Somewhere over the Pacific

Monday October 21, 2014

From Boston Logan to Washington, D.C. is about an hour in flight time.   The airline reported that the trip is an hour and a half, so when we landed in D.C., they can say "We are 30 minutes earlier than reported, Yay! a feather in our cap!".  Airlines are cheaters like that.

I fly United Airlines/.  This is my usual airline, and one that my company,   EMC, recommends.  I remain loyal to United in most of my travels, flying United all over the World.  At the end of last year, I have a Silver level frequent flyer flight status.  Not that I am proud about it or anything, I just like having the higher status to upgrade to a Business class seat once in a while.

Last year was pretty slow, in terms of travel, for Greenplum, aka Pivotal.  I only need one more flight to get to the Gold status, which means getting the Premier seats (with more legrooms), and a possible upgrade to Business class.  Yay, I said to myself.  For this trip, while I was scanning through all the available airlines, I noticed my frequent flyer miles have to wiped clean.  Gone!  Completely wiped out!.  I am down to a peasant class "regular member" of the frequent flyers status/  Because of the (long period of) inactivity, United has bounced me to peasant class of frequent flyers.  I think that was pretty heartless.
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Twenty hours later, we landed in Tokyo.

I had an interesting conversation with the passenger across the aisle.  She is writing a paper theorizing on the predictability of human longevity based entirely on genes.  She explained that studies on human genetic data correlates well between genes types and long lives.  She is presenting this to the Singapore government.  She is hoping that they can use this theory to pre-select scholarship recipients from infants.  What a crazy idea.

I doubted that the theory could be true, that she can completely ignore external influences like environment.  I  questioned her about smokers and lung cancer, etc. I cite the example of the last numbers of women older than 90 in Mongolia and the SinJiang province in China.  They found one commonality - yogurt, but to correlate yogurt eating with living to the 90s is insane.