In a story of insane luck (and unluck!), the craziest part is definitely this
" He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."
I thought the craziest part was where in this sequence of events does the pilot say
> “This is very serious,” I thought.
It's just after
> "The main, 24-foot parachute was just flapping in the breeze and was tangled in its own shroud lines. It hadn’t opened! I could see the white folds neatly arranged, fluttering feebly in the air.
So... after the flame-out, after the fire, after the lack of radios, after the failed ejection, after the canopy manual ejection, after jumping out of the plane, after not hitting the tail, then after pulling his parachute and it doesn't open does he finally think - man this is serious.
That's typical of military pilots — their ethos is to present a calm, unruffled mien to the world. Phrases such as, "I was a bit concerned" would translate as "I was this close to sh*tting my pants from terror" in normal human-speak.
(Source: Dad and sister were military pilots, plus my own service aboard an aircraft carrier.)
There's a great and probably-apocryphal story in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff where a rookie Navy fighter pilot is part of a dog fight with North Korean (probably Russian-piloted) MIGs; the rookie is shouting excitedly into the radio, "He's on my six! He's on my six!" Another American Navy pilot responds, "Shut up and die like an aviator" — as in, naval aviator.
The other pilot is not wrong. If I can't already see that there's a MiG on your tail, what on earth am I gonna do about it? Least of all because in that era would I even know which direction you are from me at that moment, if I wasn't your wingman? Meanwhile you're screaming over everybody else's wingman.
> after the flame-out, after the fire, after the lack of radios, after the failed ejection, after the canopy manual ejection, after jumping out of the plane, after not hitting the tail, then after pulling his parachute and it doesn't open does he finally think - man this is serious.
If you're a theist, you might be forgiven for thinking that someone was trying really hard to get your attention, after a day like that.
(Just kidding. Not sure about that pilot, but the book's author, Ron Knott, has written a number of Christian books. Wouldn't surprise me if that's related to why the book included that story.)
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has taught my brain how to keep my body moving even when fight/flight is in full effect. You can understand things are going to hell and lessen the effects of the hormones. There are situations where you literally feel like you have to shit your pants in BJJ. Knees on the chest, chest compression moves, etc. it hits the CNS hard. You learn to be calm and work through it. Panic means you will actually shit your pants or lose the position / match. You effectively learn to operate in the worst situations. It all comes down to training really, and pilots have a ton of it for just this reason (operating in unexpected and bad situations).
aesop #1 - king spots an ant drowning in the pond. king uses a leaf to rescue ant. courtiers admonish king for wasting his busy schedule on trivia like ants. at night the king sleeps & the snake opens his fangs to strike the king's leg. the ant bites the king's toe & king moves his leg in the nick of time. the next morning the king admonishes his courtiers - if not for the ant i wouldn't be alive.
aesop #2 - man falls off horse and breaks leg. pretty damsel unwilling to wed man because he is lame. everyone says, you are so unlucky. lost your leg. lost your lady. now what ? king announces war and all the able men of the village are drafted. our man stays home because he is lame. the able soldiers are killed off by the enemy. pretty damsel marries sole surviving lame man.
"The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbours as one living a pure life.
A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.
This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.
In great anger the parent went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.
After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else he needed.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fish market.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”"
So, whether it's unluck or foul play involved, are we supposed to be grateful for the survival, or grumpy about the occurrence in the first place. Then, apply logic to the deities in your life.
I was taught this by a Chinese culture coach. She said it more like:
Man's horse runs away: aww
Horse returns, brings new wild horse: yay new horse
Son riding wild horse breaks leg: aww
War comes and takes able-bodied men: yay get to live
Wow.. so much bad luck (the original failure, ejection failure, parachute failure) countered by that much luck (not hitting the plane during "manual" eject, not bleeding to death because havin his spleen removed 4 years earlier) ..amazing unbelievable story with some good end :)
i didn't understand something. he said impact with the plane tail will usually kill someone during a manual eject, but why? the plane and the person are going at the same speed at first?
The airplane is dense and very aerodynamic. We would say it has a high ballistic coefficient [1].
The pilot is light would leave the cockpit flat or even bent over, which is a very non-aerodynamic shape. His ballistic coefficient would be low. He would decelerate quickly, and the tail would catch up with him and slam him from behind.
Imagine pushing a balloon out of your car window while driving on the highway and taking your foot off the accelerator. It doesn't float outside the window beside you, but it comes to a stop almost in an instant.
Sounds more like a combination of pitch and yaw:
"I trimmed the aircraft to fly in a kind of sidelong skid: nose high and with the tail swung around slightly to the right"
He skidded the airplane. He applied rudder trim so that the tail was not directly behind the aircraft. He also mentions trying to be nose high.
What this would look like I think. Slow down to increase angle of attack in level flight. The nose is now high (likely already occurred after flameout and ejection attempts without thinking about it - check). Go full deflection rudder trim to skid the aircraft. Now trim the ailerons and elevators to fly level based on drag and adverse yaw. Get out.
Imagine if a car had a setting for every input equivalent of setting speed via cruise control - this is what trimming is.
A car equivalent would be applying the handbrake and "trimming" it so it sticks with your hands off, then steering into a skid so you're drifting, then trimming the steering wheel; now your car is moving in an otherwise dynamically unstable configuration (drifting), but it maintains the configuration hands-free because you have locked-in the settings. A driver could then step out of a moving vehicle without the risk of being run over by their own car
While they exist, shell based autocomplete have always felt like a suboptimal solution we just accept out of historical happenstance.
- You need to press tab to get any completion to display
- You don't know what completion will appear when you press tab, or at most one completion displays
- The completions are not at all aware of context, at best just doing some untyped fuzzy matching. Compare this to Fig, which at least seems to know what sorts of arguments each command accepts and displays a list of them
- They only provide completion, not inline documentation, which is one of the big points of the article
- You can get the completions to display as you type (see zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-autocomplete).
- Completions are completely aware of their context, probably more so than what fig can infer. You do need to actually load the completion functions of your binaries though, which are traditionally named ‘_command’ (so, an example would be ‘_git’).
- They can provide documentation; fzf-tab does so.
Ouch. I suggest you learn to configure your autocomplete. Pretty much everything you say is incorrect except perhaps the last point. I've used context aware completion and with multiple options shown for over a decade!
> You need to press tab to get any completion to display
You only need to do that if you want to bring focus to the completion selection. A lot of interfaces will display completions without the need to press tab. And to be honest, while I'm all for making things simpler, I don't think pressing tab is a hard barrier to expect people to overcome.
> You don't know what completion will appear when you press tab, or at most one completion displays
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you know what completion is going to appear then you're hitting tab to save keystrokes. If you don't know the command then of course you're not going to know what completions will display since the whole point of hitting tab is to explore the valid options.
> The completions are not at all aware of context...
That's not even remotely true of Bash, let alone any modern shells like murex and fish.
Murex even goes one step further and doesn't just display the parameters in context of the command that's being run (eg suggesting names of available branches when running `git checkout <tab>`) but it runs the entire command line that precedes it to understand the data being passed into the STDIN of the current command. This is useful when using tools that inspect JSON properties for example:
murex-dev» open https://api.github.com/repos/lmorg/murex/issues | [[ ]]
(builtin) Outputs an element from a nested structure
/0 /0/active_lock_reason /0/assignee /0/assignees
/0/author_association /0/body /0/closed_at /0/comments
/0/comments_url /0/created_at /0/events_url /0/html_url
/0/id /0/labels /0/labels/0 /0/labels/0/color
/0/labels/0/default /0/labels/0/description /0/labels/0/id /0/labels/0/name
/0/labels/0/node_id /0/labels/0/url /0/labels_url /0/locked
> They only provide completion, not inline documentation, which is one of the big points of the article
Nope. In murex if you type `kill <tab>` you'll get a list of process names instead of PIDs and when you select one it is still the PID that is placed.
murex-dev» kill
(/bin/kill) kill - terminate or signal a process
543 /Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Frameworks/Code Helper (Renderer).app/Contents/MacOS/Code...
738 /usr/libexec/promotedcontentd
1645 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DifferentialPrivacy.framework/XPCServices/DPSubmissionService.xpc/Con...
17903 /Applications/Slack.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Helpers/chrome_crashpad_handle...
47968 /System/Library/Frameworks/Metal.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/MTLCompilerService.xpc/Contents/MacOS...
496 /Applications/iTerm.app/Contents/XPCServices/pidinfo.xpc/Contents/MacOS/pidinfo
Likewise if you type `git <tab>` you will get a list of all the next commands that follow and what they do:
murex-dev» git
(/usr/bin/git) git - the stupid content tracker
init Create an empty Git repository or reinitialize an existing one
restore Restore working tree files
revert Revert some existing commits
submodule Initialize, update or inspect submodules
push Update remote refs along with associated objects
The output is colourised and highlighted so it makes more sense in a terminal than it might appear in here. But you get the idea. And all of the suggestions are scrollable with the cursor keys, you can quickly jump by typing more characters, or search for specific completions using regex if you press ctrl+f (this last feature also makes it very quick to traverse large directory structures in `cd`)
Woah, that's really cool. This seems to check the first two of the article's points, approachability and discoverability. Are there any plans to implement the third point, interactivity, where you have small, dynamic guis embedded in the terminal?
We're getting there.. The backend supports it now. If you send me a list of your requirements (just create a github issue here https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues) I will look at adding the functionality you need.
We're adding support for DOI lookup and APIs like Arxiv so you could just add a DOI to polar and it will fetch the PDF and keep the metadata.
Will also support export to bibtex too.
Our big focus right now is shipping 2.0 so that we have a more modern platform that can scale us moving forward.
Great to hear! I'm actually a week away from finishing my undergrad thesis (ironically procrastinating on that now), so kinda stuck with Zotero for now. Once that's complete I'll take a good look at polar.
Does roam support automatic importation of bibliographical info and export to bibtex? That’s the main value of zotero for me. Also latex math embedding notes would be great
You can implement pretty powerful type checkers as constraint based systems. I used Z3 in a project called LightDP to verify differential privacy as a property of the type system.
And it doesn't even need a page refresh; it could use a 204 No Content response. Potentially an yet-cleverer static browser system could also use 206 Partial Content to replace a portion of the page.
But at that point, it's no longer "purely a document," it's still an app, just one that runs entirely on the server instead of partly or mostly in the browser.
For the web to be just documents, you have to go all the way and remove state entirely. Idempotence all the way down.
" He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."