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I have a few new pictures of the cats up, for those interested in those sorts of things. Particuarly a couple of photos of Jasper and Pangur meeting a hermit crab.
I'm in Colorado Springs at the moment, home of the United States Air Force Academy and Pikes Peak, on a business trip. I was on the aisle seat, so I didn't have much of a view out of the window, but I got some good looks at Colorado from the air as we were maneuvering to land. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing--the crops were formed in very distinct circles. I finally realized that I was seeing the patterns of the irrigations systems; out here being pretty dry, at least some things only grow where they can be irrigated. It was a little bit like seeing an optical illusion, except that my visual perception didn't change, but the logsticical interpretation.
We had a long layover in Chicago, and I got to sit at the departure gate and listen to the air traffic conrol frequencies for over an hour. Air traffic at all large airports is controlled by people talking to each other of radios. The language that controllers and pilots use is extremely fast and difficult to understand at first. My very first ride in a private airplane was with my uncle when I was 7 or 8; I remember thinking that he was completely incomprehensible when he talked on the radio. As a private pilot, I don't expect I'll be spending a lot of time flying in or out of really big airports like O'Hare, but when I fly to towered airports, I want to be able to hold up my end. I want to be as professional as possible.
While I can't practice talking on the radio, I have taken up listening to airport radio traffic when the chance presents itself. If I'm working on something low-key at work, I'll occasionally listen to webcasts of tower traffic. But when I'm near enough to an airport, I'll take an airband radio along. When I was in Eagan, Minnesota earlier this spring, the hotel we were staying in was in the approach area for the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. For three evenings, I got to sit and listen to traffic flying in and out of that airport on the radio. (I also realized that the radio I had wasn't very good, prompting me to get a much nicer one:
Learning to listen to that sometimes extremely fast and infomation dense speech has been interesting for me, both in learning how to understand it from a practical level, but also the learning process itself. I took a little German in high school, and a little Japanese in college, but I've never really learned another language such that it really stuck. I've heard the phrase "the language instinct" but I'd never really thought about it. I've been able to make great strides in being able to extract useful information from radio transmissions just because I'm now somewhat used to listening to them. Occasionally, I miss words, but for the most part I can follow what's going on, and understand what the instructions mean.
By the way, traffic on this blog has gotten high enough that there's a bump in traffic when I create a new post. Looking at the usage reports, I would guess that there are 30-40 readers. Hello out there! I'd be particularly interested in finding out how people found this blog; please leave a comment or drop me a line over e-mail and let me know how in the world you found it; I don't think it's advertised anywhere.
Craig sleepy; must get shut-eye. G'night.