The Vomit Comet

A quick update:
I am currently in Ottawa, participating in an experiment that most people think is completely crazy. I'm starting to think they're right. Right. So, there is research group that is located near the lab that I'm in, and they do a lot of vision research involving the vestibular system. Right now, they're trying to figure out hw we knoe that 'up' is up. To do this, they're trying to screw with our system, and take away normal cues to 'up.' First, they took away our visual cues: we're looking at a scene through a circular window and are unable to see anything else on the periphery. Then they rotate that scene. The whole time, you're making responses to images presented on the screen, and these responses are based on your perception of where 'up' is. Then, the clevel jerks decided that gravity probably influences this a great deal, so they decided to get rid of that (that = gravity).

Which brings us to the present: I am sitting in Ottawa, and today I have flown (twice) in an experimental airplane, and I have experienced near-weightlessness. The plane does these giant parabolas (like s' on their sides, and stretched out a bit) and when you come over the top of the curve, you get a bit of weightlessness, and almost no gravity. At the bottom, you get about 2x the normal gravity. That part SUCKs. This type of research plane is known as the vomit comet for a reason. Today,I think that I had a net total of four grapes (gross total was about a half bagel, 100 ml apple juice, and 16 grapes). But, it will be a cool story to tell the grandkids. I've completed two flights, and they're hoping to get six done in total. I've been told that they'll be able to get enough data out of three flights, so I'm hopefully only going to be doing one or two more (and hopefully tomorro.w's will be better than today's). Wish me luck!

Here is me on the plane:



It's not all bad, we did get to go to the big apple: