If The Truth Fits

The world is a scary place, this much we know, but on Halloween it actually becomes a lot less scary to me. It’s like someone is having a fancy dress party, and absolutely everyone is invited, people give each other chocolate, candies, and all kinds of other treats just because you turn up at their door. Try doing that on any day other than October 31st and I guarantee that your candy to slammed door ratio with change very drastically. Also, don’t you think that its kind of funny that a night that is meant to be scary and filled with dark rituals has largely been transformed into a clean and sanitized day in which kids have fun, are told that its okay to take candy from strangers “just for today”, and that if you don’t get given any candy its totally cool to chuck eggs at their door and throw toilet paper over the carefully manicured tree in the middle of the lawn. Oh, and for the adults, parties where all the drinks are green and all the women turn up in costumes that come with the prefix of ’slutty’.

Let’s take a look at the history of Halloween, according to that actually quite reliable resource, Wikipedia:

Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain. The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year.” Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient Celtic pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.

Like I said, that is a pretty dark story, oh, and the fun pumpkins that you carve with your kids? Also kinda dark:

Originating in Europe, these lanterns were first carved from a turnip or rutabaga. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, containing the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the “head” of the vegetable to frighten off any superstitions.

As a man of science, I know that superstitions are actually have a very high likelihood of being ’supersilly’, but are we really meant to believe that the Celts thought carving a face in a turnip (a turnip!) and putting a candle in it had the awesome power of being able to frighten off any (any!) superstition?

Now that I think about it, the turnip with a candle in it actually did work, in much the same way that Lisa Simpson’s Tiger-repelling rock does, you carved a face into a turnip, stuck a candle in it, and none of the dead returned to the land of the living to kill you and ruin your crops for the coming year, so its hardly surprising that they continued to employ the TCDS (Turnip + Candle Defence Mechanism) for so long.

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In what is becoming a bit of a recurring theme on this blog, I’d like to talk about some more people that do things simply because they can. Again, much like space travel, people see these people and wonder why they ‘waste’ money on things that they simply don’t need to do, and can’t imagine them getting much pleasure out of. I am of course talking about the eccentric multi-millionaires and billionaires of the world who have the means to do all the things that I could only dream of doing.

A couple of days ago a hiker walking through the Inyo National Forest in California found personal items, cash and identification of businessman and adventurer Steve Fossett, with the wreckage of his plane being found a few days after that. Fossett had gone missing on September 3rd last year and was legally declared dead on February 15th this year after a long and fruitless search for the elusive aviator. I know I’m kind of clinging onto the myth here, but they haven’t yet found a body, and part of me thinks that a guy like Steve could still be out there somehow surviving in the wilds of the Sierra Nevada, but apparently the wreckage of the plane was in such a state that it isn’t believed anyone could have survived the crash.

I remember when I was younger and Steve Fossett and Richard Branson (Britain’s best crazy billionaire) were both attempting to be the first men to travel non-stop around the world in a hot-air balloon, and at the time I thought it was pretty cool, but now that I think about it, how awesome is that? Two men who quite possibly have more money than sense, building hot-air balloons so that they could circumnavigate the globe in a metal box not much bigger than the bathroom in an Amsterdam hotel (that is to say, pretty small, as anyone who has been to Amsterdam will surely attest), simply because no one had ever done it before. There were numerous failed attempts by both men, which enhances the story for me, no one would have begrudged them for giving up, but their determination pushed them to their very limits, and eventually on July 3rd 2002 Fossett landed in Queensland, Australia after spending 14 days flying around the world on his own. He had hoped that his record would inspire people to reach their own goals and strive to achieve their own dreams just as he had done. I think its fair to say that Fossett managed to inspire a lot of people, and not just for his balloon record, he also held records as a sailor, an airship pilot, numerous fixed-wing plane records, cross country skiing records, as well as being an extremely well accomplished mountain climber, and even swam across the English Channel back in 1985. Seriously, how cool was Steve Fossett?

On a slightly related note, I was watching Sky News today and they had an interview with the aforementioned Richard Branson since he was such a good friend of Steve Fossett, and they described it as “a live interview from his home in the Caribbean.” Fair enough, it is his home in the Caribbean, but its actually an island in the British Virgin Islands that he owns. So, he owns his own island, his own airline, he’s developing a programme to send people into space, and he has long hair and a beard… am I the only person that thinks Richard Branson might actually be a Bond villain?

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I’m probably going to sound like a bit of a broken record with this story since I already covered astounding incompetence by people in charge of transporting large numbers of people this week when I discussed the train driver that was sending texts when his train was involved in a head on collision with a freight train last week, but sometimes a story comes along that makes a little bit of repetition worth it.

I seem to spend a lot of my time on this blog pointing out how shocked I am by certain news stories, but I think that this one really takes the biscuit. Actually, I think it takes a whole box of biscuits, and fires them out of a cannon towards the sun, taking out a biscuit factory on the way.

Two pilots for Hawaii’s Go airlines who slept through their flight’s landing procedure were suspended for the careless and reckless operation of an aircraft, the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday.

Wowsers. Yeah, that is a whole magnitude of stupid over texting whilst driving a train. When you usually hear this kind of story you presume that shadowy corporate figures have been forcing their employees to work such long and dangerous hours that they were practically zombies at the controls, but it would appear that there was nothing of the sort in this case, as the two pilots had actually had a 15 hour break before setting off on the 45 minute flight between Honolulu and Hilo (which looks lovely, by the way) on February 13th this year. Captain Scott Oltman and First Officer Dillon Shepley both fell asleep during the flight and overshot the airport at Hilo by 15 miles before waking up and turning the plane around to land safely, according to air traffic control the plane was not reachable for around 20 minutes.

If you’re looking for a “how the hell could that happen?” well, Oltman was later diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea, which I guess makes me feel a bit more sorry for him, but I still can’t out work out why the other guy would have fallen asleep, maybe it was one of those cases when you start to feel tried because everyone else around you is tired… or perhaps the two pilots were indulging in a few extra curricular activities the night before the flight, just because go! gave them 15 hours off doesn’t mean they were tucked up in bed with a mug of cocoa at 9pm.

The two men were fired from go! in April (damn right!) and both were given suspensions by the Federal Aviation authority which lasted until earlier this month. A spokesman for the FAA, Ian Gregor, said that he was unsure as to whether the two men were flying with a different carrier. Ummm, wouldn’t you think that’s the kind of thing that they should be keeping tabs on? I’d like to think that the man (or woman, sorry sisters!) at the front of the plane was checked up on every so often, and that the people who were the ‘aviation authority’ had some authority over aviation.

So, next time you’re on a flight, it might be a good idea to actually listen out when the Captain tells you his name, and maybe have some coffee sent up front.

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When I first heard about the Metrolink train crash in California I was saddened because of the loss of life (25 deaths, 130 injured), we had a train crash not too far from where I live a few years ago and I happened to drive past the site and it looked fairly scary, so I can’t possibly imagine what it would be like to actually experience that kind of event. When reports came in that the conductor of the train might have been writing text messages (later confirmed by investigators) when the head-on collision between the Metrolink commuter train and the Union Pacific freight train occurred, I was shocked, I genuinely couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen. I never try and write a text whilst driving my car (I don’t really even like changing the song on my iPod), and that’s when I’m on my own, if I were in charge of a train I’d imagine that I’d be chugging Red Bull to the point where I’d be so focused on driving the train that I would stop blinking.

I don’t want to condemn the driver, I don’t know who they were, whether its normal practice for people to be using their cell phones whilst on the job, or just how much attention that these drivers need to pay to the tracks. I was under the impression that trains basically drove themselves nowadays and that the drivers were basically babysitters, but I guess that I was unfortunately very wrong in that belief, or perhaps I was being overly optimistic when it comes to the modernity of the American train network.

Something else that shocked me about this tragedy was that the driver wasn’t actually breaking a rule by using his cell phone whilst the train was traveling down the tracks at around 42mph (how they worked that out I have no idea). I would have thought that as soon as cell phones became prevalent in society that it would have been company policy for people working on trains to exercise extreme caution when using a cell phone whilst on duty, and not to wherever possible, because even if you’re just making a quick call or sending a short text you aren’t going to be able to focus properly on what you’re meant to be doing, and when it comes to something like driving a train, that’s a recipe for disaster. California regulators have swiftly moved to put a temporary ban in place for cell phone use by train operators who are on duty, something which in hindsight should have been done a long time ago, and a move that I’m sure will cold comfort to the friends and family of the people who died.

Of course, even with high-profile catastrophes like this, train travel is still a safe way to get around, for the most part, the most harrowing thing that most people usually have to go through is someone listening to their iPod way too loud in the seat next to them, which I hope is the only problem I encounter when I ride the rails around America in Spring next year.

All this week on the news they’ve been talking about the Large Hadron Collider that just went operational today at CERN on the French/Swiss border, and to see science being discussed on the main news is great, I’m all for it, but my problem is what they’re focusing on. As you may well have heard, there is a very, very, very slight possibility that the experiments conducted using the Large Hadron Collider would create a black hole which would then swallow up the earth, taking us all with it (presumably leaving a few very confused astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station).

When I say slight, I’m actually exaggerating. Massively. The chance of the Large Hadron Collider (let’s just call it the LHC from now on) creating a black hole that will swallow up the Earth like a piece of popcorn chicken is tiny. How tiny? The chance of it occurring is 1 in 10000000000000000000. That’s 10^-19 if you want a figure that makes it look less ridiculous and more science-y. To put that into perspective, the chance of you suddenly evaporating (yes, evaporating) whilst shaving is 1 in 100000000000 (or 10^-11, you would prefer), and that’s not even using one of those fancy electric razors!

Despite it being incredibly unlikely, the media seems to be obsessed with this idea that the world is going to end when they start pinging protons around the 27km length of the collider. This morning as I was eating my breakfast bagel (with pastrami and mustard, breakfast of champions!) I put on Sky News as I usually do so that I could see what was happening in the world, and they were reporting on the initial testing of the LHC. The actual scientific discussion took about one minute, whilst they explained what it is, and what we’re hoping to find out by using it. Then they went on to spend a couple of minutes talking to an actual scientist, insulting both his and our intelligence by continually pushing the doomsday angle to the story. Maybe, he should have followed the lead of one scientist, who, so sick of hearing about black holes (when the only real black holes existed in the arguments of ill-informed critics) said that “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t—.” I’ll let you fill in the blanks for yourself.

I know that its a pretty complex story to get your head around, the numbers are all so massive, the particles hitting each other are so small, and there’s a pretty large disconnect between the average man on the street and someone that would get excited about finding the Higgs Boson, but how about we get away from the scare-mongering and start trying to educate people properly about what the LHC could mean to the world, or at the very least show us some more pretty pictures.

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Can you believe that my last post was about how I’m a bit of a political pushover, consciously knowing that I put too much value on aesthetics and showmanship rather than integrity, personality, voting record and policies, and then the Republicans went and picked Sarah Palin, a woman who is definitely not ugly, as their pick for Vice Presidential nominee?

It’s almost as if the Republicans were huddled in a dark room last week and started to get a bit desperate choosing their VP, a bored intern started surfing some blogs and someone shouted across the room from behind a glowing LCD screen “hey, there’s a British guy that doesn’t care about whether the candidate is actually any good or not, he’s only interested if the person looks and sounds good.” With that, it was decided, Sarah Palin, despite not being the most experienced candidate in the world, was picked as a Vice Presidential candidate. Yes, in just a week of blogging for Pop Vulture, I have managed to change the American political landscape forever, obviously there’s no way to prove that, but similarly, there’s no way to not prove it, so let’s just assume that I’m the cause of this nomination. Imagine what I’m going to achieve next week (Madonna tour cancelled due to poor tickets sales perhaps? *Crosses fingers*)!

I don’t actually know that much about Palin, everything that I see on the net and hear on TV seems to be gossipy and often irrelevant, her 17 year old daughter is pregnant, she came second in a beauty contest, she doesn’t know what a Vice President does (although I’d presume that she probably does now), she might be a computer hacker(!), she enjoys eating caribou burgers, and she goes for midnight runs. I got all of those news stories just by searching for ‘Sarah Palin’ on Google News, and they were severely outnumbering the amount of ’serious’ stories that would teach you about the woman politically rather than just giving us some trivia. It’s frustrating, but there are websites out there that will help you find out what you need to find out about her (and lots of other politicians) to help you make the decision for yourself. Mashable, a blog that usually deals with Social Networking and media, put together a post about 7 resources you can use to help you learn about Sarah Palin that are more apolitical than more sources. And of course, you should also check out Sarah Palin ‘Facts’, which provides you with vital information like this, “Sarah Palin once bit the head off a live Osprey snatched from the air as it tried to fly off with a fish she caught.”

I almost feel sorry for her in a way, being a woman in politics means that there are so many more expectations of her. She needs to appear to be a good wife and family woman, yet strong and independent, able to make tough decisions on her own. Since she’s now regarded as being a ‘hot politician’, or, if your mind is stuck in the gutter, a ‘VPILF’ (I’m not going to tell you, Google it if you’re confused), she has to make sure that she never has a hair out of place, but that she doesn’t spend too much time on her looks, otherwise she’ll just be giving more ammo to the pundits that believe she’s all show and no go.

I know that Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin are all going to be walking on a tightrope for the next couple of months, trying to balance out every aspect of their lives so that they can appeal to as many people as possible, but I think that’s Palin’s rope is going to be an awful lot thinner than everyone elses.

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