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Water is falling from the sky in preposterous quantities. To be specific, my back door, which is not into the wind and is in fact sheltered from the rain by a balcony overhead, still has water splashing into my living room as though the solid glass of the door were not in fact there ( Read more... ) -
required memorization
Back when I was in AFROTC, hoping to fly for the Air Force, I was required to memorize a poem:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth ( Read more... ) -
hubris
I get nervous whenever my ratio of success to effort gets too high. Flight: it's not actually all that hard, or at least, I keep getting graded better than my peers at it. Principles of Aerodynamics was a downright trivial class. It didn't even have any math! But over 16% of my classmates outright failed the test on their first attempt. At most ( Read more... ) -
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I soloed* today. I was the first in my class to do so. I rock at flight ( Read more... ) -
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"As an Army Aviator, you get to pick one of two goals. You can fly to provide organic air support to the ground commander, or you can fly as an alchemical process of turning kerosene into flight pay." - Today's Academics Instructor ( Read more... ) -
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The mad genius behind xkcd has set up a side website for kicks: limerickdb.com. Being as the creator is a Level 18 Nerd and most of his audience wants to be like him one day, the top-ranked limericks are wonderfully geeky. The current top four are all wonderful:
There was an old man ( Read more... ) -
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In Alabama, nobody seems to think that it is odd to need to use the air conditioner during the first week of February ( Read more... ) -
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This morning at 0455 I was on a bus to the flight line. After some briefings, at 0800 I sat down in a helicopter--the first time I've done so in my life. Less than half an hour later, I was flying it without assistance from the instructor ( Read more... ) -
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I have spent the last five minutes thinking about the etymology of the word 'ok.' When I was very young, I read in a magazine that it was popularized in the 1920s as a joke, as an acronym for the phrase 'Oll Korrect.'
Unfortunately, I can't come up with anything more reasonable.