When recently renting a car, there was an option to rent a mystery car. It was an option to rent an unspecified type of car that would be cheaper than they would otherwise be. It was suggested that it would be either a hybrid or electric car, and that was exactly what I was hoping for. However, what I got was a giant pickup truck, which as the polar opposite of what I was hoping for.

This was disappointing. It was a lesson for me to avoid mysteries.

I have been binging on Air Disasters on the Smithosonian Channel. The show is also known as Mayday.¹ As should be obvious from the name of the show, it is mostly about disasters involving airplanes. It’s like a true disaster or true crime show mixed with detective and scientific work.

My favorite episodes are those where the problem is no one’s fault, but everyone survives despite them having no right to given the situation, thanks to the overflowing competence of the crew. The most frustrating ones are those where painstaking work has been done to exclude certain hypotheses and support others, but a significant amount of people still insist on their pet theories.

There are a few tidbits of aviation knowledge that are now engrained in me.

• In a stall, do not pull up.

• Flight attendants are not menial servants. In an emergency, they are going to save your life.

• If you need to evacuate, don’t try to take along your luggage and kill everyone behind you.

These words from the introduction sequence have also made a lasting impression:

Brace for impact!

The Ingenuity helicopter traveled to Mars with the Perseverance rover, being the first vehicle to fly around in the atmosphere of another planet. There was a little scare as contact with the helicopter was lost, but communications were soon restored. Unfortunately, damage was incurred on one of its rotors, so Ingenuity will no longer be flying. This makes me a little sad, but not disappointed. It was only supposed to be able to fly for three days, so it has far exceeded its expectations.

Large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard have been all the rage lately. After trying them out for a while, however, I think the general hype around them may be a tad bit overdone. The feeling I get is that they are very good at stitching text seamlessly together, but they do not actually know anything.

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I am so envious of the penguins which get to nap thousands of times per day. On the flip side, they don’t get to have a good night’s sleep, so maybe I shouldn’t be so envious.