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Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace  — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears  — gradually cease to provoke you.

Another person wrote: “I am terrified of string. You know, when you have a loose string hanging off your clothes. Most people just shrug it off.” (Who knew?) “But I go insane until I get it off the item.”Balloons, pigeons, boats, bald men, cotton batten, garden peas. These have all acted as the culprits, according to reports I’ve received, in making otherwise reasonable human beings assume the visage of Edvard Munch’s screamer. People fear chins, condiments, towels, cut fruit.The object appears to be irrelevant, in many cases, beyond its subconscious assignation as the Very Thing to Fear.

One attempts to find logical causes for phobia at one’s peril.

First-world commercial air travel has become so extremely safe that when something does go wrong, figuring it out can be a huge challenge -- which heightens the mystery and, for many people, the terror of these episodes, by making them seem so random.

the FAA standard, and pretty much the global standard, for certifying critical components and systems is one in a billion probability of failure, or 10 to the minus 9th. The FAA calls this standard "improbable."

That means in a transport category airplane [JF note: this includes airliners] the certification standard for a failure, or combination of failures, that would prevent the airplane from successfully landing on a runway must be one in a billion flights. Not hours, flights.

For people who get anxious when there is a change in environment, just arriving at an airport can signal a perceived threat to the brain

And a mix of psychological factors related to the plane’s altitude and a perceived loss of control can cause a person to break down emotionally once in the air, DeLuca says.

“When you’re dehydrated, it’s not just the body that’s lacking in resources,” De Luca says. “Everything is affected”—including behavior and the brain. “Some people have difficulty self-regulating their emotions.”

“I will buy one only if it has the potential to be the best. I’m not interested in having a nine.”

A friend asked me later whether Trump wasn’t “in on the joke” of his public persona, and I said that, as far as I could tell, the Trump we were used to seeing on television was the honest-to-god authentic Trump: a ten-year-old boy who, for unknown reasons, had been given a real airplane and a billion dollars. In other words, a fun guy to hang around with.

He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par.

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.

“If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done

Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.

We are told that this is the era of the empowered consumer:

Better information means more competition, which means lower prices — all features, of course, of an open marketplace ostensibly presided over by a regulatory authority that, while distant, exists to protect our safety.

This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons.

“You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.

He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share

He quickly put some money to work

As commuters stayed home in 2020 and airplanes remained on the ground, the nationwide slowdown led to a sizable drop in heat-trapping emissions. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell by 10 percent, the largest annual drop since World War II

Still, the climate diet isn't likely to stick.

By the end of the year, Americans were already back to driving and flying more.

To the untrained eye, play can seem aimless, repetitive, wild or foolish. But play can offer a window into the developing mind. Piaget viewed certain kinds of play as milestones, signs that a child had reached a new stage of development.

nstead of simply making objects move through space, they begin to make believe. A banana might become a telephone and a pencil might take flight like an airplane.

That is, the ones who could imagine hypotheticals that hadn’t occurred were also the best at pretending to operate an imaginary machine with an imaginary zando.

It was a picture-perfect launch, just before sunrise on a sandy coastline. The rocket, bright as a candle flame, climbed steadily, leaving a spindly trail of smoke that split the sky in half, with the sharp darkness of night on one side and the first pastel hues of daylight on the other. It carried a capsule, bound for the International Space Station, to the edge of space and let go.

The trouble started after that. The capsule, built for NASA by Boeing, was supposed to ignite its own engines to boost itself higher into orbit, where it would chase after the space station. But the engines didn’t start when they should have.

Engineers watched, unable to help from below, as the spacecraft became disoriented.

You will hear, variously, that the “survival rate” for COVID is 99.0 percent, or 99.5 percent, or 99.8 percent.

These numbers are all statistical constructs based on the age distribution of a given population. The older your society, the lower your survival rate. But just for fun, let’s pretend it’s 99.8 percent.

If 99.8 percent of people who experience a rare event survive, then that number is comforting. If 99.8 percent of people survived being bitten by a shark, for instance, you’d think this was encouraging.

a void at the center of our ongoing reckoning with A.I. We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we are missing the more important questions: How will it be used? And who will decide?

“Sydney” is a predictive text system built to respond to human requests. Roose wanted Sydney to get weird — “what is your shadow self like?” he asked — and Sydney knew what weird territory for an A.I. system sounds like, because human beings have written countless stories imagining it. At some point the system predicted that what Roose wanted was basically a “Black Mirror” episode, and that, it seems, is what it gave him. You can see that as Bing going rogue or as Sydney understanding Roose perfectly.

Who will these machines serve?