Scott Blomquist

About 4 months after my first loggable flight back in January, as of today I am a licensed private pilot! I showed up at the Boeing Field today around noon to have my instructor go over the checklist of stuff that I needed to have with me for the examiner to review. We had that good to go by the time the examiner showed up.

The first task with the examiner was a 1.5 hour oral exam (no, not like at the dentist–think more like technical interview). After I finished that, we re-checked the weather forecast since the printed weather that I had brought with me for the interview indicated that the clouds in the area were all too low to do some of the required practice maneuvers. The text weather that we could find still wasn’t good enough, but there was some indication that there may be some blue sky to be found somewhere, so I called the Seattle Flight Service Station to talk to a weather briefer. He took a look at the current satellite pictures and found what looked like a nice big break in the clouds up by Paine Field in Everett. I chose to give the flight a try, and was admonished by the examiner that if the weather started getting bad, it had better be me and not her that called the flight back to our starting airport.

We finished up all of the required maneuvers and headed back to Boeing Field, and for the first time during the entire process, I began to wonder if I was going to pass. It started off with what would have been a couple of straightforward special-purpose landings (short field landing and soft field landing), but the crosswind was pretty strong, and Seattle usually doesn’t have much wind, let alone crosswinds, so I hadn’t done much crosswind practice. Trying to dust off my 1337 cr0ssw1nd ski11z while at the same time performing special landings resulted in a somewhat sloppy show. She considered the specialty part of the landings fine, but after taking off from the last one, she asked "do you know how to do crosswind landings?" I sheepishly repleid "yeah." She said "well, I haven’t seen one yet today, show me one so we can call this done." If that wasn’t a challenge to my piloting skill, nothing was. It took me one extra approach, but I finally did set down in what was a pretty good plain ol’ crosswind landing. We taxied back to parking, and before I could push the airplane back into its parking spot, she said "unless you completely mess up during parking, congratulations, you’re a pilot."

[Edit: changing the category to something better than MSN's silly default.]

This is just plain strange. I always wonder how people get motivated to spend every second of their spare time practicing useless skills. Granted, it is extremely fun to watch such amazing feats of dexterity…

http://www.speedstacks.com/home.htm

I just watched the movie "Cellular". It was a pretty fun little thriller involving a kidnapping and a poor dude who gets sucked in to the whole deal just because he answered his cellular phone. Makes me even less interested than ever in answering the phone when it’s a number that I don’t already know. At any rate, the phone guy ends up pulling a Jack Bauer and taking the law into his own hands. William H. Macy plays a slightly kooky cop (kooky in the way William H. Macy’s characters are always kooky), and there’s one other character in the movie that provides better than great comic relief. For now, we’ll just call him "the Porsche-driving attorney". Watch it just for him if no other reason. 4/5 stars.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3445734

I had a great meeting on Tuesday with some gentlemen representing a tech company based in Taipei, Taiwan. One of the slides in their presentation completely surprised me. It was a map of the globe centered on the North Pole and looking down. It had China front and center on the bottom part of the map. But its most jarring feature was that North and South America were standing on their head toward the top of the map.

I had simply never seen such a thing–certainly not presented seriously as a map of the globe. In fact, someone in the meeting had the nuts to declare "certainly an interesting map!". The presenter defended it by pointing out that "it’s the most fair because it centers on the North Pole". Seems to me there’s still some room for picking an "unfair" map even given that view, but it’s not like global-projection-choice-fairness is something that I spend time fretting over.

I spent some time looking around to find the projection that was used so I could share it with the two of you who read this, and I’ve decided that it was based on a gnomonic projection onto a flattened tetrahedron. I say based on becuse the fragmented Antarctica was missing entirely, and concentric perfect circles and radial lines centered on the North Pole were substituted for the true grid lines. (The 108k PDF rotated 30 degrees clockwise is the one that most closely resembles what I saw.)

This got me to thinking about how pretty much everyone’s ideal map is the one that puts their home in some visually significant place. Seems to me that our usual view of the globe (northwestern hemisphere in the upper left quadrant) evolved naturally as maps of Europe, Asia, and Africa were augmented by new discoveries to the west during The Age of Exploration. Europe’s happy because it was a natural progression. We’re happy because we have prime real estate on the map, and pretty much everyone else feels shafted. This leads to Australians using 180 degree rotations of our map (partially in jest), and to Taiwanese businessmen using gomonic projections and flattened tetrahedra.

I really do like their map, though. I’ve already printed a copy and plan to hang it outside my office at work.