigger house. It is illegal for children over 5 to share a room.”
The private houses that we saw advertised for sale were absurdly expensive compared to potential incomes for any non-government job. Public housing is $50-100/month; a comparable quality house across the street might be $300,000 to purchase.
(Inuit have among the highest population growth rates in Canada now:
What’s left for the men to do? Some seem to have construction jobs, but there is a lot of alcohol (in industrial quantities, another gift from the European invaders) and Xbox. A teenager told us that his father had 9 children total and had not, as far as he had observed, done anything by way of gainful employment. Suicide statistics are frightening and nearly every Inuit person we met seemed to have a story about a brother or father who’d killed himself.
(https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/10/inuit-highest-suicide-rate/ : “If Nunavut, the semi-autonomous Canadian territory that is home to roughly 28,000 indigenous Inuit people, were an independent country, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world. The suicide rate in Greenland, whose population is mostly Inuit, is 85 per 100,000; next highest is Lithuania, at 32 per 100,000. Nunavut’s rate is 100 per 100,000, ten times higher than the rest of Canada and seven times higher than the US. When I visited Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, in July, virtually every Inuit I met had lost at least one relative to suicide, and some recounted as many as five or six family suicides, plus those of friends, coworkers, and other acquaintances.”)
Related:
NYT article on how not everyone can make money as an artist (October 19, 2019): “Almost 90 percent of its residents live in public housing that is crowded, run-down, and has a three-year waiting list. Suicide is rife: The stony graveyard is dotted with crosses marking young people. More than half the residents rely on public assistance.” (i.e., since 90 percent are in public housing and only about 50 percent on on “public assistance,” getting a more-or-less free house is not “public assistance”)
In working on the slides for a flight planning section of our FAA Private Pilot Ground School at MIT (videos and slides available free online), it occurred to me that none of the fancy computer tools were as convenient or efficient as talking to a competent human.
What about a system where the input is, e.g.,”I’m thinking about going from Bedford to Washington, D.C. this weekend.” (could be entered via menus; does not have to be natural language)
The Conversational Flight Planner responds after looking at the voluminous official FAA briefing and some of the long-term weather forecast products, such as MOS:
There will be a strong wind from the north so you should consider paying up to fly into Dulles and land Runway 1R rather than deal with the crosswind at KGAI.
Looks like ice is possible on Sunday evening so you’ll need to depart Sunday at noon.
It will be below freezing overnight Saturday night so you need to arrange for a hangar or a preheater plug-in.
Interesting Master’s Thesis project for a computer science or aero/astro major?
