Category: Current Events

Some years back, Idaho imposed a senior project requirement on all the high schools in the state, at least partly to make sure that graduating seniors could actually write.  I think it works.  In 2003, I was utterly floored at how few of the upper division history majors in my Constitutional History class could actually write at college level.  I had a student turn in a paper where 1/3 of the sentences–were not.  I had students tell me that this was only the second research paper that they had ever written–and did it show.  I would say that only five of the twenty-five research papers that I received that semester were what I would expect of upper division college students.

By comparison, these essays from the freshmen in my U. S. History class at College of Western Idaho (a community college) are gratifying.  They aren’t perfect, of course.  But so far, of the ones that I have graded, many are good and several are actually quite good.  Most students at least know how to write competent sentences; some students are combining competent sentences into well-structured essays.  A few students have not achieved sentence structure competency (or competency in capitalization, or punctuation), but nonetheless, have well-structured essays.

There is room for improvement for all of them, so far.  Still, many of them are starting with what would have been considered high school level writing skills when I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1974.

Charles Roberts, founder of Avalon Hill, passed away over the weekend. He didn’t invent the tabletop wargame, but without AH, wargame and role-playing games as we know them might not exist. Shame the obit above barely touches on the seminal role of both Charles Roberts and Avalon Hill in the gaming industry.

By now everyone’s heard about the crash. I’d thought I’d give my complete and thoroughly amateur analysis of what happened with the flight that killed former Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens. Some have expressed surprise that Senator Stevens was in a plane crash previously, in which his first wife was killed. While aircraft disasters are not common anywhere else, they are as common as car crashes are to us if you’re talking about Alaska. Airline pilot is erroneously listed as one of the most dangerous professions. Being a commercial airline pilot is not really any more dangerous than most desk jobs. The numbers are skewed by the fact that being a bush pilot in Alaska is really dangerous. The planes are small, weather is fickle, and there’s a lot of things to run into at altitudes bush pilots generally fly at. The most common cause of aircraft fatalities in Alaska is controlled flight into terrain. This is technical speak for crashing into a friggin’ mountain. It’s easy to do in Alaska. Stevens’ plane didn’t crash into a mountain by Alaska standards; it crashed into hills. The plane was operating under Visual Flight Rules, and flew into bad weather around the Muklung Hills. The pilot tried to take the DeHavilland DHC-3T to a higher altitude to avoid the hilltops, but came up short and crashed into them.

You can see from this sectional chart, showing the ultimate destination at Dillingham, AK, and the Muklung Hills, that there’s definitely not much in the way of navigational beacons in this area. Dillingham is pretty much it, and it only provides a VOR and a localizer to find the runway. It does not provide for a glideslope beacon. This would not be an airport you’d want to fly into in foul weather. To give you some idea just how bad flying in Alaska is in these kinds of conditions, I fired up X-Plane with today’s weather conditions in that area. The time is about 2:00PM locally, and flying is a challenge, to put it mildly.

And the plane I chose is easier to fly than the amphibious plane Senator Stevens was on. It has a modern navigation and avionics system, and can climb at a considerably higher rate of speed, even though it’ll get tossed around in the weather a lot. You can see flying in Alaska under these kinds of conditions is hazardous even for professional pilots who know what they are doing. Newsweek, being the classy publication that it is, tries to hint that Senator Stevens engineered his own demise by not allowing regulators to have their way with Alaskan Aviation. While I’m sure the folks at Newsweek, who know nothing of aviation, would probably love to believe that the right kind of liberal bureaucrats in Washington can, of course, make flying in Alaska perfectly safe, the fact of the matter is that Alaska is dangerous country. The state motto really ought to be changed to “Alaska: It’ll F***ing kill you!” If the seas don’t get you, the skies and mountains will, and if you live through that, you better hope the rescue folks find you before the grizzlies or polar bears do. Senator Stevens lived to be 86, and died living the way Alaskans want to live. Newsweek can go to hell.

… you might as well go out in style:

A JetBlue flight attendant apparently upset with an uncooperative passenger on a just-landed flight unleashed a profanity-laden tirade on the public-address system, pulled the emergency-exit chute, slid off the plane and fled Kennedy International Airport, a law enforcement official said.

I’d say that qualifies. Apparently the guy stole a few beers from the plane to take with him on his slide to the unemployment line too. Icing for the cake.

SayUncle thinks the problem of girly men is blown out of proportion. I tend to think as long as men are instinctively attracted to things that are loud, fast, sexy, and a little dangerous, we’re not in any danger of failing as a species. More on the subject here too.