I fly home tonight, and it’s weird to think that tomorrow, at the time I’m writing this (2:30 pm in the afternoon), I’ll be back in Chicago. Of course India—and all of India uses the same clock—is exactly 11.5 hours behind Chicago time, so I have 18 hours of flying ahead, broken up by a four-hour layover in Paris. I’ll try to see if there are some decent inflight movies, as I find it impossible to read on these long flights.
When I return, I’ll announce my decision about whether this site will join the Patheos network.
Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is messing with Andrzej’s head:
A: Why are you hiding behind the sofa?
Hili: I have to do some thinking.
A: What do you have to think about?
Hili: Why I hid behind the sofa.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu schowałaś się za sofą?
Hili: Muszę to przemyśleć.
Ja: Co musisz przemyśleć?
Hili: Czemu schowałam się za sofą.
Hope you have a decent journey! Amazing how much I have missed on WEIT in 2 weeks!
Actually India is AHEAD of Chicago.
Eyelids shut down = exactly, Mz Hili: precisely how to greet Iowa’s -21˚ Celsius / -6˚ Fahrenheit this morning with 4 – 8” snowfall forecast ‘fore it is to tomorrow. “Feels like” – wind chill is -17˚F / -27˚C.
A four – hour layover in Paree ? Time enough for thus, perhaps ? http://www.lecafedeschats.fr
Blue
Hope it is not coach. Makes it twice as hard.
Hope you get yourself another Indian outfit before you go. You’ll love it for Chicago summers.
Please don’t join Patheos. Whatever they may think, atheism is not a religion. And on that forum you’ll be swamped by readers of religionist blogs coming around to attack you for your views. Not to mention swamped by ads.
🐾🐾
I usually read Patheos on my mobile, but I had to quit for a whole week because *every* time I clicked on an article, I would get redirected to a fake malware update for my android.
Patheos buys cheap ad bundles, and they occasionally slip malware in. I can avoid it on my PC because I have adblock, but not on my mobile.
Hili looks scrumptious in this photo.
Cute Hili!
I hope you have a bearable flight – traveling is as much a technological wonder as it is a physical torture.
If you join Pathos, you’ll be the only science b**g. That could be either good or bad, but you would be unique. Maybe they’ll have to create another category specifically for you.
I hope for turbulence on long flights, it puts me to sleep like a baby in a car.
I’m just glad you’re only flying from India, and not a couple thousand miles farther along the same general direction. At least, until they stop crashing airliners there….
b&
Have you seen news reports of possibly ice causing the downing of the latest Malaysia air disaster? If there is truth to it, it’s not looking good for the aviation industry.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/ice-to-blame-for-downing-of-airasia-jetliner-report-suggests/article22288450/
Excerpt:
“The meteorological data raised the possibility that Flight 8501 was downed by a phenomenon that NASA has called a “modern-day aviation mystery.” In the right conditions, the core of a jet engine that normally operates at 1,600 degrees Celsius can be so badly frozen it slows, or shuts down altogether.
More than 200 examples of such ice-induced “power-loss” have been reported in the past quarter-century, with at least one aircraft gliding into a “dead-stick” landing, without any power, its pilots unable to restart the engines. Most of the incidents have occurred in the south-east Asia region, near large convective storms like the ones AirAsia Flight 8501 encountered on its flight path Dec. 28.
The unique kind of icing involves clouds of ice particles, some as small as a grain of flour, and is different from the traditional kind of wing and engine icing that Canadian flyers are familiar with, after seeing aircraft sprayed with a chemical solution to prevent problems in wintertime. That more typical icing involves supercooled water that is not present above 22,000 feet of altitude. Flight 8501 had been cruising at 32,000 feet.”
I heard a brief mention of that, but it made no sense to me. If real, though, that is quite disturbing. There’re few ways to generate heat more effective than with a turbine engine, and if even that isn’t hot enough…
…but I’m still most skeptical. If that’s where the evidence leads, I’ll buy it…but it seems a rather extraordinary claim, and I’m not seeing extraordinary evidence yet.
b&
I suspect this is all speculation about the freezing. We’ll probably find out it’s a pretty straighforward accident. Like you, I am skeptical at this point.
Hili looks pretty smug about something. Check the rest of the house.
As for Patheos, one option is to do what PZ Myer did — keep his science content on one network (scienceblogs) and his atheism, politics, and everything else on a different site — along with his science, too. That meant that all the science was doubleposted and now involved two comment sections.
It also meant that posts which were about both science and atheism were also in two places. Unless they weren’t. I don’t know, I eventually just focused on freethoughtblogs.
I also don’t know if Jerry would find this too confusing. If it tempts him he could ask PZ whether he thought it worked well.
I love this shot of Hili.
Safe journey home, Dr. C.
Hili is calm, lovely and a delight to encounter on your website. I fear Patheos will run her off with its chaos (of ads), repulsive pop-ups, and confusing maze of websites. I will try to find you there if you go but those sites confuse and irritate me unlike your site as it is now which so relaxes in the midst of internet bedlam. I probably will hide with Hili. Ah well nothing lasts forever.