What I Learnt Today

Flight Attendant: Sir, I’m going to have to ask that you turn off your cellular phone.
Toby Ziegler: We’re flying in a Lockheed Eagle Series L-1011. Came off the line twenty months ago. Carries a Sim-5 transponder tracking system. And you’re telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?
—- 1.01: The Pilot.

Hooray! At last!

No longer do we risk bringing down a $300 million A380 and it’s 800 passengers by listening to Jack Johnson during take off.
It’s Soduku all the way to the terminal.

In a press release today the US FAA announced that it is safe to use our iPods, iPhones and iPads (or all at once) at all times during a flight. Currently, airlines insist that electronic devices are all turned off until 20 minutes after take off and for what seems like an eternity before landing. We can now reveal that this has always been a strategy to force us into reading their inflight magazines.

I accept the airlines’ apologies.

WASHINGTON– The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Michael Huerta today announced that the FAA has determined that airlines can safely expand passenger use of Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) during all phases of flight, and is immediately providing the airlines with implementation guidance.

Ray Dalio is worth a cool $13 billion.

His investment company, Bridgewater Associates, is the world’s largest hedge fund, with $150 billion to look after.

He’s made his money by predicting big macroeconomic cycles. The New York Times says ‘he is one of the few investors to see the financial crisis of 2008 developing, and perhaps just as important, the rebound.’

Until now, his economic theories have been only known to those clients willing to invest with Bridgewater, paying the 2% management fees and 20% of profits.

But Mr Dalio has now decided to share his approach via a rather engaging cartoon on his new web site Economic Principles.

“While I kept it confidential until recently, I now want to share it because I believe that it could be very helpful in reducing big economic blunders, if it was more broadly understood,” he told the NY Times. He explained that, “I believe that most influential decision makers and most people cause a lot of needless economic suffering because they are missing the fundamentals.”

Even I could understand ‘How the Economic Machine Works in 30 minutes’. It should be piece of cake for someone who has a Macroeconomic exam next week (I’m looking at you, Oliver).

What I Learnt On 27th October in other years

27th October 2011 Crowdsourcing To Cure TB

Drats.

Millie has installed iOS7 on her iPod Touch before I installed it on my iPhone or iPad. Ouch.

Tomorrow marks the release of the new iPhones 5c and 5s.

You can still have that same ‘new car’ sensation without buying a new phone by installing iOS7 on your current iDevice. The new system was released today, and can be installed now on an iPhone4, iPod Touch 5, iPad2 or later releases of each.

To catch up to Millie and get with the program, you can start by

1 Updating iTunes on your Mac to 11.1. You do this by opening the Software Update (in the Apple menu) and installing the latest system update.

2. Backing up your iDevice in iTunes. (Plug your device in with a USB cable, select it in the sidebar and click update now. If you haven’t backed up for a while, you should slap yourself on the wrist.)

3. On that same screen for your iDevice in iTunes, select the Update software button. When asked, select download and install.

It is a large download, so unless you are on the NBN don’t start this just before you leave home in the morning.

More (perhaps) on iOS7 tomorrow, and (perhaps perhaps) a review of the new iPhone.

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Hat Tip – Stefahn

What I Learnt On 18th September in other years

18th September 2016 When is a Schooner not a Schooner? Beer glass sizes in Australia

18th September 2011 Wine Talking

Shhh. The 1200 people packed into the Sanders Theatre at Harvard University put down their paper airplanes and signal to each other to be quiet. The time has come. Five genuinely bemused, genuine Nobel Laureates are about to announce the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes for science.

The Ig Nobels were first awarded by the magazine ‘Annals of Improbable Resaerch’ in 1991. This year’s 24th award ceremony took place last week, under the watchful eye of the official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes, ‘the Stinker’ (almost by Rodin).

Ten winners are chosen each year. The journal says that’the Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.’ I believe this is an overly generous interpretation of the criteria. Judging by past winners, it appears that the Ig Nobels are awarded to the scientists who undertake the silliest research. You be the judge.

Shh. The real Nobel Laureates are talking. The 2013 winners are…

Ig Noble Prize for Psychology

– for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. Who would have thought?
REFERENCE: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine

– for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice. Handy to know.
REFERENCE: “Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells,” Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, vol. 7, no. 26, epub. March 23, 2012. – See more at: http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2013

Ig Nobel Prize for Safety Engineering,

awarded posthumously to Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. What could possibly go wrong.US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, “anti hijacking system for aircraft”, May 21, 1972.

Ig Nobel Prize for Physics
for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond — if those people and that pond were on the moon. Bear Grylls may need this information one day
REFERENCE: “Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity,” Alberto E. Minetti, Yuri P. Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, Francesco Lacquaniti, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 7, 2012, e37300.

Ig Nobel Prize for Probability
– for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. They get back down, they get up again.
REFERENCE: “Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?” Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1–10.

The other five winners are at the Improbable Research Site.

Are there any scientists you would like to nominate for the 2014 Ig Nobels?

What I Learnt On 17th September in other years

17th September 2011 Take a Nap! Change Your Life