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Exhibit A: Photo sent by a Disturbed Passenger
I recently received the following letter and accompanying photo:Dear Fred,I was on a Virgin Blue flight recently and was sitting with this picture in front of me.
Can you please help me to understand what they were trying to get me to understand.
Thanks very much for your help,
Yours sincerely,
A disturbed passenger
My initial impulse was to formulate a reply containing just the bare
meaning of the sign, but such a terse response would deprive the
recipient of any insight into the careful, complex, painstaking
mental processes that yielded the final nugget of truth.
The North Wind
The North Wind, The North Wind, from a The Tree Peony, Insects, most
from a Mayan
temple bas-relief
mediaeval manuscript, clearly
not
follically challenged
Paeonia suffruticosa
probably aphids
A door or window, with curiously rounded corners. Again, like the
peony symbolising plants in general, it would not do to read too much
into the precise form of this image. Note the aphids shown across
the aperture: this is another example of a verb-icon, indicating movement.
The abstract profile of a human head in silhouette is shown. I am
not certain whether the black dot shown is another aphid, or a
Picasso-esque representation of the figure's other eye, but this is
immaterial to the meaning, as will become apparent.
The head is intended to convey the notion of person - any person,
including the viewer, even if they are not completely bald or
largely featureless.
The universal symbol for negation, a red circle boundary with a red
diagonal at 45°, overlays what appears - to the less
educated eye - to be a vending machine. This is not the case; while
most of the other icons used on this picture are easily recognised,
for some reason the creators chose an obscure heraldic symbol.
When the white-box-with-little-window symbols appears on a coat of
arms, it signifies a white goods appliance; with the addition of
a rounded rectangle with a horizontal coloured bar, it specifically
means a front-loading washing machine. The colour of the bar
indicates the manufacturer - from memory the red bar means "Westinghouse" -
but again we should avoid over-interpretation and stick to
the meaning of "general front-loader". Why? Because the makers
of the sign clearly have a limited colour palette at their disposal.
"Aphids in the face" is a common metaphor for stress, and the North Wind is used to convey the idea of external influences, circumstances beyond your control. Because of the context (on board a plane), this means influences in your immediate environment. A more correct translation of the pictures would be "Even if the immediate environment causes you stress (e.g. screaming children, bad airline food), under no circumstances operate your front-loading washing machine".
The reason for this instruction is that modern aircraft are composed of a large number of intricate, interacting subsystems. Top-loading washing machines may be operated safely on an aircraft because the rotor swishes the clothes first one way, then the other, with a net cancellation of momentum; thus the plane does not veer wildly to the left or right (the aviation term for this motion is 'yaw') as would happen with a vertical rotor spinning in a constant direction.
Front-loaders, by contrast, spin in one direction only. Regardless of how they are oriented within the plane, the continued rotation of the barrel in one direction will disrupt navigation - depending on the orientation of the front-loader, the aviation terms for this motion are 'pitch' and 'roll'. Some of the latest model aircraft are able to compensate for this drift, but there is still the unsolvable problem of the front-loading washing machine 'walking'. Prior to the restrictions on front-loaders, passengers would operate them in vacant seats (imagine a not-so-small child repeatedly kicking the back of your airplane seat) or sneak off to use front-loaders in the toilets, with predictable results. Too many lives have been lost when front-loaders have escaped and 'walked' through the aircraft fuselage.
Remember, it is never safe to operate a front-loader on an aircraft, even when it is stationary on the ground.
The writer of this letter is demonstrably insane. No further correspondence on this matter will be entered into.i disagree with one point. you claim that front loading washers are inherently dangerous on aeroplanes but this is an unwarranted slight against front loading washers. the problem with "rotating parts" and "yaw" that you mention only affected early aeroplanes in which the cockpit was open to the elements (e.g. sopwith camels and so forth). i am lead to believe that it has something to with open systems versus closed systems. it has been well understood for some time in the aeronautical engineering fraternity that it is only dangerous to use front loading washers on aeroplanes when the windows are open (and hence acting as a vector or path of entry for high altitude aphids or similar). i believe that this better explains the need to emphasise the aphids. they act as an indicator of when not to use one's front loading washer. although the danger of "walking" is, of course, a very real and present threat to this day. cheers, raf
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