Sullenberger into the Hudson

This has circulated via email already, but thought I'd add it here with a note. It's a computer graphic reconstruction of US Airways flight 1549 / Cactus 1549, ditching in the Hudson River by Capt Sullenberger on 15 Junary 2009. There's a couple things I like about this, like how he goes from
touching the ground to in the water in just over 7 mins, not a lot of time to react and make a decision. Also, it shows how obvious a choice it was to put it in the water vice trying to make one of the airports. Can you
imagine what news coverage wouold be like if one of our crappy 24 hour news channels would show this instead of bringing on every idiot dingaling to give his opinion?

Incidentally, right about this time (2-3 years ago), I had a buddy in Iraq who lost all four engines on a herc at low altitude after takeoff and had to put it on the gound, a fairly similar type of emergency. Saved his whole
crew and 7-10 passengers. Military does a terrible job of PR for itself - why didn't we tell that story?

Veterans

Just read an article by Joe Klein, "The New Greatest Generation," good
stuff.

If you want to know about the good things in the US military, this is a
great place to start.

Some quotes:

'"The toughest part of leadership is telling people they have to do
something that involves pain," says Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL...'
'The inevitable military acronym for the five-paragraph memo is SMESC, and
the mnemonic device is "Sergeant major eats sugar cookies." Situation:
What's the problem? Mission: What's our strategy for solving it? Execution:
What tactics are we going to use? Support: What are the logistics; how many
troops and what sort of equipment will we need? Command: What other
organizations (air strikes, aerial reconnaissance, Afghan security forces)
will have to be involved?'

(I just read about this in ACSC; this is the same format used in CONPLANs
and OPLANs, that is to say, formal war planning documents.)

'They feel closer to one another than they do to either political
party...most of my friends feel politically homeless...neither party
reflected the combination of service and get-it-done pragmatism most
veterans value.'

'I once asked Moore whether the skills he learned in the Army had any
influence on his life as a civilian. "Absolutely! On every big decision I
make," he said and began to tell me about his tour as a counterintelligence
officer in a difficult section of eastern Afghanistan. "People have the
wrong impression of the military," he said. "It is extremely
entrepreneurial. I had more freedom to make decisions there than I do at
Citibank. My commander would tell me what needed to be done, and then it was
up to me to figure out how to do it." '

'There is a basic altruism. Gallina intuitively expanded the notion that you
don't leave a fallen comrade in the field to include the veterans of other
wars; from there, it's a short jump to including civilians as members of
their community too. Veterans are trained to believe that everyone in their
unit rises and falls together. "In the military, it's never about you,"
Lewis told me. "It's always about something larger." '

'"I was looking for something to fill the void. It was like losing your
family." Then McNulty invited him to join an Alabama tornado-relief crew. "I
rented a chainsaw, and within 20 minutes it felt like I was back in the
service again. We shared a common language and knew how to organize
ourselves to work efficiently... '

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2089337,00.html

Tags: links, leadership, war, history, pers, psychology, politics

Password Strength (xkcd)

"Through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess."

http://xkcd.com/936/

20 Aug 11: Update:

Joel Stein on the difficulty of using safe passwords:  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2089349,00.html

And, a link to gauging the difficulty of cracking your password using brute force:
http://www.grc.com/haystack.htm