Monthly Archives: July 2019

• What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
  It’s been 5 years since MH370 disappeared and we haven’t heard it on the news cycle lately. The mystery of what happened is more or less solved, even if the exact details are missing.

  Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone.

• Inside the shadow world of scooter chargers
  What’s it like to make money from charging scooters? I always wanted to know, and now I do.

  I was finally able to retrieve three, and charged them in my kitchen. At 5 a.m., I awoke to release them to the nearest available “nest,” Bird’s term for its sanctioned drop-off locations, but had troubles with the app. No matter how many times I refreshed it, no nests showed up.

  Paranoid I’d be accused of hoarding if I didn’t dump the scooters before 7 a.m., I awkwardly walked them down the street and placed them in a nest outside someone’s house, making sure to copiously document the process in order to receive my $14 bounty (I charged two Birds for $5 and one for $4). It was windy that morning; the scooters kept falling over on unstable dirt. Walking away, light just breaking, I heard them clatter into a pile.

• Why Weather Forecasting Keeps Getting Better
  Interesting article about why predicting weather is so important (particularly for war). I also found it illuminating how weather is predicted now.

  At weather-prediction centers around the world, Bjerknes’s equations have been tweaked and Richardson’s methods refined (the chess squares can now be as small as a couple of kilometres across), but the fundamental ideas are essentially the same. Blum describes the process of prediction as though there were two parallel worlds running in sequence: the real one, our own blue marble, and the simulated one, which lives inside the machine. Model Earth adjusts itself to match real Earth, to take into account all the observations fed in by “flying satellites, buoys and balloons,” and then it races ahead in fast-forward. Periodically, it pauses for real Earth to catch up, checks its answers, corrects anything it got wrong, makes adjustments, and then gallops off into the future again.

• Watch Your Step
  The 10,000 step goal is the threshold for being active, but turns out that number is kind of arbitrary. Well at least we can all agree that increasing fitness is an improvement in lifestyle regardless of what the step goal actually is.

  This is all despite the fact that 10,000 steps is a completely arbitrary figure, one that originates from a successful Japanese marketing campaign in the mid-60s. In an attempt to capitalise on the immense popularity of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the company Yamasa designed the world’s first wearable step-counter, a device called a manpo-kei, which translates as “10,000-step meter”.

• Why is airport food so expensive?
  I’ve noticed the prices have gone down, at least in Toronto where Tim Horton’s has opened, but it is still a problem.

  When a retail spot opens up in an airport, the city puts out a Request for Proposal (RFP) and opens it up for bids. An aspiring restaurant or storefront must declare a Minimum Annual Guarantee (MAG), or a base amount it pledges to pay the airport each year, based on set percentages of projected sales.

  For example, the airport might specify that it wants 10% of all sales up to $1m, and 12% on anything over $1m. If you estimate your sales at $1m, your MAG would be $100k per year; if you end up doing $1.5m in sales, you’ll pay $160k.

  A 2018 RFP for 9 retail openings at SFO lists MAG fees of between $365k and $630k per year and requires a 10-year commitment — a hefty cost for any small business, even one in a highly trafficked location.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: fitbit, pocket