type-A people—those who tend to be impatient and ambitious—are often punctual. Type Bs, who tend to be more relaxed and less neurotic, generally arrive later
Tag: airport
Circular runway
Aviation expert Henk Hesselink thinks that airports should have circular runways instead of straight ones. Among other things, large circular runways could reduce the need for crosswind landings, use airport land more efficiently, and increase the number of planes simultaneously landing and taking off.
Destroy the TSA
the security theater we pay for at the TSA has a 5% success rate, to the surprise of no one. disbanding TSA is the next logical step.
undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95% of trials
Transportation has regressed
In 1962, riders could jump from Newark to Wall Street by helicopter for just $6 ($46.61 in today’s $) as opposed to an $8 cab ride ($61.88 today)
Uncanny Dolls
When Ms. Martinez travels, she will sometimes bring one of her own 5 reborn dolls to photograph people’s reactions. She prefers to carry them in open bags because she feels uneasy putting them into closed containers, and her suitcases are always searched by airport security if a doll shows up in a scan. This leads to unusual encounters — like when other people in line get upset thinking that a real baby is about to be harmed by X-rays as they pass through security
apparently there is a hobby of modding dolls to make them as lifelike as possible. hilarity ensues when these dolls go through an x-ray at the airport.
Frantic police smashed a window to rescue a seemingly unconscious baby from a locked vehicle in Queensland last week only to find it was an extremely lifelike doll.
In this clip, Good Morning America travels to the homes of the women who buy Reborns, which the women treat like real infants. One woman throws her dolls birthday parties and invites actual children to attend the events. Another woman carries her dolls around with her and has to inform cooing strangers that her life-like dolls are not actually living babies. Awkwardness all around!
another tool for the overpopulation problem. whatever helps.
When airports weren’t terrible
airports used to be gorgeous and not full of cheap come-ons for “shopping” and constant moral panic about “security”.
Flight Wait
plots airport conditions just like the traffic layer on google maps
The reinvention of air travel
It didn’t take very long to figure out that if you replace one $25M plane with 25 $1M planes, it fixes a lot of problems. And if you couple that with doing it by the seat instead of by the plane, that lets you interleave packets, or payloads, and increases the efficiency even more. So it became very clear that we needed to build a large, self-optimizing network that would take a lot of other factors into consideration, like the physics of the airplane, the temperature, the loads. The beauty of aviation is that it’s like physics meets business, right? How much you can carry depends on temperatures, altitudes, runway lengths — and safety is all expressed in terms of parameters that the optimizer has to take into account as it starts shuffling around customers. It’s not a straight optimization, it has to be done in real time, and it has an incredible number of constraints.
fighting the NP-complete fight to give passengers on-demand routing. no more sucky hubs, yay for small airports.
Gatwick capsule hotel
A 4 hour stay in a premium cabin (10 square meters) costs $80. Bedside charging points, personal lighting, dimming control and bed deployment switch allows you to work or relax without moving from the comfort of your bed
a bit expensive, but yay for airports that are not hellholes. we need these around the world, imo
TSA Secondary Market
Want your Bic lighter mailed back to you? That’ll be $45, please. Oh, and just in case the entire security process wasn’t humiliating enough, a video camera embedded in the kiosk records the entire transaction for your “safety.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 