the corioblog : read, and be entertained

Effects of Eating a Too Hot Pepper

Presented in timeline form:

-15 minutes: Friends are encouraging, but everyone repeats one caution: no matter what, do not touch your face with your hands. Keep them behind your back if possible.

+0 minutes: The immediate effect isn’t actually very dramatic. The mouth burns, of course, but not much more so than when eating any normal hot pepper. There is an instinctive desire: “This is not good food. Spit it out immediately.” However, it is not difficult to override that and chew and swallow. The taste, so far as that sense still functions, is actually pretty decent.

+1 minute: Every facial organ of fluid production, from the salivary glands to the tear ducts to the nose runners, is working in overtime. The face itself is flushed, and the entire body is slick with sweat. However, the only real distress is the psychological one of being unable to wipe the various fluids off the face. Physiologically, this is perfectly possible; it is just a very bad idea.

+10 minutes: At this point the stomach begins to hurt. Be aware that vomiting may begin with no warning or preamble. Speech is possible, but the voice is a hoarse croak.

+15 minutes: Bread is suggested as a means of cooling the mouth. It is tried but does not work. At this point, the mere notion of keeping something in the mouth that is not actually attached there is vaguely nauseating, and to swallow may well be physically impossible.

+20 minutes: Burying the face in a double handful of ice cubes turns out to be startlingly nice, so long as there is someone around willing to carry the ice. Do not trust onlookers who claim that this does not work: they lie. Another benefit is that this pose makes for memorable photos.

+30 minutes: Physical effort beyond the minimums of breathing and standing gets nauseating quickly. Attempting to walk more than a few dozen yards can induce vomiting. The facial fluid organs are all still going strong. Most of the body is shivering with chill while the head and neck are still flushed and hot. It is an unusual sensation.

+1 hour: A long cold shower goes a long way toward improving things. The face is still flushed and there is an aftertaste but otherwise physical symptoms are mostly gone. Consumption of food and beverages is possible, with an interesting side effect: everything tastes extremely, unnaturally sweet.

+18 hours: The sore throat goes away around here.

+24 hours: The sweetness of food is still amplified, though the magnitude of amplification seems to be diminishing.

Further results pending.

2009 06 27 random things
what i learned at work today Comments (1) Permalink

night air assault

In case anyone was wondering, this is what I was up to last week. The reporter dramatizes quite a bit, but the essence of the story is correct.

CIF

I visited CIF today to get my Korea gear. They sent me home with a depth and variety of cold weather gear which, while gratifying to have, implies an almost terrifying lack of warmth. It comes with an instruction manual entitled “Generation III Extended Cold Weather Clothing System.” The illustration on the cover diagrams in overview how one can wear all seven layers simultaneously, at least while standing still.

The boots they included are a full inch longer than my normal work boots. Part of this is due to the thicker construction of the boots themselves, but it is also to compensate for the two layers of oversocks they issued me.

I’m going to take comfort from the fact that aircraft heating systems draw their warmth from bleed air just after the compressor stages of the engine. At that point, even though it has not yet been touched by jet fuel, the sheer compression has heated it to several hundred degrees celsius. When bled off for crew heating, it is tempered by outside air so as not to actually roast the crew. However, I know where that outside air intake is. If a choice becomes necessary, it might be better to restrict that for a more efficient heating system than to wear so many clothes that fine motor control becomes impossible.

2009 05 06 2-2 ASLT Comments (1) Permalink

Inprocessing: Complete

I’m finally out of inprocessing, or at least the formalized briefing portion of it. There’s still a bit more to go, but the rest takes the form of a checklist of tasks to complete. Mainly it revolves around people to meet and notify of my presence; it will hopefully not take more than a day or two.

One of the most valuable bits of inprocessing was a tour of fatal accident sites, with a focus on how proper leadership could have prevented them. There’s a hill where a AVLB accidentally ran over two pedestrians because it was avoiding a Bradley coming the other way on the narrow road. There’s a bridge where an untrained driver drove a FIST-V over the edge, and an elevated road whose edge crumbled, rolling a M-113 16 feet into a rice paddy below. At each of these sites, there was substantial post-accident reconstruction designed to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. Still, it was emphasized that the real failures weren’t failures of engineering, or even of untrained crews. Leaders should have been there to train the crews, to make sure the soldiers were performing the proper maintenance on the vehicles, to ensure that everyone knew what was going on and what should happen in the event of contingencies. In short, the leaders should have been doing their jobs. My rank makes me a leader by default; it’s instructive to know what could happen if I don’t take that seriously.

Unfortunately, not all the training was that good. It seems that Korea has something of a reputation within the Army, or at least the high leadership here feels that it does. This, it appears, is where young soldiers go to drink and debauch, where they lose their constraints and go wild. After all, they’re in a foreign country; why should there be consequences? This is where discipline and proper training and procedures go out the window. After all, we’re patrolling the most stable armed truce in history; what could go wrong?

Whether or not those things are true (I don’t have the statistics), and whether or not Korea even has that reputation (I don’t have the Army experience), the General is determined to fix the situation, and that means that everyone else in the chain of command has got to get their own words in on how to improve the situation. That, in short, is why inprocessing takes three weeks instead of the two days of logistical details that happen after the formal training bits are over.

On the other hand, I can now repeat details from an hour-long lecture on how to safely operate a multi-kilowatt generator.

2009 04 30 army
korea Comments (0) Permalink

Autotune the News

2009 04 23 misc.link Comments (2) Permalink

Army Culture Shock

For a few days before leaving Ft. Rucker, I had no duties (having completed outprocessing early) and stayed in Army Lodging, which was pretty much a cheap hotel. Like much of my time in Alabama, it was low stress, low key, low rent.

Yesterday after arriving in Korea, I had no real duties and stayed in Dragon Hill Lodge, which was pretty much an upscale hotel. The hotel restaurants have three pricing schemes: normal, 20% off for junior enlisted, children under 10 eat free. It’s that kind of place.

Today, the paperwork caught up. The paperwork says that I now belong to the 2ND INFANTRY DIVISION, which changed everything. In the INFANTRY DIVISION, there are duties: CQ, cleaning, KP. In the INFANTRY DIVISION, one sleeps in a barracks and makes a bed with hospital corners. (As an officer, instead of daily room inspections, there is only one weekly scheduled at random. That in no way reduces the cleaning duties.) In the INFANTRY DIVISION, there is a mandatory cheer (”Second to None!”) every time the division is named. The cheer is also given when saluting, at which point there is a formulaic response from the officer (”Tonight we Fight!”). In the INFANTRY DIVISION, there is a divisional song, which is to be memorized by everybody and sung daily before PT.

It’s a different culture.

Luckily for me, I don’t expect all of these things to remain the same for the duration of my stay. A division is a big entity, and if experience is any indication, once I get to an aviation base, things will get a lot more relaxed. If nothing else, I shouldn’t have to deal with room inspections once I get set up in my own apartment. Still, for these first two weeks of inprocessing at least, I get to live the Army life in the traditional manner. The major difference between this and Basic is that now that I have some rank, I have a few privileges.

Speaking of rank, I am in the odd position of being the highest ranking person I have yet encountered in this nation. People keep calling me ’sir’ and deferring to me. There are enlisted people everywhere. This may not seem so odd to an outside observer, but that’s just because the outside observer probably wouldn’t know that at Ft. Rucker, enlisted people are a rarity. You might occasionally see a company 1SG, or observe some AIT kids at a distance, but on a daily basis there are just the Warrants, the Lieutenants, and the Cadre. Here, there is no such company of officers. It’s odd, but I find myself wishing to find someone who outranks me.

2009 04 14 army Comments (2) Permalink

First Impressions

Incheon International Airport has nothing to distinguish it from any other major airport I have ever been to. For the first 100 yards out of the airplane, I didn’t even see a single character of Hangul–everything, including the advertisements, was purely in English.
The bus ride from the airport to the inprocessing station took us past several landscapes. The one I found most interesting was a stretch of beach: a bit of sand, a large muddy intertidal zone, and a line of barbed wire and blockhouses. Just your average everyday coastal fortifications.
Cherry blossoms turn out not to be a purely Japanese thing. The base right now is hilighted in pink, with fallen petals littering the grounds everywhere.
The first people visible after coming through the gate were a trio of teenagers walking and chatting after school. It amazes me how we’ve transplanted a bit of the US right into the capital of a foreign nation so effectively that you couldn’t prove without context that it is actually outside America.
In keeping with the theme, five minutes later we drove past a kid half my age and twice my weight. It’s America, all right.

In other news, I am safely arrived after an uneventful flight. If you must fly coach on a long flight, get a bulkhead seat: it is much, much better than the alternative. Inprocessing day zero begins tomorrow. Jetlag status: I think I really did develop an immunity.

2009 04 13 korea Comments (0) Permalink

On Pirates

Let’s not even mention the modern notion of a copyright pirate for a moment. That’s a distraction, a reduction of the word. A pirate is a desperate person who attacks ships either to capture their inherent worth or to ransom them and their crews. It’s cropping up again, off Somalia. This most recent batch has just “vow[ed] to take on US military might if attacked.”

We have dealt with this problem before. The cities of Algiers and Tripoli were havens for the pirates. Let us see how it ended for them:

1805: First Barbary War. Tripoli ends piracy vs. US vessels. In Algiers, piracy continues.
1812: Second Barbary War. Algiers ends piracy vs. US vessels. Against European powers, piracy continues.
1816: The British bombarded Algiers: secured the release of 3000 prisoners and the promise of ending piracy. Piracy continues.
1824: The British bombard Algiers again. Piracy continues.
1830: The French capture Algiers

The genocidal thoroughness with which the French conquered and colonized Algeria, causing the deaths of up to a third of Algeria’s population, put an effective end to piracy from the Barbary coast.

What lesson can we take from this? How about that pirates can be defeated en masse, so long as there is sufficient political will to just keep killing people until they agree to stop attempting piracy.

“But unrestrained aggression in that region will just drive more people to terrorism, exacerbating our long-term problems with them!”

There are two responses to that. The first is that attacking pirates isn’t aggression; it’s defense. It may be pre-emptive defense, but it’s still just a response to a provocation to protect the safety of our citizens. The second is that piracy is terrorism, on the seas. There are only two real differences: pirates neatly identify themselves, as anyone on a boat that is attacking or reinforcing attackers may be considered a pirate. Also, terrorists generally at least pretend to having a political goal; pirates are in it for the money.

All we need to do is bring down the hammer, such that the pirates have to decide what is more important: our money or their lives.

How do we do this? We just start killing pirates. Destroy any boat that comes to reinforce a pirate crew. Destroy any boat that contains only pirates, even if it contains hostages. We can’t let the fear of one casualty paralyze our ability to respond. If necesary, we can resort to historical precedent and just start shelling the ports from which they emerge. Shelling, historically, is at best a short term solution. Still, there’s no denying the fact that it does work.

I’d be surprised if this is what ends up happening. We’ve defined ourselves as a nation that sheds blood only as a last resort; any politician who remembers G.W. Bush is going to be very cautious about launching any sort of attack not necessary to the prosecution of the wars he started. Even so, it is appropriate to use both the carrot and the stick in national policy.

That if once you have paid him the Danegeld, You never get rid of the Dane.

–Rudyard Kipling

2009 04 10 opinion Comments (0) Permalink

First Class

Delta charges the Army about a thousand dollars to fly a soldier to Korea. Given the Army’s policy of never buying a ticket more than three days in advance and Delta’s policy of allowing ten free checked bags to active-duty soldiers, that’s really not that bad.

The Army has no policy preventing individual soldiers from using their own airline miles accounts to profit from these flights. It also has no policy preventing a soldier from upgrading their seat, providing they pay for it themself.

Delta, on the other hand, wants over two thousand dollars more to upgrade that seat. On the one hand, it’s a fifteen hour flight. On the other hand, there is no way I’m shelling out that much money for fifteen hours, even though it does mean the difference between a coach seat and a fully-reclining bed-chair. (One might be tempted to call that first-class accommodation a ‘couch seat.’)

Oh well. At least I’m getting 11000 free airline miles out of the deal. After the next roundtrip, I’ll have enough to upgrade to first class to pretty much anywhere in the world for free.

2009 04 09 what i learned at work today Comments (0) Permalink

Transcontinental Song

The Army’s in Korea to support our great allies.
My comp’ny’s role is simple: drop some troopers from the skies,
And as a junior pilot I just keep the rotors high,
SO let’s all fly to Asia for the Army.

I’m wearing now the wings that took two years for me to rate.
A couple things were rough but overall flight school was great,
though I’m not sad I finally can get out of this state.
SO let’s all fly to Asia from Fort Rucker.

The holidays don’t matter to this world weary flight crew;
They’ll fly them all again before their flight career is through.
They just want to ensure they get the one point five they’re due,
SO let’s all fly to Asia over Easter.

So everyone who knows me asks if I’ll bring back a wife.
Apparantly that question fascinates folks in my life.
I don’t intend to but the possibilities are rife.
SO let’s all fly to Asia and get married.

2009 04 09 brain flotsam
writing Comments (2) Permalink

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