Month: December 2023

Long one today in the Input sections, so I’ll keep it short up here. We’re into Bowl Season, which I both love and regret, as the culmination and conclusion of the college football season. It’s great to see teams get the chance to celebrate a season and play one final game for joy, but it, to me, marks the true beginning of the darkest part of Winter. Here’s to the kids, and the games (and #GoBulls! 🤘).

What I read

This article in the Washington Post, “Pilots hide mental health problems so they don’t ‘lose their wings’”

My father was an airline pilot. He started out flying as an officer in the Air Force, then took a job at Republic Airlines, which was bought by Northwest, which was later merged with Delta. As such, I’ve heard many, many stories about the business from the flight deck. And everything in here tracks.

I remember stories about pilots he worked with with hidden drinking problems, with mental health issues, and one very memorable one about a pilot who would, he told me, claim to “float outside his body to examine the plane” like some sort of transcendental out of body experience.

My father flew wide-body jets much of his career. 747-400s, with hundreds of passengers on board. He used to tell me that his biggest fear was making a mistake that hurt people. That there was a persistent worry about “bending one.”

Towards the end of his career, and then his life, he went on a medical leave, for mental health issues.

At first I thought it was some sort of ploy. He was an expert at flying the contract, finding all of the advantageous rules and policies to maximize his earnings. Picking up trips at the last moment that the airline was desperate to staff, finding the right patterns of back-to-back flights where it was likely they’d have to replace him for delays and pay for his whole trip. He was a good pilot, but he went to school for computer science. He knew how to work a logical system like a pro.

But, in talking with him more, I learned that he was getting to a point where the stress and the mental weight of the job were catching up to him. Delta was retiring the 400, and he’d have to retrain on an entirely new airframe after a decade of experience, and didn’t know if he could do it. If he still had it in him.

More than anything, he was worried about doing something stupid in the sky. Hurting people. Hurting himself.

He took leave for the last few years of the job, then took a buyout rather than retrain. And then he died, not a year later. It was a heart attack, but I’m certain no small part of it was the stress of the responsibility, the pressure of the job raising the pressure inside him, until it finally gave out.

I sincerely hope this article can be a wakeup call for the FAA and the industry, especially as a massive chunk of their workforce ages out of the job. It’s time to make the changes needed to ensure the continued safety of the industry, the crews, and everyone that flies. The industry has adopted Just Culture as a way to improve procedures and mechanisms without the fear of hiding from blame. I hope they can extend the same to the role mental health plays in the lives of their employees, see it as an opportunity to treat the issue without judgment, and renew the faith of all in a system meant to keep everyone safe.

What I watched

Caught the first two episodes of World War II: From the Frontlines on Netflix. It’s incredible seeing some of this footage from theaters of the war that get short shrift in America.

From the invasion of Poland to the defense of the Russian frontier, to movement in North Africa, most of the American cultural experience is tangential at best. Our media and Hollywood love to focus on Europe from D-Day to VE Day, ignoring much of the African front, Italy, and the Allied experience in the East.

Hearing participants, from both sides of the war, discuss their personal experiences, alongside footage embedded within the conflict, is a sight to behold. Highly recommended.

What I listened to

Listened to albums from Blondshell and Sincere Engineer on the recommendation of Patrick Hicks, who I follow on TikTok. Patrick is a music historian and fan, and tells amazing stories about interesting backgrounds and crossovers and emergences in music.

A favorite is his story about how three fundamental components of black culture in the 90s all came through the same call center: https://www.tiktok.com/@patrickhicks82/video/7292817678169869610?lang=en

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Put some work into defining the classes and, thus, all the collected information I’d need defined to display data to users.

So, I decided to take the weekends off from writing this journal, but did that mean I didn’t still mentally write bits, and then throw bits into the drafts for it? It absolutely did not. Which feel like an accomplishment in itself, that I’m finding desire to write regularly, to my imagined¹Also imaginary, but still, addressed in tone, I suppose? audience even without it being an assignment or requirement or whathaveyou. We’ll see if we can keep it up, eh?

What I read

The newest edition of Metafoundry, the newsletter from Deb Chachra, whose new book, How Infrastructure Works, I’ve noted here before. This latest edition is a collaboration with Robert Martello to jointly discuss a topic I’d never heard mentioned before: how the Boston Tea Party, which happened 250 years ago Saturday, had causal ties to the brutal actions of the British East India Company in Bengal a few years earlier.

The Company directly contributed to a famine, by enforcing strict taxes into a food shortage, killing between 7 and 10 million people in 1770. This led to worldwide outrage at their actions and the permission and latitude they were given by Britain. Which led to a credit crisis that the British responded to with the Tea Act (which functioned as an effective bail out of the East India Company by allowing them monopoly sales of their Chinese tea stocks into the American market).

Which the Americans responded to by dumping the whole lot into Boston Harbor.

We think of Globalization as a modern response to new ages of communication, transportation, and commerce, but actions on the other side of the planet resulted in local ripples in 1773. The world is a whole ocean of interconnected ecologies, communities, and systems, which can go unnoticed until the waves collide and crash into precipitous actions.

What I watched

I watched the Tampa Bay Buccaneers take down the Packers up in Green Bay! Though I didn’t watch it in Green Bay, as was planned, due to some unexpected and untimely illness. Still though, hell of a performance from the Bucs!

Additionally, as I have a first round bye in my fantasy league, I got to watch the week (mostly) carefree. Which was nice!

What I listened to

The morning edition of Dan LeBatard, which touched on the most unhinged bit of the offseason so far, whereby message board nutters floated the disruption of airline travel to keep a QB from transferring:

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Spent a lot of time thinking about this while trying to sleep, which was fun. Then put some time into actively implementing a backend solution, learning as I go. So, forward progress, I suppose?

Notes:

• 1
  Also imaginary, but still, addressed in tone, I suppose?

As mentioned yesterday, last night I made kringle.

In my family, by tradition, the men make the holiday treats. I come from a line of Norwegian settlers, who, at the holidays, traditionally have made caramels, peanut brittle, lefse¹A type of flatbread of a crepe or tortilla thickness, made from potatoes, and kringle²I’ve seen others spell it as kringla, which is how the word is pronounced, however for my family, it has always been kringle. Also to note, not Danish kringle, which is a flat ring with ingredients stuffed inside, then frosted.

For years, my grandfather and my father both would make kringle right around Christmas time, and I first recall eating them very young. The first time I can remember making kringle myself, however, was after my father left. There was a school project about family histories and tradition, and as part of it, I decided to try and make kringle. My mother, who had never made it herself, stood by to assist, as I was at best 10 or 11, and not yet to be trusted unsupervised with an electric mixer.

The most distinct thing I can remember is how sticky it was, and how impossible mixing it seemed. Kringle are sort of a doughy cookie, and its dough is made similar to many cookies, with sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla, plus flour and baking powder. What sets kringle apart is the sour cream, into which is mixed baking soda, to cause a chemical reaction that induces a bubbling rise into the mixture, before blending in with the sugar-creamed butter and eggs. After mixing in the flour, what you’re left with is a dough the thickness of cookie dough but the stickiness of pizza dough. It’s the worst of both worlds to handle, and without experience or the right tools, my first attempt was a nightmare. I remember my hands, coated in dough so thickly that I couldn’t separate my fingers. They came out well enough in the end, and my classmates seemed to like them³Though, being in 4th grade, they didn’t have the most discerning palates., though were clearly missing something by way of technique.

Later in life, while visiting my father’s family at Christmas, I got my opportunity to learn at my grandfather’s side. I saw the benefits of a floured cheesecloth board and how it took much of the pain of rolling the dough away. I learned the importance of mixing the baking soda in with the sour cream, letting it bubble and froth before mixing with the other ingredients. I sieved flour in with baking powder, getting a thorough mixing. There are things a recipe card, Xeroxed and copied and photographed and digitized, will never contain. That must be learned at the knee, watched and ingrained in the timbre of one’s forebears.

I still hear my grandfather’s voice in my process, though he’s been gone for years now. I still hear my father’s as we laugh over how his father would grouse about our pretzel shapes instead of his figure-eights, as was tradition as he learned it. Both men are gone now, but they’ve passed on a legacy. I make what they made, how they made it, when they made it, and for whom. As I watched the first batch cool last night, while rolling out the second, I twisted one into a poor infinity, a crossed loop, in my grandfather’s memory, and his son’s after him.

I miss them, and I’ll carry their lessons with me. And I’ll teach them to the generations to come, the way they were taught to me. With patience, love, expectation, and reverence for those that had taught them before.

What I read

A Robot the Size of the World, which is an essay from Bruce Schneier on the longer-term implications of IoT combined with networked AI and where it might lead. A lot of the initial discussion around Internet of Things applications was regarding straight algorithms. I’m curious to see what the implication around more intelligent, morphological neurally networked algorithms open up in that space and that line of technological advancement.

What I watched

After the talk about the First World War yesterday, I finally caught They Shall Not Grow Old this morning. The resonance of the stories about the conflict told only through the voices of those that fought, and the recordings of their lives, was incredibly poignant. To hear a chorus of men from varying backgrounds all share their similar experiences, focus on the little details that still stuck with them decades hence, and to think back on events that rhyme even now with those of the soldiery of the present, was something to behold. It’s definitely earned its accolades, and I’d highly recommend trying to catch it before Netflix lets it go at the close of the year.

What I listened to

The latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, the new show by the inimitable Pablo Torre. His show is an explosion of his inner self portrayed audibly and visibly externally. And then more than anything, I was thrilled to listen today because my absolute favorite sports talker, Katie Nolan, was on the show.

I’m a long-time Katie Nolan fan, back to her days recording YouTube shows in her time between shifts at the bar. I’ve followed her from the internet to Fox and her time teaching Regis Philben about the future and launching Garbage Time (which might be the most she was ever herself on screen) , to ESPN and the COVID casualty of her time there (where I listened to every episode of her podcast and watched every episode of her show, even as their leadership flailed around trying to find the right way to user her talents), and even to her time cohosting Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball (which she took more seriously than most veteran broadcasters).

Wherever I can find her work, I’m there, and wherever she ends up next, I’ll be there. Katie helped me learn more about myself, showed me new ways to think about topics I’d not given enough thought, and was one of my vital points of connection to the wider world during COVID.

Projects In Progress

This thing: I made an executive decision to go with a Monday-Friday schedule, so we’ll seeya back here after the weekend.

Notes:

• 1
  A type of flatbread of a crepe or tortilla thickness, made from potatoes
• 2
  I’ve seen others spell it as kringla, which is how the word is pronounced, however for my family, it has always been kringle. Also to note, not Danish kringle, which is a flat ring with ingredients stuffed inside, then frosted.
• 3
  Though, being in 4th grade, they didn’t have the most discerning palates.