Brits are lawless

People seemed kind of lawless

was how a North American lady described Brits after spending three weeks in the UK, two in London after her rental car broke down.

Flying 7,056km is an interesting experience. Probably my longest flight to date. At some point we were so high up that it felt like the plane was not moving at all. Strange moment that makes you question reality.

Twobob is back with some new dispatches from Alberta. Same rules as last time. Now going to see family, hike and hopefully not get eaten by grizzlies. We also have a permanent home at twobob.uk. For those of you wondering why twobob, click on Why Twobob.

The sound of soda cans opening around me on a plane makes me feel like I’m in a Coca-Cola commercial. Luckily, no crying babies that I could hear.

What do you do on a 9-hour flight? You work, think about Large Language Models, Small Language Models, eat bad plane food, listen to My Beautiful Dark Fantasy, read about Richard Schultes and his adventures in the Amazon and about Alaska.

Apparently, a sign at the entrance of Anchorage, Alaska says (or used to?): Uncontrolled Mosaic

That’s what the archipelago beyond Greenland feels like. An archipelago of intriguing names. I was also fascinated by looking at the globe from above and seeing how ‘close’ Canada, Russia and Greenland are together. The flat map give us such a misleading picture of where countries are on the planet and how close they are to each other. If you want to go from Russia to Canada, you don’t draw a straight line that goes through Northern Europe and the Atlantic, you go across the Arctic Ocean.




Maybe there’s a wider point here about the importance of how you frame information. Or as an old saying goes, “the map is not the territory”.

There are multiple alternatives to the classic flat maps that we’re used to - also known as the Mercator and the Robinson projections. They include the Goode’s Homolosine, the Peirce Quincuncial, the Winkel Tripel and Buckminster Fuller’s own Dymaxion map.

With no access to the all-knowledgeable World Wide Web, two things got me thinking:

Why did the sky look like this from Iceland up until the Hudson Bay?

It turns out that the windows now have buttons that can control opacity filters. The blue was not a flavour of aurora borealis, like I was imagining.
Now that we got that out of the way:

How did plane food evolve? And why is it not very good?

I took the beef option, which came with an awful coleslaw. I wonder why I still ate half of it. Pretzels were good though.

Because I have to research that, I will share answers in future dispatches.

Here’s another airline-related fact: Etihad means unification.

Just as towards the end of the flight, the Westjet elves* walked around handing out pizza swirls, I’ll drop songs here from time to time to capture some of the mood. Listen responsibly, before, during or after the dispatch. Enjoy.

We’ve got 14 days to go and hopefully at least as many dispatches.

Be careful what maps you use,

Twobob

*They’re actually dressed in green.