Tuesday, August 09, 2016

Airline Talk

Although like many US Americans, I have a credit card that accrues Frequent Flyer miles, I am not a frequent flyer these days.  I've flown a lot in my day, over a period of decades, so it's not like I'm a noob in that namespace.  I've been in London, Vilnius and St. Louis in the last decade or so, also Georgetown (2012).

Nevertheless, I only got the Delta story, about computers going out, through Twitter, in a Portland neighborhood, land-lubbering in a drizzly setting.  Yes, August rains.  I wasn't in transit at the time, not even by bus (that would come later in the day).

Yes, I remember another story, about a T1 or other data line getting cut, and that shutting down a service, I should Google that.  An airline is a huge operation.  I used to study airport management for entertainment, in a trailer park (mobile home estates) in Florida (Bradenton).  Airport management is but a tip of the iceberg.

I said "it's not my business, I'll gladly take in opinions and maybe in a hundred years venture to say something".

Not so Patrick's crew, off by airplane this morning. Patrick has put in a lot of miles. He came by with some leftover Ja Civa's cake, which I may never have tried.  That's a respected neighborhood bakery we're all proud of.

When I teach object-oriented programming in Python, I'll suggest Concourse, or maybe LuggageSystem as a class name, suggesting they conceptualize an airport in terms of components, for software modeling purposes.

Patrick thought in the EU that airlines were less lax because the administration was less prone to spoil the enterprises and let them get away with too much unskilled management.

These were broad brush stroke considerations on Patrick's part, regarding matters we have only a metaphysical (psychological) understanding of.

AI isn't really a big help right now, though search and pattern recognition certainly are.  What's in vogue right now is seeing if we can dump vast amounts of big data through neural nets and get the AI bots to tell us what to do.  However the GIGO principle still rules.

MEMEX, a meme lobbed from the past by one Vannevar Bush in 1945, was on the money, hit the bulls eye pretty closely.  Good aim.  That's Google search, and like that.

We absolutely benefit from the ease of retrieval, relative to having a duplicated library of books with ladders and so on, with an entire estate built to maintain it.  We call those "server farms" today, and get the http responses back electronically, in milliseconds, by tcp/ip packet.

I asked if the EU business climate was the reason for Brexit, that the UK wished for a more relaxed business climate as maybe people perceive in the US.  Thanks to tort reform, this has become the new place to get rich quick, goes the hype, maybe.

My thinking had turned to "tort reform" as a movement, given my recently viewing Hot Coffee, a documentary focused on that topic.  Hasn't McDonald's had PR problems in the UK as well?  That's a tangential question.

For those just joining us, Google only recently became a subsidiary of Alphabet, in a reorganization designed to compartmentalize operations, reserving Google for search (which includes searching Google Earth, a big data operation).

Speaking of search, we had an interesting discussion of correlation and signal composition, by algorithm, at the code school last night.  A double-E gave the talk, I came late by urban train.

Loud Lady IPA