Thursday, July 24, 2014

....But in battalions

When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.

(From Shakespeare's Hamlet)

Two more plane crash tragedies - what is going on?

A Transasia Airlines ATR-72 down in Taiwan with around 50 passengers/crew lost, reportedly amid heavy rains.
(See here.)
And a plane of a Spanish/Algerian Airline now lost over Mali, en route to Algeria from Burkina Faso. The plane disappeared from radar early Thursday after heavy rains were reported, according to the plane’s owner and government officials in France and Burkina Faso. 110 crew and 6 passengers are so far unaccounted for. (See here)

It seems pointless to offer heartfelt condolences to all relatives, surviving passengers and loved ones affected in these, and the previous two major losses involving Malaysian Airlines (MH370 and MH17), nobody involved will ever read this, but I simply wish to put such thoughts into the ether in these dark, dark circumstances for so many.

1 comment:

Twilight said...

mike ~ I think I had read about that, but had forgotten about it - what with so much other stuff going on in the meantime.

The Guardian said, at the time, that
Slovak authorities claim electronic warfare exercise caused dozens of planes to briefly disappear from air-traffic control radar

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/13/military-blamed-planes-vanish-europe-air-traffic-control-radar

Regarding the seeming clustering effect of air disasters over the past few months - I don't know what to think. I've noticed in my own life that when unfortunate stuff happens it does sometimes tend to "cluster". There's that old saying, too, that "everything comes in threes", so when two events of a similar nature happen (deaths, births, accidents etc.) "Mark my words, there'll be a third" used often to be said.

Among Tweets I noticed just now mention of Poisson Distribution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

I don't understand a word of it though. Probably not relevant here?