Female Airline Pilots

A recent trip has had me wondering, why is it that when traveling all the airline pilots we see are male? I must say I am not an avid traveler but have traveled a decent amount in my lifetime and to my recollection have yet to see one of the pilots that flew the plane I was in, be a female. Females have had more chances to get into what was known as male careers in recent years. Although we still face a lot of tribulations, we are doing our best to break the glass ceilings created by our ancestrial males to keep women as their inferiors.

Central Airlines was ahead of the game in 1934, when they hired the first female airline pilot. Unfortunately due to pressures and a rejection by the union she resigned less than a year later. About thirteen years later as she could not get a piloting job and was near destitute she commited suicide.

We have come a long way since then with an approximate of 4,000 women airline pilots worldwide, the majority reciding in the US. But with about 80, 000 pilots worldwide women make up a very small fraction. An even smaller fraction are airline captains, about 450 is the rough estimate according to ISA( International Society of Women Airline Pilots).It makes one wonder, is piloting just a career not many females are interested in or is it something else entirely. Have we not completely broken the glass ceiling that our ancestors that started the womens movements fought so hard to bring down and gain equality?

To all the women with dreams of flying, keep your eyes on the sky, let your heart soar and never let anyone tell you, you can't.

If you would like more information you can go here: http://www.iswap.org/index.html
It's the ISA website, they have some faqs, information on scholarships if you would like to try and become a female airline pilot and some good tips on how to do this also.

Fly on.

Valentines Day

Is the one holiday that makes me want to bang my head against a wall till I pass out. It shows how unevolved we truly are when the showing of love has become to go all out one day of the year and spend rediculous amounts of money on crap that will be thrown out in a week. What happened to showing your love every day, in small ways. Random sweet things that you do because you want to show that person how much you care, or just because they popped into your head instead of because the greeting card companies decided to exploit peoples wanting to one up each other. Aw, so and so gave me this for Valentines isnt that sweet? Yeah, I took her here and did this, she was totaly into it. Love has become commercialized crap. It's disheartening.

Love

Love requires a certain amount of acceptance and an immense amount of vulnerability. Accept that their happiness is equal to your own but should not come before yours. Accept that the emotion will strip you until you are raw, naked and vulnerable. Your heart in their hands. They have the ability to hurt you as no other can as well as provide you with more joy than anyone else. They can hurt you, break you but although you give them the ability for this, it also requires trust. Trust that they will not use this ability, will not shatter you. Love is the most important thing you can come to do, if you let yourself.

I Love You

Love. This emotion we strive for, we long for above all others. To find someone who will love us unconditionally. Someone who will tell us those three little words.
I love you.

I love you? Do these words have any meaning left behind them any longer? Do we even know the definition of the word? It seems to me saying those three little words have become so common they lost all meaning. It used to be we did not say those words until someone mattered more than words could explain. We meet a person, befriend them or date them and after a few weeks, I love you seems to be common to say. It seems that most expect to hear it now and how do you deal with the awkwardness of this when you do not feel it also, their hurt if you do not say it back. Even though you understand it is most likely they do not feel it, it has just become the norm. But why should you feel awkward for wanting to reserve those words for someone who has touched you beyond words? I love you used to be the expression of affection too deep for words, too vast for definition. It seems that we have made it less than nothing. While you do care about someone you love, just because you care does not mean you love. Loving someone is wanting the best for them whether it includes you or not. It is unselfish. It is beautiful. It is painful. It is bittersweet. But it is not something we should throw around like, hellos. Let's bring back the meaning of, I love you.

War

Sometimes it is utterly mind boggling how human beings process information and come to certain conclusions. We get outraged when we think of past tragedies that have lost countless lives. We shake our heads and wonder what people were thinking when they allowed lives to be lost in completely moronic tirades such as the witch hunts or the utterly devastating tragedy of Jewish lives taken for no good reason. We waited too long to put a stop to these injustices, even one life lost would have been one too many. Yet we go to war, let the lives of our nations people, soldiers to be lost. We allow the bombing of other countries where not only soldiers lives which is bad all in itself but civilian lives, lives of people who did not choose to involve themselves in the war to be lost. These people who are someones mother or father, sister or brother, aunt or uncle, niece or nephew, grandmother or grandfather, cousin. Someones wife or husband, someones heart and soul to be lost, to be taken away forever and for what? What are we fighting for? Obviously the original reason about weapons of mass destruction was not true. Freedom from terrorism you say? How about we focus on making our nation safe in the possibility we have another terrorist threat as opposed to going on a killing spree where we take out the closest thing we can find. How about we focus on ourselves instead of in-debting out nation and its people for billions of dollars in which it does not have. How about we get our heads out of our asses, stop thinking we're so superior nothing can touch us and it will all magically fix itself and actually come up with a plan before we dig a pit so deep it's bottomless. Yet we stay in a war of our own making that drains us of our resources and costs us countless lives. I in all honesty ask what we are fighting for. What is this, an eye for an eye? But as we can't get quite close enough to the eye we make do with what we can get, perhaps a leg? One which most likely had nothing to do with the initial incident. Does this really make us any better than them? Instead of strengthning ourselves to make sure we are never again vulnerable enough so that lives are lost because of others unfortunate hate for this nation, we leave ourselves even more vulnerable while playing god with others lives.

Jaded

Life is never too long. Death is always unexpected. Yet a child which has their whole life ahead of them to have it cut short is the most tragical of deaths. Especially when that life is cut short maliciously by another "human" being if we can even call them that. Here we call ourselves the most advanced species, the most evolved yet we kill each other. We kill each other for no better reason than to kill. How can we call ourselves evolved when we have yet to get past vicious, barbaric violence? Most shutter thinking of people like Manson or Hitler, who killed dozens or millions for no reason other than their stupidity of thinking themselves superior. Yet we can't seem to muster up the same outrage when a person only kills one. When a serial killer is on the loose we seem to find a way to be outraged but one life taken doesn't seem to make most even bat an eyelash. Is every life not precious? Have we become so jaded by the fact murder occurs every day throughout the world that the only thing that permeates is if it's somehow 'big' or less than the norm? Just because it is the norm does not mean it is not wrong. When will we move past these human tendencies towards violence and become a truly more evolved race? Tragedy is unavoidable in life but that does not mean we should not feel for a life cut to short whether by disease, accident or murder. How is it that some can feel for every life lost, hurt as it were one of their own while others wave it away as just another incident?

Consciousness

What exactly is consciousness? When does it start? What triggers it? Are we conscious from the moment our brain finishes developing in the womb, prior to this or long after? Why is it that we can only see through our eyes and no one else's? If how we interpret different situations and our ability to view these situations as well as interpret them lies within the brain and its various systems of 'highways', of currents running through our brain to other places of our bodies telling us what to do, how to do it, how we feel and various other things. Does that mean the answer to what our consciousness is, lies within the brain?
Now, if consciousness starts in the womb, why is it that no one can recollect this event? Neither can many recollect anything before the age of 3-5, depending on the individual. Could it be that our consciousness is still in development and therefore cannot recollect what happened before our conscious self reached a certain level? Or is it that our brains are not expanded enough? Could it be that we do not use every percentage of our brain or that the activity levels are not working at full capacity? That if we were to unlock a certain section of our brain or make it work at a higher level, we would find it holds suppressed memories of our younger years?
What is it that makes us different from an AI? Is it our ability to feel? If so are our feelings just another current running through our circuitry dictated by our brain or is it something more? The soul. An aspect that billions believe in the existence of but we have yet to prove. Of course, just because it is not yet proven doesn't mean it should be viewed as fictional. Many great mysteries have yet to be discovered. Before the atom was split scientist thought it was the smallest.
Thought. Would the thought process give us a glimpse into how our conscious self works. AIs think of the problem we present them with and answer it with the knowledge we programme into them. I have yet to hear of an AI who has a thought process that is not initialized by a human. Lets say a robot like one of those robo-pets existed that was designed to look and act human. They would obviously not eat, the years of their lives would not be measurable, a virus to them and us would mean two very different things. They would not start off as we did from an egg and sperm uniting into self replicating cells carrying our genetic code. They would always be as they were made. There would be no learning by trial and error, no childhood, no real adulthood as defined by human standards. Their circuits would let them process a variety of information and proceed as necessary depending on their set parameters. As do we, except that their action would only deal with the rational and would not be clouded by emotions reactions that plague us when dealing with different circumstances. How we were raised and what we have been taught most times preset us to how we deal with a situation, how we think about it or if we think about it at all. If you get down to technicality, an AI would seem to be doing the same thing depending on what their maker programmes into them. Giving this definition it would mean an AI would have a type of consciousness yet this is untrue as they show no reaction based on self, therefore meaning the definition of consciousness is something else entirely. But what that definition is, is a question I wonder if it will ever be fully answered.
We can see through our eyes and no one elses', experience only through the body we were born into. Individual thought and experiences as opposed to a collective mindset that would allow us to see the lives of others in first person. Again we come back to the brain and our brain cannot branch out into another body and send signals allowing us to see and experience through their eyes. Our brains connect to the nerves in our bodies sending messages back and forth allowing us to see and experience only through our eyes as it is connected only to our bodies. Could this mean that if Siamese twins existed that were connected at the brain that they could see and experience through both sets of eyes. If so would they be able to control this at will, only experience it through one or experience it through both at the same time? Would they be able to pick which to experience it through? If not, why could they not? Could they be stuck experiencing things through both sets of eyes for the rests of their lives or through a particular one designated by something else? Is it something else entirely that sets our consciousness into motion or can our brain differentiate?