Candide

The Airlines have complained at length to the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences (read: pilot factory I attend) that the finished product (my peers) are excellent at tactical skills, but severely lack Business Communication and Business Writing skills. To that end, I am sitting in ISBE 320: Business Communication and Writing. The professor is going over Negative News Letters and how we should be spinning them so as to highlight the good of the situation, using Voltaire's Candide as a talking point - best of all possible worlds.

Of course, my Misanthropy screams bloody murder as she says this, but my sense of ethics fire off as well. She's talking about not telling a hypothetical person the real reason you won't write them a letter of recommendation to Harvard Law and we vehemently disagree that she should not be so "Candide" and perhaps be a bit more candid.

It occurs to me that perhaps a lack of education is not the reason we fail at business writing.

A sense of ethics and the midwest bluntness are clearly what do us in here, which disturbs me to no small end, that the nice guy cannot succeed in business by being nice. Or maybe I'm just mad at capitalism for overwhelming me with the massive choice of video cards on the market.

TRH

Coriolis

Suppose that you were on a massive sphere (hint: you are) and that that sphere were rotating about a singular axis (hint: it is) and that you could in fact get aboard some strange variety of vehicular device which could move above the surface and seperate to it at a rate equal to the linear velocity of that particular patch of surface given the rotation speed (hint: you can). If you were to point in the direction that the patch of land directly underneath you is going and hold that vehicle in the same position, moving at the same speed as the patch of land underneath you, that patch of land would in fact MOVE.

Because the shortest distance between two points on a sphere is not in fact a straight line but a curve (hint: use string and a globe) you will by holding the attitude of the craft travel in that curved line. If going eastward in the northern hemisphere, you would curve towards the southwards, or more simply, you will always curve away from the pole who dominates your hemisphere. Meaning, you will approach the equator and given limitless fuel for your vehicular device, make a darn big sinusoidal wave of sorts.

Which means of course, that being as how you have moved, that land hasn't actually moved. It continued on it's circular path and your circular path took on new incredible dimensions - particularly, the third dimension!

All this has been made possible by the sick breeding of vector calculus, conic sections and geometric algebra. Woo math!

TRH