travel notes
Mood: listless
Posted on 2007-05-29 11:03:00
Words: 397

So we spent Memorial Day weekend with djedi's family in Houston. It was fun, despite the rain and usual hecticness that typical associates large family gatherings. (there were 10 adults and 2 kids) I took a few pictures that I'll post sometime this week. Our flight back was delayed due to rain (as were at least 80% of the flights leaving IAH), but only by half an hour, and we slept late this morning so I'm feeling fairly decent.

Travel notes:

- There are lots of little "road signs" in an airport along the runway, etc. One such set of signs is a distance marker that lets you know how far away you are from the end of the runway - when you're taking off you can see the signs count down to 0. (the flights I've been on usually become airborne around 3) They're just numbers, though, and I wondered what the units were. So, on the flight out, I noticed that the highest number was 9, and it took us around 35 seconds to reach the end of the runway. (we were in the air by then!) So, assuming constant acceleration and that our final speed was 300 mph (a ballpark number), I did the calculations and determined that we were accelerating at 13 ft/sec^2, and that gave a distance of .5*a*t^2, which is around 8000 ft. So, I figured the signs were spaced 1000 ft apart, so the whole runway was 9000 ft long. (I later saw in the magazine that the cruising speed of the 737 we were on is 520 mph, which puts us even closer to 9000 ft traveled) Yay for math! And I just found this diagram of the airport which indicates we were probably on the 9501x150 runway going northwest to southeast.

- At the baggage claim at IAH (which was pretty darn busy) we saw a Lyndon LaRouche supporter. It seemed like an odd location...who wants to talk politics when you're waiting for your bag/ride?

- On the ride home, I saw an HIV/AIDS prevention billboard that said to text your zip code to KNOWIT, which I did, and I got back my nearest HIV/AIDS testing location. Neat!

- Did you know the Petersen graph can be constructed by labeling each vertex with a 2 element subset of a 5 element set, and then connecting the vertices whose sets are disjoint? I didn't.

4 comments

Comment from cifarelli:
2007-05-29T10:45:55+00:00
You guys should come visit us and met Corwin sometime when you are in Houston, if you can sneak away from the family for a couple hours. Or with advance notice we might be able to put together a game night even. :)

Comment from gregstoll:
2007-05-29T10:52:27+00:00
Aw, great idea! (this will be easier when we'll have a car at such events instead of flying in...)

Comment from djedi:
2007-05-29T16:11:00+00:00
We really would like to get together with yall. *sigh* flying in without a car makes things more difficult. Luckily, 4 months til we're back in Texas.

Comment from omega697:
2007-05-29T12:01:31+00:00
AFAIK, most jets become airborne more around 200 mph. Cruising speed is much higher, because that's the speed they cruise at at altitude, where the air is thinner and the lift less powerful.

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