Re: _Dogfights

by Guest Tue Nov 05, 2013 2:42 pm

Hey MJ I know you're a pilot but why are you wearing a mask?

by MJ Tue Nov 05, 2013 11:34 pm

It is an oxygen mask. Even though the plane is pressurized, the Federal Aviation Administration requires one of the pilots to wear one when flying above a certain altitude (35,000 feet for chartered flights, 41,000 feet for private flights). Wearing one is pretty uncomfortable, the rubber straps that cause the mask to seal to your face, make it like having an octopus on your face. A lot of pilots refuse to wear one. You can be fired for openly flouting the regulations, so I tend to wear mine when required (not to mention you only have about 3 seconds of useful consciousness at 41,000 feet after an explosive decompression).

by **Viking Jack** Wed Nov 06, 2013 1:35 am

MJ wrote:It is an oxygen mask. Even though the plane is pressurized, the Federal Aviation Administration requires one of the pilots to wear one when flying above a certain altitude (35,000 feet for chartered flights, 41,000 feet for private flights). Wearing one is pretty uncomfortable, the rubber straps that cause the mask to seal to your face, make it like having an octopus on your face. A lot of pilots refuse to wear one. You can be fired for openly flouting the regulations, so I tend to wear mine when required (not to mention you only have about 3 seconds of useful consciousness at 41,000 feet after an explosive decompression).

better to have that octopus attached to your face than ending like the helios 522, btw i wonder if that directive came after that accident

by MJ Wed Nov 06, 2013 8:55 am

For those who don't know, Helios 522 involved a 737 that had come out of maintenance with the pressurization system checked, and the mechanics had left the controlling system in manual instead of automatic. The captain failed to notice this on the preflight, or on 3 different checklists where it tells you to check the pressurization. They also misidentified the blaring horn that comes on when the cabin goes above 10,000 feet, and the flashing red cabin altitude light. The plane never pressurized, the crew slowly went hypoxic and passed out. The plane flew on autopilot until it ran out of gas and crashed in to a mountain.

We study accidents in aviation every six months when we do simulator training. This one was pretty much blamed on pilot error, but a need to follow procedures and hypoxia awareness training was pushed after this.

by Guest Thu Nov 07, 2013 2:50 am

There are worse things than a mask, the U-2 pilots have to fly in a pressurized suit:
http://www.aviationinsurors.com/images/u2/u2-6.jpg

by Guest Fri Dec 13, 2013 9:44 pm

SU-27: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7RkwKBe-Ng

by **Pejota** Sun Dec 15, 2013 3:02 pm

Excellent documental, i understand the purpouse of each fighter now... I didnt knew...

Thank you very much

by Guest Tue May 27, 2014 11:14 am

Abstractness wrote:
MJ wrote:Spanish is your mother Tongue, Abstracness? Are you from Switzerland originally? I know the natives speak four languages there, but I didn't think Spanish was one of them. I find the mash of languages in Europe fascinating, and take my hat off to anyone who is multi-lingual.

Yo tambien hablo Espanol. Lo suficiente como para portarme mal con las mujeres.
The languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian and Romansh. I grew up in the part of Switzerland where privately everyone speaks Swiss-German but the official language is Standard-German. People learn it at school and newspapers are written in Standard-German.
Swiss-German are dialects which Germans don't understand, so subtitles are required for them.
Because the second most spoken language of Switzerland is French, I was obligated to also learn French (and English) for six years at school.
At age 18 I was able to speak and write French fluently, but I have never used it since.
So in the 3 years at university my French vocabulary has largely been replaced by English, the international language of science and engineering. My father is Swiss. Spanish I talk to my mother because she's from the Caribbeans. About the original language of my African slave ancestors I don't know anything.

Going to study Artificial Intelligence in the Netherlands for the next two years. This means I'm going to have to learn the Dutch language. This will be my fifth or sixth language. Probably my brain is going to have to delete large parts of my old vocabularies, which is annoying.

by **Loki** Tue May 27, 2014 4:43 pm

That sounds like a very cool research trip.

I think you'll only forget what you don't use, so if you keep up on the languages you want, you'll be ok.

I've been learning German and am using Language Immersion for Chrome to get more exposure and practice reading. You can adjust the immersion level to suit your tastes and there's currently 64 languages to choose from; switch it up regularly to keep in practice.

by **the-anger** Tue May 27, 2014 6:44 pm

yup. interesting plugin, know of a similar one for firefox? (don't mind me, paranoid chrome does things i don't know about as mozilla isn't funded on ads).

on the subject of language, at one point or another i've known: hebrew, yiddish, french, korean and russian. but aside english i only ever use russian, so most of that is now gone Neutral

i'm curious and have to ask... what kind of AI subjects will you be studying?

by **Shade** Tue May 27, 2014 9:15 pm

the-anger wrote:yup. interesting plugin, know of a similar one for firefox? (don't mind me, paranoid chrome does things i don't know about as mozilla isn't funded on ads).

on the subject of language, at one point or another i've known: hebrew, yiddish, french, korean and russian. but aside english i only ever use russian, so most of that is now gone

i'm curious and have to ask... what kind of AI subjects will you be studying?

Random but, you knew/know Hebrew? Sweet lol, I know a bit of Hebrew.

And that looks like an awesome app Loki, I've been wanting to learn Russian, maybe I'll use this when I get around to it.

by Guest Wed May 28, 2014 7:25 am

the-anger wrote:i'm curious and have to ask... what kind of AI subjects will you be studying?

At the moment I'm already taking the following courses at ETH Zürich (the Swiss university Einstein went to):
-Computational Intelligence Lab
-Data Mining
-Computational Vision
-Statistical Learning Theory
-Computational Statistics

Courses I'm going to be taking in the Netherlands include:
Cognitive Psychology, General Linguistics, Knowledge and Agent Technology, Language and Speech Technology, Bio-psychology, Architectures of Intelligence, Advanced Logic, Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition, Dynamic Logic, Automated Reasoning, Sound Recognition, Cognitive Engineering, Handwriting Recognition, Neuro-ergonomics,....

by **Loki** Wed May 28, 2014 9:47 am

Shade wrote:And that looks like an awesome app Loki, I've been wanting to learn Russian, maybe I'll use this when I get around to it.[/b]

There's loads of free apps you can get. I'm using DuoLingo for German, but there's many more.

Abstract, I'm expecting huge contributions to the advancement of our future technologies from you. No pressure Smile

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