Author: Joey deVilla

Mitt Romney Asks: Why Don’t Airplane Windows Open?

Here’s a video featuring the now-infamous Mitt Romney quote about windows on airplanes:

“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”

Watch Romney’s facial expressions. Looking at him, I’m inclined to believe the follow-up reports — even the one from The Blaze, the conservative news site owned by Glenn Fucking Beck — that he was attempting to tell a joke. Actually, I’m quite flabbergasted that he can even tell a joke; in so many public appearances, he’s so stiff that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is downright charismatic next to him.

While I think that making light of your wife being in an airplane that was in an emergency is a bad idea, it’s worse to perpetuate the falsehood that Romney didn’t know why airplane windows don’t open.

Still, that’s no excuse not to show some videos why airplane windows don’t open. Who’s with me?

Warning: If you’re going on a flight very soon and have some fear of flying, skip the rest of this post. Trust me on this one.

Mayday: United Airlines 811, February 24, 1989

This episode of Mayday is about the February 24th, 1989 flight of United Airlines flight 811, a Boeing 747-100. As it was flying above the Pacific Ocean, an electrical short caused a cargo door to open. It caused explosive decompression, ripping off part of the fuselage and ejecting nine passengers. The pilots managed to land in Honolulu without any more loss of life.

Mythbusters: Explosive Decompression on a Plane

The Mythbusters pressurize a decommissioned DC-9 so that the difference between the inside air pressure and the outside ground-level pressure is equivalent to the pressure difference between the inside and outside of a plane at cruising altitude. Then they start making holes of varying sizes in the fuselage to see what happens…

How to Kill a Human Being: Hypoxia

In the documentary How to Kill a Human Being, we see how hypoxia — oxygen deprivation — affects former British Conservative MP Michael Portillo, who’s looking for a humane way to execute people. In this experiment, he sits in a chamber where the air pressure is reduced as if he were at a high altitude. Long story short: first you get dumb, then you get dead, and you don’t feel any pain along the way.

When Pilots Experience Hypoxia…in Flight

Here’s a recording (with captions) of pilots who are having trouble flying their plane because of a loss of cabin pressure leading to hypoxia. Luckily, the air traffic controllers realized what was going on and managed to talk them into descending to where the air was thicker. There’s a simultaneously frightening and hilarious moment when the pilot says, without any intended irony or sarcasm, “Unable to control altitude. Unable to control airspeed. Unable to control heading…Other than that, everything A-OK.”

Airport: The Decompression Scene

And last but not least, the “decompression” scene from the 1970 film Airport. You’d think that letting Dean Martin be a pilot would be the worst thing that could happen, but you’d be wrong. It’s explosive decompression, caused by a demolitions expert whose family needs the money — he thinks that if he dies in a mid-air explosion, his loved ones will get the insurance money.

I’m often asked “Where do you get those funny photos for your blog?”. I often reply “I’m at the point where those pictures find me.”

Case in point: Three different people whom I know only via the internet gave sent me a copy of the image below:

Two of them added “You were a math guy in school, right? How does this work?” One of them threw in “OMG” and “WTF” for good measure.

I’m a little short on time today, and formatting math problems for a web page is a bit of a pain, so I simply did the math by hand on paper and scanned it:

I hope this explains things. If not, let me know in the comments and I’ll go into more detail tomorrow.

Gangnam socks!

I’ve got a big meeting today with a very corporate client, which means full-on business attire. Even my usual blazer/dress shirt/jeans combo, considered “overdressing” by many people in my line of work, isn’t going to cut the mustard for the pow-wow. It’s a business non-casual day, which means I need to dress like the folks pictured above, not the folks pictured below. Enjoy the photos!

Seen in Kensington Market on Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday marked the return of Toronto Techie Dim Sum, the regular gathering for a cheap and cheerful dim sum lunch at Sky Dragon restaurant for local techies and their friends. I called ahead and booked the back room, which made the event a little harder to find, but once you found it, it was much easier to walk around, mingle with people at the other tables and catch up with or meet everyone.

Thirty-three people attended, which made for three tables of guests and a lively room. Lunch turned out to be pretty cheap as well — it worked out to about $10.50 a person. Some people who had to get back to work early left “yuppie food stamps” (my favourite term for $20 bills), which meant that Adam (the staffer in charge of the room) and the folks at Sky Dragon got a nice (and well-deserved) tip.

Toronto Techie Dim Sum will be a monthly event, and I’ll announce a date soon. Thanks to everyone who came out!

After lunch, I had a good long chat with a programmer whom I’ve been thinking of recruiting for my startup’s project. We had a nice conversation over ice mochas at Moonbeam in nearby Kensington Market, the official place for deep off-site conversations for HacklabTO members.

With the conversation done, I hopped on my bike and hightailed it to the home office, where I continued to work on the aforementioned startup project, which is building mobile device management systems for enterprises.

I’ll save a full description of what that means for a later time; it should suffice to say that it’s a way for medium to large companies to manage their employees’ smartphones and tablets when they’re on company time, let people use their phones and tablets they way they want to when they’re off the clock, and keep sensitive company information safe. Enterprise software is neither cool nor sexy, which one of the reasons why startups typically avoid that market. However, I wanted my return to building software to involve building something of substance, and uncool and unsexy as it is, enterprise software is how you have a bank balance, how food finds it way to your grocery store, how you can get checked in at the ER and how your flight/hotel package to your last vacation destination got put together.

Later that evening, I got dressed up Gangnam Style…

…to attend the fundraiser bash for Ladies Learning Code. The proceeds from admission to the bash, held on the bottom floor of the Centre for Social Innovation’s Annex location, are going to build their classroom/workshop space, computer lab and mini-maker studio, all of which will be used to help girls and women — who are severely underrepresented in the sausage party of tech — learn about computers, mobile tech, programming and related stuff.

They had a Makerbot 3D printer printing out jewellery for sale, but even more impressive was the 3D printer being built by Panda Robotics, pictured below:

While most of Makerbot’s 3D printers are aimed at the hobbyist who doesn’t mind building something from a kit, Panda Robotics’ is more like a paper printer you’d pick up at Best Buy: ready-built, simple to assemble out of the box, and meant for the general public. Panda’s printer had a rock-solid-feeling aluminum chassis and doesn’t go out of alignment when you sneeze on it. If the Makerbot’s analogue are the Altair 8800 and other kit-based computers of the mid-1970s, Panda Robotics’ is the Apple ][, which went a long way to defining what desktop computers were.

Photo by John Gauthier. Click to see the original.

And yes, I played accordion at the party.