I took the afternoon off today. It’s the first time that I can remember I’ve taken part of a day off to do nothing–in every other circumstance it’s been in service of some activity or other. Of course, today there were logistical reasons behind it, but it was a weird sensation nevertheless.<\/p>\n
The wind was strong and the air was bumpy today, all the more so since I flew in the afternoon. It’s technically Spring break for the school, so I have the week off from my regular flight blocks, but my instructor called me a few days ago with an opening this afternoon for some extra practice, and I jumped on it. The flight was uneventful except for getting bumped around a lot in the cockpit. I flew solo down to Rowan County airport, practiced some landings and flew back. I did power-on stalls on the way there, a maneuver designed to simulate a stall during a full-power situation such as takeoff. The gusts made coordination of the airplane challenging during the maneuver. Unfortunately coordination is crucial quality during the stall, and a lack of it makes for some interesting situations, namely incipient spins. As I told my instructor during the debrief, I know in the back of my mind that the Cessna 172 is a perfectly well-behaved, benign airplane in all respects and is almost impossible to spin, but when I’m in a stall and the left wing drops and the nose starts sliding very quickly below the horizon at a considerable angle, it’s a little unnerving, even if I do know what to do to recover.<\/p>\n
I talked with an assistant philosophy professor<\/a> from Wake Forest last night. The church group and I attended a gathering of young adults in the area and he and I struck up a conversation afterward. We made the usual small talk and when I heard what he taught I tried to remember everything I had learned in my intro to philosophy class at NCSU, which mainly centered on Cartesian dualism<\/a>. Talking about the mind\/body problem in philosophy, I asked him whether he ascribed to a trichotomy (body\/soul\/spirit), dichotomy (body\/spirit) or monistic view and he kind of skirted around the issue. Evidently his main area of expertise is ethics and he didn’t seem particularly keen on engaging the mind\/body issue (maybe it was the informal setting?) It was interesting to me because I had always been under the impression that if you know philosophy you were well-versed and had a ready opinion about the whole range of philosophical issues. But I suppose it makes sense to specialize. It would be analogous to someone coming up to me and plying me with questions about off-roading or some area of automotive interest I just don’t know that much about. They’re both remarkably broad topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I took the afternoon off today. It’s the first time that I can remember I’ve taken part of a day off to do nothing–in every other circumstance it’s been in service of some activity or other. Of course, today there were logistical reasons behind it, but it was a weird sensation nevertheless. The wind was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}