An Alpine Mystery

GermanWings 9525 went down in the Alps yesterday. The initial reports stated that it was in perfect mechanical condition, took off with no issues, reached cruising altitude and soon after started a shallow descent which ended when it hit the side of the mountain. There was no communication from the plane to the ground, though radar had clearly followed and determined the above path. The flight recorders were found soon, and analysis has started.

The New York Times is reporting that, per one investigator, one of the two pilots was outside the cockpit and unable to get back in. This instantly screams foul play or engineering failure, and the speculation seems pointed at suicide missions or sudden cabin pressure loss, etc.

My initial reaction is that this is a tragic, but innocent case. One of the pilots stepped out of the cabin to use the bathroom. In the meantime, the other had a heart attack or other sudden medical emergency that left him incapacitated. The cockpit door is locked, the other pilot can't get back in, the end.

We'll see how this all plays out, but this is an interesting point of failure. If there's only one crew member in the locked cabin, what DOES happen if they are incapacitated? Is there any override to get into the cockpit? The pilots can't have physical keys because then hijackers could nab one when s/he came out of the cockpit. Maybe there could be a secret code? But that could be tortured out of the abducted pilot. Or maybe a code that only opens the door if the person inside the cockpit doesn't enter a lockdown code? I wonder if a possible solution would create more security risks or points of failure for cockpit access?

So who's really the dumb one?

On a recent trip to bing.com, this article popped up. So I read it. Pretty cut and dry: two twenty-something girls go to Rome, try to carve their initials into the Colosseum, get busted. Not really that exciting.

What is interesting is the torrent of outrage in the comments. And I don't just mean vanilla outrage like "idiots, how could they!". The comments went way further. By my approximate assessments, here are the major categories:

Throw them in jail!
In this category were variants including jail times up to 2 years, fines up to $10k in addition to restitution costs, months of community service cleaning Rome, and banishment from Italy. While mostly excessive, at least these are in the realm of feasibility. However, a non-trivial number of commenters piled it on with options like:

• send them to Singapore for a caning
• send them to a Turkish prison
• permanently revoke their passports

I really wonder how these guys think the world works?

These kids these days!
A giant portion of comments bemoaned the state of America's youth. Additional variants branched into "California", "libtard", "sense of entitlement", etc commentary. However, the article itself calls out that per 6 million visitors over the course of the last year, only 5 similar incidents occurred (1 each were by American, Canadian, Brazilian, Russian and Australian). So not only is this exclusively an American problem, it's pretty easy to argue that it's not a problem at all. If only about 1 in a million people does something that, in the end, amounts to just poor judgment (in the sense that it's not, for example, blatantly hurting another person), we're doing pretty well.

No respect!
This is similar to the kids these days set, really, but I'm focusing it more on the idea that kids are raised badly by their parents.

Permanent black mark!
These include, in no particular order: revoking passports, marking passports as "defacers of other cultures", marking all social media with "I'm a defacer" and so on.


What is particularly fun ("sad") for me to see is how all the self-proclaimed wise/enlightened elders a) advocate for grossly disproportionate or downright non-sensical punishments, b) complain about the sad state of affairs that leads to the absolutely vast majority of visitors doing no wrong, and c) then cast the stone at, ultimately, their peers. And of course, I suspect if any of these people were assigned such a permanent black mark they'd be outraged at the violation of their personal liberties.

This behavior is understandable in that most people believe the world is getting worse.
Lucky for us, that's just not true.

Minor differences: Beijing

It's pretty common to see people take a nap on their desk after work, and since there are no closed-door offices, they're just RIGHT THERE. No big deal, just different.

There's a lot more manual labor, it seems. For example, our meeting rooms are stocked with sharpened pencils. The pencils are sharpened by the custodial staff, using the old-school pencil sharpeners that you crank by hand. In the USA we'd probably just buy machine-sharpened pencils or something. Actually I think we mostly just use pens?

Traffic has the same rules, but red lights seem to be suggestions only. Pedestrians don't have unquestioned right-of-way, so cars will cut people off in crosswalks. However, it works because everyone expects it, and everyone pays attention. However, don't text while walking [across the street].

I asked a coworker what he felt were the differences between Chinese and Japanese food. "Japanese food is all undercooked, served cold and has no oil. So ... really it's all just rice".

While walking around the vibrant bar district, I get solicited. Except now I have no idea what I'm being offered. Hope it was only hookers and blow, not something I actually wanted.

The same downtown district has security staff like we'd expect to see in an upscale area in the USA as well. Except here, the staff are all busy watching the girl dancing in the plain-glass window of what I think is technically a club? She was on a stage, with a pole, with stripper moves, but her small amount of clothing stayed on.

I love when contractors call around noon. Not too early, I'm usually free. Except when I'm 16 hours ahead and finally getting a decent sleep through the night.

Who needs gloves?  A lot of people ride motorcycles. To keep their hands warm, they put a jacket around the front of the motorcycle, pulling the sleeves over the handles. Then they put their hands into sleeves to operate the bike. As a bonus, the jacket acts as a windbreaker for their legs. Also, they still wear gloves.

Walking around, I see all the same stuff I'm used to: bicycles, gyms with weights, etc. Just in most cases, the construction quality is lower. But all the stuff works. I wonder how much more we spend on a basic item just because we want it newer, shinier, nicer, etc.

Musings via Beijing

I'm currently on a 1-week work trip to Beijing. I'm just wrapping up my first 24 hours here.

The flight itself is uneventful. It's an approximately 12 hour direct from Seattle, roughly following the Pacific coastline through Alaska, then passing into Russia and flying the last 6 hours over Siberia and China. Funny thing is, the Delta flight tracker on our entertainment systems stopped working right around the time we hit Russian airspace. Coincidence, or something more? Who knows.

As we were landing, we were told that anyone experiencing flu-like symptoms, vomiting, fever, etc, or anyone who has recently been to West Africa needs to notify the flight staff and fill out a card. They must then present that card to the quarantine officer, who may decide to detain them. I wonder how many people comply ...

Beijing is physically giant. It's made of a giant core and an even more giant suburb. After all, 20 million people have to fit somewhere. Unlike Mexico City, it has a fair number of tall buildings and probably higher density.

Beijing is externally famous for two things: scary driving and smog. After getting through customs and immigration, I bought some yuan and hailed a cab. One of my colleagues had warned me not to take up any free-lancing cabbies on their offers, so I instead stood in the longest cab line I've ever been. Vegas can compete. However, no one really tries to cut in line in Vegas, then argues with a cop who tells him to get to the back of the line. Also unlike Vegas, I found communication with my cabbie impossible. The same colleague had also told me to just show them written text of where I want to go, but that wasn't working. The cabbie just looked confused and angsty. I was about to ask if I should get out of the car (which made him even more anxious, probably because he'd have to circle around for a new fare) when one of the line attendants came to our aid. I kept pointing at my hotel name; turns out they needed a phone number to call. Once that happened, all was well. And unlike Mexico City, the drivers were relatively normal. Aggressive, but normal.

We got to the hotel without incident. I checked in and went up to my room and admired the view. I look down the 3rd ring road as it passes between some large, lit-up buildings. Smog shmog. Good night.

My view was considerably different in the morning. I woke to a PM2.5 rating of 198, which is nearly ten times the levels in Seattle, 4 times New York and double LA (though to be fair, these values change a lot daily, so these factors may vary). I could barely see skyscrapers a half a mile away. There was also a  slight sensation in my throat for a good part of the day. A local coworker later exclaimed "Oh, it's a pretty clear day today!"

I took the subway to work. I can't tell a Chinese character from another one to save my life (or find my direction). I prepped by cross-checking subway maps I'd printed out. 13 stops. The one with the name made of 3 characters, immediately after the one with 4. The rest before those are 5. These are my path markers. In reality the subway had been overhauled for the 2008 Olympics so not only were the names also present in Pinying (like how we type, for example "SuZhouJie" or "LiangMaQiao"), but there was even good English on everything. Despite the warnings, it wasn't horribly crowded. Standing room only, for sure, but no sliding in each others' sweat while a 4'10" woman squeezes between everyone, selling stuff for 5 pesos. Just like in Mexico, I (or my immediate party) was the only non-local in the transit system.

I was well aware that a lot of people might not speak English. I was not, however, prepared for how isolating it is to not even be able to attach a sound to a written character. It's how I imagine telling a 4 year old to read a map and find their way would play out.

The internet is another funny. It seems like they mostly dislike Google (and Youtube), Twitter, and Facebook. My hotel has CNN and BBC news (so western propaganda or whatever seems not to be an issue in that sense) and both their sites load (however, most CNN stories don't load). Microsoft services all work, but only in china-specific form. The only way I can check my gmail account from the hotel is to VPN to my corp network, remote into a machine physically sitting in Redmond, and run my browser there. Same with Facebook. However, both at least kinda worked at the airport. Maybe the Great Firewall has a few holes in it?

My hotel is very nice. The nightly rates are not outrageous (~150). However, the dinner options at the hotel are crazy. There's  restaurant that serves the most expensive steak I think I've ever seen. $130 for a ribeye and $105 for a sirloin. They do have attached marbling ratings and probably the life story short movie of the cow, but ... wow.

Other tidbits: a lot of people smoke, but it seems predominantly to be the men. Women wear very little makeup or jewelry (at least on the #10 subway line) and very few high heels. And, I got a nosebleed after dinner.