Breakfast Links: Flight Safety, Swear Words & Trivia
This ones not very reassuring - NASA, apparently, has conducted an air safety survey amongst commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly 4 years. That’s air safety like near collisions and last minute changes, not any sort of anti-terrorism type of safety. It’s completed now and they are not releasing the findings. Why? Good question, according to them:
Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey
Sigh.
Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show
Sigh.
How can they not release this data? Full disclosure makes people fix problems. This is the sort of thing that induces much foul language from this normally sweet tongued blogger. Fortunately, thanks to the BBC, I can employ just the right invective for the occasion as they have a ranked list of swear words! Fortunately, I’m not British so you don’t have to worry about any Wankers or Bollocks or even Arsehole’s escaping me. I particularly like the historical perspective - I wish they did this every year so you could watch the movements of different words. Oh, I forgot - as far as cursing goes, here’s a nice piece by Steven Pinker on why we do it.
Lastly, check out this list of all kinds of stuff you didn’t know. It’s filled with a variety of trivia that will enlighten and entertain your feeble mind. For instance, you may have a little chuckle when you discover that the dot over an “i” is called a “tittle” or that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button. I, however, don’t believe that it is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open and will be working on my sneezing skills.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Nader would be pissed!