Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.
Link (via BoingBoing)
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Speaking of conferences (as we were a little while ago), the Female Science Professor has a post on the phenomenon of logos in talk slides:
Several people in the geekout thread asked me to explain how a sliderule works, and I've been meaning to write a couple of article about manual computing devices. So I thought I'd do it.
Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better pr
Bad teaching is one of my pet peeves, but I go back and forth on PowerPoint. I think its egregious abuse most of its users shouldn't necessarily bring a cloud on the whole program -- sometimes it is used effectively.
There's more fun to be found at the Link link.
What I couldn't see was a byline. Someone has a deep background to be able to come up with so much good stuff. I suppose it might just be a very white knuckle frequent flyer with an inquiring mind and a morbid sense of humour.
JohnnieCanuck wrote: "What I couldn't see was a byline."
The Economist eschews bylines. There's a good chance that whoever wrote the article flipped through a copy of James Morrow's novella City of Truth. The main character, Jack Sperry, lives in a city named Veritas and finds himself on the horns of a dilemma when his son falls ill during a stay at Camp Ditch-the-Kids. I was just flipping through the book myself, which was published in 1990, and discovered a similarity to current events. The host of the TV morning show Enduring Another Day, while interviewing the Assistant Secretary of Imperialism, comments that, "So far, over four thousand Veritasian combat troops have died [in the Hegelian Civil War]." The Assistant Secretary responds by saying, "A senseless loss. Our policy is impossible to justify on rational grounds, which is why we started invoking national security and other shibboleths." A review of the book can be found here.
Personally, if a jetliner I am on is headed for an emergency landing, my anti-gravity belt is the last thing I'm going to leave behind.