Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

A brief pause in all the uncanny madness

Infocult posts will be lighter over the next two weeks, dear readers.  I'm engaging in a manic travel spree, including two events:

• CCA-Educause, Sydney
• The NITLE Summit, Washington DC

Twitter will probably be my main outlet.

(photo from Jerk with a Camera)

Blogging light as Infocult goes viking

Posts will be fewer this week, as Infocult heads to this conference in Scotland.

Continue sending your Infocultish requests and submissions.  Rest assured they will accumulate, be stored, then... dealt with.

Giant hole threatens to devour Infocult

As I headed east across Tennessee this week, a giant hole opened up in the highway and tried to eat cars and trucks.  A sinkhole, to be precise, gaped across I-24.

25 feet deep, at least 40 feet wide.  Would have destroyed any car which plunged into it.  

Repairs still going on as of this posting.  It doubled in size overnight.  13 miles of the highway closed. 

Tennessee tried to kill Infocult, but we survived. 

One scary but happy story involves a DOT worker who saved lives.

Infocult on the road: summer 2010 tour

Infocult is hitting the road for the next two+ months. Behold the Dopplrmap:

 

Items:

• Georgetown, Texas
• Vancouver, British Columbia: Northern Voice
• Sewanee, Tennessee
• Claremont, California: Multimedia Narrative: Teaching with Stories, NITLE workshop
• Waterville, Maine: Social Software for Education, NITLE workshop
• Anaheim, California: New Media Consortium conference
• Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges
• Greencastle, Indiana: NITLE Camp
• Edinburgh, Scotland: JISC/CNI: Managing Data in Difficult Times

If you're around, I'm happy to meet up.

US domestic air travel increasingly late: study surprises nobody

More US domestic air flights are late than ever before.  It's the second-worst or worst ever, depending on how you track it:

More than 26 percent of commercial flights in the U.S. arrived late or were canceled last year as rising passenger demand and an industry preference for smaller planes intensified congestion in the skies and on runways.
Excluding cancellations, however, 2007 was the worst on record for flight delays, with 24.2 percent arriving late, compared with 23.9 percent in 2000...

Worse yet, it's not going to get better.  For one,

The air-travel logjam, reported Tuesday by the Department of Transportation, comes as a growing number of air traffic controllers near retirement age -- a trend the controllers' union says will magnify the problem.

And for another thing,

There is no sign of improvement on the horizon, analysts said, because airlines continue to replace larger aircraft with smaller ones. The practice is intended to maximize profit margins by flying with fewer empty seats, but it also means more flights and more congestion and delays.

Strange things on the road

Two odd things during last week's trip:

1. An airport's rolling walkway suddenly stopped, as I was striding along it.  A very disturbing, silent event.
2. I spent time in each of the continental USA's four time zones: eastern, central, Mountain, and Pacific.

Watch your face in US airports

American TSA staff will soon be watching travelers' faces for telltale signs.  According to the Seattle PI some airport workers are scrutinizing our mugs to see if we betray hidden levels of fear or nervousness.  Now, for most of us there's nothing hidden about our feelings!  Experienced travelers spend a great deal of time in existential dread as we shamble from "lounge" seat to cramped airplane perch. 

But I've experienced something like this already.  Last year, in Philadelphia, I noticed a TSA group in front of my departure gate.  Which was unusual.  My first (and correct) response was, sadly, to look away, not make eye contact.  After a few minutes of that I became embarrassed at my own cowardice, and looked up at the staffers, and briefly made eye contact.  I was shortly thereafter searched.  Well, Philly is one of the worst US airports...

Nice American air travel mashup

This American domestic air travel map is a nice mashup with Google Maps:

Delayed by air across the US

Both of my domestic air flights were delayed today, and isn't it interesting how we expect such things?

The first flight orbited over Newark for an extra hour, because of unexplained delays on the ground.  Weather was fine, no holidays or other crises loomed, and air traffic was not cited.  I read, remembering my recent plan to bring long, long books when I fly in the US.

Now my Newark->Burlington flight is at least one hour late, because the plane we need to use took a long time to leave its previous site.  We, a bunch of passengers, had to prod the gate agent several times to get a reason: that other airport was crowded.  Again, the weather is fine, no holidays are screwing up schedules, etc.  It's simply an ordinary day.

It's just the way air travel works.  Like Amtrak, we now expect domestic flights to be late, and receive a small buzz of unexpected pleasure when they're on time.

As a practical matter, I'm expanding the size of layovers for trips.  And expanding the interval between landing somewhere and being expected to do something near there.  And increasing the amount of reading material.

But I can't stand how much this weighs on my wife and children, who simply cannot know when I'll return home, until I've actually landed in Vermont.  They can't plan anything around me, not meals, not picking me up, not their own appointments.

And as awful as this is, are we seeing signs of improvement in US airlines?

A prophet is without wifi in his own land

Once again, my terrible law of hotels and internet connectivity is confirmed.  Alan Levine is the hapless empiricist. 
For those new to Alexander's Iron Law, it's tragically simple: the more expensive the hotel, the more expensive and/or lower quality the internet connectivity.