Yeah, I mean it. I'm gonna do an "On the meaning of..."
This has been exasperating, no? Why has it been exasperating? Because a frigging Boeing 777 full of passengers just...disappeared!
And how did it "just disappear?" Didn't we learn something about radar in this whole thing? Yes, we did. We learned that there are gaps, big frigging gaps, in radar.
Who amongst us knew that there were big frigging gaps in radar? Not many of us general public usn's.
We learned that there is civilian radar and military radar and "secondary" radar, which relies on blips or beeps or tweets emitted by a plane's transponders. Who knew? I thought there was Radar, singular and it worked on a green screen with like a clock second hand sweeping around and around and you could "see" the frigging thing's--a plane's, a UFO's--second-by-second progress across your green screen. I didn't think the object had any say in it but with secondary radar the object does have a say in it; if the transponder doesn't...transpond secondary radar doesn't "see" it. Who the fuck knew?
And with at least three kinds of radar we still lost a Boeing 777 passenger jet.
We can't even find one of those things after it stops movin'! Look at this map today from the Quasi's:
On the right, where we've been lookin', the search area. On the left, where that chap here is,
lookin' at part of the wing of MH370!...Have had at least one view pager from Reunion in the past, maybe that's him.
We're not all that.
Radar, satellite tracking, in-flight communications--the image we usn's have is that a plane never really "leaves," the plane is redundantly tethered to terra firma by all of this invisible technology. It is impossible in the 21st century for a plane to just disappear.
Well, it did. We're not that good. We're not good enough in the 21st century to not lose a big passenger jet. That's pretty bad!
Modernity has been a grievous disappointment to humanity. We think we're doin' good, it's the age of Progress, we think we're making progress and BOOM! World War I. We think that's the "War to End all Wars" and then BOOM!
-Lotta booms in the 20th century, lotta wars, different kinds of wars,--Who knew?--we thought there was just War, singular. No, there's hot war, cold war, conventional war, guerrilla war, unconventional (nuclear) war. All of our progress, all of our enlightened thought, all of our technology couldn't prevent the 20th century from becoming the bloodiest in mankind's history. We were not that good.
-Redundancy: Built-in redundancy. It's impossible for the space shuttle to fail, it's got all that "built-in redundancy."
Gotta keep them rubber O-rings from freezin' up, bubba. Who would have thought that something so mundane, so technologically primitive, could be the cause of THAT?!
-The internet. The "wild, wild web," remember that? Totally "free" speech, impossible to control. Oh, heads of state can simply pull a plug and boom, no more internet free speech, no more internet. Apologize for any misunderstanding.
Limits. We are limited; mankind is limited, we're not as good as we think we are. That to me is the meaning of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
This has been exasperating, no? Why has it been exasperating? Because a frigging Boeing 777 full of passengers just...disappeared!
And how did it "just disappear?" Didn't we learn something about radar in this whole thing? Yes, we did. We learned that there are gaps, big frigging gaps, in radar.
"Data from Malaysian military radar showing Flight 370 (green) crossing the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea to where it was last seen by radar. The left of the two segments of the flight track follows air route N571 between waypoints VAMPI and MEKAR; the white circle appears to highlight a section where the aircraft was not tracked by radar." (Wiks)
Who amongst us knew that there were big frigging gaps in radar? Not many of us general public usn's.
We learned that there is civilian radar and military radar and "secondary" radar, which relies on blips or beeps or tweets emitted by a plane's transponders. Who knew? I thought there was Radar, singular and it worked on a green screen with like a clock second hand sweeping around and around and you could "see" the frigging thing's--a plane's, a UFO's--second-by-second progress across your green screen. I didn't think the object had any say in it but with secondary radar the object does have a say in it; if the transponder doesn't...transpond secondary radar doesn't "see" it. Who the fuck knew?
And with at least three kinds of radar we still lost a Boeing 777 passenger jet.
We can't even find one of those things after it stops movin'! Look at this map today from the Quasi's:
lookin' at part of the wing of MH370!...Have had at least one view pager from Reunion in the past, maybe that's him.
We're not all that.
Radar, satellite tracking, in-flight communications--the image we usn's have is that a plane never really "leaves," the plane is redundantly tethered to terra firma by all of this invisible technology. It is impossible in the 21st century for a plane to just disappear.
Well, it did. We're not that good. We're not good enough in the 21st century to not lose a big passenger jet. That's pretty bad!
Modernity has been a grievous disappointment to humanity. We think we're doin' good, it's the age of Progress, we think we're making progress and BOOM! World War I. We think that's the "War to End all Wars" and then BOOM!
-Lotta booms in the 20th century, lotta wars, different kinds of wars,--Who knew?--we thought there was just War, singular. No, there's hot war, cold war, conventional war, guerrilla war, unconventional (nuclear) war. All of our progress, all of our enlightened thought, all of our technology couldn't prevent the 20th century from becoming the bloodiest in mankind's history. We were not that good.
-Redundancy: Built-in redundancy. It's impossible for the space shuttle to fail, it's got all that "built-in redundancy."
Gotta keep them rubber O-rings from freezin' up, bubba. Who would have thought that something so mundane, so technologically primitive, could be the cause of THAT?!
-The internet. The "wild, wild web," remember that? Totally "free" speech, impossible to control. Oh, heads of state can simply pull a plug and boom, no more internet free speech, no more internet. Apologize for any misunderstanding.
Limits. We are limited; mankind is limited, we're not as good as we think we are. That to me is the meaning of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
