In-flight Reading Material

I occasionally travel to various cities to give demonstrations, present on research, or participate in competitions. In this particular story, I traveled to California to participate in a programming contest called “The Imagine Cup”. The Imaging Cup bills itself as a place for ideas to be showcased and compared with other ideas, but we found it not really to be about ideas, but implementations: our idea was great, but the implementation was not complete, and so we advanced but could not win because one judge hated the user interface. But complaining about The Imagine Cup is not the purpose of this blog.

Because this leg of the overall competition was in California, we convinced the BYU CS department to foot the bill for our travel, lodging, and vehicle rental. My two lab-mates/teammates and I got to travel to and from Los Angeles, CA, and free shirts from the department, to boot!

Whenever I fly, I like to read the emergency pamphlet provided on the plane. Each plane’s pamphlet is different, and although I have never had the fearsome responsibility to actually use that knowledge, I like to review the nearby instructions so that, in the event of an emergency, I might be able to recall some small relevant portion of the instructions. I have reviewed such pamphlets dozens of times, and about half of which before this particular trip.

While taxiing down the runway for takeoff from the SLC International Airport, I get to the section on emergency landings. I glance at the images for potential emergency landing situations, turn to my fellow grad-students (who were in the same row), and point out:

“This is what we do when we land on blue water, and this is what we do when we land on brown water.”

My companions both get a stunned look on their faces, and one states back to me “did you really just call the mountains ‘brown water’?”

Needless to say, the phrase “brown water” was a punch-line back in the lab for years to come.