Last week I finished reading "Flying Blind" by Peter Robison. The book details the story of the Boeing 737 MAX, a passenger airliner that suffered two fatal crashes less than two years into service, and the changing culture of Boeing from the days of "The Incredibles" that built the 747 to the shareholder value-driven philosophy of today's executives. The author--an investigative journalist with Bloomberg--has an evident left-wing bias, but his proclivities ultimately don't distract too much from the harrowing tale of a company that put quarterly stock reports over safety and quality assurance. If you are interested in civil aviation or business ethics, I highly recommend this book. ISBN: 9780385546492.
In the wake of a heavy nonfiction book like that, I decided that my next foray would be in sci-fi. My current read is a Star Wars novel I've owned for a while but had only started in the past: "Before the Storm" by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, the first in the "Black Fleet Crisis" trilogy.
While reading the second chapter of the novel last night, I was struck by the following passage:
Leia looked vaguely uncomfortable. "I wondered if I could quietly ask Admiral Ackbar to list Luke’s E-wing as missing."
"You could do that," Han said, "but you couldn’t do it quietly. It’d take about two hours for the whole fleet to be buzzing with 'Luke Skywalker has vanished!' Face it, Leia, anything involving Luke is news.["]
Nineteen years after "Before the Storm" was published, the seventh mainline Star Wars movie "The Force Awakens" would base much of its marketing and mystery on the premise that Luke had gone missing. The line "Luke Skywalker has vanished" is, in fact, used verbatim as the first sentence of the film's opening crawl.
The local weather warmed up considerably in the last few days. I've been taking the opportunity to go cycling and walk around a nearby college campus. I was given the suggestion to work from the campus in order to get out of the house a little more, which I started doing last Wednesday. The change in locale helped my mood and productivity quite a bit.
Despite my renewed focus on activities outside the house, my weight still crept up a little bit relative to last week. I recorded the change in my weight graph this morning. What the graph doesn't record, however, is that my weight actually topped out around the end of last week, and I've lost just over a pound in the few days since then. I think I'm finally moving in the right direction again.
Photo of the week:
(PNG, 800x450, 178 KiB)
The college campus I visited last week has a display shelf near the mathematics department office. Among curio such as tangrams and Rubik's Cubes, I spotted these glass drinking cups. Each one describes a mathematical constant and marks that number of fluid ounces in the cup.
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[Last updated: 2025-01-27]
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