Sol Young

I came across this fun post on CNET News because my photos on Flickr are licensed Creative Commons Attribution and the page came up in a Google Search on my name. Chris Matyszczyk wrote an article on why people are the gating factor to the release of a decent flying car (or any flying car for that matter). It’s a fun read, more on a fear of road-rage-in-the-sky than anything else, but successfully points out one of the reasons we don’t have flying cars.

I love to read anything on aviation, and am in agreement with Chris that most of human-kind isn’t capable of flying. That’s why we have flight schools and a vast amount of training, and why there are ~400,000 pilots out of the entire United States. In order to have flying cars, we can’t have human control.

When I think flying car, I think robotically controlled aerial taxi cab.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is Create Commons and offering to share one’s work. I use plain Attribution because I want people to use my content. I don’t care how. Trackbacks and notification of use isn’t ubiquitous or standardized, so planting one’s name makes it easy to see where things are used.

And again, I don’t care where or how my stuff is used, I just want to be able to find the fun stuff that builds upon it. I came across Chris’s post through a Google Alert on my name. There wasn’t a trackback. If there hadn’t been attribution, I wouldn’t have known and wouldn’t have read his post.

Maybe we’ll get to a trackback standard for content usage. It’ll probably get here around the time we have those flying cars.

On September 23rd, 2003 I rented a plane with friends in Colorado Springs (COS) to fly to Denver (DEN). It was a calm, warm, clear, evening and made for a great night to fly. It was the typical $100 hamburger flight (in to a major International).

The pre-flight was fast and we fired up the engine, but moments later the taxi/landing light blew. Getting a new bulb was out of the question, so we called up AOPA‘s member services – closed for the night – and proceeded to whip out the laptop and look up FARs. A landing light was required for commercial flight, but not private VFR-night flight (pilots, remember your TOMATO FLAMES+FLAPS).

Why am I re-telling this story more than five years later? The Beast, of course! A $4,160 flashlight. Yes, four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars (thanks @AgentM for the link).

At only a foot and a half long, no lamp filaments to break, and a weatherproof body made of rugged anodized aerospace-grade aluminum, the Beast Rechargeable makes a perfect backup landing light.

During taxi and landing we used a Lightwave mounted firmly in the co-pilot’s hand, arm extended out the passenger window. This wasn’t necessary since we had ample runway lights, but it made us feel safer prior to the runway and was bright enough to illuminate the threshold before the numbers.