Events

Of course we knew Bill O'Reilly didn't care about the Constitution, but it's refreshing to hear him admit it:

Silly me for forgetting that U.S. citizens need visas to visit India. (I'm usually more up on those things.) So yesterday I got mine, for the CCMBA Delhi residency. Color me impressed. Travisa, the company that the Indian government employs to handle their visa processing, had me in and out in 15 minutes to drop off my application, then sent me a text the same afternoon letting me know my passport had come back, then had me in and out in 90 seconds in the afternoon. Total time spent getting the visa...

You should see him after I've been gone a week. This is Parker after three days of boarding:

While the Burj Dubai will likely remain the tallest building in the world for a long time, the rankings of the next few buildings on the "world's tallest" list got shuffled today when the organization that ranks them changed the definition a bit: The old standard was that a skyscraper's height was determined by calculating the distance from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building's spire or structural top. The new standard is that height is measured from "the lowest, significant...

Reader EB has passed along Travel & Leisure's "World's Scariest Runways," including one of my favorites, Princess Juliana Airport in Sint Maarten: Why It’s Harrowing: The length of the runway—just 2,180 m—is perfectly fine for small or medium-size jets, but as the second-busiest airport in the Eastern Caribbean, it regularly welcomes so-called heavies—long-haul wide-body jetliners like Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s—from Europe, which fly in improbably low over Maho Beach and skim just over the perimeter...

Andrew Sullivan has a recap of the top 30: Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor. Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day. Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not...

This is about the coolest aviation-related thing I've seen in years.

Two more photos, one of London and one of Dubai. Guess which is which:

It's sad when a trusted companion dies. Like my poor, inoffensive laptop, which blew out its monitor at Boston Logan airport two weeks ago. I would rather not have just ordered a new computer to replace it. I will try to get the old laptop's monitor fixed, but the time, effort, and expense involved almost don't justify it. Everything else still works just fine; in fact, I'm using it now with an external monitor. In order to get it fixed I'd need to hand it over to strangers for an unknown length of...

The Duke CCMBA has a novel structure that includes two courses that spread out across five of the six terms. One of these, "Cultures, Civilization, and Leadership," aims to give us the context and a set of tools to deal with the myriad cultures we encounter during the program and after. The class requires us to compose a "cultural disconnect" essay each term, which the rest of the class, rather than the professors, evaluates. Here's mine for Dubai. (The essay refers to some diagnostic and cultural tools...