International Jet Trash

Pack Like a Clown (In a Good Way)

While I still swear by my modified Stewardess Packing Technique (see links below), I enjoy seeing how other people wrestle with fitting stuff into small pieces of luggage.

YouTuber eviltommy demonstrates the “clown car packing technique”, complete with Yakety Sax soundtrack, for a (hypothetical?) one-month journey. The best part of this is how he deals with the hoodie.

Also, the shoe-stuffing. Shoe-stuffing is very important.

As for jeans, they can be rolled. Also, you also only need one pair per month, really: pack one pair, then wear one pair on the plane. That’s what I do, anyway*.

Overall, this is a pretty good way to manage clothing for travel, but I have a few issues:

1. Not a real-world one-month travel scenario, since he has no toiletries, camera, electronics, or… well, any non-clothing items.
2. The entire bag is stuffed with casual clothes. If you’re filling that bag, then bring a few items with buttons. Maybe some slacks. Either way, leave half the t-shirts behind. Adults tend not to go anywhere for a month with only a selection of casual clothes, and nothing else, in the bag.
3. Why the hell wouldn’t he wear the Keyboard Cat t-shirt onto the plane?!

Tommy’s blog, I’m Flying Around the World, seems to have been abandoned, alas.

(* I’m presuming that he’s demonstrating carry-on-only packing; otherwise the small size of the luggage piece seems arbitrary. Is there another, unseen bag for toiletries/electronics/etc?)

Subways, Metros Converge Towards Core-&-Branch Systems

Interesting: despite their different histories and development cycles, the world’s major underground transit systems are converging towards a quantifiable form. Cities are like living things, and those who study them are well aware of this: part of the study of mass-transit developments involves studying slime molds.

Not the slime molds growing along the N platform at Canal Street, as a group, but the way each organism develops to distribute nutrients throughout a rapidly-growing body.

Understand those principles, and one might “make urbanism a quantitative science, and understand with data and numbers the construction of a city,” said statistical physicist Marc Barthelemy of France’s National Center for Scientific Research.

via Wired.

Read the abstract in the Journal of the Royal Society: “This limiting shape is made of a core with branches radiating from it. For most of these networks, the average degree of a node (station) within the core has a value of order 2.5 and the proportion of k = 2 nodes in the core is larger than 60 per cent.”

I’m crazy about mass transit when I travel, and find it to be a stellar way to get to know a new city. I often imagine that I’m making my way through the bloodstream of some huge living thing… turns out I kinda am.

You begged for it, and Richard Branson answered. Virgin Atlantic is rolling out in-flight mobile phone service on its EWR-LHR service (Airbus A330).

Of course, you’ll pay dearly for the privilege of pissing off your neighboring passengers. Also, the GPRS platform Virgin is using for in-flight mobile phone service is maddeningly limited.

To be honest, if I were a flight attendant, I’d switch it off and tell passengers, “Sorry, six other people are using the system at the moment. Then six more. Then six more…” That’s why I’m not a flight attendant.

However, that privilege will not be cheap: Virgin will charge about $1.20 per minute for the service, and access will be limited to six passengers at a time.”The service is intended for use in exceptional situations, when passengers need to send an SMS, make a quick call, or access an e-mail on a BlackBerry,” the company said.

Note that this will be on Virgin Atlantic, and not Virgin America. In-flight mobile use is coming to US airspace… let me check my watch… basically never.

I think Emirates was first with in-flight mobile phone service, and that was four years ago. The technology isn’t new, but not every airline is convinced that in-flight phone calls are enough of a selling point to invest in the hardware, support, and testing. Meanwhile, US carriers cannot really get on board with something like this: the FAA and TSA are too afraid of their own passengers to allow it.

WestJet’s Ill-Advised In-Flight Tablet Scheme

WestJet, not content with its current failure to implement an in-flight entertainment strategy, decided to check out those newfangled tablet thingies all the kids are talking about.

However, since WestJet is WestJet, the airline was only able to envision tablets as rental products. Like pay-per-use headphones, since those are such a huge hit with passengers. As it stands, WestJet’s entertainment system can only be described as shite, so perhaps staring at a blank seat-back would be a step up.

The airline is considering deploying the tablets on four planes by the end of the year while it searches for a more permanent solution to a lacklustre entertainment system that includes live TV, which one aviation consultant has called “a complete failure.”

via Macleans.ca

Canada does air travel, but, sadly, doesn’t do it very well.

IN BED WITH INVADER chronicles a night in the life of the mysterious Invader, the guy who puts up those mosaic Space Invaders all over the world.

It’s great to know that Invader’s work is an ongoing process: look up when you walk the streets of Paris, New York, Melbourne, London, Vienna, Bilbao, and other locales around the globe.

• Space Invaders Around the World

Beachgoer vs Jetliner at Maho Sint Maarten

Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM) services Sint Maarten (the Dutch half of St. Martin). Planes take off and land right over the beach at Maho. Consequently, beachgoers like to get up right against the fence to feel the force of the planes’ jet engines.

If you were about to ask, “Does anybody ever get blown over by the jets?”, the answer is, “Watch the video below.”

View Larger Map