Comments | extemporanea: the still, sad music of humanity

extemporanea

the still, sad music of humanity

Oct 02, 2012 11:40

I am not, alas, of the cellphone generation. My phone is not a prosthetic limb, it's an occasionally useful communication device on which I probably receive more spam/sales calls than social ones. I am capable of, as I did this weekend, turning it off for a meeting on Friday morning, and suddenly and vaguely recollecting its existence on Sunday ( Read more... )

perambulation, pervy cloud fancying, eco-fear, pictchas

Comments 6

pinkthulhu October 2 2012, 12:50:01 UTC

I used to think I was of the internet generation, but then I found out that kids these days consider email old-fashioned, and prefer to IM on their mobile devices, no doubt LOLing as they sext each other.

extemporanea October 2 2012, 15:43:16 UTC

Well, yes, that's the scary part. We are of the internet generation, which means we were actually geekily proud to be cutting-edge for a while, but now that whole geek/internet thing is out of date. Whatever these kids are, they're not primarily about the internet in the sense that we know it. We are neither instant nor fragmented enough for their new toys. Length and coherence are the province of the aged. Also, get off my lawn, kids.

pinkthulhu October 2 2012, 12:52:27 UTC

Great pic btw. Good quality shot of the vapour trails. I live not far from Kingston and Heathrow Airport, and it really is frightening the frequency of planes circling to land; about one every 2-3 minutes.

strawberryfrog October 2 2012, 21:33:27 UTC

Yep. Not all of London's skies are like that, you were just under a Heathrow flightpath.

extemporanea October 3 2012, 07:11:59 UTC

The sky was doing that obliging thing where it clearly had the vapour trails professionally staged and backlit - the light was amazing. While I am, of course, glad to think that the whole of London isn't blanketed by vapour trails, I am also slightly chilled by the implied plural of "a Heathrow flightpath." And they want to put in another runway. Aargh.

strawberryfrog October 3 2012, 08:41:49 UTC

> While I am, of course, glad to think that the whole of London isn't blanketed by vapour trails, I am also slightly chilled by the implied plural of "a Heathrow flightpath."

Yep, it's only like that under an approach to Heathrow. or to a lesser extent, Gatwick or Stansted. Or London City Airport. ... Ok, fine ... large parts of London.

> And they want to put in another runway

Yeah, because it's full up with flights. As I learned doing rail scheduling, if every timeslot in the day is full, then any problem delays everyone else for the rest of the day.

It's hard to put in more runways at Heathrow because it's now surrounded by residential areas; putting more flights there would be bad for these people. The right thing to do is to build an island like Hong Kong did and put all the runways there instead and either turn Heathrow into houses or the kind of airport that's mostly full of Cessnas. The right time to start building it would be in the region of 1990 to 1995 ( ... )