captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

I think if I was you I’d go have a talk with your sawyer, talk about “man if I wanted my wood this wet I wouldn’t have broken up with Meagan. Is your kiln in working order?”

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

The consumer doesn’t need to know the dimensions at harvest. But the lumberjack and the sawyer do. They care about how much of the tree was needed to make a particular board, not how much board the customer ended up with.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Which is why I buy stock rough sawn and mill it myself.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Canned french onion soup? meh.

Homemade french onion soup? Yeah!

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

I think this meme is talking about how tough life is for any given organism in kind of a TierZoo sort of way.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Not on a phone, though it’s bad there too. I’m on a 34" computer monitor. At a comfortable distance to read the text, the emoji looks like a brown smudge. Could be a dog, a cat, a bear, a mouse, one of several of the face emoji with a brown skin tint instead of the default Simpsons flavor…Yeah, they’re supposed to be really easy to discern, but they’re not. I’ve seen very few emoji “fonts” that were well designed for purpose.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

At viewing distances/zoom levels/font sizes at which I can read text just fine, that allegedly bear emoji is a brown oblong with some black flecks on it. Why should I have to mess with my device’s UI to accommodate an objectively shittier way to communicate?

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

No but my avatar was.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

What do you think a “meltdown” is?

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

It is my understanding that the Three Mile Island incident was a meltdown, that the fuel rods got hot enough to melt themselves and pool in the bottom of the reactor vessel but did not escape containment, unlike Chernobyl whose reactor core is currently a big lump in a sub-basement.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

What is your opinion of the word “another”?

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

The only time I see “cleanse” used is either on women’s cosmetics or religious drivel as your example. So “cleanse” is 100% marketing bullshit.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

See? Nothing but emotional bongwater.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Yeah, in my experience “You won’t carry a calculator with you everywhere you go” was what they said to justify pointless busywork.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

A coherent ecosystem…of blank windows with not enough functionality crammed into a hamburger menu made the way it is mostly for aesthetics. A workflow that doesn’t make sense to most people who are trained on PCs. A dev team who hate their users.

No thanks.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Naw, Cinnamon will still be here.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Do you type on a QWERTY keyboard?

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

There’s a lot of math to flying airplanes, quite a lot of it you’d recognize from high school physics class.

Pilots are required to calculate the weight and balance of the aircraft before flight, making sure the plane is not only below maximum gross weight so that the airplane can safely carry the load, but that the center of gravity falls within an acceptable envelope so that it remains controllable… This is done by weighing everything including the airplane itself, and noting their location from a datum point. Multiply the weight of each item by their location aft (or sometimes forward but the datum is usually somewhere near the front of the plane) and you get a “moment arm” of that item. Add the weights and moments up, then divide the total moment by the total weight to find the location of the CG. Weight * Arm = Moment.

Often you do this with everything but fuel to calculate how much fuel in pounds you can carry given your intended load of passengers and baggage. Avgas is usually handled in gallons not pounds, so convert from weight to volume. Then look up your fuel consumption rate for not only the cruise portion of flight but startup, taxi, takeoff and climb to altitude. That will tell you your endurance plus the legally mandated 30 minute reserve (45 minutes at night). Determine how long you can be in the air without running out of fuel.

From there, you’ll need to plot your course on a sectional chart, measure the true courses, then correct for magnetic variation and compass deviation, then get the winds aloft forecast and do the trigonometry to find the wind correction angle to calculate your compass heading and your ground speed, and then given the distance of each leg and your ground speed during those legs you can compute your time aloft. This information will be used on the ground to make sure you can make the intended flight within your earlier calculated endurance, “will we make it without running out of fuel,” plus you will turn to the computed compass heading to not get blown off course and get lost.

Then there’s my favorite aviation equation, I found this in the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge: An airplane tire will hydroplane at a speed in knots equal to the square root of the tire pressure in PSI. The reason the government published that equation was so pilots could calculate whether they can use full braking for short field landings if there is standing water on the runway. For example, the main tires of a Cessna 172 are inflated to 35 PSI, let’s round that to 36 to make the math easy, the square root of 36 is 6, 6 times 9 is 54, a Cessna 172 will hydroplane at 54 knots. The VS0 of this plane is 44 knots, a touchdown speed of 1.2VS0 comes out to be about 53 knots, so if you manage your energy well on approach you will just barely have full braking available immediately after touchdown even with standing water on the runway. There’s a more fun off-label use for this info though: if you have fairly low pressure tires, like big balloon tundra tires on a bush plane, you can set down on a lake and hydroplane well below your VS0 then just water ski up to the shore, set the tail down and stop to get in and out of somewhere where you don’t have room to land on solid ground.

=====

There is a question that high school algebra teachers get asked a lot that I never heard: “Why do we need to learn this?” When I teach the above math, I answer that question myself. I did so in the paragraphs above, I explained why it is important for pilots do to these things. This is an application of the Principle of Readiness as described by Ed Thorndike, which…think about Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. I’m teaching flight school, you’re teaching high school algebra. Where do our lessons fall on our students’ pyramid of needs? Probably pretty high up, right? Somewhere in the Self Actualization layer? So first of all, you need to make sure all the students’ needs that are below that on the pyramid are taken care of so that they’re operating at the level of your lessons, and once you achieve that, you MUST establish why and how your lesson will fulfill their needs.

As a flight instructor, that answer almost always boils down to “so you don’t crash the plane and get hurt or killed.” Algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus teachers are THE LITERAL WORST at this, coming up with answers like “This might save your life someday” or “it’s required to get your diploma.”

The former answer is so vague that it tastes like a lie; it might as well be “just in case you’re ever on Jeopardy and the Daily Double is about this topic.” The latter is an outright insult. K-12 students are required by law to go to school, and by the time they’re in Algebra class they’re old enough to understand the social contract allegedly at play here. “All these classes are supposed to prepare me for life as a citizen of this society, to equip me with the knowledge and skill I will need as a functioning adult responsible for earning my own living.” And then they drop “We have unilaterally decided to waste your time by requiring that you ‘learn’ something that I as the subject matter expert acknowledge is fully useless to you. We have officially departed the ‘preparing you for life’ portion of your education and have now entered the ‘how much bullshit can you swallow’ portion. Test is on Friday.”

I partially blame the approach taken to building mathematics curricula. We start out teaching pre-algebra to 13 year olds as if they’re going to grow up to be mathematicians. You’re trying to hit hormonal pubertines with shit like “the transitive property of inequality” and expect them to internalize it for dumbass reasons like “someone decided it’s mandatory I guess.”

This attitude of vindictive joy at proving your old math teacher wrong, “See? I never use this!”…I can only explain it as an abject failure on the part of the teacher/school/state department of education for designing and teaching the curriculum the way they do; not only failing to motivate students to learn, but building in them a pride in their resulting ignorance. Short of physically injuring your students I don’t know how you fuck up worse than that as a teacher.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

So you’re saying that my students pay attention to my lessons because they are important and relevant to them in their lives. And students of math classes don’t pay attention because they do not have that same importance to their students.

And somehow I’m being downvoted to hell for pointing out that this means math class is extremely badly designed for its stated purpose, and the people who design and maintain it in the condition that it is in are complete fuckups.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

I’ve been a flight instructor since 2010, in 14 years not a single one of the pilots I trained has ever come back to me bragging about how they never use something I taught them. Or failed a test I endorsed them for. I’m a damn good teacher of technical subjects, certainly good enough to recognize a piss poor one.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Granted, teaching 10 well-off adults is easier than 30 poor kids.

This doesn’t explain why all math classes everywhere from about 6th grade and up are designed as if we’re raising an entire generation of mathematicians. What good does memorizing proofs do? Why do we focus so much on the quadratic equation? Algebra is a useful skill that schools systematically beat a hatred for into the masses…in order to pretend they’re doing something academic and scholarly?

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

Is it Shine by Collective Soul? “Heaven let your light shine down?” That’s basically the only concrete imagery in that whole song.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

That do it?

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

So let’s work through this.

There are very few distinct details; the locomotive is a weird half-steam half-diesel thing pulling the most nondescript consist of cars I’ve ever seen, the landscape is grey and featureless, and there’s an extremely prominent thunderstorm.

Going out on a limb here, is it Thunderstruck by AC/DC? Figure it interpreted “I was caught in the middle of a railroad track. THUNDER” and then didn’t really do anything with the rest of the lyrics.

captain_aggravated, 1 month ago

maximum fluff