Note: There are clearly more important issues facing the nation and the world today. Focus on those big, real issues — this week and every week and see this newsletter as hopefully a fun aside.
Tidbits:
Improve Flight Safety via Machine Learning Based Alerts for Abnormal Glide Slopes
Last week tragically Flight PIA 8303 crashed in Pakistan. My take is that it was human error — specifically a poor approach on landing.
The graphic below shows, in blue, the glide slope of Flight PIA 8303, while in red we see a normal glide slope for a landing in Karachi.
This Quora article does a good job of explaining Glide Slope and is the source of the image below — in a sentence, glide slope is an imaginary line that travels from the approach end of the runway upwards to the aircraft that is about to land.
There is a standard and optimal angle for this line along with appropriate rates of descent and airspeed — but certain airports require deviations due to obstacles (e.g. mountains, nearby cities, short runways).
In studying this, a thought on how to improve safety: use “machine learning” — really just an average of all landings at an airport — to determine how far off average a plane is when coming in on final approach for this specific airport — and when abnormal, automatically alert the pilots to go-around. There are already many systems (e.g. ILS) to aid in safe landing but in this case — ILS wasn’t sufficient. Monitoring the full approach may be a way to detect very early that something is not right, that the plane should abort and try again and that the control tower should cancel clearance to land.
I’d be interested to learn what is out there like this already.
Mod your car to play a custom song if you forget your keys
This really shows the power of Arduino (in this build) or RaspberryPi devices to modify existing systems.
Watch the video and then read the full how-to (really click the link it’s worth it) — the project is both seemingly simple (and in the grasp of many) while also surprisingly complex given you are modifying a car!
Quick bits:
American Driving During Shelter in Place
Stripe’s notes on how to successfully work remote — a year long experiment
"Perceptual insight" — Sine-Wave Speech as a great example to hear and understand Perceptual Insight
Much for me to learn in how the brain understands what is perceives — this was a fun reminder / example.
Observation: COVID-19 isn’t an event. In the US, it is the backdrop for life in 2020.
