"a fulsome embrace of the gig economy"

fulsome foolsm
adj. Disgusting or offensive.

We see what you did there.

Thank you! My kids think I'm making it up that I was working happily at 1920x1600 *twenty fricking years ago" on an affordable off-brand monitor. Granted I had to reinforce my desk to keep it from sagging.

The four from WestJet would be the ones that were 25 years old when WestJet got them from Qantas in 2014. They spent a lot of time in the shop for maintenance.

Maybe Amazon has a source of ... next-day parts?

The nose of the pod is essentially entirely occupied by the intake fan, which is engineered for operation at a particular near-vacuum air pressure. So, designing it to fail gracefully at a sudden onrush of higher-pressure air may be non-trivial.

S

Actually the media finds things like wheels-up landings, single-engine operation and surviving-pilot operation really newsworthy and makes it out as if it's a frickin' miracle that anyone gets out alive. Hence the cognitive disconnect.

The clearance between the pod and the tube wall is very much part of the system design, because the pod isn't pushing air ahead of it like a piston, it's *using* that (rarefied) air to propel itself and to maintain tube clearance. These pods are battery-powered fan-driven aircraft. Or, surface-effect craft.

So that clearance has to be what it has to be, for given values of speed, diameter and tube pressure.

I agree that the cost-benefit analysis is going to be WAY different once solutions to the real-world problems are engineered.

On the one hand, Musk's hype seems way over-the-top pie-in-the-sky starry-eyed hand-waving. On the other hand, he *has* gotten cargo to the ISS, and satellites in orbit, with ground-landed resusable boosters. And he has got some vast number of actual working electric cars on the road, AND started a whole new US-based car company to do it. All those things were REALLY REALLY improbable, before he did them. So, I'm really not inclined to bet against the guy.

But, not really inclined to lend him any of my money, either...

S.

There are probably scenarios in which the pods will need to be brought to a controlled stop in the tube; much as airliners are held on the ground, or (less common today) put into a holding pattern. I'm thinking that automatic detection of some parameter (tube vibration, air pressure, temperature, who knows) being out of spec will be pretty common; less commonly some catastrophic failure far ahead of you which you can survive if you stop where you are.

What I didn't get from any of the pod diagrams I've seen is any kind of emergency egress from the pods, if the pod is stopped at an arbitrary place in the tube. At the front the entire diameter is occupied by the compressor fans, the rear is entirely occupied by mechanicals. Possibly the latter has enough design flexibility to allow an emergency escape into the (re-pressurized) tube.

And how long would it take for rescue personnel to arrive on some kind of transport? Today people freak way out when their 737 parks on the taxiway for more than a couple of hours--and that's under conditions where you can walk up and down the aisle, use a bathroom and look out the window, and where there are uniformed staff to provide some semblance of of service and (psychologically important) nominal authority. In a pod you're stuck in your seat, with random strangers, maybe in the dark, as the heat builds from the sun on the tube and the now-unfanned mechanicals.

One of the things that always raises a red flag for me is when someone asks a what-if for a particular scenario and the answer that comes back is about the low risk of that scenario developing. This means to me that there is no contingency for the scenario, and, worse, that this fact is being avoided. Admittedly I have not been following the details of hyperloop design, but in the first big hype, I remember a lot of "this is how we made failure really unlikely" and the plan that in the worst case, a pod would just glide slowly, in a fully re-pressurized tube, to the nearest emergency station, where the tube wall could be opened. So there was an explicit denial that a pod could ever become stuck, stationary, within the tube.

Let's hope that by the time these things are built there's enough left of the regulatory agencies to put some critical thinking on it.

S.

I set my elderly Mom up with Thunderbird precisely because I knew any web interface would be so variable, I'd be unable to talk her through it a week after I left her with it. (Plus, of course, the ads, which are deliberately contrived to mimic UI elements). Added bonus, I could change her back-end e-mail service without changing her UI.

She's having ongoing issues with features on her TV remote control because of a very specific design decision: for both the volume and the input-select button, the first press brings up the on-screen display for that feature, but doesn't actually change it. If you don't press the button again for a few seconds, the OSD disappears and the feature remains unchanged. If you actually want to change the volume or cycle through the inputs, you need to press it in sequence within a few seconds. She really has a hard time doing that, and I get calls to the effect of "the tv is stuck on the dvd and I can't get it back on the satellite box". It's partly physiological (92-year-old fingers don't move very fast, and don't point very accurately) but also cognitive, because she didn't grow up with machines that worked like that. A typewriter puts an A on the page once for each time you press it, no matter how long it was since the last time.

-S

If you're going to use highly technical terms, please follow the relevant RFCs: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/...

Who the heck was Wilbert Wright? Wil*bur* (of Wilbur and Orville) died of Typhoid fever. There was a WWI Ace called Wilbert Wright who died in action but hardly on his third sortie.

Also, Flight Attendants still train in first aid.