Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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Author: Joey deVilla
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The Safest Seats on the Plane
In your face, First and Business Class! Survival rates for various parts of the passenger cabin, based on an analysis of all commercial jet crashes in the United States since 1971 where detailed seating charts were available.
Illustration by Gil Ahn, diagram courtesy of seatguru.com, image taken from Popular Mechanics. Click the picture to see the original article.
According to this Popular Mechanics article, where you sit on a plane matters, at least safety-wise. This is in contradiction to statements made by Boeing, an FAA spokesperson and airsafe.com. Passengers near the tail of a plane are about 40 percent more likely to survive a crash than those in the first few rows up front.
Keep in mind that plane crashes are made spectacular by news reporting, but in fact are quite rare. The article reminds us “There’s been only one fatal jet crash in the U.S. in the last five-plus years.” Contrast that with the number of auto accidents; in the year 2004, there were 6.3 million police-reported accidents in the U.S. alone. Of those accidents “less than one percent” were fatal, which means that some number less than 63,000. Remember, that’s 63,000 car fatalities in the U.S. in a year compared to 49 air fatalities over the past five.
Evon Reid, who was called the “Ghetto Dude” in a mis-forwarded email from the Ontario government. Photo taken from his Facebook page.
It’s insult added to injury: not only did poor Evon Reid find out that he wasn’t accepted for a job by way of an accidental email forwarding, he was referred to in the email as a “ghetto dude”.
“This is the ghetto dude that I spoke to before,” said the email written by Aileen Siu, who works in the Ontario government cabinet office as an acting team leader in cabinet office hiring, which was meant to be forwarded to a job-search colleague.
There’s a mish-mash of issues brought up by this gaffe, including:
- Race: Reid is black, but there’s some question as to whether or not Siu knew that. In the Toronto Star article, Reid did indicate that the office spoke to his mother, who has a Jamaican accent. Siu pointed out that she’s Asian and implied that she understands racial discrimination. Of course, not being white doesn’t give you immunity from being a racist, in spite of what the loonier elements from the left will tell you. Kudos to Reid for handling this issue well: in a follow-up article in the Star, he said “”This isn’t a Confederate flag in a pickup truck. But it’s the kind of private view that affects decisions about someone like myself in the job market.”
- Class: I’ve seen the term “ghetto” used as an adjective by people from all races and all walks of life to refer to something that’s cheap, crass or tacky: “He shortchanged us when the bill came around! That’s so ghetto!” Reid’s from Malvern, a part of the large east-end Accordion City suburb called Scarborough (which often gets tagged with derisive names such as “Scarberia“, “Scarlem”, or the one that made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it, “Scompton”). Malvern has a rep, and Reid pointed this out when he said that it’s got one of the highest levels of youth unemployment in Canada.
- Qualifications: Reid’s credentials, from what was written in the Star article, are pretty good for someone who’s not quite out of university yet. They include a summer course in international management strategies at the University of Hong Kong, some solid projects in his courses, a good resume and a glowing letter from a former employer. It’s a crying shame that he wants to work for the government.
- Using office email wisely: First, there’s the obvious issue of double-checking the list of people in the “to:” and “cc:” fields of your email — we’ve all heard stories about people who’ve forwarded mail to the wrong people. But less obvious is the fact we live in the post Sarbanes-Oxley age, which means that every last little email you send using your employer’s email system is logged somewhere. The bottom line is that you should write email on the company email system as if someone at a law firm will be going over it with a fine-toothed comb someday.
- Multi-tasking: Siu said that she was multi-tasking when she made the mistake. Let this be a lesson to those of you who still think you’re being productive when you multi-task.
Related Reading
While surfing around, I stumbled across a link on the site Internet Duct Tape that took me to an article on Lifehacks.org titled 10 Virtually Instant Ways to Improve Your Life. Believe you me, a link like that is hard to ignore. Here are the ten ways; they’re explained in more detail in the article:
- Stop jumping to conclusions.
- Don’t dramatize.
- Don’t invent rules.
- Avoid stereotyping or labeling people or situations.
- Quit being a perfectionist.
- Don’t over-generalize.
- Don’t take things so personally.
- Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy.
- Don’t let life get you down. Keep practicing being optimistic.
- Don’t hang on to the past. This is my most important suggestion of all: let go and move on.
Interesting list, and easier said than done.
There’s something about Filipino culture that makes every Filipino, deep down, want to be a game show host or entertainer. Think about that for a moment and suddenly my schtick — accordion-playing mixed with blogging and technical evangelism suddenly makes sense.
Take this cultural tendency and mix it with the general preference in the Philippines for R&B, funk and soul music and our fondness for line dancing. With that in mind, getting 1500 inmates at a Filipino prison (the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu, Philippines) to do the dance routine from the Thriller video doesn’t seem unexpected:
I’ll bet you could never coordinate this in a North American prison.
[Cross posted to Global Nerdy]
Click to see the comic on its original page.
Trust me, kids: learn to play a musical instrument reasonably well before college.
As for accordion playing, the “coolness graph” looks like this:
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One Lapdance Per Child
[Cross-posted to my technical blog, Global Nerdy]
Sometimes I write a blog entry just for the sake of getting a funny title out there. This is one of those times, thanks to this report: Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops.
(With apologies to the fine people at the One Laptop Per Child project)