seafood

Auckland to L.A.

It was a very short night. We were travelling with the spin of the Earth and so we passed through the night at an accelerated pace. I remembered something really interesting about air speed on this leg with the help of a fellow passenger, Howard. The speed of the wind not only aids in making the plane go faster, one _adds_ the speed of the wind to the maximum speed of the plane to calculate its ground speed. Why? Because the engines push against the air itself. This is in contrast to ground dwellers who at best get a mild push by the wind.

Howard remarked that at one point we had been going over 1000km/h, to which I foolishly replied, "Oh, I'm surprised we didn't break the sound barrier". But of course we didn't, since sound requires matter to pass through (i.e. air) the speed of the sound barrier is also increased by the speed of the wind.

Howard was a great guy to talk to as well - we got on very well indeed. Apparently on the flight from Brisbane to Auckland he'd been sitting next to a guy who believed that 9/11 was a conspiracy. He was of the opinion that the planes that crashed into the twin towers could not have possibly brought down the buildings and that additional explosives must have been involved. However, what made this opinion even more worrying than it already was is that he was a structural engineer. Perhaps there is some truth to the fact that people these days are coming out of the university system under-qualified. It's quite clear that the properties of metal change when heated. I see reason not to believe that the planes generated enough heat to destroy the structure bearing properties of the metal within the twin towers.

I slept quite well on the flight except that the dream I had was completely stupid. Instead of dreaming of wide open grassy fields in which I could gambol about stretching my aching legs as much as I wished, I dreamed of being in a bus on the way to a ski trip, something I've done twice in real life and is practically indistinguishable from being stuck on a long haul flight from Auckland to L.A.

I woke up in the middle of the "night" (it was already broad daylight outside, but the shutters were closed) and started to drift off to sleep again, and although I usually don't put much stock in trying to think logically in a half asleep state I actually think I managed map out some exciting new territory in my research. The conclusion is simple: Haskell is a good host language for EDSLs but it is not the best - that has still to be written.

Customs was surprisingly straight forward. I had my finger prints taken, albeit digitally, for the first time in my life; it's quite strange being subject to a procedure that is reserved for criminals in one's own country. The U.S. now has more of my biometric data than Australia.

When I stepped out of Terminal 4 on my way to Terminal 3 it was little things, like the stretched limo that pulled up and the distinctive fashion of some of the teenagers, that let me know first hand that yes, I was in fact now in the U.S., a place I know so much about from a thousand media sources.