Isegoria

When Pilots Pass the BRBON, They Must Be in Kentucky:

Pilots primarily navigate by using special radios that tune in to signals emitted by transmitters, or beacons, on the ground. They then fly from one beacon to the next. To pinpoint their position, they determine the compass reading, or ‘radial,’ from two different beacons. Fixes are points in the sky at the intersection of two radials from two beacons. They act as landmarks — much like the intersection of two city streets — only airborne. HEHAW, for example, is the point when the Nashville navigation beacon is at a radial of 156 degrees on the compass and the Bowling Green beacon is at 247 degrees. There’s only one spot where those two radials intersect.

In the mid-1990s, the military released satellite-based navigation for commercial use, enabling the FAA to create additional fixes anywhere in the sky. Now, the FAA can mark a spot with simple longitude and latitude coordinates, and then give it a name. Airplanes can identify it with Global Positioning Satellite computers, which receive signals directly from space.

Satellite navigation lets the FAA create better routes, such as more-precise approaches at small airports or safer passages through mountainous areas. As a result, scores of new fixes have been dreamed up in the past 10 years.

The ‘Tweety Bird’ approach in Portsmouth, N.H. — one of the first satellite-based airport approaches in the U.S. — is credited with unleashing the burst of creativity at the FAA.

The Tweety Bird approach?

The route takes you from ITAWT to ITAWA to PUDYE to TTATT. If a pilot can’t land, he is told to hold by way of IDEED. (“I thought I saw a pussy cat….I did!”)

Nashville has PICKN, GRNIN and HEHAW. Vegas has HOLDM. Newark has HOWYA and DOOIN. Louisiana has RYTHM, Kentucky has BRBON and Massachusetts has BOSOX. Kansas City, Mo., has SPICY, BARBQ and RIBBS.

The FAA switched from meaningless five-letter combinations to pronounceable, mnemonic codes in 1976.

For the Danish, A Job Loss Can Be Learning Experience:

The government allows liberal hiring and firing as in the U.S. And it has imposed limits on the duration of its high unemployment benefits. But it also invests more than any other country, as a percentage of its gross domestic product, in retraining the jobless — a combination it calls ‘flexicurity.’ Its unusual mix of the free market and big government has helped Denmark cut its unemployment rate in half, from about 10% in the early 1990s to U.S.-style levels of under 5% now. The economy has been relatively robust, growing 3.4% last year. Meanwhile, France and Germany are at or above the Danish jobless rate of a decade ago.

Many Marines have been saved by ‘sand’ poured into the wounds:

Every US marine and navy soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan carries QuikClot. Its maker, Z-Medica of Wallingford, Connecticut, claims it has saved 150 lives so far. The porous mineral powder is poured into the wound, where pores quickly absorb water, which concentrates the blood’s clotting factors and so speeds up clotting. In lab tests, blood treated with QuikClot clots in less than 2 minutes, compared with the 10 minutes or so for untreated blood. In studies on pigs with severed arteries, the survival rate was 100 per cent; with a standard gauze dressing, more than half the animals died.

The safety problem in the way of QuikClot’s wider use arises because of the large amount of heat the material releases when it absorbs water, sometimes enough to cause second-degree burns. In the face of a life-threatening injury, this may be a price worth paying. ‘The general feeling around the department is that if I get shot, I don’t care if it burns,’ Johnson says. Despite this, the navy and marines advise soldiers to apply QuikClot only after all other methods have failed, and it is not standard issue for the US army’s troops.

Instead, they carry HemCon, a special bandage of ground-up shrimp shells. The shells contain chitosan, a substance which binds strongly to tissue and seals wounds in much the same way as a tyre patch seals a tyre. HemCon has its own problems: because it comes in a bandage, it is difficult to apply to deep or oddly shaped wounds. The bandage is also too stiff to be used to treat gunshot wounds effectively, as it cannot be packed into a hole to create enough pressure to control the bleeding. As a result, many army units buy QuikClot regardless of the policy at the top, says Z-Medica CEO Ray Huey.

Getting Physical notes that many of the great physicists were notorious philanderers:

Schrödinger, Curie, Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer…the finest names of pre-Cold War 20th-century physics, some of whom gave us the most concise theories ever posited, form a roster of lamentable philanderers. Albert Einstein was completely “given to flirtation” and had legions of affairs. Caltech professor and bestselling raconteur Richard Feynman was probably the only Nobel Prize winner to befriend porn stars, claim a foolproof manner for bedding women and do his calculations on napkins in strip clubs. And it wasn’t just the guys: Marie Curie was relentlessly hounded by the press for seducing away her late-husband’s former student from his wife and kids.

Allan M. Jalon describes A break-in to end all break-ins — which, I must admit, I’d never heard of:

Thirty-five years ago today, a group of anonymous activists broke into the small, two-man office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pa., and stole more than 1,000 FBI documents that revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress dissent.

The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as the group called itself, forced its way in at night with a crowbar while much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight. When agents arrived for work the next morning, they found the file cabinets virtually emptied.

Within a few weeks, the documents began to show up — mailed anonymously in manila envelopes with no return address — in the newsrooms of major American newspapers. When the Washington Post received copies, Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell asked Executive Editor Ben Bradlee not to publish them because disclosure, he said, could “endanger the lives” of people involved in investigations on behalf of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Post broke the first story on March 24, 1971, after receiving an envelope with 14 FBI documents detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, letter carriers and a switchboard operator at Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.