Boeing 747

190 results back to index

Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives by Christopher Bartlett

Air France Flight 447, air traffic controllers' union, Airbus A320, airport security, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, crew resource management, en.wikipedia.org, flag carrier, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Maui Hawaii, profit motive, sensible shoes, special drawing rights, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

However, in January 13, 2008 The Sydney Morning Herald in an article about the slide in Qantas’ share value and Merrill Lynch’s sell recommendation said the carrier, a week previously, had suffered ‘arguably the biggest dent to its once enviable safety reputation in decades’ after one of its Boeing 747s lost electrical power on approach to Bangkok. It was referring to a Boeing 747-400 London–Bangkok flight that lost electrical power from all four engine-driven electrical generators 15 minutes out of Bangkok and had to rely on back-up power to land there. Battery power would only have lasted for about an hour and had the aircraft been a long way from an airport and in bad weather, the situation could have been precarious.

…

However, six minutes later the trainee controller discovered they were on courses that could result in a collision. In probably a panicky reaction to the aural warning of the potential conflict, the controller, who had intended to tell JL958 (the DC-10) to descend, mistakenly told JL907 (the Boeing 747) to do so. The TCAS in the descending Boeing 747 gave an aural conflict resolution advisory to climb. Notwithstanding the fact that TCAS resolution advisories are mandatory, the 747 captain continued his descent in accordance with the erroneous ATC instruction. Meanwhile, the DC-10 that had continued when the controller attached the wrong flight number to the order to descend initiated a descent in accordance with instructions from its onboard TCAS.

…

The problem with the aft cargo hold door—as were a number of other problems with the DC-10—was said to be due to the frenetic pace at which the aircraft was brought into production, with Lockheed’s very similar TriStar in direct competition, and the Boeing 747 lurking in the background. Although, the competing Lockheed TriStar L1011 was an excellent aircraft, McDonnell Douglas had the advantage that US airlines were so used to buying its aircraft that they were likely to choose them out of habit and inertia. This did not prevent the airlines playing off the two companies against each other, with the result that prices became so low that neither aircraft would ever be a big money-spinner, unlike the Boeing 747, which was in a category above. In addition, delays in developing the power plant for the TriStar had almost led to the demise of the UK engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce, which had to be bailed out by the British Government, and in turn meant that Lockheed got off to such a delayed start that sales never took off.

The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World's Most Mysterious Air Disasters by Christine Negroni

Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, flag carrier, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, South China Sea, Tenerife airport disaster, Thomas Bayes, US Airways Flight 1549

Passenger masks dropped, but one flight attendant who was trying to use the public address system before putting on his mask lost consciousness, as did the passenger who tried to help him. The pilots made an emergency descent and landed without further problems. Faulty door seals and breaks in the structure of an airplane have been known to cause decompressions. In one case, a passenger oxygen bottle exploded on a Qantas Boeing 747 in 2008. The bottle shot through the side of the airplane like a small missile, leaving a hole large enough to cause a rapid decompression. No one was injured. Sometimes, however, decompressions do turn deadly. In one horrific case in 1988, an eighteen-foot section of an Aloha Airlines 737 tore off on a flight to Honolulu, sucking a flight attendant out of the airplane.

…

There are only a few ways this can be explained: there was a power failure on the airplane, the software failed, or something interfered with the connection between the antenna and the satellite, such as the plane flying upside down so that the fuselage was between the antenna and the satellite. All three possibilities are extremely remote. Some clues, however, have not been pursued. One week into 2008, a Qantas Boeing 747 was on approach to Bangkok from London with 365 people on board. It was a clear and sunny afternoon—which was fortunate because as Qantas Flight 2 passed through ten thousand feet, it lost electrical power. The autothrottle, autopilot, weather radar, and many other systems, including the automatic control for the pressurization system, simply stopped.

…

The autothrottle, autopilot, weather radar, and many other systems, including the automatic control for the pressurization system, simply stopped. Only the captain’s flight display worked, albeit in “degraded mode.” The plane landed safely, but once it was on the ground, its doors could not be opened because the outflow valves failed to automatically release the cabin pressure. On the Boeing 747 and other Boeing jetliners, including the 777 and the 767, there is a galley located above the electronics and equipment room, called the E&E bay. On Qantas Flight 2, a flood from the galley above caused water to flow into this area. This was not a one-time event. During its investigation, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau discovered that electronics equipment in the bay had been “repeatedly subjected” to liquid beyond what it was designed to handle.

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

It is less obvious that a drastic change of this kind necessarily constitutes a leap into the ocean of impracticality or death. I promised that I’d return to ‘Boeing 747’ and ‘Stretched DC8’ macro-mutations. Remember Sir Fred Hoyle’s debating point about junkyards and 747s? He is reported to have said that the evolution, by natural selection, of a complicated structure such as a protein molecule (or, by implication, an eye or a heart) is about as likely as a hurricane’s having the luck to put together a Boeing 747 when whirling through a junkyard. If he’d said ‘chance’ instead of ‘natural selection’ he’d have been right. Indeed, I regretted having to expose him as one of the many toilers under the profound misapprehension that natural selection is chance.

…

Any theory that expects evolution to put together a new, complex machine like an eye or a haemoglobin molecule, in a single step from nothing, is asking too much of chance. On this theory, natural selection has hardly any work to do. All the ‘design’ work is being put in by mutation, a single large mutation. It is this kind of macro-mutation that deserves the metaphor of the 747 and the junkyard, and I call it a Boeing 747 macro-mutation. Boeing 747 macro-mutations do not exist and they have no connection with Darwinism. Turning to my other airliner analogy, the Stretched DC8 is like an ordinary DC8 only rather longer. The fundamental design of the DC8 is all there, but an extra length of tubing has been let into the middle of the fuselage.

…

A more modest number to be sure, but still a horrifyingly low probability. His co-author and fellow astrophysicist, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, has quoted him as saying that the spontaneous formation by ‘chance’ of a working enzyme is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously having the luck to put together a Boeing 747. What Hoyle and Wickramasinghe miss is that Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for even sophisticated scientists to grasp this simple point? Darwin himself had to contend with an earlier generation of physical scientists crying ‘chance’ as the alleged fatal flaw in his theory.

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

The sky was the canvas, she believed; the jetliner as discardable as the painter’s brush. I disagree, for as a brush’s stroke represents the moment of artistic inspiration, what is travel without the journey? We’ve come to view flying as yet another impressive but ultimately uninspiring technological realm. There I am, sitting in a Boeing 747, a plane that if tipped onto its nose would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I’m at 33,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, traveling at 600 miles per hour, bound for the Far East. And what are the passengers doing? Complaining, sulking, tapping glumly into their laptops. A man next to me is upset over a dent in his can of ginger ale.

…

The old Airbus A300, probably the best example, was built specifically for short- to medium-haul markets even though it could accommodate 250 people. Meanwhile, there are nine-passenger executive jets that can stay aloft for eleven hours. Neither is it fair to say out of hand that one plane has greater reach than another. Does an Airbus A340 outdistance a Boeing 747? Some do, some don’t. Technical options, such as engine types and auxiliary fuel tanks, help determine endurance. Watch the dashes. There’s not just a single A340; there are the A340-200, -300, -500, and -600. At Boeing you’ll discover -200s, -400s, -800s, -LRs (long range), -ERs (extended range), and so forth.

…

If you enjoy graphs and charts abounding with asterisks and fine print, go to the manufacturers’ websites and knock yourself out. How much do planes weigh? There are weight limits for the different operational regimes, including limits for taxiing, taking off, and landing. The Airbus A380’s maximum takeoff weight exceeds one million pounds. A Boeing 747’s weight can be as high as 875,000 pounds. For a 757, it might be 250,000 pounds, and for an A320 or 737, it’s around 170,000. A fifty-passenger turboprop or regional jet will top out around 60,000. Those are maximums. The actual, allowable takeoff weight varies with weather, runway length, and other factors.

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Chapter 5: Engineering and Its Solutions 90 Standard Engineering: Thomas Kuhn called routine science “normal science,” and Edward Constant, following him, talks of normal engineering. I do not like the term “normal” because it implies parallels to activities in science that may be not be there. I prefer to call this standard engineering. 92 Boeing 747 in… 1960s: The quotes on the 747 are from Peter Gilchrist, Boeing 747, 3rd Ed, Ian Allen Publishing, Shepperton, UK, 1999; and Guy Norris and Mark Wagner, Boeing 747: Design and Evolution since 1969, MBI Publishing Co., Osceola, WI, 1997; also, personal communication, Joseph Sutter, Boeing, November 2008. 93 Getting things to work requires: Ferguson, p. 37. 98 envisions the concepts and functionalities: Ferguson tells us this happens visually.

…

The purpose itself determines the requirements for the overall concept. This determines the requirements of the central assembly, which determines the requirements for its supporting assemblies, which determine the requirements for theirs. “We wanted to design a 350-passenger airplane,” says Joseph Sutter, director of engineering for the Boeing 747 in the late 1960s, “and having conceived the wide single deck, we knew that in the tourist section it could go to nine or ten abreast. That pretty much defined the length of the fuselage. The wing we tried to optimize to give the airplane the lifting capabilities, range, and fuel efficiency that we wanted.

…

And if the project is particularly complicated—think of the lunar space program—it may be necessary to break it into steps with different experimental versions of the technology acting as markers, each building on what has been learned from its predecessors. When a project is exploring into unknown territory, glitches come close to being unavoidable. When the Boeing 747 was conceived in 1965, its larger weight dictated a much more powerful engine than had been used until then. This required not just a scaled-up version of the standard turbofan, but moving to one with a much higher bypass ratio (nearly 6:1 instead of 1:1 for the ratio of air blown by the fan to that from the core turbojet).

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

By the year 2000, pilots of a Boeing 747 retracing the transcontinental route 11 km aloft could choose an auto-mode for a large part of the journey as four gas turbines developed up to about 120 MW and the plane flew at 900 km/h (Smil 2000a). Figure 6.4 Stoking a late-nineteenth-century steam locomotive (top) and piloting a Boeing jetliner (bottom). The two pilots control two orders of magnitude more power than did the stoker and the engineer in their locomotive. Locomotive from VS archive; Boeing cockpit from http://wallpapersdesk.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2931_boeing_747.jpg. This concentration of power also demands much greater safety precautions because of the inevitable consequences of errors in control.

…

Minuteman weapon system ICBM tested 1961 U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise launched Manned space flight (Yuri Gagarin) 1962 Transatlantic television relay (Telstar) 1964 Shinkansen (Japan National Railways) starts operation 1966 U.S. jumbo jet aircraft Boeing 747 ordered 1969 British-French supersonic aircraft Concorde takes off Boeing 747 in commercial service U.S. Apollo 11 spacecraft lands on Moon 1970s Radio and television satellite broadcasting Concerns about fossil fuel supplies Acid rain over Europe and North America Japanese car exports soar 1971 First microprocessors (Intel, Texas Instruments) 1973 OPEC’s first round of crude oil price increases (until 1974) 1975 Brazil starts producing automotive ethanol from sugar cane 1976 Concorde in commercial service Unmanned U.S.

…

The Boeing 707 (1957) was based on an in-flight refueling tanker. The Boeing 737 (1967) is the all-time best-selling jet aircraft (nearly 9,000 planes had been delivered by the end of 2015 and 13,000 more had been ordered). The supersonic French-British Concorde, which flew limited routes between 1976 and 2003, was an expensive oddity. The Boeing 747 (in service since 1969) was the first wide-body long-haul aircraft. For comparison with these scaled drawings the Wright brothers’ plane and its total flight path on December 7, 1903, are shown. Based on Boeing and Aerospatiale/BAe publications and on Jakab (1990). Figure 6.1 Production of the three principal fossil fuels: global totals and annual outputs for the largest producers.

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, phenotype, random walk, silicon-based life, Steven Pinker, the long tail

The argument has already been sufficiently made, but it may be helpful to draw a distinction between two kinds of hypothetical macromutation, both of which appear to be ruled out by the complexity argument but only one of which, in fact, is ruled out by the complexity argument. I label them, for reasons that will become clear, Boeing 747 macromutations and Stretched DC8 macromutations. Boeing 747 macromutations are the ones that really are ruled out by the complexity argument just given. They get their name from the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle’s memorable misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection. He compared natural selection, in its alleged improbability, to a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and chancing to assemble a Boeing 747. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is an entirely false analogy to apply to natural selection, but it is a very good analogy for the idea of certain kinds of macromutation giving rise to evolutionary change.

…

Indeed, Hoyle’s fundamental error was that he, in effect, thought (without realizing it) that the theory of natural selection did depend upon macromutation. The idea of a single macromutation’s giving rise to a fully functioning eye with the properties listed above, where there was only bare skin before, is, indeed, just about as improbable as a hurricane assembling a Boeing 747. This is why I refer to this kind of hypothetical macromutation as a Boeing 747 macromutation. Stretched DC8 macromutations are mutations that, although they may be large in the magnitude of their effects, turn out not to be large in terms of their complexity. The Stretched DC8 is an airliner that was made by modifying an earlier airliner, the DC8.

…

If you struck lucky on one of those multi-dialled combination locks on bank safes, it would seem a very major miracle, for the odds against it are many millions to one, and you would be able to steal a fortune. Now, hitting upon the lucky number that opens the bank’s safe is the equivalent, in our analogy, of hurling scrap metal around at random and happening to assemble a Boeing 747. Of all the millions of unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, positions of the combination lock, only one opens the lock. Similarly, of all the millions of unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, arrangements of a heap of junk, only one (or very few) will fly. The uniqueness of the arrangement that flies, or that opens the safe, is nothing to do with hindsight.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

He found a top-of-the-line French engine that could generate more power, cut down its oversize propellers, moved the fuel tanks to the outside of the fuselage, and added an extra seat. Business boomed. For the next four decades, Trippe applied this strategy over and over. He designed and demanded bigger and faster planes that no one thought could be built, from his three-seater taxi all the way to the Boeing 747. Pan Am launched the Jet Age, brought international travel to the masses, and became the largest airline in the world. Trippe was a quietly dominant P-type innovator. Do you remember that American Airlines created the frequent flier program? Or SuperSaver fares? Or do you have any idea what two-tier employment is?

…

“If you build it,” said Trippe, “I’ll buy it.” “If you buy it, I’ll build it,” Allen responded. One more dance. On December 22, they signed, once again, the largest corporate deal in history to that time: $525 million for 25 production models of a new, first-in-class plane. Allen gave it a name: the Boeing 747. To fill two and a half times as many seats, an airline needs two and a half times as many passengers. Pan Am’s lock on international travel, however, had been weakening. Congress had launched an antitrust investigation of Pan Am’s monopoly on foreign routes in the 1950s. Populist voices complained that regulators were protecting industry giants rather than consumers.

…

Flying to secondary airports. Reducing turnaround times to 20 minutes. Like Sam Walton’s supersized stores far outside cities, none of the ideas involved new technologies. They were all small changes in strategy that no one thought would amount to much. They were all S-type loonshots. Boeing delivered its first 747 in January 1969. The music had stopped, but Pan Am didn’t notice. It ordered eight more 747s for another $200 million. Then it splurged on a new $100 million terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. While its competitors nurtured S-type loonshots, Pan Am doubled down on franchise. The faint glimmers from those S-type loonshots were dwarfed by the decade’s most glamorous P-type loonshot: the 747 jumbo-jet airliner.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic.58 Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility.

…

CHAPTER 4 WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD The priests of the different religious sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. – THOMAS JEFFERSON THE ULTIMATE BOEING 747 The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument – but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention.

…

In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747. The argument from improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define ‘come about by chance’ as a synonym for ‘come about in the absence of deliberate design’. Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability.

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

But the Joint Chiefs, the heads of the armed forces, the principal military advisers to the President and the National Security administration continued to plan for a major exercise, to be called Ivy League 82, to rehearse the command and control of forces during a crisis in which the United States was hit by a major nuclear strike. In the build-up to this exercise, on 15 November 1981, Reagan flew on a specially adapted Boeing 747 known as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. This aircraft was kitted out as a command centre from which the President could issue orders in the event of a nuclear attack that had devastated Washington and other parts of the US. It was nicknamed the ‘Doomsday Plane’ and was supposed to be able to remain airborne for seventy-two hours without refuelling.

…

Captain Chun Byung-in was in charge of the flight. He was a tall, stocky man, larger than most Korean males. He had been a fighter pilot in the Korean Air Force and was known then as an aggressive, bold flier. He had joined KAL in 1972 and was one of their most experienced pilots, having clocked up 6600 hours flying Boeing 747s, and had been flying the Anchorage to Seoul route for five years. He had just received a commendation for his long accident-free record. He had also been picked out to fly the South Korean President on three international journeys–a highly prestigious honour. He was one of the best-known pilots in Korea and certainly one of the most respected.

…

He reported that he could see its navigation lights flashing. He then moved closer, and although he could not see the logo on the tail fin he could see a row of windows on the side of the aircraft. The windows would have been dark as the screens would have been down to allow passengers to sleep. The outline of a Boeing 747 jumbo was quite different to that of a Boeing 707, from which the RC-135 was adapted. But both had four engines below the wings and Ossipovich had never been trained in the identification of B-747s. He was absolutely sure that this must be some kind of spy plane disguised as a civilian airliner or a large cargo plane.

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business by John Newhouse

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, corporate governance, demand response, high-speed rail, legacy carrier, low cost airline, MITM: man-in-the-middle, upwardly mobile

Airbus’s calculation was that eventually JAL would see its competitors—Korean Airlines, SIA, and others—flying seven A380 flights in and out of Narita every day and would do the simple math: the cost of flying five hundred or so people on the long routes would be less with A380’s than with Boeing 747’s. So the question (Airbus thought) would not be whether JAL would buy the A380 but when. Then, toward the end of 2005, Boeing began offering the 747-8, a bigger and highly improved version of its own jumbo. This aircraft seemed capable of prospering in various Asian markets, including, most important, Japan’s. IN 2004, people in the United States were averaging about 2.2 trips by air annually, according to Airbus calculations.

…

An A380 could take 550 passengers from Tokyo to, say, Los Angeles or New York, where many of them would then transfer to flights going to Denver, Phoenix, Cleveland, and so on. And, Airbus argues, this superjumbo airplane will be cheaper to operate than other aircraft, partly because it will burn less fuel per passenger. Its operating costs are expected to be 15 percent below those of Boeing’s 747. Boeing had the better strategy. Until recently, an airplane’s range was equated with its size; the bigger it was, the farther it was expected to travel. But with today’s more advanced technology, that needn’t be the case. Boeing’s 787 will carry half as many passengers as the A380 between cities set equally far apart, but will carry them directly from one point to another—from Tokyo, say, to Denver, Phoenix, or Cleveland—with no intermediate stop in a hub airport.

…

An article in the Seattle Times in January 1994 warned readers that although Clinton had visited Boeing the previous winter, his administration’s focus had shifted to Long Beach, California, where Douglas Aircraft manufactured its airplanes. California, the piece noted, “was crucial to Clinton’s election.”34 Also, Missouri was a so-called swing state, and Saint Louis was headquarters for McDac. In the end, Saudia bought twenty-three Boeing 777’s and five 747-400’s, twenty-eight aircraft in all. And it purchased thirty-three airplanes from McDac, four MD-11 freighters and twenty-nine MD-90’s. As seen from Seattle, the good news—that Airbus was beaten on a deal it had expected to win—was mixed with having to divide the business with McDac. Some of Boeing’s board members reacted angrily.

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

Then we obtain a type rating, a separate license to fly one specific kind of aircraft, such as a Boeing 747, or perhaps a series of aircraft designed with similar cockpits for exactly this purpose. A type rating involves a course of several months, including classroom and simulator training, as well as actual flying. When we switch to a new aircraft, the new type rating replaces the old one, and usually we are no longer permitted to fly the previous type. Some pilots fly a dozen types or more in their career. I may fly only three—the smaller short-haul Airbus airliner I started on, the Boeing 747-400, and probably one new type, between the 747’s retirement and my own.

…

I’d be woken by an alarm in the 4 a.m. darkness of Helsinki or Warsaw or Bucharest or Istanbul, and there would be a brief bleary moment, in the hotel room whose shape and layout I’d already forgotten in the hours since I’d switched off the light, when I’d ask myself if I’d only been dreaming that I became a pilot. Then I would imagine the day of flying ahead, crossing back and forth in the skies of Europe, almost as excitedly as if it was my first day. I now fly a larger airplane, the Boeing 747. On longer flights we carry additional pilots so that each of us can take a legally prescribed break, a time to sleep and dream, perhaps, while Kazakhstan or Brazil or the Sahara rolls steadily under the line of the wing. Frequent travelers, in the first hours or days of a trip, may be familiar with the experience of jet lag or a hotel wake-up call summoning them from the heart of night journeys they would otherwise have forgotten.

…

In all contradiction to what we know about our negative influences on the world, so often from above it’s disturbingly easy to imagine that we are the first to look upon the earth, that we are seeking a level place to set down our ship. — The author J. G. Ballard wrote that “civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.” Those who fly often may naturally acquire the worldview, inaugurated by the 747, that takes a planet to be a reasonably sized thing. I’ve come to measure out countries in jet time. Algeria surprised me, when I first started to fly across Africa. North to south it is nearly a two-hour country and I now feel what I did not then know, that it is the largest country in Africa.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, British Empire, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, megacity, megastructure, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, rolodex, X Prize

But this has not been a universal experience. For example, the MTOW of the Boeing 747 rose from 333 t for the 100 series launched in 1969 to 442.25 t for the latest version 747-8i – but (because of a longer maximum range) so did the relative weight, from as low as 605 kg/passenger in 1969 to nearly 950 kg/passenger for the 747-8. And, contrary to the impression created by the unprecedented extent of composite materials in that new plane, the zero-fuel weight of the Boeing 787 is actually higher than that of the Boeing 747-8: when the comparison is made for three-class seating (467 people in the 747, 242 people in the 787) the smaller plane rates at 665 kg/passenger, the larger one at 623 kg/passenger (Boeing, 2012).

…

Agronomos ETSIAUPM, Madrid, http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/NPK/Documents/Madrid_NPK_supply_report_FINAL_Blanco.pdf (accessed 22 May 2013). Boeckel, B. and Baumann, K.-H. (2008) Vertical and lateral variations in coccolithophore community structure across the subtropical frontal zone in the South Atlantic Ocean. Marine Mircopaleontology, 67: 255–273. Boeing (2012) 747 Family, http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/747family/747-8_facts.page (accessed 22 May 2013). Boesch, C. and Tomasello, M. (1998) Chimpanzee and human cultures. Current Anthropology, 39: 591–614. Bolin, C.A. and Smith, S. (2011) Life cycle assessment of ACQ-treated lumber with comparison to wood plastic composite decking.

…

And the complexity of airplane design increased the number of blueprints by another order of magnitude. A World War II bomber required about 8000 drawings – and the adoption of jet propulsion (starting in the 1940s for military designs and a decade later for civilian aircraft) and the introduction of wide-bodied jetliners during the 1960s brought another order of magnitude increase. The Boeing 747, conceived in 1965 and launched in 1969, required about 75 000 drawings adding up to nearly 8 t (Boeing, 2012). This is why, during the 1970s, Boeing developed a mainframe-based CAD system that eventually contained more than 1 million drawings and that was replaced, after more than 25 years of service, by a server-based Sun Solaris operating system (Nielsen, 2003).

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

the first “jumbo” jet, would take four years, and the labor of fifty thousand mechanics: Ed Van Jinte, “The Unexpected Success of the Boeing 747,” Works That Work, December 2017. In 1937, the average airplane carried only 6.5 passengers: Federal Aviation Administration, Economic Impact Report 2015, January 2015. The 747 could hold nearly 500 . . . two and a half times more than its immediate predecessor: Van Jinte, “The Unexpected Success of the Boeing 747,” Works That Work, December 2017. In 1937, a flight from New York to Los Angeles took over eighteen hours: Henry Ladd Smith, Airways: The History of Commercial Aviation in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1942).

…

for the pleasure you would pay: The National Air and Space Museum, “America By Air,” https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/america-by-air/online/, accessed August 30, 2018. over 80 percent of Americans had still not set foot: Henry Ladd Smith, Airways: The History of Commercial Aviation in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1942). Within a year, the 747 had cut the cost of flying in half: Howard Slutsken, “Five ways Boeing’s 747 jumbo jet changed travel,” www.cnn.com/travel/article/boeing-747-jumbo-jet-travel/index.html, November 7, 2017; updated February 8, 2019. The first TJ’s would open with one hundred brands of scotch: Joe Coulombe to author. It’s hard to imagine tiki as sincere: Thoughts on tiki informed by Wayne Curtis’s And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (New York: Broadway Books, 2018); Sven A.

…

“They weren’t any smarter, but college gave them a different vocabulary.” And he decided he was going to give them a chance to flex it while they shopped. * * * — The second thing Joe saw was in the air. Pan Am had just placed an order for twenty-five airplanes of a radically new design. The Boeing 747, the first “jumbo” jet, would take four years and the labor of fifty thousand mechanics to get off the ground. And while much of the world followed its progress, marveling at the engineering required to get a tube of steel the size of Lady Liberty aloft, Joe read about the 747’s development and saw the future of grocery.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

The extraordinary beauty of the wings of the Second World War fighter, the Spitfire, the amazing watershed represented by the Stealth Bomber were both landmarks, not only in aeronautical history. They affected the design of cars and furniture, clothes and domestic appliances. But it is the Boeing 747, known in its early days as the jumbo, that has the most powerful visual presence, and which can be said to be the aircraft that has had the single biggest impact on the world. When the Boeing 747 made its first public appearance on 30 September 1968, it was the largest passenger jet the world had ever seen. The first version could take 450 passengers, more than twice as many as its largest predecessor.

…

What was not so immediately obvious was that the plane would also turn out to be one of the most successful airliners ever built. Still in production thirty-five years later, Boeing delivered the 1,000th 747 to Singapore Airlines in September 1993. There have been another 400 built since then: bigger, faster, smarter but still basically with the same ingredients as the original N7470, even after the introduction of the curious swept-up wing tips and the stretched upper deck of the later versions. The Boeing 747 was not the only aircraft that attempted to define the new category of wide-body, or twin-aisle jet. It was developed just ahead of rival products from Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas in a titanic struggle for domination of the market for big passenger jets that would eventually force both Boeing’s rivals out of the business.

…

The DC-10 was more blunt about the way its engines were distributed. Its third engine did not sit on the hull like the Lockheed, but was lashed, in an apparently ad hoc way, to the tail. It looked unstable, and the aesthetic prejudice was reinforced tragically when a DC-10 lost an engine on take-off and crashed, killing all on board. The Boeing 747 became more than a commercial necessity for airlines flying heavily trafficked routes. For the more insecure politicians and tycoons, owning a jumbo or two became an essential trophy for a while, one to go with the fleet of armoured Mercedes cars and the crop of mirror-glass skyscrapers in their home towns.

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbus A320, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, index card, John Snow's cholera map, megacity, RAND corporation, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

But aviation had this challenge, too, and somehow pilots’ checklists met it. Among the articles I found was one by Daniel Boorman from the Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington. I gave him a call. He proved to be a veteran pilot who’d spent the last two decades developing checklists and flight deck controls for Boeing aircraft from the 747-400 forward. He’d most recently been one of the technical leaders behind the flight deck design for the new 787 Dreamliner, including its pilot controls, displays, and system of checklists. He is among the keepers of what could be called Boeing’s “flight philosophy.” When you get on a Boeing aircraft, there is a theory that governs the way your cockpit crew flies that plane—what their routines are, what they do manually, what they leave to computers, and how they should react when the unexpected occurs.

…

Boorman showed me the one for when the DOOR FWD CARGO warning light goes on in midflight. This signals that the forward cargo door is not closed and secure, which is extremely dangerous. He told me of a 1989 case he’d studied in which exactly this problem occurred. An electrical short had caused a Boeing 747 cargo door to become unlatched during a United Airlines flight out of Honolulu on its way to Auckland, New Zealand, with 337 passengers on board. The plane was climbing past twenty-two thousand feet and the cabin was pressurized to maintain oxygen levels for the passengers. At that altitude, a loose, unlatched cargo door is a serious hazard: if it opens enough to begin leaking air, the large pressure difference between inside and out causes a “ring-pull” effect—an explosive release like pulling the ring top on a shaken soda can.

…

As recently as the 1970s, some airline pilots remained notoriously bluff about their preparations, however carefully designed. “I’ve never had a problem,” they would say. Or “Let’s get going. Everything’s fine.” Or “I’m the captain. This is my ship. And you’re wasting my time.” Consider, for example, the infamous 1977 Tenerife disaster. It was the deadliest accident in aviation history. Two Boeing 747 airliners collided at high speed in fog on a Canary Islands runway, killing 583 people on board. The captain on one of the planes, a KLM flight, had misunderstood air traffic control instructions conveying that he was not cleared for takeoff on the runway—and disregarded the second officer, who recognized that the instructions were unclear.

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

It was a machine that was, broadly speaking, a scaled-up version of the orbiting Shuttle itself; a father carrying his son on his back. And it was a behemoth. At 204 feet long, the machine Mueller and Faget were suggesting would have the hypersonic performance of the little X-15 rocket plane, but be built on the scale of Boeing’s new 747 jumbo jet—the world’s largest airliner. As if that wasn’t enough, NASA even commissioned a study to explore the possibility of using Faget’s winged Space Shuttle design for ferrying payloads to and from the moon. To do so, a report concluded in October, would require twenty-nine Shuttle launches.

…

Air-launched American aircraft, like Yeager’s X-1 or the X-15, had always been dropped from beneath the carrier aircraft, but, inspired by Mayo, Kiker started to explore whether the major’s concept could be successfully adopted by the Shuttle program. He corresponded with Major Mayo’s widow, who was only too happy to share her late husband’s reports. There were just two contenders for the job of giving the orbiter a piggyback: the USAF’s new C-5A Galaxy transporter, then the biggest airplane in the world, and the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, the world’s biggest airliner. Kiker was given data from both companies and realized that in all three key areas, propulsion, aerodynamics and structural strength, both of the heavies were up to the job. Encouraged by Houston’s engineering boss Max Faget, Kiker took his proposal to the orbiter program manager, Aaron Cohen, whose reaction was straightforward.

…

Instead, tracked by the Department of Defense, the disposable tank burned and broke up on reentry, depositing what remained from its blazing descent in the Indian Ocean. It was also going to be the biggest single structure ever launched into space. Over 150 feet long and, at 27 feet, 6 feet wider than the fuselage of a Boeing 747, it could more or less have engulfed the Saturn IB rocket being prepared to carry the Apollo-Soyuz crew into orbit. In commissioning the painting, Odom wanted to remind the Michoud workforce of the size and complexity of the job they had to do. Not only did the tank have to carry the liquid hydrogen and oxygen that slaked the main engines, it also acted as the backbone of the whole stack.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

I could name them, unmemorably, saltation (1) and saltation (2), but instead I shall pursue an earlier fancy for airliners as metaphors, and label them ‘Boeing 747’ and ‘Stretched DC-8’ saltation. 747 saltation is the inconceivable kind. It gets its name from Sir Fred Hoyle’s much-quoted metaphor for his own cosmic misunderstanding of Darwinism. Hoyle compared Darwinian selection to a tornado, blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 (what he overlooked, of course, was the point about luck being ‘smeared out’ in small steps – see above). Stretched DC-8 saltation is quite different. It is not in principle hard to believe in at all.

…

It has to be the product of some very special process that generates improbability. The mistake is to jump to the conclusion that ‘design’ is that very special process. In fact it is natural selection. The late Sir Fred Hoyle’s jocular analogy of the Boeing 747 is useful, although it, too, turns out to make the opposite point to the one he intended. The spontaneous origin of the complexity of life, he said, is as improbable as a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard and spontaneously assembling a Boeing 747. Everybody agrees that airliners and living bodies are too improbable to be assembled by chance. A more precise characterization of the kind of improbability we are talking about is specified improbability (or specified complexity).

…

They are intelligent design and natural selection, and only the latter is capable of serving as an ultimate explanation. It generates specified improbability from a starting point of great simplicity. Intelligent design can’t do that, because the designer must itself be an entity at an extremely high level of specified improbability. Whereas the specification of the Boeing 747 is that it must be able to fly, the specification of the ‘intelligent designer’ is that it must be able to design. And intelligent design cannot be the ultimate explanation for anything, for it begs the question of its own origin. From the lowlands of primeval simplicity, natural selection gradually and steadily ramps its way up the gentle slopes of Mount Improbable until, after sufficient geological time, the end product of evolution is an object such as an eye or a heart – something of such an elevated level of specified improbability that no sane person could attribute it to random chance.

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

It would be unwise to try to predict what computer technology will be capable of in a hundred years, still less a thousand. But it seems highly unlikely to me that, if the Singularity occurs, it will take us by surprise, as in the Terminator narrative. To use an analogy by Rodney Brooks, think of human-level intelligence as a Boeing 747. Is it likely that we would invent a Boeing 747 by accident? Or that we would develop a Boeing 747 without expecting to? A counter response is that, although it might be unlikely, the consequences for us all if it did occur would be so dramatic that this justifies thinking and planning ahead for the Singularity now. Whether or not the Singularity is about to happen (and it should be clear that I don’t believe it is), it does seem that there are enough concerns about AI at present to think seriously about whether it needs to be regulated.

…

Brooks made his case in a satirical parable, published in 1991:1 Suppose it is the 1890s. Artificial Flight (AF) is the glamour subject in science, engineering and venture capital circles. A bunch of AF researchers are miraculously transported by a time machine to the 1980s for a few hours. They spend the whole time in the passenger cabin of a commercial passenger Boeing 747 on a medium duration flight. Returned to the 1890s, they feel invigorated, knowing that AF is possible on a grand scale. They immediately set to work duplicating what they have seen. They make great progress in designing pitched seats, double pane windows and know that if only they can figure out those weird ‘plastics’ they will have their grail within their grasp.

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

His one major reservation was whether the GPS program might dry up and blow away. He sought the advice of Brad Parkinson, who told Trimble that if the project had survived the 1970s, it was likely here to stay. As it turned out, one of the major Cold War geopolitical crises of the 1980s ensured that it was. On the final day of August 1983, a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 bound for Seoul left New York and flew to Anchorage for the first leg of its journey. After departing from Alaska, sometime during the early morning of September 1, the plane was shot out of the sky over the Sea of Japan by two missiles fired by a Soviet pilot, just off the Russian island of Sakhalin.

…

If this were a smaller airport, the conga line would be more like dancing the limbo, as planes descend in a sort of stair-step formation: dropping altitude, flying straight for a while, dropping again, repeating the process until the final approach. GPS gives pilots more leeway in plotting an approach to the airport, with gradual descents and less stair-stepping, and a reduced minimum space between planes. Basically, it allows crowded airspace to be used more efficiently, and these little changes add up. Every time a Boeing 747 lands in San Francisco without taking a side trip to Livermore, 1,600 gallons of fuel are saved. The FAA estimates that the planes vying for space around Washington, DC’s two airports will save 2.3 million gallons of fuel per year, and reduce emissions by 7,300 metric tons. Commercial airlines aren’t the only ones reaping the benefits.

…

., 205–7 Big Data External Monetisation Model, 192 BI Inc., 195 bin Laden, Osama, 255 Birnbaum, Mel, 59–60, 70, 77 black holes, 209, 257 black market, 183 “black war program,” 62 Blue Nile Datum, 255 Bluetooth, 72, 127 Bock, Yehuda, 214–15, 218–21, 223–26 body language, 236 Boeing Company, 51 Boeing 737s, 138 Boeing 747s, 81, 143 Bojczak, Gary, 201, 283–84 bombing, 47, 70–72, 271 of Baghdad, 66–67 carpet-, 50, 52 civilian casualties of, 50, 62 GPS-guided, 70–71, 145 of Japan, 49–50 low-altitude nighttime, 49–50 of North Vietnam, 51, 70 of Pearl Harbor, 34 pinpoint, 58, 60, 65, 71, 153 strategic, 48–49 terrorist, 185 bombs: dirty, 146 faux, 77 Bora Bora, 7 Boston, Mass., 239–40 Boulder, Colo., 154, 215, 217, 227 brain, 133–34 gray matter increase in, 133 hippocampus of, 129, 133 of London cab drivers, 132–33 mapping in, see maps, cognitive Brazil, 204 British Ministry of Justice, 197 British Museum, 263 Buckley, William F., 86–87 Buddi company, 197–99 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 97 Burkina Faso, 254–55 Burrell, Gary, 126–27, 242 Bush, George H.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

The Thames Tunnel: from freight shaft to world-class tourist attraction, and now a passenger railway tunnel. Fast forward 150 years to the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994. The scale is bigger but the principles remain the same. Ground-breaking innovation enables the transport of 1 million tonnes of freight and 10 million people per year between England and France. The Boeing 747 became an iconic passenger airliner but was originally designed for the military and hastily repurposed for freight, which is why it has a bump at the front, for loading the largest payloads. Eventually, airlines repurposed the upper deck for first class seating and dining, offering luxurious seclusion for the most profitable passengers.

…

Development had taken so long that the decades-old analogue control units were too costly to update to modern standards, while the steep take-off and landing angles put unrelenting loads on the long landing gear and tyres.29 It was expensive to maintain and carried fewer than 120 passengers. Its fuel consumption per passenger was five times higher than that of a Boeing 747. But just as important as the technical reasons for failure was the fact that Concorde’s engineering could not survive in a human habitat. It was too noisy, too dirty and too exhausting. Most people couldn’t afford to use it. It was noisy on take-off, so people who lived near airports lobbied against it.

…

People were now paying to rub shoulders with Mick Jagger while sipping gin and tonic, not just to say they were flying supersonic. Concorde had become an eleven-mile-high social club. British Airways posted five consecutive profitable years, peaking at £53 million in 1987.31 Concorde was in full bloom. Out-competed by comfort and convenience By the 1990s the (much slower) Boeing 747 had acquired reclining flat-bed seats and seat-back video entertainment screens. The narrow Concorde was unable to adopt the former and chose to shun the latter.32 What’s cooler than flying supersonic? It turns out that, for many, the answer was a movie in their pyjamas and getting a half-decent night’s sleep.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility.

…

Had he not chosen to abandon his religion for the materialist worldview, he might have earned a living as a satirist, as the ensuing two feuilletons demonstrate. The priests of the different religions sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. —THOMAS JEFFERSON The Ultimate Boeing 747 The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favor of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument—but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention.

…

In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747. The argument for improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define “come about by chance” as “a synonym for come about in the absence of deliberate design.” Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Jet engines are constantly being improved, but they date back to the 1920s and 30s and the first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet, began operations in 1951. The first passenger jets crossed the Atlantic in eight hours; it now takes seven, not including the faff at the airport.40 Supersonic commercial air travel came and went with Concorde. The Boeing 747, the workhorse of the sky's great trunk routes, first flew commercially in 1970 and is still going strong. The fastest planes in history – the legendary Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and the X-15 rocket jet – date from the 1960s. The Airbus A380 was heralded as a revolution; it's a great plane with countless small improvements.

…

As complexity increases, so does the difficulty of making a breakthrough. Already our societies face an ‘ingenuity gap’ which renders us incapable of dealing with the complexity of events.30 A system's complexity is rarely understood by any individual, a phenomenon shown to be behind industrial accidents like Three Mile Island or the BP oil spill.31 A single Boeing 747-400 contains over six million parts and 171 miles of wiring.32 Software now typically runs to millions of lines of code and runs on devices engineered at nano scales. In the twenty years since its creation in 1990, the program Photoshop's codebase grew by over forty times.33 This is typical of a ballooning underlying complexity in software.

…

Our closest star and planetary system is over 25 trillion miles away. A ship travelling at a million miles an hour would still take three thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri and involve engineering, biological and psychological challenges whose scope are far beyond anything ever attempted.39 The leap from a goods-carrying caravel to a Boeing 747 doesn't really do it justice. Transcontinental travel, before modern technology, was immensely tough. It was also a low-hanging fruit. This is where we find ourselves in the twenty-first century. As the challenge of big ideas increases in scale, there is no guarantee that we have the will or means to scale up our efforts to meet it.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

James’s Church and clock tower from Brno’s central square, photographed in the early twentieth century 143 Assistant at the Greenwich observatory time-signal control desk, c. 1897 147 Officials investigating bomb damage at the Edinburgh observatory, 1913 160 Government sketch showing the scene of the Greenwich observatory explosion, 1894 170 Greenwich observatory official posing with gate clock, c. 1925 172 Crawford Market and clock tower, Bombay, in an early-twentieth-century postcard 175 Ethel Cain, photographed after winning the “Golden Voice” competition final, 1935 180 Family photograph of Mary Dixon (right) with her older sisters, Anne (middle) and Margaret (left), outside their home in Jarrow, 1930s 181 Watchmaker Daniela Toms adjusting a Charles Frodsham and Co. wristwatch, 2020 188 Efratom miniature atomic clock, backup for the two clocks installed on the NTS-1 satellite, made c. 1972 198 Thwaites and Reed rolling-ball clock, made c. 1972 202 Doomsday Clock, photographed on January 23, 2020, after having been adjusted to 100 seconds to midnight 204 Plutonium timekeeper buried at Osaka, 1970 215 About Time Introduction Korean Air Lines Flight 007, 1983 It is the early hours of a crisp Alaskan morning. Korean Air Lines’ Captain Chun Byung-in, First Officer Son Dong-hui and Flight Engineer Kim Eui-dong stride purposefully across the tarmac of Anchorage International Airport and climb into the cockpit of the Boeing 747 airliner that they are rostered to fly to Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport. Flight KAL 007 has stopped off at Anchorage on its journey from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for servicing, refueling and a changeover of the flight and cabin crew. The Alaskan airport, on the northwest tip of North America, is, at this time, a common staging post for flights between the USA and eastern Asia.

…

Five hours after the Boeing jet leaves Alaska, and unknown to the Korean flight crew, a Sukhoi Su-15 supersonic jet, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Osipovich, is scrambled to intercept the airliner. Osipovich’s military commanders have recently spotted a US spy plane operating in the area, monitoring a missile test being carried out. This is a well-known Boeing RC-135 four-engine reconnaissance jet, similar in many ways to the Boeing 747 passenger jet but without the distinctive hump above the cockpit. Osipovich and his bosses are convinced the Korean Air Lines aircraft is another US spy plane. Twenty minutes later, having reached the airliner with its oblivious crew and passengers, Osipovich fires a burst of warning shots from his cannon across the Boeing’s nose, but the shells cannot be seen by the Korean crew, who carry on chatting, unaware of the danger that is fast closing in on them.

…

Meeting John at Greenwich in 2007 was a great inspiration, setting my research on a new path, though I have a long way yet to travel along it. Finally, this book is dedicated, with love, to my family. Notes INTRODUCTION 1.Quoted in “Attachment C: Background Information Related to the Report of the Completion of the Fact-Finding Investigation Regarding the Shooting Down of Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 (Flight KE 007) on 31 August 1983,” in State Letter 93/68 (Montreal: International Civil Aviation Organization, 1993), 14–16. 2.“Transcript of President Reagan’s Address on Downing of Korean Airliner,” The New York Times, 6 September 1983, 15. 1. ORDER 1.Attributed to the playwright Plautus, translated and quoted in Robert Hannah, Time in Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 82. 2.The playwright Alkiphron, translated and quoted in ibid., 82. 3.Cassiodorus, translated and quoted in Paulo Forlati, “Roman Solar-Acoustic Clock in Verona,” Antiquarian Horology 9, no. 2 (March 1975): 199. 4.Translated and quoted in ibid., 201. 5.Quoted in Wu Hung, “Monumentality of Time: Giant Clocks, the Drum Tower, the Clock Tower,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

And in general, as a complex system becomes big enough, it ends up becoming a kluge of one sort or another, as we shall see. The airplane the Wright brothers built in 1903 was a masterpiece of simplicity, constructed with a small number of parts and weighing only 750 pounds including the pilot. A Boeing 747-400 has 147,000 pounds of aluminum, 6 million individual parts, and 171 miles of wiring. More generally, during the past 200 years the numbers of individual parts in our most complicated manufactured machines have increased massively. What about software, which undergirds the modern technological systems of every aspect of our lives?

…

Katz, “A Mathematical Approach to the Study of the United States Code,” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 389, no. 19 (2010): 4195–200, http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.4146. airplane the Wright brothers built: “Wright 1903 Flyer,” NASA Glenn Research Center, accessed June 17, 2015, http://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/air1903.html. A Boeing 747-400: “747 Fun Facts,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes, https://web.archive.org/web/20111205231111/http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/pf/pf_facts.html. the numbers of individual parts: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 279. Windows operating system became: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 279; David McCandless, “Codebases: Millions of Lines of Code,” infographic, v. 0.9, Information Is Beautiful, September 24, 2015, http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

In the early 1960s, Trans World Airlines began installing Doppler radar on its planes. This new type of radar could measure the plane’s location based on the radio echoes from the ground below, and it was simple enough that the pilot and copilot could use it themselves. Its invention eliminated hundreds of navigator jobs.25 Inertial navigation would take care of the rest. The Boeing 747 became the first commercial jet to install an inertial rig as standard equipment—three of them, in fact, with two as backups. The system, called Carousel and manufactured by the Delco Electronics division of General Motors, let the pilot and copilot punch in the desired course as a series of waypoints, like bread crumbs in space.

…

There was Doppler radar, capable of identifying the aircraft’s location by bouncing radio signals off the earth below. As Doppler began to be installed on planes in the early 1960s, airlines that had used full-time navigators on international flights began to abandon the practice; the pilot and first officer could find their way around the world without the extra help. Then there was inertial navigation. The Boeing 747 had been the first commercial airliner to use an inertial navigator; indeed, each plane carried three of them, for extra reliability. The system had proven extremely reliable and quite accurate, but only when used properly. An investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization concluded that KAL 007 went wrong because its flight crew blundered while setting up the system.

…

., The Global Positioning System: Assessing National Policies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1995), 264. 19. “Crew Uses GPS to Cross Ocean,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 6, 1983. 20. Powers and Parkinson, “Origins of GPS.” 21. Asaf Degani, Taming HAL: Designing Interfaces Beyond 2001 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 49–65. See also Destruction of Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 on 31 August 1983 (Montreal: International Civil Aviation Organization, June 1993), 42. 22. Federal Register, 46 F.R. 20724, April 7, 1981. 23. Tom Logsdon, interview with the author, August 23, 2012. 24. United States National Imagery and Mapping Agency, The American Practical Navigator (Arcata, CA: Paradise Cay, 2002), 167.

Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson by William Langewiesche

Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Bernard Ziegler, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, crew resource management, gentrification, New Journalism, two and twenty, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche

The cost of repairs ran to $9 million, of which the airport manager, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had to pay more than half, presumably because it was supposed to have kept geese away. Three months later, in September 1995, an Airbus A320 landing at LaGuardia struck more than a dozen Canada geese, including at least one that went into an engine, causing it to torch. The repair cost was $2.5 million. In December 1995, a Boeing 747 inbound to Kennedy flew through a flock of geese, destroying one engine, badly damaging another, and causing extensive damage to the fuselage. The pilot reported that the birds had thumped like sandbags hitting his airplane. The birds in that case turned out to have been migratory snow geese, but this was too fine a distinction.

…

It was set in 2006, also in Argentina in Andean lift, by two American pilots wearing pressure suits—the adventurer Steve Fossett (who died a year later in a small airplane in California) and a former NASA test pilot named Einar Enevoldson, who specialized in ultrahigh flying. Again, this was in a glider. • It is obvious that no one will set soaring records in an airliner without power, but history shows that a total loss of thrust is not necessarily catastrophic. There was the 1982 case, for instance, of a British Airways Boeing 747 that flew through a volcanic plume one night over Indonesia and suffered compressor stalls and the loss of all four engines at 37,000 feet. The ensuing glide (with engines harmlessly belching fire) was written up afterward as a “near-death experience” for the passengers, during which the airplane “plunged.”

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Apple’s Stuart Cheshire concurs that it’s high time for latency to become a top priority for network engineers. He’s appalled that companies who advertise “fast” Internet connections refer only to high bandwidth, not to low delay. By analogy, he notes that a Boeing 737 and a Boeing 747 both fly at about five hundred miles per hour; the former can hold 120 passengers, while the latter carries three times as many. So “would you say that a Boeing 747 is three times ‘faster’ than a Boeing 737? Of course not,” Cheshire exclaims. Capacity does matter sometimes: for transferring large files, bandwidth is key. (If you’ve got a huge amount of cargo to move, a container ship may well trump thousands of trips by a 747.)

…

large-scale industrial sorting problems: The current records for sorting are hosted at http://sortbenchmark.org/. As of 2014, a group from Samsung holds the record for sorting the most data in a minute—a whopping 3.7 terabytes of data. That’s the equivalent of almost 37 billion playing cards, enough to fill five hundred Boeing 747s to capacity, putting Zdeněk Bradáč’s human record for sorting cards in perspective. 167 books a minute: Says shipping manager Tony Miranda, “We will process—I think our highest is—250 totes in one hour. Our average is about 180 totes in one hour. Keep in mind, each tote has about 40-plus items inside of it.”

…

Explicit Congestion Notification, or ECN: The Request for Comments (RFC) document for ECN is Ramakrishnan, Floyd, and Black, The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP, which is a revision of Ramakrishnan and Floyd, A Proposal to Add Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP. Though the original proposal dates from the 1990s, ECN remains unimplemented in standard networking hardware today (Stuart Cheshire, personal interview, February 26, 2015). “This is a long-term swamp”: Jim Gettys, personal interview, July 15, 2014. “would you say that a Boeing 747 is three times ‘faster’”: This comes from Cheshire’s famous 1996 “rant” “It’s the Latency, Stupid.” See http://stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html. Twenty years later, the sentiment is only truer. 11. GAME THEORY “I believe humans are noble and honorable”: Steve Jobs, interview with Gary Wolf, Wired, February 1996.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Frank Whittle patented the bypass idea already in 1936, and in 1952 Rolls-Royce built the first jet engine with a bypass, albeit just 0.3:1. By 1959, P&W’s JT3D (80.1 kN) had a bypass ratio of 1.4:1 and in 1970 the company introduced the first high-bypass engine, JT9D (initially 210 kN, bypass ratio 4/8:1, T/W 5.4–5.8) designed to power the Boeing 747 and other wide-body jetliners (Pratt & Whitney 2017). GE demonstrated an engine with an 8:1 bypass ratio already in 1964 and it became available as TF39 in 1968 for military C-5 Galaxy planes. The first engines of the GE90 family, designed for the long-range Boeing 777, entered service in 1996: they had thrust of 404 kN and a bypass ratio of 8.4.

…

In terms of macroscopic components, complex machines are easily as “species-rich” as complex ecosystems: the average Toyota car has 30,000 parts, Boeing 737 (the smallest plane of the 700 series) has about 400,000 parts (excluding wiring, bolts, and rivets), the new Boeing 787 has 2.3 million, and Boeing 747–8 has 6 million parts (Boeing 2013). Of course, the functioning of living systems (be they rain forests or human bodies) depends on assemblages of microbial species (microbiomes), and the numbers of bacteria, archaea, and microscopic fungi in a unit mass of forest will be vastly larger than the total of the smallest functional components in a unit mass of even the most complicated machine.

…

Cruising speeds for the first generation of these planes were set about 15% lower than the speed of sound (Mach, M) which is 1,062 km/h between 10.7 and 12.2 km (35,000–40,000 feet) above ground, where most long-distance flights take place. Speed of 0.85 M thus means cruising at just over 900 km/h. There has been no substantial change in the subsequent generations of jetliners, with cruising speeds at 0.86 M for Boeing 747, 0.84 M for the long-distance 777, and 0.85 M for both the newest Boeing (787) and for the double-decker Airbus 380 (see chapter 1, figure 1.16). All of these planes could be engineered to fly faster but additional drag generated as they surpass 1 M would make them significantly more expensive to operate: a speed plateau dictated by the economics of commercial operation has been thus in place ever since the beginning of the jetliner era.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Steven Duclos, “Energy-Critical Materials,” paper presented at Materials Research Society Fall Meeting and Exhibit, Boston, November 25, 2012. 35. Karl Gscneidner, telephone interview by David Abraham, November 12, 2013. 36. Duclos, “Energy-Critical Materials.” 37. Boeing Facility Tour, Everett, Washington, July 19, 2013. 38. Boeing, “Boeing Celebrates Delivery of 50Th 747-8,” May 29, 2013, http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2013-05-29-Boeing-Celebrates-Delivery-of-50th-747-8; Steven J. Duclos, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science and Technology,” February 10, 2010, accessed December 15, 2011, gop.science.house.gov/Media/hearings/oversight10/mar16/Duclos.pdf. 39.

…

The building seems oversized until you see the assembly lines: rows of planes, the biggest high-tech products on earth, nose to tail. Perhaps no single product uses more minor metals than an airplane. If you don’t think planes are high tech, consider that the wires connecting the electronic wizardry in just one Boeing 747 extend over 130 miles. But the electronics onboard are just the beginning. Planes over the past fifty years have shed steel, replacing it with composite materials and lighter metals like titanium. For example, the new Airbus A350 frame is 14 percent titanium compared to 6 percent in the older Airbus A320.

…

Since fuel accounts for around a third of airline costs, airline executives wanted more fuel-efficient planes. And those plane engines needed rhenium; therefore, demand for it increased. In essence airlines were exchanging dependence on fuel for dependence on rhenium. Boeing and GE must continuously understand the evolving rare metal trade because of their vast demand. Boeing’s 747 needs six million components from over thirty countries. What’s more, rhenium is just one metal of the seventy or so elements on the periodic table that General Electric and Boeing together use. Boeing likes to run a lean supply line; only five months elapse between the time that a component enters the manufacturing supply line until it leaves as part of a plane.37 While not building buffer supply stocks means that the company has more cash to spend on more productive investments, running such a lean supply chain puts the company at risk in ensuring long-term supplies of rare metals.

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

airline deregulation, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, flag carrier, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, RAND corporation, revenue passenger mile, Tenerife airport disaster, yield management, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Traffic was projected to increase by at least 15 percent a year into the next decade. Each 747 would replace two and a half 707s and would operate at 30 percent less seat-mile cost. The 747 would slice twenty-five minutes off each Atlantic crossing. And, oh, yes, Trippe added, the administration of President Johnson had given its blessing to the Boeing-Pan American 747 contract. That was the clincher. The board of directors asked a few questions, made comments, then did its duty. The members granted their official approval to the project that Trippe had already undertaken. Trippe had authorization to buy twenty-five 747s, as well as an option for ten more.

…

Everyone knew the day was past when Pan American could afford to be the torchbearer for new aviation technology. But for the new hires, it was the death of a promise made on the first day of their careers: Congratulations, gentlemen. You’re going to be SST pilots. . . Chapter Fourteen Besieged We have an unround situation. —EVERETTE WEBB, Boeing 747 project engineer Well, maybe they wouldn’t be SST pilots. But Pan Am had the Everyman airplane, and it was almost ready to fly. On a cold January day in 1970, Pat Nixon followed the example of First Ladies since Herhert Hoover’s wife launched Pan Am’s first S-40 flying boat, back in 1931.

…

They were shortened models of the 747 that, because of their reduced weight, had lower fuel consumption and thus longer range. Because of the shorter fuselages, they also had fewer seats, only 233, compared to the nearly-400-seat versions of the normal 747. Now the SPs were anachronisms from the seventies. Boeing was delivering full-size 747s with new, more powerful engines that had the same range as the undersized SPs. They also had upper decks that allowed a total load of as many as 500 passengers. A Pan Am executive said, “To equal the seats in one of those new planes, you have to fly two SPs in formation.” United was also taking the fleet of six Lockheed Tri-Stars, which Pan Am had been trying for several years to unload.

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

Magnetic confinement fusion aims for a temperature of roughly 10 keV, a confinement time of several seconds, and a density of 1020 particles per cubic meter (about a million times less dense than air). ICF, on the other hand, aims for the same temperature, a much shorter confinement time of 1 nanosecond, and a much larger density of 1031 particles per cubic meter (about a million times more dense than air). This density is equivalent to two Boeing 747 airplanes crammed into the volume of a gym locker! Figure 9.4 shows the different stages in a typical ICF implosion. You start with a tiny 1 millimeter spherical capsule comprised of a plastic shell filled with D–T fuel. The first step is to hit the capsule from all sides (and as uniformly as possible) with electromagnetic waves.

…

We require enormous power to be produced in light-weight devices (although they can have enormous volumes). Nevertheless, not only is fusion our best option for manned interstellar travel, it currently appears to be our only one.9 Figure 11.4:The energy required to accelerate a small spacecraft with the mass of a Boeing 747 airplane (i.e. a measly 400 tonnes) to a particular speed, given the propellant exhaust velocities from Figure 11.3. 11.2Fusion Thruster As discussed, designing an interstellar fusion thruster makes a commercial fusion power plant look easy. We have just seen that, even in optimistic circumstances, travel to Alpha Centauri would take an uncomfortably long time.

…

Index A agriculturalists energy sources, 4 air conditioners, 12 Al-Qaeda, 308 Alcator C-Mod, 231, 280, 301, 361 Alpha Centauri, 348 aneutronic see p-B, 292 ARC, 248 Argentina see Ronald, 179 Arkhipov, Vasili, 305 arsenals by country nuclear weapons, 304 ASDEX-U, 129, 193, 277 Aston, Francis, 177 atmospheric pollution, 238 B B-59 submarine, 305 bald spot, 103 banana orbits see super-bananas, 118, 190 baseload sources, 46 bell curve, 39, 83 Bell Telephone Laboratory, 184 Beria, Lavrenti, 189 beryllium, 162, 224, 324 Bethe, Hans, 178 Big Bang, 12 binding energy, 70–71 biomass, 35 Boeing 747 airplane, 353 Boltzmann constant, 69 bootstrap current, 189 bootstrap multiplication see bootstrap current, 254 brains, 59 bravery, 59, 335 brawn, 59 breakeven, 135 Breakthrough Starshot, 353 breeder reactors, 26, 330 fuelling proliferation, 333 bremsstrahlung see p-B, 293 burning plasma see ignition, breakeven, triple product, Lawson criteria, 136, 214 C C-2U, 278 Californium, 316 CANDU reactors, 327 capital cost, 240 carbon capture and storage, 39 Carnot limit, 31 catalyzed D–D fuel cycle, 85, 355 central solenoid, 145, 283 chain reaction, 314 chemical propulsion, 352 Chernobyl, 24 Chicago Pile-1, 311 classical transport, 123 climate change, 238–239 CNO cycle see stars, Bethe, Hans, 178 cold fusion, 77 Commonwealth Fusion Systems, 301 confinement, 82 electrostatic, 112 empirical scaling laws, 251 energy confinement time, 90 toroidal magnetic, 109 volume to surface area ratio argument, 256 conservation of momentum, 349 frozen lake argument, 350 convective eddies, 32 conventional spacecraft, 350 Coriolis force, 32 cost of electricity, 239 critical mass, 315 cross-section, 77–78 Cuban Missile Crisis, 304 current drive, 144 electron cyclotron, 152 electromagnetic wave, 150 inductive, 145 neutral beam, 148 cusp geometry see Lockheed Martin, 288 D D–3He fusion, 85, 300, 354 D–D fusion, 20, 85, 202, 301, 354 D–T fusion, 20, 83, 161, 202, 269, 281, 287, 292, 337 Darwin, Charles, 175 Debye length, 99 dense plasma focus see Lawrenceville plasma physics, 297 deuterium abundance on Earth, 22 diagnostics, 164–165 diffusion see random walk diffusion, 123 DIII-D, 277 direct drive see indirect drive, inertial confinement fusion, 272 dirty bombs, 321 dispatchable sources, 46 disruptions, 153–154, 222, 244, 267 mitigating, 155 divertor, 157, 194, 220, 256 double-edged sword nuclear energy as blueprint, 345 nuclear physics, 310 technologies, 311 E early hominids, 3 Earth–Moon system, 16, 41 Eddington, Arthur, 178 edge localized modes see ELMs, 194 Edison, Thomas, 6 electric field, 94, 150 electromagnetic force, 74 electromagnetic induction, 5, 12 electromagnetic repulsion, 67 electromagnetic waves, 269 electromagnetism, 90 electromagnets, 93 electrons, 65 in light bulbs, 6 electrostatic, 95 ELMs, 194, 222 ELMO bumpy torus, 114 empirical scaling law, 130, 251 enrichment, 333 energy conservation of, 11 flows of, 13 energy hierarchy, 58 energy storage, 50 Enola Gay, 305 entropy, 11 EPED, 197 exhaust velocity, 350 expanding electrical grids, 54 external power, 249 F Faraday, Michael, 5 Fat Man, 305 fissiled percent, 322 fertile material, 330 field-reversed configuration, 290 first wall, 153, 222 fission proliferation, 333 fission reactors, 325 climate versus nuclear security tradeoff, 335 fission–fusion hybrids, 332 flow, 197, 245 Fokker–Planck simulations see gyrokinetics, 209 formation of fossil fuels, 37 Forrest, Michael, 188–189 fossil fuels, 37 Fukushima, 24 fusion, 13, 16, 19 enrichment in fusion blanket, 337 proliferation, 336 fusion fuels, 83 fusion power density, 243 fusion reactor design, 237 disabling a proliferator, 338 small fusion system, 339 smallest planned, 159 timescale for blanket proliferation ramp-up, 340 fusion thruster, 354 G gas centrifuges, 318 gaseous diffusion, 317 General Atomics, 198, 279 General Fusion, 284 geopolitics, 343 geothermal, 16, 27 global zero, 343 gravitational confinement, 89 gravity, 13, 89 gravity-assist, 351 Greenwald limit, 251 gun-type bomb, 323 gyrokinetic simulations, 252 gyrokinetics, 206, 252 scale separation, 207 gyroradius, 92 H H-mode, 130, 193, 206, 252 hairy ball theorem, 103 Halite-Centurion, 274 half-life, 20 Harwell, 187 heat death of the Universe, 12 heat flux, 221 heating, 14, 218 electron cyclotron, 152 ion cyclotron, 152 heavy element synthesis, 15 heavy elements, 16 heavy water reactors, 327 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, 79 Helion Energy, 300 heliotron, 114 helium-3 abundance, 354 hex, 317 Hiroshima, 322, 336 hohlraum see inertial confinement fusion, 272 hydroelectric, 39 hydrogen bomb, 89, 304, 324 hydropower, 17 I IAEA, 334, 339 ignition, 131, 250, 269 MCF and ICF ignition differences, 274 implosion bomb, 323 inboard see torus terminology, 110 indirect drive see direct drive, inertial confinement fusion, 272 inductive heating, 147 Industrial Revolution, 4 inertial confinement fusion, 269 weaponization propspects, 271 intercontinental ballistic missiles see ICBM, 309 intercontinental electrical grids, 55 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 9 internal transport barriers see pedestal, 196 intermittency, 30, 46 INTOR, 225 IPA, 278 Iron Curtain, 181 isotopes, 20, 73 isotope effect, 204 isotopic semantics, 73 ITER, 137, 203, 211, 237, 248, 257, 273, 302, 353, 361 ignition, 214 Q, 213 strategy, 216 Ivy Mike, 304 J JET, 140, 155, 169, 198, 200, 260, 273, 277 jet engine, 349 JT-60, 260 JT-60SA, 140, 169, 361 JT-60U, 140, 277, 361 Juno spacecraft, 347 K K-DEMO, 361 Kelvin, Lord, 177 Khrushchev, Nikita, 187 kink limit, 246 Kremlin, 186 Kurchatov, Igor, 188 Kurchatov Institute, 185 L L-mode, 193, 252 Lamb, Horace, 127 Landau energy levels, 298 Landau damping, 151 Landau, Lev, 151 Langmuir, Irving, 165 Langmuir probes, 165 laser enrichment, 320 lattice structure, 156 Lavrentyev, Oleg, 186 Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, 296 Lawson criterion see triple product, 131, 324 Lawson, John, 131 levitated dipole, 114 limiter see divertor, 157, 194 linear magnetic, 100 lithium, 21, 242 lithium pebbles, 163 lithium-6, 84, 161 lithium-7, 161 lithium-ion batteries, 22, 51 Little Boy fissiled percent, 322 Lockheed Martin, 287 Lufthansa Flight 181, 199 M magnet(s), 139 permanent, 93 magnetic confinement fusion, 247 magnetic field, 91, 150, 247 magnetic islands, 117, 265 magnetic mirror, 100, 355 magnetic surfaces, 114, 144, 158, 191, 265 open versus closed, 158 magnetized target fusion see MTF, 284 magnetohydrodynamics see MHD, 121 Manhattan Project, 318 Mars, 347 mass–energy equivalence, 77 material survivability, 255 matter–antimatter annihilation, 352 mechanical stress, 142, 283 Mercury, 181 Mercury laser see NIF, 276 messy engineering endeavor, 259 MHD, 209, 246 MHD stability, 153 mini-golf, 68 Mini-Sphere, 278 MIT, 301 Model C stellarator, 189 moderator, 326 Moore’s Law see triple product, 136, 205 MRI machines, 140 MTF, 284, 300 Munich, 199 N Nagasaki, 305, 322 neoclassical transport, 126, 265 net electric power, 241–242 net electricity, 169 neutral beam, 220 negative ion acceleration, 220 neutral beams, 291 efficiency, 149 neutron capture cross-section, 331 neutron flux, 156 neutron multiplication, 224 neutron multiplication factor, 162 neutron multipliers, 162 neutron shielding, 292 New York Times, 180 NIF, 273, 336 niobium–titanium, 184 niobium–tin, 184, 248 Nixon, Richard, 224 Nobel Peace Prize, 186 Nobel Prize, 183 non-inductive see current drive; neutral beam, 149 non-renewable, 19 North Korea, 339 nucleons, 65 nuclear energy transition, 341 nuclear fission, 16, 23 nuclear proliferation, 238, 359 nuclear potential, 66 nuclear security, 336 nuclear weapon, 303 boosted implosion bomb, 323 defenses, 309 gun-type bomb, 322 hydrogen bomb, 323 implosion bomb, 322 inspectors, 340 neutron initiator, 324 proliferation with increased tritium availability, 342 significant quantity, 334 tamper, 322 Teller–Ulam design, 325 weapon designs, 321 yield, 303 nuclear winter, 308 O ocean waves, 44 Onnes, Heike, 181 outboard see torus terminology, 110 Oxford, 199 P p-B fusion, 290 particle drifts, 104 E × B drift, 106, 128 B drift, 106, 194 curvature drift, 106 Pauli exclusion principle, 183 pedestal, 193 Pelamis, 46 Perhapsatron, 114, 181, 285 photosynthesis, 35 plasma, 86 plasma current, 114, 264 maximization, 246 plasma flow, 197, 245 plasma gain, 169 plasma heating, 144 plasma power engineering multiplication factor, 170 plasma power multiplication factor, 135 plasma pressure, 244 plasma shaping, 198 Pluto, 321, 347 plutonium, 90 plutonium-239, 25 production, 320 reactor-grade, 329 weapons-grade, 321 poloidal field coils, 144 poloidal see torus terminology, 110 polonium-210, 162 power multiplication, 170 Princeton, 189, 198 Princeton University, 180 profits, 238 proliferation, 333 propellant, 349 proton–proton chain see CNO cycle, stars, Bethe, Hans, 179 proton–proton fusion, 28 public relations, 359 pure fission weapons, 325 Q quasineutrality, 97–98, 150 R radioactive waste, 167 random walk diffusion, 123 rate of energy consumption, 18 Rayleigh–Taylor instability, 271, 285 remote maintenance system, 204 renewable, 19, 57 resistivity, 141 Richter, Ronald, 179, 187 right-hand rule, 93 robotic maintenance, 169, 257 rocket equation, 351 role model effect of fusion technology, 344 S safety factor, 115 Sakharov, Andrei, 186 Saturn, 347 scattering collision, 67 scientific notation, 26 seasonal energy storage, 52 Seebeck effect, 6 seeds, 35 shaping, 198 D-shape, 198 shattered pellet injection see disruptions, 156 significant quantity, 340 solar, 16, 28 Solar System, 17, 348 energy flows, 15 space capsules see divertor, 160 space colonization, 349 SPARC, 301 spent fuel current world production, 334 spherical tokamaks, 281 spheromak, 114, 287 Spitzer, Lyman, 113, 180, 263 ST40, 278 Stalin, Joseph, 187 stars, 175 possible fusion reactions, 178 red giant phase, 15 steam engine, 4 steam turbine, 6 stellarator(s), 114, 263 ignited, 267 stochastic regions, 117, 265 strong nuclear force, 66 Sun, 347 lifetime of, 176 super-bananas see banana orbits, 118 super-duper H-mode, 259 supercomputers, 204 superconductivity, 141, 181, 248 Cooper pairs, 183 type I, 184 type II, 184 superconductor, 283 high-temperature, 185, 283, 301 REBCO, 186 materials, 182 problem with neutrons, 163 supernovae, 14–15 surface-to-air missiles, 309 Sword of Damocles, 306 Symmetric Tokamak, 189 T T-1, 188 T-3, 113, 189, 263, 278 T-7, 185 T4, 278 TAE Technologies, 280, 290 Tamm, Igor, 186 TCV, 201, 280 technetium, 24 temperature, 83 TFTR, 203, 277 tritium detection, 339 thermal equilibrium, 82 thermodynamic efficiency, 31 thermonuclear bomb see nuclear weapons — hydrogen bomb, 324 thermotron, 180 Thor, 110 Thomson scattering, 166 thorium, 321 Three Mile Island, 24 tidal, 16, 41 TNT, 304 toast making of, 7 tokamak, 113 Tokamak Energy Ltd., 281 Tore Supra, 141 toroidal torus terminology, 110 toroidal field, 140 toroidal field coils, 198 toroidal symmetry, 264 torsatron, 114 torus, 104 torus terminology, 110 trapped particles, 118 TRIAM-1M, 185 Trinity, 303, 344 triple product, 135, 267 tritium, 20, 161, 338 cost, 202 current reserves, 341 detecting use in fusion reactor, 339 increased availability proliferation risk, 342 tritium breeding, 215 tritium breeding blanket, 160, 247 Troyon limit, 243, 282 game of chicken, 244 violation, 245 Tsar Bomba, 304 Tuck, James, 181 tungsten, 224 turbulence, 206, 255 turbulent eddy, 128, 197 turbulent transport, 126 U U.S.S.

Industrial Internet by Jon Bruner

air gap, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, commoditize, computer vision, data acquisition, demand response, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Google X / Alphabet X, industrial robot, Internet of things, job automation, loose coupling, natural language processing, performance metric, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application

Real-time aviation networking tends to be constrained by bandwidth, which forces airlines to rely on a continuum of intelligence — processing some data locally, streaming some data, and waiting until a plane is on the ground and connected to a high-bandwidth pipeline to use the rest of it. Richard Ross, vice president for IT at Atlas Air, an air-cargo company that operates one of the world’s biggest Boeing 747 fleets, says “we can get quite a rich data stream from the plane — to the point where we had to become more selective about what we streamed real-time versus what we gathered once the plane landed, because satellite communications can quickly become too expensive.” Integrated data collection is important because airlines can build nuanced models out of collective maintenance and performance data.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

That's $200 million per passenger. Figure 1.1. SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully lands at Cape Canaveral, December 21, 2015. Image courtesy of SpaceX. Why is the price so high? One obvious reason why space launch costs so much more than air travel is that aircraft are reusable, while space launch systems are expendable. A Boeing 747 seats four hundred people and costs $400 million. If the plane were expended after every flight, the ticket price for a round-trip would have to be at least $2 million each, or one thousand times the going rate. Of course, an expendable 747 could be manufactured more cheaply than one built to last, but even so, prices would still be wildly prohibitive.

…

Between 1900 and 1940, the world was revolutionized: cities were electrified, telephones and broadcast radio became common, talking motion pictures appeared, automobiles became practical, and aviation progressed from the Wright Flyer to the DC-3 and Hawker Hurricane. Between 1940 and 1980, the world changed again, with the introduction of communication satellites and interplanetary spacecraft; computers; television; antibiotics; nuclear power; Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets; Boeing 747s and SR-71s. Compared to these changes, the technological innovation from 1980 to the present seems insignificant. Immense changes should have occurred during this period but did not. Had we been following the previous eighty years’ technological trajectory, we today would have flying cars, maglev (magnetic levitation) trains, fusion reactors, hypersonic intercontinental travel, reliable and inexpensive transportation to Earth orbit, undersea cities, open-sea mariculture, and human settlements on the moon and Mars.

…

Columbus dared the Atlantic in small, frail coastal craft that, even fifty years later, no one would have attempted to use to cross the ocean. This was how it had to be. Until European civilization became transatlantic, there was no cause to develop truly Atlantic-capable vessels. But once Europeans found their New World, soon enough they developed reliable three-masted caravels, then clipper ships, steamships, ocean liners, and Boeing 747s. Similarly, the first explorers will make their six-month voyages to Mars in small, cramped vessels, demonstrating a toughness that will be a source of awe to their grandchildren, who will do their three-week interplanetary transits in style aboard well-appointed fusion-powered spaceliners. But the same technology that makes travel to Mars a matter of ease and comfort for everyone will make it possible for those with the bravest spirits to venture much further.

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Boeing 747, Gene Kranz, ice-free Arctic, index card, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, panic early, Strategic Defense Initiative, two and twenty, women in the workforce

The pilot could control the craft through the visual view out the window, so pedal force did not matter. A 747 had been readied for the Enterprise tests. Owen Morris’s Integration Office had conducted an early study of which specific model would be suitable. The choice was narrowed down to the Boeing 747 or the military’s Lockheed C-5A transport. Ultimately, the 747 was chosen primarily because NASA could own the aircraft, which was not the case with the C-5A. Since it was a military plane, there was some concern that a national emergency would limit access to the C-5A. American Airlines put NASA in front of the line to meet the schedule.

…

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 164th Tactical Fighter Squadron (Ohio Air National Guard), 39, 44, 188 185th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (Oklahoma Air National Guard), 35–38, 37 A Abbey, George, 170 Abrahamson, Jim, 174 Adams, Mike, 38 Aerojet Aerobee, 45–46 Aerospace Defense Command (ADCOM), 174–75 Aerospace Research Pilot School, 52–53 Aldrin, Buzz, 84, 86, 88–89, 94, 95–98 Algranti, Joe, 40, 41 Alvarez, Vincent, 161 Anders, Bill, 84, 85–86, 86, 91, 92–93 Anderson, Tom, 100 Anthony, Jack, 188 Apollo 1 Mission, 69, 70–71, 73, 90 Apollo 2 Mission, 69 Apollo 8 Mission (formerly Apollo 9 Mission), 84–92, 86, 116, 117, 140 Apollo 11 Mission, 92–98, 97, 140 Apollo 12 Mission, 126–27 Apollo 13 (film), 100 Apollo 13 Mission, 99–129, 104, 110, 113, 115,, 127, 128, 129, 135, 190 Apollo 14 Mission, 135–37 Apollo 16 Mission, 130, 135, 137, 138–40, 138 Apollo 18 Mission, 137 Apollo 19 Mission, 137 Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) experiments, 135, 139–40 Approach and Landing Test (ALT) Program, 144, 154–55, 168 Arabian, Don, 139 Ariane rocket, 175 Armistead, Lewis, 14 Armstrong, Neil, 40, 50, 58–59, 68, 84, 86, 88, 94, 96–98, 140 Armstrong Flight Research Center (formerly Flight Research Center), 48–49 astronauts on the NASA team Apollo 8 Mission (formerly Apollo 9 Mission), 84, 86, 140 Apollo 13 Mission, 99, 103–04, 104, 127, 129, 190 Apollo 14 Mission, 135 Apollo 16 Mission, 130, 140 closeout crew, 90–91 Group One, 58 Original 19, 62–68, 78, 81, 84, 130, 135, 148 public relations training, 63 scientific training and field trips, 63–65 selection process, 58–61 survival training, 65–68, 66 Attridge, Tommy (“Tommy Outrage”), 78 Auter, Henry, 120 B Balch, Jackson, 120 Ballard, Dave, 69, 75, 77, 148, 155–56 Barber, Russ, 59–60 Bartlett, Ron, 184 Barton, Dick, 176 Bean, Al, 81 Beauregard, Al, 78 Beechcraft SNB aircraft, 23–24, 33 Bell TH-13M helicopter, 68–69 Berry, Charles, 97 Bierwith, Jack, 172, 180–81 Biloxi, Mississippi, 2, 7–8, 10, 12, 130–32, 185–86 Biloxi Gulfport Daily Herald (newspaper), 10, 12 Bischoff, Will, 79–80 Blacksher, Fred, 16 Bobko, Bo, 153 Boeing 747 aircraft, 160–61, 163 Bolender, Rip, 71 bombing practice, 44–45 Bone, Jim, 142 Boone, Bill, 114 Borman, Frank, 84, 85, 86 Bourque, Don, 156 Bradbury, Ray, 178 brakes, landing gear, 160, 167 Brand, Vance, 62 buffeting, 32, 163 Bull, John, 62, 66–68, 80–81 Bulldog Barks (newspaper), 13, 15–16 Burke Lakefront Airport, 42 Butler, Paul, 78 C C-47 aircraft, 49, 50 Cairl, Jack, 60 Callister, Betty, 49 Calspan NT-33N aircraft, 58 Calvin, Lew, 177 capsule communicator (CapCom), 95–96, 97, 135, 138 captive-active (CA) flights, 161–67, 166 Carr, Gerald (“Jerry”), 62, 88, 130, 137 carrier landings, 22 Carter, Jimmy, 164 Cernan, Gene, 139 Cessna T-37 Tweet aircraft, 50 Chaffee, Roger, 70 Challenger explosion and investigation, 178–79 Chanaud, Lt., 18–20 Cheathum, L.D., 156 Chrysler, Scott, 180 Clancy, Harry, 156 Cleveland Hopkins Airport, 42 Cochran, Dick, 183 Cohen, Aaron, 143–44, 152 Collins, Mike, 94, 95, 156 Columbia orbital flights, 168, 169–70 command and service module (CSM), 65, 70–71, 84–85, 111, 122–26, 123, 136 command module simulator (CMS), 85–86, 87–88 computers and software development Enterprise orbiter and simulators, 156–57, 158 multicomputer operations, 159, 165 system-management software, 162 Confederate Air Force (later Commemorative Air Force), 146–47 Conrad, Peter, 81, 170 Cooper Harper pilot rating system, 159 Correale, Jim, 116 Cortright, Ed, 178–79 Crabbs, Clifford C.

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

You have to soak them in a bowl of water until they loosen from their backing, then align them on the aircraft’s fuselage or tail without tearing them, even as they’re drying out and curling up. Sometimes I ask myself if I really like assembling model airplanes; maybe I only like having the airplanes afterward. The flagship of these models is a Boeing 747 in the blue-and-white colors of Pan Am. On a December night two decades or so from now, an hour before I pilot an actual 747 for the first time, from London to Hong Kong, I’ll walk around the plane to conduct the preflight inspection and when I look up at its sail-like, six-story tail fin I’ll recall this model, and this window by my desk, and the view it offers from a house that by then will be the home of someone else.

…

Three years later I moved to Kidlington, near Oxford, England, to start my pilot course, after which I moved to a shared house near Heathrow to start my flying career. In those early years I flew a narrow-body Airbus jet on short-haul routes to cities all across Europe. Eventually I retrained on the Boeing 747, the iconic airliner I’d dreamed of flying since I was a little kid. In my eleven years on the 747 fleet, I traveled to many of the world’s largest cities, but never to Abu Dhabi. Not long ago I retrained again, to fly the 787, and it was in the cockpit of one of these newer and smaller jets that I finally returned to this city.

…

The train that met these ships to take their passengers northeast—toward Johannesburg, its gold mines, and the nation’s administrative capital of Pretoria—came to be called the Blue Train, as the Birmingham-built carriages introduced in 1937 were painted a saturated Atlantic hue. The Blue Train still runs from Cape Town to Pretoria, a roughly thirty-hour journey. The Union-Castle service between Southampton and Cape Town, meanwhile, ended in 1977. It was finished off, in part, by the Boeing 747, the plane on which I often cross over the lights of Mark’s hometown only minutes after liftoff from Heathrow. To reach Robben Island on that long-ago trip, Mark and I went down to the harbor, past the stacks of shipping containers—many of which, once they’re taken out of use, are repurposed elsewhere in the city as shelters, and as small venues for shops and hairdressers—and took one of the boats that run out to it.

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain de Botton

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, fear of failure, invention of the telephone, liberation theology, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Silicon Valley

But the staff shied away from existential issues, seeming to restrict their insights to matters relating to the transit time to adjacent satellites and the location of the nearest toilets. Yet it was more than a little disingenuous for the airline to deny all knowledge of, and responsibility for, the metaphysical well-being of its customers. Like its many competitors, British Airways, with its fifty-five Boeing 747s and its thirty-seven Airbus A320s, existed in large part to encourage and enable people to go and sit in deckchairs and take up (and usually fail at) the momentous challenge of being content for a few days. The tense atmosphere now prevailing within David’s family was a reminder of the rigid, unforgiving logic to which human moods are subject, and which we ignore at our peril when we see a picture of a beautiful house in a foreign country and imagine that happiness must inevitably accompany such magnificence.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Not once in all the ground conversations nor in the transmissions to the pilots did anyone mention a Boeing 747. They directed Osipovich minute by minute toward the target, and told him: "The target is military, upon violation of State border destroy the target. Arm the weapons." Osipovich at first could only see the target as a dot, two or three centimeters. He had studied the RC-135s and knew the various Soviet civilian airliners, but he later recalled he had never studied the shape of foreign aircraft such as the Boeing 747. A ground controller speculated, "If there are four jet trails, then it is an RC-135."

…

---------- 3 ---------- WAR SCARE When Korean Air Lines flight 007 left Anchorage at 4 A.M. local time on August 31, the crew was well familiar with the planned route across the Pacific, which came close to the airspace of the Soviet Union before crossing Japan and heading to Seoul. The pilot of the Boeing 747 was Captain Chun Byung-in, forty-five years old, a veteran of the Korean Air Force who had logged 6,619 hours flying jumbo jets, including eighty-three flights across the northern Pacific in the previous decade. His copilot, Son Dong-Hwin, forty-seven, had made the crossing fifty-two times. And the navigator, Kim Eui Dong, thirty-two, had made forty-four flights across the ocean.

…

A. Chiprany, to Chief of Naval Operations, March 1, 1984. Watkins testimony is from Seymour M. Hersh, The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It (New York: Random House, 1986), p. 24. 15 Hersh, pp. 25-26. 16 Andrei Illesh, "Secret of the Korean Boeing 747," Izvestia, January 24, 1991, p. 5. This was part of a lengthy series by the journalist. 17 Whitworth had received $60,000 from Walker just before he sailed on the Enterprise in late 1982. Over nearly ten years, Whitworth received $332,000 for leaking secrets to the Soviets. 18 Howard Blum, I Pledge Allegiance... : The True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 299. 19 Affidavit of Rear Admiral William O.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

airport security, Boeing 747, cognitive dissonance, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Hawkins, Lao Tzu, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, social intelligence, Steve Jobs

Believe it or not, you don’t need to sound smart. You just need to make them feel smart. Get Graphic If you were told the number of deaths caused by smoking every year, would you remember that exact figure three months from now? Probably not. But what if you were told that this figure was equal to three fully loaded Boeing 747 planes crashing into the earth every day for a year, with no survivors? That image you’d remember for a while.* A picture is worth a thousand words, indeed—and for good reason. Image generation has a powerful impact on emotions and physiological states and a high impact on brain function.6 Our brain’s language-processing abilities are much newer and less deeply wired than are our visual-processing abilities.

…

To emanate vocal warmth, you need to do only one thing: smile, or even just imagine smiling. * This image isn’t just powerful, it’s also frighteningly accurate. In the United States alone, 530,000 people die each year from diseases caused by smoking. This is equivalent to 1,325 crashes of a Boeing 747 (more than 3 crashes per day). 9 Charismatic Body Language It was the last day of my vacation, and I intended to enjoy every minute of it. I was strolling through a small park in the center of town, drinking in the sun, when suddenly, something caught my attention. Perched atop a white bandstand, a short, middle-aged man was making an impassioned speech.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

For a detailed account, see the Netherlands Aviation Safety Board’s final report on the accident (one of the two planes involved was a KLM flight; hence the involvement of the Dutch authorities), Final Report and Comments of the Netherlands Aviation Safety Board of the Investigation into the Accident with the Collision of KLM Flight 4805, Boeing 747–206B, PH-BUF, and Pan-American Flight 1736, Boeing 747–121, N746PA, at Tenerife Airport, Spain, on 27 March 1977 (available online at http://www.project-tenerife.com/nederlands/PDF/finaldutchreport.pdf). reducing significant commercial aviation accidents. National Transportation Safety Board Aviation Accident Statistics, Table 2: Accidents and Accident Rates by NTSB Classification, 1988–2007, 14 CFR 121 (available at http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Table2.htm).

…

By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail. Among high-risk fields, commercial aviation currently sets the standard for error management. As often happens, the airline industry’s commitment to curtailing error grew out of a mistake of unprecedented and tragic proportions. In 1977, two Boeing 747s collided at the Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands, killing close to 600 people—then and now, the worst accident in aviation history. When safety officials investigated, they found that the collision was caused by a concatenation of errors, individually minor but collectively catastrophic. The airline industry responded by establishing strict protocols for every aspect of aviation—from how runways should be labeled to what phrases air traffic controllers and pilots can use to communicate with each other.

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich by Daniel Ammann

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business intelligence, buy low sell high, energy security, family office, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, peak oil, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

The T official wrote Green’s name, date of birth, and passport number on the back of a piece of paper packaging and signed the unusual receipt. Khomeini’s Return On that day, February 1, 1979, hundreds of thousands of people kept vigil at Mehrabad Airport. They were waiting for an aged man who finally arrived on an Air France Boeing 747: the seventy-six-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returning to Iran after fifteen years in exile in France. Four days later Khomeini appointed an “Islamic revolutionary government,” and soon afterward Bakhtiar had to make way for Khomeini’s appointed prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan. All the while Green was stranded in Tehran without a passport.

…

He even called back to give us the correct flight number, SR 111 to Geneva and Zurich.” Weinberg could not believe his ears. He cursed so loudly that his colleagues came into his office to see what was wrong. After he cooled down, he immediately sent a few agents to John F. Kennedy International Airport. At 7:00 P.M. the Swissair Boeing 747 was already on the runway and ready for takeoff; the police were able to stop the plane only minutes before its departure. Thanks to the tip-off from Rich’s own law firm, agents recovered two steamer trunks full of business documents. Shortly afterward, the media-savvy Giuliani had the trunks brought to Judge Sand’s courtroom as physical evidence of Rich’s brazen behavior and immediately held a press conference to publicize the seizure.

The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

A problem with cooling systems, encroaching weather, and the early consumption of night lunch may have all been ordinary observing scenarios, but the telescope we were currently waiting in was anything but. About twenty of us were onboard the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy—SOFIA—a modified Boeing 747-SP with a 2.7-meter telescope mounted in the back. When everything was going well, the plane was designed to fly into the stratosphere, as high as forty-five thousand feet, and then raise a 13.5-foot-wide retractable door on the rear left side of the plane to expose the telescope. Operating above 99 percent of the water vapor in the atmosphere, it would observe a span of wavelengths that would normally bounce off water molecules and be impossible to capture from the ground.

…

A crew of people still flies with the telescope every time it observes, keeping an eye on the various instruments and operating it from the air-supplied side of the cabin, but nobody is actually hanging out the open side of the plane like a delighted dog riding in a car’s passenger seat on the highway. I was only slightly disappointed. SOFIA has since taken up the mantle from Kuiper as NASA’s airborne observatory, upgrading to a Boeing 747-SP and a 2.7-meter telescope. SOFIA began observing in 2010; for most of the year, it flies out of Palmdale, with annual deployments to Christchurch, New Zealand, in June and July so it can observe the southern sky during that hemisphere’s longer winter nights. Standard SOFIA flights are about ten hours long, and since beginning operations, it’s mapped the magnetic field of the Milky Way, studied new stars being born, and searched for signs of water plumes erupting from Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Igor anthologies, literary anthropomorphization anti-inflammatory drugs Apple Apprentice, The arbitrage Archimedes architecture Aristotle Arrow, Kenneth art Art of the Deal, The (Trump) art experts artificial intelligence Asian financial crisis (1997) aspirin assets authority Autobiography (Mill) aviation industry Balboa, Vasco de Bankers Trust banking industry Barnevik, Percy Basel agreements (1987) basic goals Bear Stearns Beckham, David Bell, Alexander Graham bell curve Bengal Bentonville, Ark. Berlin, Isaiah Berlin Wall beta-blockers Black, James “blind watchmaker” Boeing Boeing 737 airliner Boeing 747 airliner Boeing 777 airliner Boesky, Ivan bonuses Borges, Jorge Luis Borodino, Battle of Boston Consulting Group brain damage brain teasers Brando, Marlon Brasília Brave New World (Huxley) Brin, Sergey British empire brokerage firms Bruck, Connie Brunelleschi, Filippo Buffett, Warren Built to Last (Collins and Porras) Burke, Edmund Burns, Robert Bush, George W.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

He instructed us to pay a small amount. “You don’t need to pay a lot; just two or three percent. It looks bad if we pay nothing.” We mastered the art of paying no taxes, but paying some tax was a challenge. There were many levers at our disposal. We used foreign tax credits, investment tax credits, or depreciation on Boeing 747s and the Alaska pipeline, which we legally owned and leased to users. We also used tax-free municipal bonds and discretionary loan loss reserves to dial down tax liability. The third floor of our corporate headquarters at 399 Park Avenue featured a plastic palm tree in one corner. That symbolized Citibank, Nassau, our zero-tax Bahamas booking center operating at nearby desks.

…

Equipment deals can be structured as a loan in one country (to deduct interest) and a lease in another country (to deduct depreciation). The parties double-dip on deductions with one piece of equipment. The loan-lease double-dip is combined with tax treaty back-to-back structures to obliterate taxes in multiple jurisdictions. As tax counsel to Citibank, I saw triple-dip leases, where a single Boeing 747 was written off in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Australia at the same time. The separate jurisdictions never knew what hit them. Other structures are used to convert ordinary income into capital gains that receive favorable tax treatment. Discounts on bond sales disguise hidden interest payments embedded in the discounts.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

But radio waves have nothing to do with air, they are better regarded as invisible light waves with long wavelengths. Airwaves can sensibly mean only one thing and that is sound. This chapter is about sound and other slow waves, and how they, too, can be unwoven like a rainbow. Sound waves travel about a million times more slowly than light (or radio) waves, not much faster than a Boeing 747 and slower than a Concorde. Unlike light and other electromagnetic radiation, which propagates best through a vacuum, sound waves travel only through a material medium such as air or water. They are waves of compression and rarefaction (thickening and thinning) of the medium. In air, this means waves of increasing and then decreasing local barometric pressure.

…

There are many other ways in which we could pair people off and still end up noticing an apparent coincidence. Two successive girlfriends with the same surname, although unrelated, for instance. Two business partners with the same birthday would also come within the petwhac; or two people with the same birthday sitting next to one another on an aeroplane. Yet, in a well-loaded Boeing 747, the odds are actually better than 50 per cent that at least one pair of neighbours will share a birthday. We don't usually notice this because we don't look over each other's shoulders as we fill in those tedious immigration forms. But if we did, somebody on most flights would go away muttering darkly about occult forces.

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

A few weeks after the rollout ceremony, the evolutionary DC-X test vehicle, a precursor to the proposed DC-Y, was transported to White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, where it was hot fired during two months of static tests. For its launch and landing pads, the DC-X would use two concrete pads originally constructed to support the cranes that lifted the space shuttle atop a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft. On the afternoon of i8 August 1993, the first flight of the DC-X took place in anonymity, witnessed only by DC-X staff and crew. The obelisk-shaped vehicle was piloted remotely from the flight operations control area by a crew of three, headed by former Apollo astronaut and McDonnell Douglas vice president Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr.

…

Confronting the tricky issue of reusability that has confounded generations of space engineers, Musk's mind kicks into gear. He proceeds to explain that the lowest price point one can expect from a human commercial orbital flight can be derived by comparing the operations and propellant cost for his seven-person spacecraft with a four-hundred-person-capacity Boeing 747 airplane. Cost is a factor of the propellant passenger ratio, which is sixty times greater for a spacecraft than for a commercial jet. Insofar as each stage of the three-stage spacecraft corresponds to a separate jet, it would be equivalent to the cost of operating and maintaining three airplanes.

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, failed state, family office, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, Global Witness, high net worth, junk bonds, low interest rates, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Virgin Galactic

Whatever the men’s personal dynamic, even before filming was finished, Riza and McFarland were attending readings with Scorsese for The Irishman, a film project involving Robert De Niro that was next on the director’s slate, and Red Granite was attempting to line up DiCaprio to headline a remake of Papillon, the 1970s Steve McQueen hit movie. Still, after this season of celebration, as filming wrapped up toward the end of December, Low and DiCaprio hadn’t had their fill of partying. The Malaysian had one more treat for the cast and other friends. A Boeing 747-400 can hold around six hundred passengers, but the VIP-configured model Low had chartered, with plush reclining seats, was a more spacious alternative for the forty or so people who boarded in Los Angeles at the end of December. Atlas Air rented these kinds of planes to professional sports teams or Saudi princes.

…

In the casino complex a Marquee nightclub recently had opened, owned by Tepperberg and Strauss. For the group’s New Year’s Eve celebration in the club, Low had ordered ice baths to be filled with scores of bottles of Cristal champagne. “Showtime!!!!!!!!!!!!” Swizz Beatz wrote on Instagram. After the stroke of midnight, the group got back on the Boeing 747-400 for a fifteen-hour flight to Las Vegas. After crossing the international dateline and being picked up by stretch limousines, the partygoers made for LAVO, a nightclub also co-owned by Tepperberg and Strauss—ready for yet another New Year’s countdown. Perhaps in an effort to sustain the group for a few more hours of partying, Low ordered buckets of KFC chicken.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

During the 1960s, Pan Am started promoting trips to the moon as a way to cash in on the surging interest the Apollo program generated. So, it created a waiting list of passengers who wanted to go to the moon. “We like to think of ourselves as pioneers,” a Pan Am spokesman told the New York Times in 1969. “We were first across the Pacific and had many firsts across the Atlantic as well. We’re going to be the first to fly the Boeing 747. So we would hope some day that we would be pioneering moon travel. That’s why we keep the list.” Whether or not it was a PR stunt, Pan Am’s customers bought it, signing up for their trips to the moon in droves. In return, the future astronauts received a letter addressed “Dear Moon First Flighter,” signed by James Montgomery, Pan Am’s vice president of sales.

…

“How are we going to figure out how to make a spaceship that took an incredible amount of people in the sixties, when we didn’t have those resources?” he wondered. But here they were “fighting our fucking hardest,” all following Musk, believing that he always “figures out how to make the magic happen.” BY THE TIME Mosdell showed up, the company had moved into a new, bigger facility in Hawthorne, a former Boeing 747 fuselage factory not far from the Los Angeles airport. For an aerospace engineer, it was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Massive rockets were being built from scratch, long cylindrical cores stretching along the factory floor like the hulls of great ships. Engines—new, American-made engines—were being manufactured in-house.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

.* A new study published in September 2013 asserts that the number of deaths due to medical error is dramatically higher: 210,000 to 400,000. Either estimate would have put medical errors as the third-leading cause of death in the CDC’s 2011 ranking. If the estimated 100,000 deaths due to hospital-acquired infections are included, this loss is equal to twenty Boeing 747 airliners going down every week. COMMAND OF TEAMS The quandary faced by Brigham and Women’s in 2013, like that faced by our Task Force in 2004, was that of what we might call a “command of teams”: adaptive small teams operating within an old-fashioned rigid superstructure. In a response to rising tactical complexity, many organizations in many domains have replaced small commands with teams.

…

James, “A New, Evidence-Based Estimate of Patient Harms Associated with Hospital Care,” Journal of Patient Safety 9, no. 3 (2013): 122. third-leading cause . . . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (National Center for Health Statistics), “Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2011,” National Vital Statistics Reports 61, no. 6 (2012): 4, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf twenty Boeing 747 . . . Charles R. Denham et al., “An NTSB for Health Care—Learning from Innovation: Debate and Innovate or Capitulate,” Journal of Patient Safety 8 (March 2012): 8. MIT economist Paul Osterman . . . Found in J. Richard Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performance, referencing Paul Osterman, “How Common Is Workplace Transformation and Who Adopts It?

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

In investigating the incident in depth, we will draw upon the seminal report by the journalist Stephan Wilkinson19 and unpublished papers from the trial, as well as confidential documents from the British Airways internal investigation and interviews with eyewitnesses. For the deeper story, it turns out, doesn’t begin as a Boeing 747 approaches Heathrow, or even the moment it took off from Bahrain. Rather, it starts two days earlier, as the crew enjoyed a Chinese meal during a stopover in Mauritius. III It had been a long trip. The crew had been involved in a series of flights in the days before landing in Mauritius and decided it might be nice to unwind by sharing dinner.

…

The two radio beams at the far end of the runway were now sending out lateral and vertical guidance, crucial for November Oscar to calibrate its approach onto the correct path. But the autopilot didn’t seem to be capturing the lateral signal. It is almost certain that an Air France plane, still on the runway at Heathrow due to the squeezed distance between incoming aircraft, was deflecting the beam. Stewart, who had a low opinion of the Boeing 747 automatic functions, was straining his eyes at the localizer and glidescope, the internal instruments that should have been picking up the signals. The flight was now dropping through the London sky at 700 feet per minute. It was traveling at close to 200 mph. The tension in the cockpit was intense.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

If a generic software error crippled the four identical primary computers, the backup system could kick in and return the spacecraft to Earth. Although redundancy is a good insurance policy, it obeys the law of diminishing returns. After a certain point, piling up additional redundancies unnecessarily increases complexity, weight, and cost. Sure, the Boeing 747 could have twenty-four engines instead of four, but you would have to pay $10,000 to ride in a cramped economy seat from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Excessive redundancy can also backfire and compromise reliability, instead of improving it. Redundancies add additional points of failure. If the engines on the 747 aren’t properly isolated, the explosion of one engine could compromise the others—a risk that increases with each additional engine.

…

In January 1972, when the space shuttle program was announced, President Richard Nixon declared that the shuttle “will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.”20 It was anticipated to be a reusable spacecraft that would fly frequently—as much as fifty times per year, according to initial estimates.21 The shuttle would be a souped-up version of a Boeing 747 that “you could simply land and turn around and operate again.”22 Treating the shuttle like an airplane would have the additional benefit of attracting customers for payloads. By November 1982, the shuttle “had proven sufficiently safe and error-free to become routine, reliable, and cost-effective,” as two organizational researchers explain.23 NASA was so confident in the safety of the space shuttle that, before the Challenger accident, the management saw no need to include an escape system for the crew.24 And by the time of the Challenger mission, spaceflight was so routine that a civilian—an elementary school teacher—could ride shotgun to space.

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

Back to the gate the aircraft rolled and ingloriously disgorged all the passengers and baggage loaded into her with such difficulty. “It’s marvelous,” the wife of TV producer David Susskind, one of the unlucky passengers, muttered sarcastically. “A dozen bathrooms and no engines.” By the time an alternate 747 had been loaded, the orchids pinned to the flight attendants were dead. The Boeing 747—and to a lesser degree its brethren widebodies, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and the Lockheed L-1011—would devastate the airline industry, bringing it as close to disaster as the government had ever permitted. The planes were simply too big. Although there had been airplane gluts in the past, each generation of new and bigger planes was always ultimately filled with newly converted passengers coaxed into the air by the latest breakthrough in speed or comfort.

…

Muse ultimately wound up in Detroit at a cargo airline called Universal, where he introduced to the airline industry the practice of bringing everything into a single airport—a “hub”—and sending it back out to its ultimate destinations along “spokes.” Muse quit that airline too, because it insisted on ordering a Boeing 747, which he considered a costly frill. Now, as the president of the marginal, newly founded Southwest, Lamar Muse was vitally concerned with cost and profitability. It bothered him that in its three-cornered route system one of the company’s planes was flying empty each night back to the maintenance base in Dallas.

…

Wolf told the United pilots that he wanted to make the airline grow, that he wanted to swell the fleet—but that he first wanted to cut still further United’s costs. This gave the pilot leadership all the ammunition it needed in the character assassination campaign that followed. Anti-Wolf stickers were passed into cockpits. Because it was not specifically accounted for in their contract, pilots refused to fly two newly delivered Boeing 747s in the 400 series, the newest and best jumbo jet model ever built; the cost to United of leaving the two planes on the ground totaled $200,000 a day. Taking a page from the Max Safety playbook at Eastern Air Lines, the United pilots adopted a strategy they called “Sweet Sixteen”—delaying one minute past the 15-minute grace period that the government gave the airlines before counting any flight as late.

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

Compounding the problem of managing or controlling technology, if indeed that is possible, is that predicting how a technology will be used is fraught with uncertainty. One could not have imagined at the outset the myriad uses, both good and malevolent, to which the laser and the jet engine would ultimately be put. Who would have dreamed of a massive Boeing 747 aircraft, carrying tons of hypergolic chemicals (which are highly reactive, releasing enormous energy when they come into contact with one another), with a high-powered laser in its nose capable of destroying a ballistic missile at long range? Regulators and managers cannot know the full range of the effects of a technology until it has been in use for a while.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

For example, by speeding up traffic flow and reducing journey times, commuters could live further away from city centers, which in turn affects the workable size of cities. At the time Futurama was viewed very much as an America of the near future, a realizable dream rather than a fantasy. Other projects were closer to fantasy. His Airliner Number 4 (1929) was a nine-story, amphibian plane twice the size of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. It had room for deck games, an orchestra, a gymnasium, a solarium, airplane hangars, and could sleep 606 passengers. Bel Geddes intended it to be built and flown between Chicago and London, but sadly, was unable to raise the necessary funding. Norman Bel Geddes, Airliner No. 4, 1929.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, job satisfaction, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, out of africa, phenotype

Let's use the word "brittle" for a device that must be perfect if it is to work at all-as my correspondent alleged of waspmimicking orchids. I find it significant that it is actually quite hard to think of an unequivocally brittle device. An airplane is not brittle, because although we'd all prefer to entrust our lives to a Boeing 747 complete with all its myriad parts in perfect working order, a plane that has lost even major pieces of equipment, like one or two of its engines, can still fly. A microscope is not brittle, because although an inferior one gives a fuzzy and ill-lit image, you can still see small objects better with it than you could with no microscope at all.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

The immediate tasks would be to break up large banks and ban most derivatives. Large banks are not necessary to global finance. When large financing is required, a lead bank can organize a syndicate, as was routinely done in the past for massive infrastructure projects such as the Alaska pipeline, the original fleets of supertankers, and the first Boeing 747s. The benefit of breaking up banks would not be that bank failures would be eliminated, but that bank failure would no longer be a threat. The costs of failure would become containable and would not be permitted to metastasize so as to threaten the system. The case for banning most derivatives is even more straightforward.

…

So we bought gold futures, which are very liquid, and then we surprised the market by standing for delivery! Some of the bars delivered were three-nines [99.90 percent pure], but we melted them down and refined them into four-nines [99.99 percent pure] because we could only use the finest gold for the Emperor. The gold was transported to Japan by Brinks in the upper deck of two Boeing 747s configured for cargo use. Two shipments were used not because of weight but to spread the risk. Brinks had two couriers on each flight so that the gold could be watched at all times even as one courier slept. The foregoing documentary record is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of official gold market manipulation by central banks, finance ministries, and their respective bank agents.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

Realizing this, Schiphol pioneered a simplified system for transit passengers that eliminated passport checks and encouraged shopping at the proliferating duty-free outlets. It was also in the 1960s that the new airport terminal was constructed. The major impetus for this was the invention of the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, which carried over 400 passengers and needed new terminal docking points to accommodate its massive bulk. The new terminal (1967) had twenty-five gates on three piers. In addition to the new terminal, four new runways were built swallowing up more and more of the polder, where the farmers continued to farm root vegetables.

…

“Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy.” In The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, edited by Josh DeWind and Philip Kasinitz, 71–93. New York: Russell Sage, 1999. RT52565_C012.indd 320 3/7/06 9:04:05 PM Index A Adey, Peter, 238 aesthetics, 142–145 airplanes, 197, 211 Boeing 707, 227 Boeing 747, 228 Douglas DC8, 227 airports, 45 as city, 221 as machines for mobility, 237 as metaphor, 220–224 spaces in, 223 as transnational space, 222 workforce at, 223 Akaka, Daniel, 187–188 alien, the, 185, 186, 189, 193, 223 American Woman Suff rage Association, 200 anachronism, 55 Anderson, Nels, 18, 37 Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco, 175−176, 182, 186, 188, 191−194 animality, 91 Anthony, Susan B., 200 anthropology, 43–44 Appadurai, Arjun, 19 architecture, 51–53 of Schiphol, 232, 246–247 Aristotle, 14 Asian-Americans, 187 assimilationist ideal, 173, 179 Atkinson, David, 39 Augé, Marc, 220, 244 automobiles, 214–18 automobility, 260 Aviation City, 227 B Baedecker guides, 208–210 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 46, 48–49 Balibar, Etienne, 173 Banta, Martha, 92 Bauman, Zygmunt, 11, 12, 19, 46, 255–256, 263 Beard, George, 17–18, 37, 70, 82 becoming, 47–50, 52, 232 Bedouin, 39 Benjamin, Walter, 18, 211 Benthem, Jan, 232, 234, 239, 244, 246, 248 Berman, Marshall, 18 biometrics, 239–41 Blatch, Harriot Stanton, 200 Blomley, Nickolas, 164 blood circulation, 7 body, the, 173, 239 in airport, 237–238 classical, 48 grotesque, 48 lazy, 88 321 RT52565_Index.indd 321 4/18/06 7:52:09 AM 322 • Index as machine, 72, 86, 92 of workers, 92–95 borders, 234 Boston, 198–202 Bourdieu, Pierre, 145 Braidotti, Rosi, 46, 221 Brandeis, Louis, 85–86 Braun, Marta, 77 Braverman, Harry, 87, 92 Broussais, Joseph Victor, 82 Bryson, Norman, 9–10 Burgess, Ernest, 36–37 bus fares, 170 Bus Riders Union, 151, 167–174, 261 buses: accessible, 173 compressed-gas, 173 diesel, 173 overcrowding on, 171 Bush, George W., 263 C CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), 238 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 151 car chase, 197 cardiology, 73 carnivalesque, the, 48–49 cars, 196–197, 214–218, 259–260 Castells, Manuel, 225, 255 categorization, 184–185, 223, 263 Chambers, Iain, 43, 221 Charleston, the, 132–133 Chicago School of Sociology, 18, 36–37 Chinese-Americans, 176, 182–184 Chinese Exclusion Act, 159–160, 175, 177, 180–186, 190–192 Chouinard, Vera, 165 circular workplace, 118 circulation, 7–8 citizen, the, 15, 20, 150–152, 174, 184, 186, 189, 193, 223 and aliens, 164 European, 236 and slaves, 161 citizenship, 149, 151, 190, 237, 241 RT52565_Index.indd 322 and mobility, 159–162, 173 rights of, 151–153, 156, 264 stretched, 167 city, the, 12, 50 city planning, 7–8 Civil Rights Act, 168 class, 127, 173, 181 and race, 172 Clifford, James, 43–44 closed circuit television, 240 code, 238 code space, 238 commerce, 149, 156 Communist Party (US), 153–154 Corbin, Alain, 8 Corfield v Coryell, 158 corporeality, 223 cosmopolitanism, 255 Crandall v Nevada, 149, 152–156, 158 Crang, Mike, 220, 222, 223 Crary, Jonathan, 61–62 Critical Path Analysis, 239 Crow, Jim, 261 culture, 43–44 mass, 35 and sedentarism, 32–36 working class, 34–35 Curaçao, 250, 257 cyclograph, 99, 101, 108 D Dalcroze, Emile-Jacques, 125 dance, 9–10, 53 African-American, 124, 131–132, 135, 141 ballroom, 123–7 as cultural knowledge, 128 history of, 123–124 Latin-American, 124 and race, 127 dance charts, 137–138 dance teachers, 129–130; 134 Daniels, Roger, 182 De Certeau, Michel, 46–47, 213 Deben, Leon, 251 Delaney, David, 4 Delsarte, Francois, 124–125 Delueze, Gilles, 46, 49–50, 54 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM Index • 323 Demeny, Georges, 79–80, 82, 87 denizen, 185 Dercum, Francis, X., 69–70 de-skilling, 92 Desmond, Jane, 127 Deutsche, Sarah, 203 Dewsbury, J.D., 55 difference, 178–180, 183, 186 politics of, 178–180 disability, 165–166, 173 disease, 150 dishwashing, 115 diversity, 188 Dodge, Martin, 238 driving, 216 Durkheim, Emile, 82 E Edwards v California, 147–151, 156, 158 efficiency, 120 Eliot, T.S., 32–33 Ellis Island, New York, 180, 188 Enloe, Cynthia, 207 entropy, 72 ethnicity, 173 European Charter of Rights, 162 European Commission, 236 European Union, 233 and right to mobility, 233 evacuees, 263–264 exclusion, logic of, 160–161 F Farm Security Administration, 39–42 feudalism, 10–12, 163 Fing Yue Ting v United States, 184–185 flâneur, the, 18–19, 48, 211 Foley, Margaret, 195–218 foreigner, the, 189–190 Forer, Pip, 30 Foster, Sue, 127 Foucault, Michel, 16 Franco, Mark, 127 freak steps, 128–136, 143 fugitives, 150 Fuller, Gillian, 244 RT52565_Index.indd 323 G Galileo, Galilei, 13–14 gender, 54, 64–69, 127, 165, 173, 197–198 geographical imagination, 177 geography, 27–32, 45–46 geosophy, 21–22 Gilbreth, Frank, 85, 89, 93, 95–115, 125, 144, 237, 239 Gilbreth, Lillian, 95–96, 98, 113–121, 237, 239 Gilpin, Heidi, 57 Gilroy, Paul, 204, 206 globalization, 221, 224 Graham, Laurel, 114, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth, 247 Guattari, Félix, 46, 49–50, 54 guerrilla warfare, 39 gypsy-travelers, 41–42 H habit, 86, 92, 106–109, 121, 134 Hacking, Ian, 177, 183 Hägerstrand, Torsten, 30 Haggett, Peter, 27–28, 30 Harrington, Ralph, 6, 20 Harvey, David, 44, 95 Harvey, William, 7, 14 Heathrow Airport (London), 222, 223, 242, 246 Heidegger, Martin, 42 heritage, 176, 186–192, 194 Hobbes, Thomas, 14–15, 218 Hoelscher, Steven, 188 Hoggart, Richard, 34–36 Holzer, Jenny, 219, 223 home 114–15 homelessness, 27, 53 in Amsterdam, 251 in Schiphol Airport, 248–251 Honig, Bonnie, 189–190 Hopper, Kim, 251 hotels, 210, 225 horses, and photography, 59–60 humanistic geography, 30–32 Hurricane Katrina, 259–65 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM 324 • Index I Iberlings, Hans, 221 ideal movements, 29 ideology, of mobility, 123, 199 Illich, Ivan, 165 immigrants as taxi drivers, 253–254 Chinese, 176–177, 182, 184 illegal, 233 Turkish, 254 immigration, 176–177, 189, 193 remote control of, 185 Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, 132–134, 136–142 indigence, 150 information technology, 238–241 instruction chart, 103 Iyer, Pico, 222 J Jackson, J.B., 31 Jackson, Rev.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

What a Waste In spring 2013, a solar-powered airplane called Solar Impulse flew across the United States, “proving that unfueled, clean flight is possible,” according to news reports.62 The pilot flew from San Francisco to Phoenix to Dallas to St. Louis to Washington, DC. “Who Needs Fuel When the Sun Can Keep You Afloat?” asked a headline.63 But Solar Impulse underscored the inherent limits of energy-dilute fuels. Solar Impulse’s wingspan was the same length as a Boeing 747, which carries 500 people at close to 1,000 kilometers an hour.64 Solar Impulse could only carry one person, the pilot, and fly less than 100 kilometers an hour, which is why it took two months to complete the trip. The dilute nature of sunlight means that solar farms require large amounts of land and thus come with significant environmental impacts.

…

Diane Tedeschi, “Solar Impulse Crosses America: Who Needs Fuel When the Sun Can Keep You Aloft?,” Air & Space, June 19, 2013, https://www.airspacemag.com. 63. Ibid. 64. “Around the World in a Solar Airplane,” Solar Impulse Foundation, https://aroundtheworld.solarimpulse.com/adventure. Solar Impulse 2 in 2015 was little improvement. It flew at 75 km/h and had the same wingspan as the Boeing 747, a jumbo jet, and similarly could not hold passengers other than the pilot. 65. “California,” Environmental Progress, last updated August 12, 2019, http://environmentalprogress.org/california. 66. Gilbert Masters, “Wind Power Systems,” in Masters, Renewable and Efficient Electric Power Systems (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004): 307–83, https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Masters_2004_Wind.pdf. 67.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

Until the pandemic, a 737 was landing or taking off somewhere around the world every 1.5 seconds. In addition to making commercial aircraft, Boeing supplies the Pentagon with such military hardware as the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter, the Apache attack helicopter, and the KC-46 aerial refueling tanker. The president himself flies on a Boeing 747 and is frequently called upon to close international sales worth billions of dollars. Barack Obama, who stood beside Lion Air’s CEO in Bali when it signed a $22 billion order for MAX planes, once said he deserved a gold watch from Boeing. When I visited Boeing’s headquarters in Seattle for the first time as a Bloomberg News reporter in 1998, I was excited to meet the engineers who’d created these essential machines and the business leaders lionized in bestsellers like Built to Last and In Search of Excellence.

…

All 346 people aboard died when the plane plunged into Ermenonville forest outside Paris, the worst airliner crash in history at the time. Debris was scattered for a half mile through wooded trails popular with Sunday hikers. The plane was a DC-10, a slightly smaller wide-body McDonnell Douglas had developed to keep up with Boeing’s 747. The engineers on the Douglas side in Southern California had struggled mightily for the needed investments, Mr. Mac holding the purse strings as tightly as ever. To save valuable interior cargo space, they broke with industry convention by designing a door that opened outward. At a stockholders’ meeting a month after the crash, a McDonnell Douglas executive blamed an “illiterate” baggage handler at Turkish Airlines (who spoke three languages) for failing to latch the cargo door properly.

…

But Wilson had little use: The personality traits of the former Boeing CEO are drawn from author interviews with former Boeing executives and Andrew Pollack, “Putting Boeing in a Class by Itself,” New York Times, September 8, 1985. The Seattle plane maker surprised: Richard Witkin, “Boeing Says Repairs on Japanese 747 Were Faulty,” New York Times, September 8, 1985. “the most honest, reputable”: Author interview with Gordon Bethune, December 2019. “We are fighting”: Quoted in Mark A. Lorell, “Multinational Development of Large Aircraft: The European Experience,” Rand Corporation, July 1980.

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

At the time, these lines of activity did not seem to be burdened by contradictions. FOLLOWING THE DEATH from heart failure of his placid brother Khalid, Crown Prince Fahd had ascended to become the king of Saudi Arabia. Now that the throne belonged to him, Fahd told Salem he wished to travel in a more regal style. The king wanted a Boeing 747—and not just any one, but the largest model then in existence, known as a 747-300, which had a stretched upper deck, offering the potential for an aerial duplex. Fahd had become king at sixty-two, just young enough to indulge in one last splurge. His health remained poor and he sometimes had difficulty walking.

…

King Fahd shaped the Hajj’s physical environment. The architectural ambition of the two renovated holy cities—bigger, better, shinier, ringed by condominium towers and shopping malls, and under surveillance by security cameras—reflected the same spirit Fahd had brought during the early 1980s to the refurbishment of his Boeing 747. Among other things, his ideas about urban planning seemed to express a “deliberate desire to erase the past,” as Hammoudi put it. This was partly another bow to his religious establishment, who tended to view all of the schools of Islamic art and architecture between the Prophet’s death and their arrival in the Hejaz in the 1920s as illegitimate.

…

.; of 1980; of 1984 electricity Elizabeth II, queen of England Elmenshawy, Mohamed Elsner, Michael El Zahraa Farm Empty Quarter England; Salem in; Salem’s estate in; see also Great Britain Enron Corporation Ericsson Ethiopia, Ethiopians; Mohamed’s marriage to “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” (Clarke) Fadl, Jamal Al- Fadli, Tariq Hasan Al- Fagan, Wayne Fahd bin Abdulaziz, king of Saudi Arabia; Afghan war and; anti-communism of; appearance of; Bakr’s views on; Boeing 747 of; bombing of palace of; Cayman Islands bank account of; death of; desert camps of; favorite wife of; health problems of; invasion of Kuwait and; marriages and affairs of; Mecca renovations and; Mecca siege and; Medina projects of; Osama’s denunciation of; Osama’s exile and; palaces of; in Panama City; personality of; political reforms and; Fahd bin Abdulaziz, king of Saudi Arabia, Prince Abdulaziz favored by; Reagan’s relations with; rise to power of; Salem’s death and; Salem’s relationship with; Washington summit of; Yemen policy and Faisal, king of Saudi Arabia; anti-communism of; anti-Semitism of; anti-Zionism of; Arab-Israeli war (1973) and; assassination of; austerity of; as Bin Laden guardian; Bin Laden trustees and; Fahd’s relationship with; financial reforms of; foreign travels of; Hejaz Railway and; Israel denounced by; made prime minister; majlis of; marriage of; modernization drive of; Mohamed’s conflicts with; Mohamed’s death and; Mohamed’s relationship with; Muslim Brotherhood and; Nasser and; Osama’s identification with; palaces of; power consolidated by; publicity drive of; road building and; Salem’s relationship with; sale of Bin Laden planes ordered by; Saud compared with; Saud’s disputes with; sons’ education and; succession and; Suleiman’s retirement and Fakhreddine, Nadim Bou Falcon Sporting Goods Falken Limited Falun Fame Advertising Faqih, Saad Al- Faqih family Fathalla, Ahmed Fathlalla, Mustafa fatwas Fawwaz, Khalid Al- fax machines, faxes Fayed, Dodi Fayed, Mohammed FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation); Bin Laden interviews of; Bin Ladens investigated by; in Saudi nationals’ return to Saudi Arabia Federal Reserve Bank (Dallas) Felix-Browne, Jane Finance Ministry, Saudi “Financial Position of the Inheritance of the Late Salem Binladin as of February 10, 1990” Finmeccanica Finn, Timothy J.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

I thought, more trivially, of the opening of a slew of Pacific Disneylands, first in Anaheim in 1955, then in Tokyo in 1983, and in Hong Kong in 2005, and wondered about the spread of America’s cultural impress on the people around and within the ocean. I thought about the lasting social consequences of the staging of Olympic Games in such Pacific cities as Melbourne, Tokyo, and Seoul. I wondered similarly about the social effects of invention of the Boeing 747-400, a plane made on the Pacific coast, an aircraft built specially to cross the entire ocean without refueling, in one bound. The list went on and on. What of the significance of pollution—so poignantly symbolized by the Minamata disease that was identified in May 1956? What of the impact of the first television service that began in Australia, in September, four months later?

…

., 97 basalt, 310–11 base surge, 63 Bashful (transponder), 318 Bata-Bata motorcycles, 89 Bathurst Island, 232 Bay of Bengal, 382 BBC, 55n Beach Boys, 144 Belgium, 352 Belize, 343 Bell, Coral, 424 Bell Labs, 97, 99, 102, 104 Bennelong Point, 284 Berann, Heinrich, 317n Bering Land Bridge, 126 Bering Strait, 18 Bermuda, 224n Bikini atoll exile of islanders, 17, 50–52, 64–66, 79–81 nuclear tests, 13n, 17, 26, 37, 43, 49–72, 76, 78–82 payments to islanders, 78–80 tourism and, 79 Bingham, Hiram, 130–31 Bingham, Hiram, III, 130n biological weapons testing, 20 Bird, Isabella, 128–29 birds, endangered, 350–62 Bishop, Ida, 233 Bishop Museum, 353, 436, 438 Bislama language, 215 Bismarck Archipelago, 126 Bismarck Sea, 333, 337 Blandy, William “Spike,” 47–50, 52–53, 60, 62–64 Blank Monday, 146 Bligh, Captain, 216 Boeing 707, 192–93 Boeing 747–400, 25 Bombay Castle, 396 Bonesteel, Charles Hartwell, III, “Tick,” 154–56, 154, 168, 175, 187, 309 Bonin Islands, 361 Borneo, 262, 389, 393, 398, 412–13 Boso Peninsula, 114 Botswana, 262 Bounty, HMS (ship), 216–18, 220 Bowen, Australia, 348 BP dating convention, 36–37, 430 Bradley, Stephen, 290 Brattain, Dr., 97 Brazil, 261, 337 Bremerton, Washington, 158, 160 Bridge of No Return, 172–73, 176, 177, 183, 187 Brink, Francis, 206–7 Brisbane, Australia, 234 Britain, 31 Australia and, 269, 272, 277 citizenship rights and, 224n colonies, 9, 27–28, 190, 202, 211–20, 272, 352, 424, 433 French Indochina and, 203–6 Hong Kong and, 216, 221–29, 227 marine protected zones and, 368 NSA and, 157 nuclear tests and, 18–19, 33 Opium Wars and, 225 Pitcairn Island and, 216–20 state of, in 1950, 31 WW I and, 9–10 Britannia (royal yacht), 226–29 British Admiralty, 3 British Columbia, 262 British Commonwealth, 272 British Empire, 191, 252 British High Commissioner, 213 British Indian Army, 203, 205 British Royal Air Force, 195 British Royal Navy, 371, 393n British Solomon Islands Protectorate, 214 British Virgin Islands, 224n Brooke, Rupert, 6 Brookhaven laboratories, 73 Brookings Institution, 419 Broome, Australia, 299 Brown, Bruce, 144 Brown, H.

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

Heavy machinery squeezed along the narrow jungle roads. Smoke and dust mushroomed into the sky, and the bemused farmers stood and watched as the new church began to take shape. The building was thirty-five storeys high with room inside for four football pitches and enough space in its gardens to land a Boeing 747. Its main dome was modelled on that of St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The walkways are crumbling a little now, weeds poking through the stone, beggars sleeping against Corinthian columns, but once inside, you are transported to a cool Renaissance interior where light streams through the towering stained-glass windows in a confetti of lilac and blue.

…

He is next in line to rule the oil-rich state. Côte d’Ivoire’s President Felix Houphouet-Boigny posing outside the monument he built to himself. Our Lady of Peace Basilica, completed in 1989, is a copy of St Peter’s in Rome. The building is thirty-five storeys high, with grounds large enough to land a Boeing 747. Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki during a rare foreign trip, to Khartoum, Sudan, in 2015. Once a war hero, he presides over Africa’s most secretive state, forcing the population into endless military conscription. Endpapers Acknowledgements I vanished for long periods of time while writing this book, hiding away at the British Library or embarking on whirlwind research trips, or barricading myself into my cave-study among a sea of books with little regard for personal hygiene, surfacing only occasionally to rant about my latest Africa-related discoveries to weary friends and family, and for that I would like to apologize.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

The subsequent transition was very swift: by 1960 jetliners claimed more than 70% of all traffic and although three large new ocean liners were launched during the 1960s (the France in 1962, the Michelangelo, and the Raffaello in 1965), by 1969 ships carried only 4% of all trans-Atlantic passenger traffic, forcing the retirement of the QE2 in May and the United States in November 1969. Jetliners had eliminated shipping as a commercial option within a decade, one of the fastest epochal transitions on record. The first wide-body jet, Boeing 747, had entered the service in 1969, making it impossible to resurrect any regular large-scale ocean-borne traffic. Starting with the Mayflower, average crossing speeds increased by about two-thirds during the two centuries between 1620 and 1820. First steamers more than doubled it, and by 1952 the SS United States (with 66 km/h) was nearly 20 times faster than the Mayflower.

…

KLM offered the first scheduled flights in 1920 (358 km from London to Amsterdam) and by the 1930s in the United States and Europe there were many intercity links covering distances on the order of 102 km (Grant 2017). Introduction of aluminum monocoque planes raised this maximum to 103 km: in 1935 the DC-3 had a maximum range of 2,400 km, and just before World War II the Boeing 314 Clipper (a hydroplane) was capable of nearly 5,900 km. Only 30 years later, in 1969, the Boeing 747 brought the maximum to nearly 10,000 (9,800 km) but only the plane’s second variant (747-200) could fly more than 10,000 km (104 km). And we are now close to bridging the longest frequented route (Sydney to London, 16,983 km) by a nonstop flight: the longest scheduled commercial link is now Singapore to Newark at more than 15,000 km (Rosen 2019).

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

“He is involved but detached.” The specially trained crew has to set the system up, keep an eye out for failures, and take over in case of a problem. To be ready to intervene in the case of failure, they may also keep their hands on the controls while the autoland flies. Richard de Crespigny recalled the autoland on his old Boeing 747 Classic as “a humble mechanical device, incorporating lots of servos and actuators that delivered mediocre performance and reliability, and needed to be checked regularly.” Modern autoland systems are reliable digital boxes. But if there is a failure during the critical moments of landing, the pilot must employ a sequence of logic and choose a set of actions, such as land manually, command automatic go-around, or go around manually.

…

., development of, 44–45 naval career of, 26 as naval liaison to Woods Hole, 26–27 telepresence vision of, 26, 43, 57 Titanic, discovery and exploration of, 42–43, 45–51 bathyscaphe, 35 bathysphere, 35 Beebe, William, 35 Benthos, 39, 40 Big Safari, 129, 130, 136, 138–39 Bin Laden, Osama, 137, 138 Blair, Dave, 155 Boeing, 86–87 707, 82 747, 87 757, 82 767, 82 Bonestell, Chesley, 164, 165 Bonin, Pierre Cedric, 1–2 Bowen, Martin, 39–41, 46, 47, 48–49, 55–56, 57 Bowersox, Ken, 169–70, 171 Bradley, Al, 192 British Airways, 86 Bryant, Brandon, 152–53 Buck, Robert, 79, 84 Bush, George W., 139, 172 Cameron, James, 51 Camilli, Rich, 195 Cape Cod Times, 45 Carolyn Chouest (ship), 17–18, 22 cars, driverless.

Understanding Exposure, Fourth Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs With Any Camera by Bryan Peterson

Boeing 747, Frank Gehry, Y2K

Now that the digital age of photography has grown up since the first introduction of the Kodak/Nikon DCS with its whopping 1.3-megapixel charge-coupled device (CCD), it’s also fair to say that many shooters who are just starting out in photography are more confused than ever before, and for this I hold the camera manufacturers responsible. Because of their attempts to make so much of the picture-taking process automated, the simple manual cameras of yesterday have been replaced by cameras reminiscent of the cockpit of a Boeing 747-400. I don’t know about you, but I find the cockpit of a 747-400 amazingly intimidating! The once simple shutter speed dial on the camera body and the once simple aperture dial normally found on the lens have taken a backseat to dials that are crammed with “features” such as Landscape mode, Flower mode, Portrait mode, Aperture Priority mode, Action Sequence mode, Sports mode, Group Portrait mode, Shutter Priority mode, and Program mode, and there is even a bee on the Flower mode!

The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks

Boeing 747, Brownian motion, mutually assured destruction, South China Sea

On Earth, of course, they were quite oblivious to the fact they had a million tonnes of highly inquisitive and outrageously powerful alien spaceship orbiting around them, and - sure enough - the locals were doing all the things they normally did; murdering and starving and dying and maiming and torturing and lying and so on. Pretty much business as usual in fact, and it bothered the hell out of me, but I was still hoping we'd decide to interfere and stop most of that shit. It was about this time two Boeing 747s collided on the ground in a Spanish island colony. I was reading Lear for the second time, sitting underneath a full-size palm tree. The ship had found the tree in the Dominican Republic, marked to be bulldozed to make way for a new hotel. Thinking it might be nice to have some plants about the place, the Arbitrary dug the palm up one night and brought it aboard, complete with its root system and several tens of cubic metres of sandy soil, and planted it in the centre of our accommodation section.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

But how to proceed? After several fits and starts, it was finally decided that Khomeini would fly back to Iran on February i. But at the last minute, Bakhtiar’s government announced that the plane would not be allowed to land. So the ayatollah’s aides opted for an insurance policy. They chartered an Air France Boeing 747 and packed it with Western journalists: the army would surely think twice about shooting down a French airliner filled with representatives of the world’s media. As the Boeing neared the Iranian border, one of Khomeini’s men unnerved the reporters with an announcement: “We have received news that the plane will be shot down as soon we enter Iranian airspace.”

…

Deng visited Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, where he took a good, thorough look at a modern, highly automated production facility. He also took a tour of a Ford car-assembly plant with Henry Ford II as his guide. The itinerary also included a call on Boeing headquarters in Seattle. (China had already ordered three Boeing 747s from the company.) At the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Deng was given a chance to try out a flight simulator that enabled him to practice flying a space shuttle—an experience he enjoyed so much that it proved difficult to pry him away. He and his party comrades also attended a rodeo in a small Texas town, where Deng, attired in his usual dark-gray Mao suit, happily donned a cowboy hat for the cameras.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, correlation does not imply causation, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Mars Rover, nocebo, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, sugar pill

The red lights were reflecting eerily off the mirrored surface of a massive, foot-thick chromium steel column of electromagnetic lenses that rose to the ceiling in the center of the room. Spreading out on either side at the base of the column was a large control console. The console resembled the instrument panels of a Boeing 747, filled with switches, illuminated gauges, and multicolored indicator lamps. Large tentacle-like arrays of thick power cords, water hoses, and vacuum lines radiated from the base of the microscope like tap roots at the base of an old oak tree. The sound of clanking vacuum pumps and the whir of refrigerated water recirculators filled the air.

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

“This is the frst time that we’ve detected weather changes in real time on a planet outside our solar system,” Laughlin added. Weather reports from other extrasolar worlds are arriving now. And, as the Spitzer mission winds down, astronomers look forward to using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-meter telescope mounted on a Boeing 747. At an altitude of 12 kilometers, it rises above most of the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere, which otherwise hampers long-wavelength observations. If funding permits, SOFIA may fy three or four nights a week starting in 2010 (it had the frst fight in May 2010, but regular operations start in 2011) for ten years or more, out of Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?

Twenty years before the crash of K A L 801, a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down by a Soviet military jet over the Barents Sea. It was an accident, meaning the kind of rare and catastrophic event that, but for the grace of God, could happen to any airline. It was investigated and analyzed. Lessons were learned. Reports were filed. l79 Then, two years later, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Two accidents in two years is not a good sign. Three years after that, the airline lost another 747near Sakhalin Island, in Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that went down over the Andaman Sea in 1987, two more crashes in 1989 in Tripoli and Seoul, and then another in 1994 in Cheju, South Korea.* To put that record in perspective, the “loss” rate for an airline like the American carrier United Airlines in the period 1988 to 1998 was .27 per million departures, which means that they lost a plane in an accident about once in every four million flights.

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it by Dom Nozzi

Boeing 747, business climate, car-free, congestion pricing, Donald Shoup, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, New Urbanism, Parkinson's law, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, skinny streets, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

By the same token, the more dispersed a community’s suburbs, producing more car trips and longer trip distances per person, the more air pollution—20 percent to 50 percent more than compact development produces.9 Human Lives and Well-Being Another familiar cost of driving, apart from air pollution, is the highway death and injury toll. We hear the dire predictions before every holi-day, but unless someone we know dies or is injured, it’s easy not to connect them to real people. The number of people who die on U.S. highways every year is the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 747 aircraft crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. In 2000, almost 6.5 million motor vehicle crashes killed 41,821 people and injured more than 3 million; 13 percent of those killed were pedestrians, bicyclists, and others not in the vehicles. Every 13 minutes in 2000, someone died in a motor vehicle accident, an average of 115 persons every day.

The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means by Jeff Yeager

An Inconvenient Truth, asset allocation, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, do what you love, dumpster diving, index card, job satisfaction, late fees, mortgage debt, new economy, payday loans, Skype, upwardly mobile, Zipcar

More than 1.2 million people filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and in 2009 unemployment rates climbed to a twenty-five-year high. “Shock and awe” barely describes what’s happened to the economy. Downward trends turned into a downward spiral and then into a literal free fall that would make the oxygen masks drop out of the overhead compartments on a Boeing 747. It’s a whole new economy. Who would have thought a few years ago that Ken Lay’s Enron would begin to look like a model for good corporate management? That during the Christmas shopping season of 2008, I would swear I saw then–U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in my local dollar store? I was shocked to discover that Cabinet members are apparently allowed to moonlight.

The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks, Jr. Frederick P.

Boeing 747, Conway's law, finite state, HyperCard, Ken Thompson, machine readable, Menlo Park, Multics, no silver bullet, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Turing machine, work culture

If the program is available full-time, one pays $400 software rent and $1920 memory rent for using the program. If one uses the APL system only four hours a day, the costs are $400 software rent and $320 memory rent per month. One frequently hears horror expressed that a 2 M byte machine may have 400 K devoted to its operating system. This is as foolish as criticizing a Boeing 747 because it costs $27 million. One must also ask, "What does it do?" What does one get in ease-of-use and in performance (via efficient system utilization) for the dollars so spent? Could the $4800 per month thus invested in memory rental have been more fruitfully spent for other hardware, for programmers, for application programs?

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Andrew Mason founded Groupon as a basic website where he manually typed in deals and created PDFs to email to subscribers from Apple Mail. Pebble, a smartwatch, started with just a single explainer video and a Kickstarter campaign (no actual product, even) that raised more than $20 million to fund its development; Pebble was eventually sold to FitBit. Virgin started as a single Boeing 747 flying between Gatwick, England, and Newark, New Jersey. Once these startups were up and running, they were able to build from customer feedback and make positive changes. In much the same way, companies of one need to continually iterate on their products to keep them useful, fresh, and relevant to the market they serve.

How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, sustainable-tourism, two and twenty, University of East Anglia

In other words, for your plastic bags to have the same footprint as just one trip from L.A. to Spain, you would have to go to the supermarket every single day for 10 years and return each time with 93 disposable bags. A flight from New York to London has roughly half the impact. The distance is a bit more than half, but there is a slight efficiency gain because there is less fuel to carry. New York to Vancouver or San Francisco is just over a third of the distance. A Boeing 747 carrying 416 passengers burns through 116 tons of fuel on the 9,700 km (6,030-mile) flight each way. Almost one-third of the total weight on take-off is fuel. As the fuel burns, it creates three times its weight in CO2. But the impact is worse still because high-altitude emissions are known to have a considerably greater impact than their low-altitude equivalents.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

Al Qaeda had longevity. It was an outlier.3 The idea of an aeroplane being used as a weapon had been circulating for almost a decade. In 1994, an Algerian group hijacked a plane in Algiers and reportedly intended to blow it up over the Eiffel Tower.4 Later that year, Tom Clancy penned a thriller about a Boeing 747 being flown into the US Capitol building. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. In 1995, police in Manila filed a detailed report about a suicide plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. In 1997, Ayman Al Zawahiri – bin Laden’s deputy – underscored the intent of Al Qaeda by inciting a massacre of tourists in Egypt, an atrocity that left 62 dead, including children.

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

Ship traffic was stalled as port closures and COVID-19 panic had—seemingly overnight—left the Zaandam and dozens of other cruise ships stuck at sea. Donoso zipped past orphaned ships as he crossed the flat seas toward the Zaandam. After ten minutes, he slowed and pulled alongside, aligning his tiny craft with the gargantuan ship. At sixty-two thousand tons, the Zaandam weighed roughly the equivalent of three hundred fully loaded Boeing 747 jumbo jets. Looking up the side of the ship from water level was like staring up the walls of a bobbing steel-encased skyscraper. The Ecuadorian sailors snapped photographs and recorded video. This was a mission to remember. A hatch the size of a garage door opened on the side of the Zaandam’s hull and the Coast Guard crew handed box after box of supplies to the anxious team aboard the cruise ship.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

They continued along yet another conveyor belt, traveling up and away from the piler on a long boom that resembled the arm of a construction crane, flying out its open end onto the top of a three-story beet mountain. Over the course of the harvest, that mountain would get much longer. To give it room to grow, the piler occasionally inched backward on its treads. By the end of the harvest, the heap of beets would be the length of two Boeing 747s parked end to end and roughly as wide as the planes’ wingspan. A forced-air ventilation system would help keep the pile near freezing as the beets awaited trips to the refinery. The process was thunderously loud, rushed, and messy as hell. Our job involved constant cleanup: shoveling masses of spilled beets—some the size of frozen turkeys—back into the hoppers with pitchforks and agricultural scoops.

The New Sell and Sell Short: How to Take Profits, Cut Losses, and Benefit From Price Declines by Alexander Elder

Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, double helix, impulse control, low interest rates, paper trading, short selling, systematic trading, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, uptick rule

When you hear the sound of the market bell and act on it, it means you are becoming a serious trader. The first time the market rang its bell in front of me I realized it only after the fact. A major money-making opportunity had slipped away, but it sensitized my ears for the future. In 1989 I flew to Asia. The upper deck of the Boeing 747 felt clubby and comfortable. The lights went out after dinner and most passengers drifted off to sleep, but I felt keyed up on my first flight across the Pacific. I walked over to the galley and fell into a long friendly conversation with a Japan Airlines steward, a man of about 50. He told me how he grew up in poverty after the war, with little education.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

If you didn’t have your seatbelt on you would have smashed your head.27 The flight was met by ambulances on the runway, and sixteen people were taken to hospital. The most severe episode of clear-air turbulence on record hit United Airlines Flight 826 en route from Tokyo to Honolulu in 1997. Two hours into the flight, minutes after the captain turned on the fasten seat belt sign in response to warnings from other aircraft, the Boeing 747 dropped downwards and then rebounded with such force that one of the crew, a purser who had been steadying himself on a countertop, found himself upside down with his feet high in the air. A passenger whose seat belt was not fastened left her seat, hit the ceiling, and fell into the aisle. She was unconscious and bleeding heavily, and, despite resuscitation attempts by flight attendants and a passenger doctor, was pronounced dead shortly after.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But a prediction a hundred years ago that there would be between six and ten thousand planes in the air at any given moment, and double decker planes capable of ferrying 800 people, would have been seen as absurd. The first flight by the Wright brothers in 1903 lasted just 12 seconds covering a total distance of 120 feet - less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Just under 70 years later, the 747 could fly 400 people for 12 hours across continents. This illustrates that whatever we’re familiar with becomes a seemingly fixed certainty, and paradigm shifts are hard to comprehend. Early indications are that public opinion on self-driving cars is split.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

The average war college student is a senior officer with fifteen years of service behind him or her. Leaders must learn to think strategically as cadets, not as colonels. It’s often too late by then. This is because tactics and strategy require two different kinds of thinking, and they are diametrically opposed. One is complicated while the other is complex. Imagine a Boeing 747 versus Congress. The 747 is one of the most complicated machines on the planet. It has a zillion parts, but with enough mental horsepower it can be taken apart, reassembled, and flown. In other words, it’s solvable. Not so with Congress. It is composed of 535 people who act independently and often unpredictably.

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

Image credit: Virgin Galactic This satellite-launching spin-off company, called Virgin Orbit, was initiated in 2015 with the opening of a separate facility in Long Beach, California. The goal is to fly midsized satellites on a rocket called LauncherOne, which will be carried to launch altitude by a converted Boeing 747, much as Unity is carried to altitude by Eve. I spoke to George Whitesides at length about Virgin Galactic’s plans and the trials before them. “Space is a challenging technical endeavor and it is very unforgiving given the current technology,” he said. “We’re trying to do hard things in a world that has more risk aversion than fifty years ago.”

The Zero-Waste Lifestyle: Live Well by Throwing Away Less by Amy Korst

airport security, Boeing 747, business climate, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, if you build it, they will come, Mason jar, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Parkinson's law

Air travel does not in and of itself create trash, but many of the activities accompanying flying do generate waste. Like with any other aspect of trash-free living, heading into the situation prepared is the best way to create zero waste. According to the National Resource Defense Council, “The U.S. airline industry discards enough aluminum cans each year to build 58 Boeing 747 airplanes.” And aluminum waste is just the tip of the iceberg: the airline industry discarded nine thousand tons of plastic in 2004 and enough newspapers and magazines to fill a football field to a height of more than 230 feet. Your first obstacle will be the security checkpoint, where no liquids in an amount over three ounces can be carried onto the plane.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

There have been sublime technological objets, like the iPhone, whose original release was the closest my own generation possesses to a shared experience of techno-wonder. There have certainly been men and women who get famous selling the promise of the sublime—Elon Musk’s hyperloops being the most famous examples. And there have been moments of a nostalgic sublime—such as the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery, carried into history on a special Boeing 747 airliner, which had people craning their necks to watch as the retired spacecraft was ferried from Florida to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. But the hyperloop is a blueprint, Las Vegas is a simulacrum, virtual reality is not—and as the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson wrote after watching Discovery pass overhead, the nostalgic sublime of its final flight mostly accentuated the possibilities we’ve given up: “My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

Not content with the complexity of cars, not to mention people, he then switched to aerospace at Rolls-Royce. If you’ve ever been on a plane, there’s a really good chance that you’ve been jetted around by an engine that Carling had a hand in. At my insistence, he reels off a list: the Airbus 380, 350, and 330, the Boeing 747, 777, and 767. “Jet engines run hot all the time, and the intake temperature can be of the order of two thousand Kelvin, which is three hundred degrees or so above the melting temperature of the turbine that is extracting the power,” he tells me, going on to explain how such a feat is possible with clever engineering.

Speed by Bob Gilliland, Keith Dunnavant

Airbus A320, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, US Airways Flight 1549, work culture

By this point in his life, the middle-aged aerospace engineer had logged several million miles as a paying customer, encountering his share of bumpy rides. Fascinated with aviation from an early age, Lee had already achieved a rare distinction—riding along on the first commercial flights of the Boeing 747, the Airbus A320, and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, three signature airliners of the modern age. In time, he would add the Airbus A350 to his list of firsts, further demonstrating his passion for cutting-edge experiences. But this flight was historic in a different way. In one row of the first-class cabin sat Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

As Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design explained, [The acquisition] relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @—as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection.61 At present, years after the dot-com bubble knocked the wind out of the first wave of Internet entrepreneurs, the @ has lost some of its luster, and an ever-expanding roster of replacements are assuming its mantle as a sign of the future.

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

Most of these 90,000 pages comprised technical documentation on new aircraft (among them Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011), aero-engines (including Rolls-Royce, Olympus-593, RB-211 and SPEY-505) and flight simulators. ACE’s material on the flight simulators for the Lockheed L-1011 and Boeing 747 was believed to be the basis for a new generation of Soviet equivalents. ACE also recruited under false flag (probably that of a rival company) an aero-engines specialist codenamed SWEDE.94 The Security Service investigation of Gregory was hampered by the fact that he had been dead for ten years by the time it received Mitrokhin’s notes on his KGB file.

…

After more than a month’s negotiations, the Israeli passengers on board were exchanged for sixteen Palestinians in Israeli jails.5 Because there was as yet no evidence that British airlines were at risk from the PFLP, Whitehall showed little urgency in responding to the hijacking menace. Following a second PFLP hijack in September, however, this time of a TWA Boeing 747 also en route to Tel Aviv, the cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, set up a working party to study hijacking and other attacks on civil aircraft. Progress was slow. C Branch issued threat assessments to El Al and Jordanian Airlines, which were thought to be most at risk from the PFLP, but did not yet think it necessary to contact British airlines.6 The first PFLP attacks on Jewish targets in London were so amateurish that they failed to give a greater sense of urgency to British counterterrorism.

…

Arguello was shot dead by the air marshal and Khaled, who was prevented by other passengers from removing grenades hidden in her bra, was arrested when the plane made an emergency landing at Heathrow. The hijackers aboard a TWA Boeing 707 and a Swissair DC-8, however, successfully diverted their aircraft to Dawson’s Field, which they promptly renamed ‘Revolution Airstrip’. A hijacked Pan Am Boeing 747, which was discovered to be too large to land at the Airstrip, was forced to land instead at Cairo where passengers and crew were evacuated and the aircraft blown up. A fifth plane, a BOAC VC-10, was hijacked three days later and flown to the Airstrip to provide the PFLP with British hostages. As the PFLP had planned, the hostages were eventually exchanged for Khaled and six Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in West Germany and Switzerland.32 The aircraft were destroyed by the hijackers.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

That depends on whether we are willing to respond to disaster the same way aviation does. A good place to start would be the terrifying voyage of British Airways Flight 9. On June 24, 1982, Flight 9 took off from Kuala Lumpur at around 8 p.m. local time. It was en route from London to Auckland, New Zealand, with 263 passengers and crew aboard. A few hours later, as the Boeing 747 approached the Indonesian island of Java, passengers and crew noticed something unusual. A sulfurous-smelling smoke had begun to fill the passenger cabin. First one, then in quick succession all four, engines surged, then flamed out. Seven miles above the Indian Ocean, Flight 9 was utterly without power.

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to Las Vegas by Mary Herczog, Jordan S. Simon

Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, Saturday Night Live, young professional

Mandalay Bay has 5,300 palm trees of various species; its wave pool holds 1,640,270 gallons of water and is surrounded by 1,700 tons of sand. Lucky the Clown, the 123foot neon marquee mascot of Circus Circus, has 1,232 fluorescent lamps, 14,498 incandescent bulbs, and 3⁄ 4 mile of neon tubing. The Luxor’s 29-million-cubic-foot lobby could shelter nine Boeing 747s stacked atop one another; the laser-lit Luxor pyramid is one of only two man-made objects (the Great Wall of China is the other) visible from outer space. Where can I find a legal hooker?... Nowhere. The world’s oldest profession is legal in Nevada, except in Las Vegas, Reno, and their counties.

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

It was packed with a large quantity of ice in a Styrofoam box known as a coffin, and sent by truck from Cartagena to Madrid for a fivehour overnight drive. By 5 a.m., the coffin had arrived at Madrid’s Barajas International Airport, where it was tied down with netting onto a metal pallet and slid into the hull of a Boeing 747-400 operated by Thai Airways, which at 11:45 a.m. took off for Bangkok. The fish arrived the next morning at Bangkok’s Don Muang International Airport, where it was rushed across the Tarmac to meet its connecting flight to Tokyo. Three NARITA, JAPAN The Hub How Narita Airport became Japan’s top fishing harbor Each day at 3:40 p.m., Thai Airways flight 676—in the guise of a wide-body white plane decorated with a horizontal purple stripe and the airline’s gold orchid logo on its tail—touches down at Narita International Airport, an exurban campus of banal corporate architecture erected on an asphalt tundra laid down atop rice paddies.

Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Lynn Ross, John Norberg

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, glass ceiling, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, space junk, Ted Sorensen

The entire Shuttle stack stood 184 feet tall on the launch pad— about the height of an 18-story building—and when fully fueled it weighed an amazing 4.5 million pounds. At liftoff the Shuttle’s three main engines and its two solid rocket boosters provided more than 6.5 million pounds of thrust. The six orbiters were assembled in Palmdale, California, and these were flown piggyback on top of NASA’s highly modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The external tanks were manufactured at a voluminous plant at Michoud, Louisiana, near New Orleans, and shipped by barge to the Cape. The solid rocket boosters were manufactured in Brigham City, Utah, and shipped in segments via a special train to the launch site in Florida.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

READ-DO checklists typically deal with an emergency or an abnormal situation. In these cases, the pilot is likely to be unfamiliar with the situation, so the READ-DO checklist offers a recipe for action. The main virtue of a READ-DO checklist is that it allows the pilot to focus on concrete steps to address the problem. For example, if the warning light on a Boeing 747 for “Door FWD Cargo” goes on, indicating that the front cargo door is open, a READ-DO checklist would direct the pilot's decisions: “Lower cabin pressure partially. Descend to the safest altitude or 8,000 feet, whichever is higher. Put the air outflow switches on manual and push them in for 30 seconds to release the remaining pressure.”

Concentrated Investing by Allen C. Benello

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, Claude Shannon: information theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, family office, fixed income, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Louis Bachelier, margin call, merger arbitrage, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, prudent man rule, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, technology bubble, Teledyne, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Worse, the blowout preventer was an unusual size, which meant there were no spares available. Worst, it couldn’t be repaired in the Ivory Coast. The only way to fix it was to take it to a workshop in Aberdeen, England. Siem left his honeymoon to fly to Abidjan, where he arranged for an Air Afrique Boeing 747 cargo plane that opened in the front to pick up the blowout preventer and transport it from the Ivory Coast to England. Next he needed an oven hot enough to repair the part, which was essentially a metal-on-metal seal that operated under tremendous pressure. It needed a perfect seal. Any imperfection in the surface would mean that it would not seal fully, and wouldn’t function.

Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

That is to say, a society not so unlike the one that in the nineteenth century used armies of migrant Irish labour to build the canals and railways of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. But, in fact, it is not that the building process is slower in Europe, construction itself takes much the same time, it is the management and the decision-making that drags on interminably in Britain. By spring 2008, when my British Airways Boeing 747 pulled up on the crescent wing of stands furthest from the landside, there was no sign that the warrior armies had ever been here. There was still some dust – that is unavoidable in Beijing – but no mud, and no cranes. The site huts had gone, and in their place was the sharp outline of the new airport: more like a landscape than a single building, a kind of dunescape of glass and steel taking on the form of wind-drifted snow or sand.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

England’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, explained, “Well, it was predicted in 1945 by Alexander Fleming, when he accepted his Nobel Prize for penicillin. And he said resistance will occur, and it will cause deaths.”21 Even so, the scale of today’s resistance problem would have shocked and saddened him. Dame Sally again: “Worldwide, at least 700,000 people die a year. Let’s make it real for the United States: the equivalent of a Boeing 747 dropping out of the sky every week in the United States, 25,000 deaths. The same in Europe. Take India: 60,000 newborn babies dying of infections that are resistant to drugs every year.” As a result, the World Health Organization warns that we now face a global health crisis of potentially epic proportions.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

It looks like something your eight-year-old son might design on Roblox: no curves at all, just a giant metal box. You wonder how it steers. It sells for $55,000 and weighs more than 6,000 pounds. Even with four adult passengers weighing 160 pounds each, there are still well over 10 pounds of car for every one of passenger carried. By comparison, an unladen Boeing 747 weighs about 180 tons—or sixty Suburbans—and can carry 450 passengers and their luggage comfortably, or more than a pound of payload for every pound of plane. According to Chevrolet, the Suburban gets about 21 miles to the gallon. (Or, it consumes 5 gallons to drive 100 miles.) A typical American driver using one will burn roughly 4,000 pounds of gasoline a year, or their own body weight worth every sixteen days.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

We obviously couldn’t tell an engineer to try plugging his gizmos in somewhere else just to see what happened, but we could suggest that maybe we should try using the famous French restaurateur Maxim’s of Paris with butlers in tailcoats to serve our Upper Class section. Sadly it didn’t last more than a few weeks! The fancy French sauces that worked in a kitchen at sea level just didn’t hold together at 35,000 feet and worse still those tails kept tripping the butlers up as they climbed the circular staircase to our Boeing 747’s upper deck. But it certainly got us lots of press and – as with all attempts to effect real change – if we’d never tried it we’d never have known. It was a tribute to the people on both sides of the equation that – surprisingly, perhaps – we never had any violent eruptions and the two groups quickly came together with a healthy balance and understanding as to which elements the other needed to function and where there were grounds for serious further experimentation.

One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

air freight, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Boeing 747, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, fixed income, index fund, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, large denomination, money market fund, prediction markets, random walk, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Teledyne, vertical integration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Since I was the analyst who recommended it, I kept having to reassure them that it had a good balance sheet. In fact, it cheered us all up to discover that with only 25 million shares outstanding, at the $4 price the entire company was selling for $100 million. That same money would have bought you four Boeing 747s back then. Today, you’d get one plane with no engines. The stock market had driven Kaiser so low that this powerful company, with its real estate, aluminum, steel, cement, shipbuilding, aggregates, fiberglass, engineering, and broadcasting businesses—not to mention jeeps—was selling for the price of four airplanes.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Hinton’s interviews for the McKinsey job had taught him an early and vital lesson about this approach to problem-solving: It was not about drawing on knowledge, and often even sneered at doing so; it was, rather, about being able to analyze a situation despite ignorance, to transcend unfamiliarity. The interview questions that struck him were of this sort: How many Ping-Pong balls would fit into a Boeing 747? What would you estimate the size of the Bolivian steel industry to be? How many razor blades are sold in Australia every year? Hinton joked that his instinct, hearing such questions, was to call a friend in this or that job who might be familiar with the relevant facts. But the point in the interviews was not to get the number right.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

They also knew that gaining access to future investors from a notoriously skeptical and well-educated generation would mean transparency and authenticity in these efforts. Customer engagement was a big bonus that year when the bank processed CND$1.4 million in donated pennies for WE Create Change. Allow me to move the decimal. That's 140,000,000 pennies, enough to outweigh five Boeing 747s—passenger jets always make numbers easier to digest. The feat is made even more incredible when you consider that kids ran the show, excavating couches at home and holding coin drives at school. But there is one thing kids can't do—drive. And pennies are heavy. Across the country, proud parents walked into RBC branches with their kids, who hoisted bags of coins onto bank counters.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

Wayne van Citters, the National Science Foundation’s director of astronomy, says that most of the astronomical community believes those big telescopes are worth building only if they can incorporate adaptive optics systems. The military is using adaptive optics and laser guide stars, too, but aren’t posting before-and-after pictures on the Internet; for billions of dollars, they’re putting the systems on Boeing 747s that from high orbits can aim killer lasers at battlefield missiles hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, in yet another example of the futility of answering, once and for all, the moral questions about science’s applications: the UCSC center is using adaptive optics technology in devices that overcome natural distortions in the eye to make images of a living human retina.

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

Bulkheads, decks, and compartments piled on one another, a mosaic of gray, green, and rust-colored steel structures protected in some spots by a green tarp and penned in by temporary safety-wire fencing anchored by green metal pegs. Now, in July 2016, steelworkers put Big Blue to a major test with a superlift set to tip the scales at about nine hundred tons, or about the same weight as two Boeing 747s at their maximum takeoff weight when packed with passengers, cargo, and fuel. Sam Carper and the steelworkers erected and outfitted the units as planned, in a way never attempted before the Kennedy. Butler planned to complete the ship in 445 lifts, 51 fewer than it had taken for the Ford and 149 fewer than the Bush.

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Peter Petre

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, California gold rush, call centre, clean tech, clean water, Donald Trump, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, index card, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, Y2K

I also wasn’t interested in the investments that often attracted Hollywood business managers, such as trendy hotels and clubs. I could tolerate big risks in exchange for big returns, and I would want to know as much as possible about what was going on. My openness to new ideas and my involvement, plus the amount of money coming in, attracted Paul. He knew there would be plenty to do. The idea of buying a Boeing 747 snuck up on us slowly. We had an acquaintance in San Francisco, David Crane, whose investment firm had gotten into the aircraft leasing trade. Aircraft leasing is a whole industry that exists because airlines often don’t like to own their airplanes. Owning ties up a lot of capital and can be a big distraction when your real business is flying around passengers and freight.

…

., 588 International Creative Management, 192–93, 298 International Federation of Body Builders (IFBB), 65, 101, 110, 251, 456 International Mining, 291 International Olympic Committee, 102 Iraq; Arnold’s visit to, 488 Ireland; Arnold and Park on exhibition circuit in, 61–62 Ironman (movie), 337 Ironside, Michael, 348 Issa, Darrell, 484, 489, 502 The Jackie Gleason Show (TV show), 74 Jackson, Alphonso, 572 Jackson, Jesse, 506 Jagger, Bianca, 214–15 Jagger, Mick, 214–15 Janz, Franz, 33–34 Japan; Weider-Arnold trip to, 103, 104 Jaws (movie), 236 The Jayne Mansfield Story (movie), 232 Jenner, Bruce, 220 Jessel, George, 357 jet planes: Arnold’s buying of Boeing 747, 427–30 Arnold’s campaign for governor and, 507 Arnold’s Gulfstream, 393, 394 corporate, 442–43 Jews, 293, 332 Jingle All the Way (movie), 410 Joel, Billy, 424 John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Special Olympics promotion at, 373 John Paul II (pope), 617–18 Johnson, Hiram, 468, 505, 587 Johnson, Lyndon B., 242, 372 Johnston, Dick, 161 Jones, Bill, 503 Jones, Grace, 305–6, 307, 330–31 Jones, James Earl, 263, 271, 272–73, 375 Jones, Quincy, 328 Joseph (Mildred and Arnold’s son), 592, 594–95, 596 Junior (movie), 374, 381, 423 Jurassic Park (movie), 407, 410 Kallianiotes, Helena, 190 Kassar, Mario, 345–46, 347, 470–71 Kaufman, Elaine, 209.

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland | ALEXANDER OGANEZOV/SHUTTERSTOCK © Theme & Water Parks Riverfront Park, Spokane, Washington Public park plus a carrousel, gondola ride, IMAX theater and more; don’t miss the giant Radio Flyer Wagon. Enchanted Forest, Oregon Large theme park with lots of rides, a haunted house, themed towns with activities, live music and more. Evergreen Wings & Waves Waterpark, Oregon Year-round, indoor park with tons of slides. It’s attached to an aviation museum – you can slide out of a Boeing 747! Slidewaters Water Park, Washington Variety of slides plus a floating river and hot tubs. Region by Region The Pacific Northwest – from the sun, sand and surf along the coast to the snow-covered slopes further inland – is a fun and exciting destination for families. Kids will love exploring the many child-oriented museums, amusement parks, zoos and animal safaris.

…

Evergreen Wings & Waves WaterparkWATER PARK (%503-687-3390; https://wingsandwaveswaterpark.com; 500 NE Captain Michael King Smith Way; visitors under/over 42in $20/29, dry passes $10; h10am-6pm or 7pm, varies with season; c) A must on a hot day, this indoor water park is next to the aviation museum and quite unmissable – a retired Boeing 747 lies atop the building. Inside are 10 waterslides (including four that come out of the 747), a wave pool, a splashing play structure, a leisure pool and a bubbly toddler area. Plenty of lifeguards keep everyone safe. Eyrie VineyardsWINE (%503-472-6315; www.eyrievineyards.com; 935 NE 10th Ave; tastings $40; htastings by appointment only, 11am & 2pm Thu-Mon) Eyrie is home to the first Pinot Noir and Chardonnay plantings in the Willamette Valley, and the first Pinot Gris plantings in the US.

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

To translate this “in principle” into reality will require two things: first a great advance in the engineering of hypersonic aircraft, and second the growth of a traffic massive enough to permit large economies of scale. It is likely that the Apollo vehicle bears the same relation to the cheap mass-transportation space vehicle of the future as the majestic airship of the 1930s bears to the Boeing 747 of today. The airship R101 was absurdly large, beautiful, expensive, and fragile, just like the Apollo Saturn 5. If this analogy is sound, we shall have transportation into space at a reasonable price within about fifty years from now. But my grounds for believing this are not essentially firmer than Bernal’s were for believing it in 1929.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

The plane carrying the envelope, KLM flight 611, had landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport a few hours earlier after a four-thousand-mile journey from the Netherlands. As weary passengers stood up and stretched their arms and legs, baggage handlers twenty feet below them unloaded cargo from the belly of the Boeing 747. Suitcases of all shapes and sizes were ushered in one direction; forty or so blue buckets filled with international mail were sent in another. Those blue tubs—nicknamed “scrubs” by airport employees—were driven across the tarmac to a prodigious mail storage and sorting facility fifteen minutes away.

Felaheen by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Boeing 747, bread and circuses, haute cuisine, polynesian navigation, sensible shoes

He had two fish the length of Sally's arm crisping on its griddle, fat spitting on the glowing coals, their eyes gone opalescent with heat . . . "You okay?" Atal asked. "Sure," said Sally as she watched Singh's cab roar away. "Just remembering how we got here." Bozo grinned. He knew exactly how he got there, by Boeing 747 from KL to Idlewild, paid for by the weird Chinese guy and with $1,000 spending money in his pocket. "We going to do this, or what?" he said, putting on a fresh pair of gloves. Almost opposite the Church of Our Saviour stood the Hotel Kitano. A lovingly restored fifteen-storey redbrick hotel that majored in rollout futons and sunken hot tubs for its mainly Japanese clientele, or so Atal said, then got embarrassed when Bozo asked how he knew.

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

It is fundamentally necessary that it should be progressive if Darwinian natural selection is to perform the explanatory role in our world view that we require of it, and that it alone can perform. Here’s why. Creationists love Sir Fred Hoyle’s vivid metaphor for his own misunderstanding of natural selection. It is as if a hurricane, blowing through a junkyard, had the good fortune to assemble a Boeing 747. Hoyle’s point is about statistical improbability. Our answer, yours and mine and Stephen Gould’s, is that natural selection is cumulative. There is a ratchet, such that small gains are saved. The hurricane doesn’t spontaneously assemble the airliner in one go. Small improvements are added bit by bit.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

Layovers between flights were longer. Flights were less crowded, the passengers more experienced and generally richer, the work more pleasant. Descriptions of flying today are much different: Now we have these huge planes that can go forever. I mean, we have twelve-hour duty days, with 375 people to tend [on the Boeing 747]. The SP [Special Performance plane] is smaller, but it can go fifteen or sixteen hours without refueling. We used to fly with the same people, and there were fewer of us. We would just informally rotate positions. Now you come to work all set to argue for not working tourist class. When we go down the rows, we avoid eye contact and focus on the aisle, on the plates.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

* * * In the recent past, several individuals and groups – from the IRA in Ireland and Hamas in Palestine to Sikh, Kashmiri and Baloch insurgents in South Asia, Chechens in the Caucasus – have used terrorist violence as a tactic. In an almost forgotten atrocity in 1985, a bomb planted by Sikh militants fighting for Khalistan, or ‘Land of the Pure’, brought down a Boeing 747 travelling from Montreal to Delhi, killing 329 people. The Sri Lanka Tamils, who were fighting for a separate homeland, pioneered suicide attacks. One of them, a woman suicide bomber, assassinated the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Their Sinhalese opponents, officially Buddhist, responded with ethnic cleansing.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

For instance, in July 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to FBI headquarters suggesting that there was a possible “coordinated effort by Usama Bin Ladin” to send students to US flight schools. The FBI agent based his theory on the “inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest” attending flight schools in Arizona.14 The next month, independently, the FBI in Minneapolis investigated Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui was taking flight training for a Boeing 747, but he had none of the usual qualifications for such training. Questions he asked raised the suspicions of his flight instructor, who reported him to the FBI. Moussaoui was arrested for immigration violations, but even though other intelligence agencies had information linking him to al-Qaeda, this information was never connected to the reports about flight training, so no further investigation occurred.15 Part of the reason these two pieces of information were not connected has to do with restrictions on sharing information between agencies like the CIA and FBI.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

He predicted handheld communicators, colour photocopying and the digitisation of financial transactions, and he was right. But this is exactly the sector of the economy where pluralism is alive and well. Another sector of the economy that must have seemed set for never-ending improvement at the time Kahn was writing is long-haul air travel. Who would have expected in the late 1960s, when the Boeing 747 was designed, that the same plane would still dominate the industry over forty years later? If we had asked business travellers of the 1960s to predict what their counterparts in the 2000s would vote as ‘the travel innovation of the decade’, they would surely have thought of jet packs or flying cars.

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

The journalists reporting from the location were seen wiping their sweaty brows and fanning themselves. At the luxurious Capella Hotel, where the summit took place, peacocks roamed the grounds—a sign of new beginnings, suggested the management in a promotional tweet. Kim Jong Un took center stage even before the summit started. The night before, after having borrowed an Air China Boeing 747 because his own aging jet could not have flown the nearly three thousand miles between Pyongyang and Singapore, Kim went on a surprise evening stroll, while the media (including North Korea’s regime mouthpiece) and curious onlookers took photos and applauded. He even took a selfie with the Singaporean foreign minister and education minister, the three men smiling broadly.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

The World Wide Military Command and Control System had grown to encompass eight warning systems, sixty communications networks, one hundred command centers, and 70,000 personnel. But the ground stations for its early-warning satellites could easily be destroyed by conventional weapons or sabotage, eliminating the ability to detect Soviet missile launches. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post—a converted Boeing 747, designed to take off, whisk the president away from Washington safely, and permit the management of nuclear warfare in real time—did not have a computer. The officers manning the plane would have to record information about a Soviet attack by hand. And the entire command-and-control system could be shut down by the electromagnetic pulse and the transient radiation effects of a nuclear detonation above the United States.

…

The Pershing II missiles were supposed to arrive in West Germany at the end of November, and anxieties about nuclear war increased throughout Europe as the date approached. On the evening of September 1, Soviet fighter planes shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing all 269 of its passengers. The Boeing 747 had accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace, not far from a missile test site, and the airliner was mistaken for an American reconnaissance plane. The Kremlin denied that it had anything to do with the tragedy—until the United States released audio recordings of Soviet pilots being ordered to shoot down the plane.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

The Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 doubled the speed and increased the productivity of air transportation, leading to steady declines in airfares. By the 1960s, jet service had been extended to most major world markets. Developing countries began to connect, although the long distances required multiple stops and transfers along the way. With the arrival of the Boeing 747 and other wide-bodied aircraft, that changed, especially with the development of the longer-range 747-400 in the late 1980s. Nonstop flights at reasonable prices could connect New York with Shanghai, London with Johannesburg, Tokyo with Istanbul, and Los Angeles with Santiago. Prices dropped: the price per mile traveled within the United Sates fell by more than half between 1980 and 2005 (figure 7.3), and prices for long-haul flights dropped by even more.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

We know that human innovation rarely designs things from scratch, but jumps from one technology to the ‘adjacent possible’ technology, recombining existing features. So it is taking small, incremental steps. And we know that the same is true of natural selection. So the mathematics is misleading. In a commonly used analogy, you are not assembling a Boeing 747 with a whirlwind in a scrapyard, you are adding one last rivet to an existing design. And here there has been a remarkable recent discovery that makes natural selection’s task much easier. In a laboratory in Zürich a few years ago, Andreas Wagner asked his student João Rodriguez to use a gigantic assembly of computers to work his way through a map of different metabolic networks to see how far he could get by changing just one step at a time.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The single biggest chunk of the global goods trade was, and remains, commodities—oil, gas, coffee, wheat, iron and other raw resources. But among manufactured goods, what gets traded now is far more diverse than just a quarter-century ago. A page from the July 1991 journal of the International Civil Aviation Organization heralded the delivery of Air China’s first Boeing 747, which “is used to transport textiles, apparel and other goods from Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris and Hong Kong. On return flights, the freighter’s payload includes computers and other electronics items.”10 Today, we can all look back to such vignettes with amused incredulity.

One Day in September by Simon Reeve

Boeing 747, disinformation, fear of failure, friendly fire, New Journalism, Seymour Hersh, two and twenty, white flight, Yom Kippur War

An hour later Zvi Zamir, the head of Mossad, who had personally witnessed the deaths of the Israeli athletes at Munich, allegedly also arrived in the region to monitor the operation; he checked into the Esso Olrud Hotel south of Lillehammer with a bodyguard.38 Israel would soon have its revenge on the man who planned the Munich attack. But at the same time as the Israelis were preparing to launch their operation, another terrorist atrocity was unfolding elsewhere in Europe. The afternoon before the Israeli killers arrived in Lillehammer, a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 flight from Amsterdam to Tokyo with 123 passengers was hijacked by a mixed group of Japanese and Arab terrorists who announced they were changing the call sign of the plane to “Operation Mount Carmel.” There was panic in Israel when military commanders heard the news. For months Israeli intelligence had been hearing rumors that the Palestinians were plotting a massive suicide attack on the Jewish state.

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

I tried to imagine a jumbo jet with six hundred passengers on board flying into a mega electro-magnetic wind tunnel inside which it would hit invisible magnetic buffers; or be brought to an abrupt halt by a massive arrester wire stretched across the runway at Heathrow, as if on the deck of an aircraft carrier. ‘Good idea, Sir,’ I said, marshalling all my diplomatic skill. ‘Magnetic fields have very short-range effects but it may be possible.’ No, it would not. I pictured a Boeing 747 being flipped head-over-heels in a magnetic field because its polarity was the wrong way round. ‘Excellent, I’d be most grateful if you would give the matter some thought.’ That was Admiral-speak for: ‘Go away and find out.’ I sighed inwardly. The idea was a clear non-runner. ‘Yes, Sir,’ I replied.

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

This is our opportunity, now, to turn this final migration into a force of lasting progress, an end to poverty, a more sustainable economy, a less brutal existence in the village. It will work only if we stop ignoring those awkward neighborhoods on the edge of town. * Job Cohen and Ahmed Marcouch both entered national politics in 2010. † The change in approach was precipitated in part by a 1992 disaster, in which an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment tower in Bijlmermeer, killing 43 passengers and 39 people in the building and drawing attention to the neighborhood’s plight. ‡ Rising ocean levels caused by the ice-cap melting of global warming are already having effects on Bangladesh, which has one of the largest rural populations at or below sea level.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Nor would Wilbur and Orville’s first trip have turned any bird heads. The first of their four flights—at 10:35 A.M. eastern time on December 17, 1903—lasted twelve seconds, at an average speed of 6.8 miles per hour against a 30-mile-per-hour wind. The Wright Flyer, as it was called, had traveled 120 feet, not even the length of one wing on a Boeing 747. Even after the Wright brothers went public with their achievement, the media took only intermittent notice of it and other aviation firsts. As late as 1933—six years after Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic—H. Gordon Garbedian ignored airplanes in the otherwise prescient introduction to his book Major Mysteries of Science: Present day life is dominated by science as never before.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

When an event is planned, rather than covered-up, other attacks on a proper investigation are possible, such as planting fake evidence trails in advance, framing patsies with circumstantial evidence, or moving corrupted individuals into key positions ahead of time. Even a well conducted investigation, like the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into TWA flight 800, runs afoul of many problems. And in this investigation, fully 95% of the exploded Boeing 747 was recovered and reassembled, and hundreds of witnesses were interviewed. When we see a major crime that is not investigated properly, when we see evidence disappearing, or made to appear, or when we see unreliable confessions, then we must conclude that we are seeing a cover-up. That in itself is evidence, if not of direct responsibility, then at least of complicity.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

Everest towers above sea level. But to those of us who think infrequently of the oceans, this demonstration of Archimedes’ principle, this leap across the deepest known chasm in the solar system, is but a ship afloat on the sea, and not, as we might otherwise recognize it, a feat equivalent to flying 700 Boeing 747s’ worth of cargo over the Himalayas. Crossing the world’s largest ocean after navigating the hazards of the South China Sea is a study in contrasts. Here, the sea is so endless, so thinly populated—and by only the largest vessels—that an officer on watch can go days without seeing another ship on radar, or weeks without seeing one with his own eyes.

Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

airport security, Boeing 747, company town, D. B. Cooper, Google Earth, industrial robot, off-the-grid

Like no other innovation, the invention of the airplane in Kitty Hawk and the evolution of American airpower were testaments to the nation’s technological virility and essential to the American ethos. Air-power had been instrumental in winning the World Wars, in ushering in the jet age, in developing the space program. America had put man on the moon. Boeing had built the 747, the jumbo jet. And yet, in one impulsive action, the lone skyjacker was able to show the fallibility of the costly flying machines. What good was the power of the Air Force in a country like Vietnam where American soldiers were slaughtered under the canopy of the jungle? What good was flying a jet to vacation in Miami when so many flights were getting rerouted to Castro’s Cuba?

…

In Seattle he is changing planes to go to his grandmother’s house in the San Juan Islands. The plane has been circling for three hours. He’ll miss his flight. He’ll have to spend the night in SEA-TAC. He looks out the window and sees the lights on the wing illuminate the rain streaking by. He feels the plane move. Another loop. The jet banks again, over Everett, where Boeing’s 747 factory is located. The 747 was a gamble that nearly bankrupted the company. In the recession, Boeing has been forced to lay off more than half the workforce. A company town, Seattle has the highest unemployment rate of any American city since the Great Depression. It’s over 12 percent. Aeronautical engineers with advanced degrees are forced to mow lawns to feed their families.

A Very Strange Way to Go to War: The Canberra in the Falklands by Andrew Vine

Boeing 747, clockwatching, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Anderson’s prediction that ten years would prove him right or wrong about the future of liners turned out to be correct; on Friday January 23 1970, the sort of crowds that had gathered to see Canberra away on her maiden voyage looked to the skies over Heathrow Airport as a huge, wide-bodied airliner made its approach. The Pan Am Boeing 747 from New York touched down safely, its 362 passengers getting off full of the excitement of knowing that they had just been part of history. The jumbo jet opened a new era of mass air travel over long haul routes; the ship of the future had been consigned to the past. The years that followed were fraught.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. http://us.penguingroup.com For my brilliant, beautiful Abbie, who is a part of this story PROLOGUE Flying into Fort McMurray My nose was pressed against the rear window glass of a Boeing 747. It was a direct flight from Edmonton to the booming new oil city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the broad belt of boreal forest that girdles the globe through Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia. The scene below morphed from urban concrete to canary-yellow canola fields, then gradually from fields to a deep shag carpet of evergreen forest jeweled with bogs.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

The most dangerous time of flight is landing, which arrives at the end of a journey, when the greatest amount of sleep deprivation has often accrued. Recall how tired and sleepy you are at the end of an overnight, transatlantic flight, having been on the go for more than twenty-four hours. Would you feel at peak performance, ready to land a Boeing 747 with 467 passengers on board, should you have the skill to do so? It is during this end phase of flight, known in the aviation industry as “top of descent to landing,” that 68 percent of all hull losses—a euphemism for a catastrophic plane crash—occur. The researchers set to work answering the following question, posed by the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA): If a pilot can only obtain a short nap opportunity (40–120 minutes) within a thirty-six-hour period, when should it occur so as to minimize cognitive fatigue and attention lapses: at the start of the first evening, in the middle of the night, or late the following morning?

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The probability is that improving automatons will have the same effect as other advances in engineering and technology: economic disruption, some jobs lost while others are gained, and higher living standards for almost everyone. Most likely robots, no matter how advanced, never will do any more or less than they are designed to do. The Boeing 747 is an astonishingly complex mechanism with six million parts and state-of-the-art electronics. Of the 1,500 that fly the skies of the world, not a single one has become self-aware and turned on its creators nor performed any action unrelated to flight engineering. A person, company, or government could design a robot whose purpose is to harm or dominate people.

Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, Stuxnet, traveling salesman, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

At their sides were hundreds of infantry soldiers and paratroopers of Ethiopian origin, who had immigrated to Israel as children a few years ago. They deployed at the confines of the airport and led the Jews into the planes. In thirty-four hours, 14,400 Jews were brought to the airport. At a lightning speed, they boarded the aircraft and took off for Israel. A world record was broken during the operation: an El Al Boeing-747 took on board 1,087 immigrants; but when it landed, it carried 1,088 people. A baby had been born during the flight. At the sight of the young Ethiopian soldiers who had arrived from Israel to rescue their brothers, tremendous emotions swept the immigrants; even the tough Ethiopian paratroopers, in their green IDF uniforms, red berets, and jumping boots, burst into tears.

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

Quite the contrary, they are thoroughly feasible and will probably dominate interplanetary commerce a century from now. For that reason we shall discuss them further in some of the later chapters of this book that deal with the more futuristic aspects of Mars colonization. However, just as Columbus would not have traveled very far if he had held his expedition on the dock until an iron steamship or a Boeing 747 was available for trans-Atlantic transport, so the first generation of Mars explorers will have to settle their hopes upon a more primitive set of technologies than will be available to travelers of a later era. Columbus crossed the Atlantic with vessels designed for Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal traffic.

Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles

air gap, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alignment Problem, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, crew resource management, cuban missile crisis, Exxon Valdez, flying shuttle, Gene Kranz, Maui Hawaii, megaproject, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ted Sorensen, time dilation

On this particular night, a twin-engined passenger jet known as the BAC1-11 rolled in for work that needed to be finished by 6:30 A.M. so the aircraft could get a wash before starting the day’s flight to Malaga, Spain. At thirteen years old and with 32,724 hours of flight time, the airplane registered as G-BJRT was well into middle age. Jets can last much longer; one Boeing 747 finally departed the Sabena fleet with 94,794 hours on the meter. Jones saw from the worksheet that G-BJRT needed its left front windscreen replaced. His small crew was already busy, so although he ranked as a supervisor and didn’t have to do this sort of thing he decided to take on the awkward job of replacing the sixty-pound slab of layered glass and plastic himself.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty thousand per year. That’s a third more people than are killed by guns. It’s more than ten times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Here’s an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That’s how many people die on U.S. highways every year. Globally, traffic injuries are the greatest killer of ten- to twenty-four-year-olds.* A rational actor would be terrified of suburban roads. A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game