sundries: "baby, your fandom has problems" edition

[rm]

Subject line: What Patty said when we watched the video of Gareth David-Lloyd riding a mechanical sheep. Video from dr_is_in. There are also stills of the thing over on the Casimir Effect website.

The story of the pilots who overshot Minneapolis gets weirder. They say they weren't arguing and weren't sleeping, but had gotten involved in a covo and hadn't heard the radio. So what they hell were they doing? Arguing about healthcare reform? fucking? I am confused.

Tonight we are going to see Where the Wild Things Are.

Heard back from the Center for Fiction Writing. I'll be going in next week to settle on space and stuff.

Our wireless router, which has never worked wirelessly, suddenly is. Internet in bed!

Because we both come from fandom, Patty and I call each other OTBaby -- like OTP (One True Pairing) but with the fact that we call each other "baby" among other things. So we just ordered matching OTBaby necklaces from Wyrding Studios.

CNN has more details on the girl who doesn't know who she is including another picture and more evidence of possible fanishness. Please contact the authorities if you have information. I know there are at least two theories going around fandom about who she is -- someone needs to make the call.

More as it happens.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

Good point. But so stupid. Not just on the part of the pilots, but just in terms of what modern aviation has gotten us. Have you read that AMAZING piece New York Magazine did after the Sully thing about how modern aviation technology and training makes most flights safer, but means there's very few folks left in the cockpit who can really pull out a save when something catastrophic happens? It's interesting stuff.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I did see that New York piece. Also his testimony to Congress.

It's all symptomatic of the problems of (i) complexity (bad enough, given limitations on human brains), combined with (ii) the political process and the people running it. It's devilish hard in the first instance to predict the collateral effects of things like improvements in aviation technology, such as the astonishing abilities of our autopilot systems. And the problem is compounded by a political process that privileges the viewpoints of those who don't know how a set of technologies and systems works -- that is, the broad voting public -- and those who profit by keeping a system in place and making it run as cheaply as possible -- that is, the airline businesses. Put them together and you have a disaster that's been building since the twin hammers of deregulation (probably a Good Thing, but badly implemented) and the Reagan destruction of the flight controllers' union set us all on this path.

(I am so sick of the Cult of St. Ronnie. If I were Ayn Rand, I would write a long preachy novel in which a whole planeload of lovingly-described characters who'd all gone along with or benefited from deregulation crashed and burned as a result of some minor official on the plane insisting that the airline put it into service so he could get to an important meeting in California. In fact, if I didn't have chronic writer's block I'd be tempted to do it even without being Ayn Rand, as a kind of public service. Grrr. Arg.)