Hidden Obvious
Watching the World Outside the News Lens
What is not in the news today? What is hidden “in the waters beneath the earth”1?
Watching the world is intriguing. I love finding puzzles not on the public agenda. When I was a kid, I liked looking at carpet patterns that had no particular sense. In the USSR, there was a tradition of attaching carpets to the walls, so exploring them was easy. When I got sick, I used to stare at those patterns for a long time, which was barely fun sometimes.
Stumbling upon someone's hidden agenda can be tough. (That was the news, I know :)
The lens we apply to watch things is highly dependent. I’m a technical guy. The things that move and evolve have always attracted me.
Airplanes
I like airplanes. It's hard to find anything more aesthetically pleasing than airplanes in the technical realm. Beauty in machines is probably inevitable when they can serve a complex purpose gracefully, day by day. What’s mesmerizing is probably the feeling that these giants can fly and carry you far, far away in a safe way. Surprisingly, airplanes fly without flapping their wings. :)
From RCM, we know that complex systems fail randomly, but airplanes are still the safest. An airplane is a sophisticated piece of technology, yet not that fragile. In fact, every accident makes the next one less probable, so there's a kind of built-in antifragility. Risk is mitigated in aviation by layering protections—two pilots, rigorous maintenance, failure investigation, and more.
So, I like watching them. My weird hobby. Sometimes I open two websites:
Listentothe.cloud or Liveatc.net to tune into live radio transmission from an airport. I usually pick a Russian airport in the middle of the night. There is a background music built-in. And then I open Flightradar24 to track the flights there
For example: Novosibirsk
And yet, airplanes may have their own hidden agenda too.
For example, it was a weird flight by OmniAir #OY1005
Why would you fly such a route?
Or this one:
Ships
The Arctic is not on the daily agenda, and that’s interesting.
Even cargo ships have their beauty designed in. If you construct them right, you construct them beautifully. That’s pretty much objective. I know a little, I graduated from a shipbuilding institute many years ago.
My kids don’t share my affection for ships. I failed to pass that on. Such a pity. I have to enjoy it alone.
My father was a seaman all his life, a captain of big cargo ships. I’ve never known a calmer person than him. He used to tell me that a good school must adequately prepare navigators to prevent situations where they would need to apply all of their experience and skills at once.
But ships have their own hidden agenda too, like what happened to the Ever Given.
Spot a submarine on this photo.
What's your lens for watching the hidden patterns?
Deuteronomy 5:8