Several days ago I asked readers for questions and I’ve started writing posts that answer many of them.
However I thought I should also highlight where I don’t know the answer to questions being asked. Maybe readers will. I do have my limits.
I sought to limit the questions to travel or miles and points but readers asked other things as well, again some of those were outside my area of expertise.
Here are some questions I do not know the answers to:
Reader Jed asked,
Which NFL teams are going to move to Los Angeles next year?
I’ll defer to readers to may wish to take this one up in the comments.
Ask Me About Earning Bonus Miles with European Football Co-Brand Credit Cards, That I Can Answer
Reader JT asked,
Why does AA lie? What can we do to force them to honor the contracts that they are legally bound to?
Lie about what in particular? Generally the methods for compelling a party to perform under the terms of a contract involve seeking a court order. But I don’t think that’s really what you had in mind.
Reader MEOW wanted to know,
Is the struggle “real”?
Depends on your definition of real, and also what ‘is’ is.
Dave wondered,
When a pilot is flying the plane at 35,000 feet, and looking at the horizon, how far does the naked eye see in the distance? 10 miles? 100 miles?
Is the curvature of the earth limiting you or your own eyes on seeing the farthest in the distance?
I have a feeling I should remember something about this from high school physics class. But I don’t.
Unclesam offered,
I am curious to know why all the hotels use the cheapest toilet paper.I have stayed at many luxury brand hotels where rooms can go as high as $1000 / night but yet they don’t consider investing in better quality toilet paper which would barely cost the few cents more per roll.
You know, there’s some truth in this, I am often amazed by the low quality toilet paper in otherwise top quality hotels. Leaving aside Europe, even, where everyone uses awful toilet paper.
But I do not know the thinking behind underinvesting in toilet paper in particular. I probably overinvest in it myself, I do find it important (relatively speaking). So it’s a real disappointment.
I may have to ask several folks about this, but I do not know.
MileStalker asked,
Will you transfer all your miles and points balances to me?
This one is simple: no.
ivan said,
Give me your full thoughts on worldventures. They have rovia, a ‘lowered’ booking 3rd party and ‘lowered’ cash trips abroad.
My full thoughts are summed up as follows: ___________
Unfortunately I’m not familiar with them.
This may be supposition on my part, but at my office, the cheap feeling toilet paper is used because it decomposes quickly in water so as not to clog pipes. Of course, when using it for your business it feels like sandpaper and also decomposes in your hands, but let that not stand in the way of progress!
After several weeks in remote areas of Turkey, I would have welcomed a roll or two of cheap toliet paper…..my knees were sore from those Squat Toilets and it tooks weeks to recover from the chafing cause by the water from the stubs of a garden hose used for modest sanitation.
Unclesam, consider yourself fortunate to have access to cheap toliet paper!
Cheap toilet paper you say? Delta has to win the award for the worst airline toilet paper. I’ve seen Teflon pans that are more absorbent.
Which NFL team(s) will move to Los Angeles next year? I will take a stab at this one…. In questions like this I think the best guess is to first answer who wants it the most and who has the most means to make it happen. I have been following this religiously as a die hard San Diego Chargers fan and I would rank them from most likely to least likely as 1) Rams, 2) Chargers and 3) Raiders. The owner of the Rams has the money and extreme interest in making it happen. The Chargers seem to have given up on the city of San Diego. The Raiders are the most complex situation and I could see them leaving, but to San Antonio. Regardless, none of them will play in a new stadium in LA and they still need to find a venue to play at until their stadium is built. The LA Coliseum seems like the best bet. I look forward to reading this comment in 12 months and seeing how stupid I look 🙂 GO CHARGERS!
American lies to make the struggle real for moving an NFL team.
David: I am also a Chargers fan! I was hoping the answer would be that the Rams and Raiders are the most likely to move back, but I’m afraid you are probably right. The city of SD isn’t really motivated enough to make a new stadium a reality. Oh well.
Gary, you should change your article’s headline to the recommendation made by Christian’: “American lies to make the struggle real for moving an NFL team.” Better than any clickbait headline you’ve had in the past.
Nice one Christian 🙂
Dave wondered,
When a pilot is flying the plane at 35,000 feet, and looking at the horizon, how far does the naked eye see in the distance? 10 miles? 100 miles?
Is the curvature of the earth limiting you or your own eyes on seeing the farthest in the distance?
I don’t think I paid enough attention in HS either.
But google is a “know it all”
Apparently the passenger can see 122.5 miles out
No mention about the pilot
this is the webpage.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-474381.html
No NFL team will move to Los Angeles. For a variety of reasons, L.A. isn’t the best area for a pro football team (abundance of popular college teams, for example) which has caused it to be abandoned twice, despite being the 2nd largest market in the country.
Furthermore, its absence as an NFL market is shrewdly used by savvy owners as a threat. “If you don’t give us X or Y, we’ll move to Los Angeles.” Tampa Bay played this role for years in MLB until it got an expansion team, but no one actually moved to Tampa. No NFL owner wants there to be a team in LA, because it would remove it as a possibility, and no one really wants to move there either.
Christian absolutely nailed it. Send that man a gift card.
Good questions. I think the Rams owner is ready to move the Rams to LA any minute but it might be next season before he can. So sad. Just a few years ago the Rams won the super bowl.
A plumber explained to me why the cheapest, most dissolvable toilet paper. Clogs! Maybe 99 people will use the toilet paper correctly, but one idiot tries to put way too much down the toilet and causes huge problems. Sorry, but they stock the toilet paper for the least common denominator idiot who uses the bathroom — and this goes for a lot of hotels too.
Funny is not your specialty
Gary: I knew you wouldn’t be that generous. 95% of your balances will be enough.
“Dave wondered,
When a pilot is flying the plane at 35,000 feet, and looking at the horizon, how far does the naked eye see in the distance? 10 miles? 100 miles?
Is the curvature of the earth limiting you or your own eyes on seeing the farthest in the distance?”
The real question should be about structures you can see further than the 122+ miles, because nobody cares about looking at nothingness (unless airsick). Wouldn’t it also depend where you are on the Earth? I’ll ponder whether the curvature is greater at points in lower and higher latitudes?
Also, World Ventures is a MLM travel deal with really high-earning reps: http://www.worldventures.info/pdfs/incomedisclosure.pdf
They do have some cheap trips, but they are generally cruises and hotels during low season, and then only for a specific number of days during a specific period. You also have to pay a monthly fee, and you usually pay about regular prices for airfare.
How do I know? I have a good friend who is involved and I keep belittling him with the income disclosures.
I need to correct Rami’s statement about how far away the horizon is when you’re 35,000 feet in the air. The web page Rami sites contains an answer from ChrisK about 10,000 feet in response to a question about 35,000 feet, so his confusion is understandable.
“At 10,000 feet you can see 122 miles, at 30,000 feet you can see 211 miles, and at 40,000 feet you can see 244 miles. ” — https://hub.united.com/en-us/news/company-operations/pages/ask-the-united-pilot-july-2013.aspx
So, if the above quotation is correct, we would expect the answer for 35,000 feet to be between 211 (for 30,000 feet) and 244 miles (for 40,000 feet).
Here is my attempt at calculating it.
If we ignore atmospheric distortion and pretend that the Earth is a perfect sphere, then the computation is actually quite simple, once you realize that your line of site will be exactly tangential to the surface of the earth at the horizon, which means that, at that point on the horizon, it is also exactly 90 degrees from a line drawn at that point to the center of the earth. You do not need any transcendental functions like sine or cosine. It’s just a right triangle, so you can use the Pythagorean theorem (c^2 = a^2 + b^2, where c is the length of the long edge–the hypotnuse–and a and b are the lengths of the other edges, and where “x^2” means “x times x”).
D: Distance from airplane to the horizon
R : radius of the Earth (pretend it’s a perfect sphere) = 3959 miles, per Google.
h: height of the airplane above the Earth = 6.63 miles (35,000 feet / (5280 feet / mile))
R + h: distance from airplane to center of the Earth
D^2 + R^2 = (R+h)^2 because of the Pythagorean Theorem]
D^2 + R^2 = R^2 + 2Rh + h^2
D^2 = 2Rh + h^2
D = square_root(2Rh + h^2)
D = square_root((2 * 3959 miles * 6.63 miles) + (6.63 miles * 6.63 miles))
D = 229.2 miles, if I have my math right.
I need to correct Rami’s statement about how far away the horizon is when you’re 35,000 feet in the air. The web page Rami sites answers the question for 10,000 feet, although it starts by asking the question about 35,000 feet. So, his confusion is understandable.
“At 10,000 feet you can see 122 miles, at 30,000 feet you can see 211 miles, and at 40,000 feet you can see 244 miles. ” — https://hub.united.com/en-us/news/company-operations/pages/ask-the-united-pilot-july-2013.aspx
If we ignore atmospheric distortion and pretend that the Earth is a perfect sphere, then the computation is actually quite simple, once you realize that your line of site will be exactly tangential to the surface of the earth at the horizon, which means that, at that point on the horizon, it is also exactly 90 degrees from a line drawn at that point to the center of the earth. You do not need any transcendental functions like sine or cosine. It’s just a right triangle, so you can use the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2, where “x^2” means “x times x”, and a and are the lengths of the short edges–the ones that connect to the right angle, and c is the length of the long edge–the “hypotnuse”).
D: Distance from airplane to the horizon
R : radius of the Earth (pretend it’s a perfect sphere) = 3959 miles, according to Google.
h: height of the airplane above the Earth = 6.63 miles (35,000 feet / (5280 feet / mile))
R + h: distance from airplane to center of the Earth
D^2 + R^2 = (R+h)^2 [because of the Pythagorean Theorem]
D^2 + R^2 = R^2 + 2Rh + h^2
D^2 = 2Rh + h^2
D = square_root(2Rh + h^2)
D = square_root((2 * 3959 miles * 6.63 miles) + (6.63 miles * 6.63 miles))
D = 229.2 miles, if I have my math right.