Gulfstream: 2010

On the architectural challenges Qatar faces to prepare for the World Cup: “If you thought building 12 open-air, air-conditioned stadiums was hard, try shipping them abroad when you’re done. And then try to explain why one of your top architects is called Albert Speer.”

Interview with one of the flight crew onboard QF32. On trying to figure out whether they would be able to stop the plane on Singapore’s 4000m runway: “We didn’t have the ability to dump fuel, the fuel dumping system had failed and we were about 50 tonnes over our maximum landing weight. In the Airbus and the A380 we don’t carry performance and landing charts, we have a performance application. Putting in the ten items affecting landing performance on the initial pass, the computation failed. It gave a message saying it was unable to calculate that many failures. So we then looked at them in more detail and rejected ones that we considered minor and things that were affecting landing performance on wet runways. It was a beautiful day in Singapore thankfully and not wet so it obviously wasn’t going to affect our landing performance. After we’d eliminated about three or four items the computer happily made a calculation and it gave us a touchdown speed of about 165kt and showed us about 130m of surplus runway (it’s a 4,000m runway) so basically said we could stop on the runway.” Also: “So it was nearly two hours on the ground with major fuel leaks and engines running.”

Free running video. (Shot in London, 720p available.)

Very readable preliminary account of the Qantas A380 incident. Minutes after the explosion, the flight crew had to process and evaluate at least 17 separate warning messages (!), which took nearly an hour. (The second officer took several largely fruitless trips into the cabin to visually inspect the damage during this time.) Eventually they decided to land overweight with the left wing leaking fuel, and only one engine available for reverse thrust. (Only two engines on the A380 can reverse thrust.) After they landed, one engine would not shut down despite manual intervention by ground crew. During this time passengers were disembarked via stairs on the right side of the aircraft. Eventually the engine was drowned with fire-fighting foam but because it took so long to render the aircraft completely safe (over two hours after touchdown), and because the cockpit voice recorder only stores two hours of audio, all the audio from the initial incident was lost.

Simple mobile phone (no text messages!) from Dutch design firm. Shame it’s 80€.

“One two-block stretch of Spring Street has a creperie, a café dedicated to chocolate cake — a Portuguese transplant called the Best Chocolate Cake in the World — and even a business, Rice to Riches, that has managed to thrive since 2003 on rice pudding alone.”

Beautiful, minimal illustrations comparing NYC and Paris.

McDonald’s burgers are no more invulnerable to rotting than any other burger of the same size.

“Brooke Greenberg is almost 18, but she has remained mentally and physically at the level of a toddler.”

It costs about the same (in terms of energy) to desalinate sea water as it does to raise its temperature 80°C; to melt ice is equivalent to an 80°C rise. (i.e. it’s almost as energy-intensive to melt ice as it is to boil water.)

A (Detroit) house designed by Mies van der Rohe is selling for $120k.

The current skirmish between Amazon and Apple over digital content distribution will become a proper fight sooner or later.

Part of the Apollo astronauts’ life insurance: commemorative cards signed before launch, that would presumably greatly increase in value if they were to perish.

List of mistakes made in resolving the Manila bus siege, according to a counter-terrorism expert. The first attempt to board the bus failed; “Squads like this have to be made up of very special people, specially trained and selected for their characteristics of courage, determination and aggression. In this case they acted as 99% of the population would have, which was to turn round and get out. They didn’t seem to have the necessary determination and aggression to follow the attack through.”

“By next October, if everything goes right in Afghanistan — like, almost perfectly — just about every local cop and soldier there should be able to read like a first-grader.”

Nice Google-maps powered view of the SF, Boston, NY and Chicago marathons. The Boston marathon is basically downhill all the way, so much so that the course can’t be used to set world records.

Series of interviews in Slate on “what it means to make mistakes.” That is, various people’s thoughts (Anthony Bourdain, Peter Norvig) on how making mistakes and being wrong are involved in the work they do.

Summary of what’s currently known about the Russian spies recently arrested in the USA. So far, they’ve only been charged with acting as “undeclared agents of a foreign country” (though not with sending or receiving classified information), and money laundering.

“... it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself.”

I didn’t know: Anne Applebaum, Washington Post op-ed columnist, is the wife of the Polish Foreign Minister.

Some excellent anecdotes in this piece about a controversial bike lane that runs along Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, sending scantily-clad hipsters through an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish enclave.

Skype-backed calling card service that works like a regular calling card (i.e. you call a number from a regular phone, then enter the number you want to call) but you can top up credit online, it remembers your password/code and previously called numbers, etc. Works well!

Two years ago, New York City passed a labelling law requiring all fast-food chains to display the calorie count of their foods alongside the price, in the hope that this would lead to consumers reducing their calorie intake. A study performed on Starbucks data revealed that the law did lead to customer consuming 14% less calories in Starbucks food (either by ordering lower-calorie foods, or less food), but for some reason the amount of calories consumed via drinks remained about the same. (A New York Times piece about the same story shows that during the holidays, calorie consumption reverts to pre-labelling levels!)