Author Archives: iraheilveil

Altitude is Your Friend

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images-5I made a few mistakes when taking my private pilot checkride, that crucible that determines whether or not you get the privilege of taking to the skies and risking life and limb.     After showing the examiner that I could find my way from point A to point B without getting too lost, and that I could make the airplane go up and down, handle a loss of power and a few other tricks, he asked me where I wanted to “do my landings.”   At that moment, we were flying almost directly over the town of Santa Paula, with an airport conveniently right below us.  I told him I wanted to do my landings in Oxnard, some 13 miles away, which was one of several surprises I had for the examiner that day, because he was expecting that I would choose the airport right below us.

I chose Oxnard because it had once been a military base and the runways were long and wide, and really hard to miss.   My checkride hadn’t been going so well up to then, and I wanted to give myself plenty of room for error, and landing in Santa Paula, even though I had already done it often, was like squeezing into the proverbial sardine can.

I had also landed in Oxnard many times, and each time I did my instructor had me begin my descent into that airport at just about where I happened to be at the time the examiner asked me where I wanted to do my landings, 13 miles away over Santa Paula.

As I began to descend, the examiner urgently asked me what I was doing.  I was obviously doing something wrong; I just didn’t know what it was.  I responded that I was beginning my descent into Oxnard.   He impatiently growled at me something I have heard many times since then: “Remember– altitude is your friend.”  He told me to climb back to my previous altitude, and not to descend into Oxnard until I absolutely had to.   “You’re safer up higher.   Down lower is where helicopters hang out.  You’re in an airplane.”  I’m not sure about my memory here, but I think I also heard him mutter, “For god’s sake, you’re not a crop duster.”

Of course the examiner was correct, and I have always tried to remember the phrase that “altitude is your friend.”   Altitude keeps you safe because it gives you more time to figure out what to do if an engine quits, and more time to maneuver to a safe landing spot.  But also, there are far fewer things to bump into the higher you go. “Controlled flight into terrain,” as it is officially called, is one of the biggest killers of pilots and their flying companions.   Another reason we like altitude is that the higher you go the more you see, and it is therefore more difficult to get lost.   Pilots learn “the three C’s” of what to do if lost while flying are to confess, climb, and communicate.   You climb in order to be able to see more of what is around you.

Good management, whether it concerns an airplane, a business or one’s self, has a lot to do with the dance between immersion in the details (descending, if you will) and pulling up (climbing) to see the big picture.   If, after all, the devil is in the details, perhaps the sky is where the angels reside.

It is not a matter of whether managing details or seeing the big picture is the best approach, but the ability to move between them that is important.   Getting stuck in either the details or the big picture can be a recipe for disaster.   In companies, it is often the CFO who is charged with mastering the details, while the CEO is typically the big picture person, but someone needs to make the final call, and that person is usually the CEO.   It is too easy to miss the forest for the trees, and the best way to see the forest is from high above it.

Brandy Lovely, a Unitarian minister in Pasadena, used to tell a story about an argument he and his wife had over a small detail.  He knew he was right, but the argument went on and on for hours as each of them dug their heels in.  Finally, his wife said to him, “Look, do you want to be right, or do you want to be married?”  Sometimes the big picture has to be forced upon us, and as my examiner reminded me, finding a way above it all can be our best friend.

Miso Aviator

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imagesI’m sure every profession has its way of distinguishing the amateurs from the professionals.   In aviation, the lowest rung of the ladder is “airplane driver.”  I heard it more than once in my training, typically when I did something wrong: “You don’t want to be a driver, do you?”

The next higher level is the pilot, the one who has mastered the technical aspect of flying, the one who finally makes the shift from the two dimensional steering of the driver to the three dimensional flying of the pilot.   But there is yet another level, one reserved for the masters of flight.  These are the aviators.

They are, of course, somewhat artificial and arbitrary distinctions.  Yet, just as Justice Potter said about the difference between pornography and art, “I know it when I see it.”

The aviation writer Budd Davisson describes the difference between a mere pilot and an aviator this way:  “The difference is that an aviator is the airplane, and they move as one, while the pilot is simply manipulating the proper controls at the appropriate time and sees the airplane as a machine that he forces to do his bidding.”

I have flown with a lot of pilots, and the best pilot with whom I have ever flown was my first instructor, Floyd Jennings.  I witnessed Floyd’s flying on several occasions, but the most memorable was on my second flight as a student.   The first and only time I had ever felt nauseous in a small airplane was on that flight.

The nausea, which seemed to come from out of nowhere, was so bad that I knew I wouldn’t make it down to the ground without creating an embarrassing mess in the cockpit.  I was sweating profusely and my face was pale as I was trying to hold back.  I finally told Floyd that I couldn’t hold back any longer.  He glanced over and saw the sweat on my face and my normally pink Polish skin shift to a whiter shale of pale.

We were about halfway through the downwind leg of the pattern in Santa Paula, which means we were flying parallel to the runway, but pointed opposite to the direction needed to land.  Floyd took control of the airplane.  In what appeared to be a single movement, he looked from side to side, cut the power to idle, pointed the nose down, swooped down and around, and in a matter of mere seconds, the airplane kissed the ground sweetly and almost imperceptibly.

Whenever Floyd took control of the airplane, I had the distinct feeling that he and the metal bird were one.  Though he was a grizzled, curmudgeonly character, his flying was seamless, effortless, like wearing a comfortable shirt.   When he moved the airplane moved, when he blinked the airplane blinked.  He met Budd Davisson’s definition of aviator to a tee.   This was sadly in contrast to my flying, in which I often felt that I was wrestling with a metal beast.

I am currently working on a collection of poems I am calling “One With the Miso.”  It’s just a whimsical, silly title, but I like it because on the one hand, it sounds meaningless, but on the other hand, it expresses something bigger.   We can eat or drink the miso (that is, be a pilot), or we can become one with it.   Whatever our behavior, be it simply brushing our teeth, drinking soup or flying an airplane, we can get to the point where our sense of self as separate from the universe disappears, and the thing that we do and thing that we are becomes one.

Shit and Shinola

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Unknown-4Although my dad, who never made it past high school, took pride in his vocabulary, he was not beyond vulgarity– undoubtedly resulting from his Bronx roots and likely nurtured by his 3-year stint in the Navy.  One of the vulgar sayings I heard emanating from my father was that a particular person didn’t know shit from Shinola.

Shinola was a popular brand of shoe polish, presumably with enough of a cachet that it could be used to distinguish the high quality stuff that was applied to the top surface of your shoes from the low quality stuff that might be found clinging to the bottom. It also had a nice alliterative ring to it, more so than the other phrase I heard my father say in similar situations– that a particular person didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

Although Shinola was the “good stuff” and the other wasn’t, I came to associate the two words.  One became what behaviorists call the “discriminatory stimulus” for the other, which in English means that one thing signaled the presence of the other.   I was therefore surprised the other day to see an advertisement in a magazine for a new Wright Brothers commemorative watch made by, you guessed it, the Shinola Company.  That took me to the Internet, to find out how it came to be that a shoe polish company began manufacturing watches.   What I learned is that the modern Shinola Company, headquartered in a beautiful building in Detroit, began three years ago after the initial investors bought the rights to the Shinola name from the New York based company that had since gone out of business.  Besides watches, the new Shinola manufactures leather goods, journals and bicycles, all made nearly exclusively from American components, or so they claim.

Now, exactly what brought the owner of the Shinola brand to buy a name from a defunct company that is associated with shoe polish seemed intriguingly out of the shoebox to me.   Shinola has a great website (www.shinola.com), and on it they claim to be “reinvigorating a storied American brand.”

The new Shinola has been criticized because while it is true that its products are assembled in Detroit, a place badly in need of resurrection itself, most of its parts emanate from elsewhere in the U.S., and some come from abroad, including China.  “It’s not like we’re saying everything is 100% made in Detroit,” said company President Jacques Panis.    The fact that the new Shinola isn’t all about Detroit doesn’t bother me all that much; I’m not sure that the economic interdependence of nations isn’t a bad thing.

I don’t know whose decision it was to buy the rights to the Shinola brand name, but to me that is the intriguing part of the story.  Clearly, the idea that someone didn’t know shit from Shinola resulted from the fact that Shinola shoe polish was, in its day, considered the bomb, to use current parlance.  But for me, even the idea that Shinola was supposed to be a sign of quality gets lost by its contiguity with the stuff that all living critters deposit.

I imagine that if I were to buy and wear one of those watches, as Bill Clinton proudly does, I would be compelled to roll up my sleeve and declare, “See, I really do know the difference!”

 

 

Inattentional Blindness, or Hide It in Plain Sight

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imagesI have been known to search for my car keys when they are in my hand, or nervously prance around looking for my glasses when they were perched on top of my head.  Worse than that, I have even looked for my glasses while I was wearing them.  After all, it makes it much easier to find them. If you want to hide something, they say, put it in plain sight.

In the 1990’s, a group of researchers coined the term “inattentional blindness” to refer to the effect of not seeing something due to one’s attention being focused elsewhere.  The research that evolved from this approach was compelling.

It turns out that inattentional blindness is not only common, but it can easily kill you.  I have heard it said, for example, that the last thing many motorcyclists remember seeing before an accident are the eyes of the driver of the car that plowed into them. The driver of the car looks right at the motorcyclist, but because he isn’t expecting to see him, he just doesn’t.

In one study, a group of people were shown a short film showing three people in black T-shirts and three people in white T-shirts dribbling and tossing basketballs among them.  The subjects were asked to count how many times the players in white shirts caught a ball.  In the middle of the film, a woman in a black gorilla suit walks onto the floor, stops, turns, and waves at the camera.  She then slowly turns and walks off camera.  When the subjects were asked if they had seen anything unusual, fully half of them didn’t report seeing the gorilla at all.  Even when they tried the exercise a second time, a large percentage of the subjects didn’t see the gorilla.

This sort of thing has been replicated many ways and with many groups, including pilots.  In the late 1990s, NASA conducted an experiment to see if commercial pilots would notice distractions while making landings in a flight simulator.  In the simulation, an object rolled out onto the runway just as the plane was landing.  One-fourth of the highly experienced pilots noticed nothing out of the ordinary and landed on top of the distraction.   Interestingly, untrained pilots who had no preconception of what to expect during a landing, always spotted the distraction.

One way to look at inattentional blindness is that it is just one point along the spectrum of attention and distraction.   In order to function, humans must constantly filter extraneous information, and in essence, go on autopilot.  Sleep is a kind of inattentional blindness, which is probably why it isn’t such a good idea to fall asleep while driving a car or flying an airplane.

This may all explain how it is that hiding something in plain sight makes it difficult to find.  Perhaps the act of “looking” for something is its own form of distraction; we are engaged in the looking and not the seeing.   Seek and ye shall find may be a truism, but perhaps if ye seek too much ye shall find nothing at all.

Falling Awake

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Unknown-4Some people I know fall asleep as easily as this laptop I am working on (and just as unpredictably).  This is for the rest of us who have trouble finding the rest in us.

I have long suspected that most of my insomnia has been caused by anxiety, a slightly more syllabic way of saying fear.  Fear, in my view and counter to Frank Roosevelt’s, is nothing to be afraid of and can be our best friend, but just like our best friends, sometimes our fears can talk too much and keep us up at night.   I have used and recommended a few sleep-inducing tricks over the years (see last post), but the most effective one of all is good old-fashioned paradox.

True insomniacs will tell you that staying awake can be just as challenging as falling asleep.  That is because, as I mentioned in the last post, insomnia in its truest form is not really a state of being awake; it is a state of not being asleep.  Different thing.

It is the battle between sleep and wakefulness that itself is the problem.  When the objective of the battle is to fall asleep, the insomniac finds herself failing continually.  The failing becomes a source of tension and self-criticism, and it is all very exhausting, but not sleep-inducing.

The failure to fall asleep is often the body’s way of saying that there are too many unresolved problems, too much that is not quite right in the world that cannot be solved safely enough to allow one to sleep.

So, just as Captain Kirk solved the Kobayashi Maru test by not accepting the parameters of the simulation and then reprogramming the computer, one must change the parameters of the sleep game.   Rather than try to fall asleep and repeatedly fail, try instead to stay awake.   If you succeed at doing this, you may be able to work toward resolving whatever it is that may be keeping you awake, or simply stay awake long enough that sheer exhaustion will eventually overcome you.

The key to staying awake is to stop trying to fall asleep.  It is that shift of focus that eases the burden of the conflict and gives sleep a welcome place to reside.   Get out of bed, fold the laundry, read a book, study a foreign language, or engage in whatever activity is leftover on the grand to-do list.   The worst-case scenario is that you will be up all night and tired the next day.   At work, you might have to fight the urge to fall asleep, but that is an urge you will be happy to have when you are home safe.

Sleep may be “nature’s soft nurse,” but while she may be on call she may be attending to other patients and unavailable.  In that case, try canceling the appointment.   At least for the moment, you may not need her, and trust that she will come when she is needed the most.

Dr. Ira’s Insomnia Cure (in 2 parts!)

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Unknown-3I have suffered from insomnia off and on nearly all my adult life, as do a huge number of folks.  If you read what’s going around the internet and other fonts of wisdom on the topic of sleep it could scare you to death, or at least keep you up at night.  Insomnia has been linked to diabetes, weakened immunity, weight gain and heart disease, not to mention accidents in which people fall asleep at the helm of whatever sort of chariot they are driving.   I do like to remind myself though that aside from falling asleep at the wheel, if lack of sleep is going to kill you, it’s going to be a slow death, kind of like life itself.

The first thing a good insomniac should do is get a medical workup.   That turns out to be a productive path in only a very small percentage of cases, but in case you are one of those who suffers from treatable sleep apnea it may be a good idea.

Many books and articles tout the benefits of exercise, timed to occur well before bedtime.   Interval training may be a better way to go than pushing through a single strenuous workout.   This seems to work really well with my dogs, who will sleep through the night if they get a lot of exercise during the day, but frankly it has never helped me much.

Losing weight is almost always a good thing.  That seems to help nearly everything under the sun, and research tells us that people who are thinner also tend to sleep better.   I can tell you, though, I had just as much trouble sleeping when my BMI was 20 than I do now with a BMI of 26.

My first-resort insomnia treatment is making lists.   Transferring annoying things to do from brain to paper tends to ease my mind, allowing me to temporarily put the intrusive thoughts aside and trusting that the paper, if not my mind, will still be there in the morning.  The second thing to do is reading something particularly boring, which, when I am half awake, is practically anything.   The third thing I do is something writers, psychologists and hypnotists call “automatic writing,” which is simply letting your hand write whatever it seems to want to without giving the process any conscious thought.  Sometimes surprising things appear, although I find that most of what I write in this state is indecipherable in the morning.   But when those fail, I go to the surest thing of all, the ultimate, guaranteed insomnia cure: staying awake.

True insomniacs will tell you that staying awake can be just as challenging as falling asleep.  That is because insomnia in its truest form is not really a state of being awake; it is a state of not being asleep.    This, it turns out, warrants its own post.  More on this next week!

 

 

Think Goodness: My iPad Wrote That

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Unknown-2I was taking notes on a future blog post on my iPad, and I was attempting to write the aphorism thqt “flying is hours of boredom filled with moments of terror,”.  Whatever I had typed in as “flying” was auto corrected to “dying,” which, when read back, was perhaps even more apt.

I don’t know how often the autocorrect feature on my ipad gets things right, because I type quickly and I often don’t know what I actually typed until I attempt to read it back.  I suppose if I actually looked at what I was writing it would help things, but that joule require more focus than I actually have.  Okay, so I did it in the last sentence, just as an experiment, and noticed thqt I was auto corrected correctly four out of five times.  Whatever I typed in as “would” was changed to “joule” which is a beautiful word, but “joule require more focus” is a bit too ungrammatical to work even for Wallace Stevens. well, maybe not.  (and for those of you who noticed, i am not going to bother correcting the autocorrect’s inability to figure out that I mean to type “that” instead of “thqt”)

I do like the idea of writing freely and posting exactly what the iPad interprets me as intending to say, just for fun.  The problem is thqt when I do just that I am post traumatically trqnsformed to my days tacking at unnamed graduate schools and grading student papers.  But that is another story.  Oh, and “tacking” was meant to be “teaching,” but in this case I do think that tacking works a bit better.

I cannot help but wonder, as one would think occasionally about how the toaster works when dropping a slice of bread into it, how the autocorrect function works.  Is it simply a built in dictionary with some sort of algorithm that recognizes when a word doesn’t exist and then matches it through some sort of matrix logic to the closest word in the English language?  I don’t think it could be that easy, although perhaps it started out that way.  It seems, somehow, to take context into consideration, or is that just an illusion?  No, not an illusion, as I had typed “must” instead of “just” in the prior sentence and it auto corrected me to “just.”  Obviously, both are words but somehow the programmers at Apple or wherever decided that some words don’t fit into some contexts and so it corrected me.  Like some people I know?

Humans, of course, have their own autocorrect feature, otherwise known as a conscience.  Well, at least most humans do.  In th autism world, it is often referred to as a “theory of mind,” which is essentially the concept that humans are aware that other humans have awareness.  It is wht the information theorists in the old days sometimes referred to as “feedback loops,” It is often posited thqt the single most defining characteristic of autism is the lack of a “theory of mind,” which makes for the idea that those on the spectrum do not know how to autocorrect. (Thankfully, I just read over what I had written five minutes ago and had to correct the autocorrect.  It had interpreted me as saying “shoes on the spectrum.”)

I once heard the story of a very “successfully” treated young man on the spectrum who got a job working at the post office sorting mail, which was a perfect job for him and which he did very well, at least for the two or three days he got to work there.  He was fired when he went up to a female coworker and asked her to have sex with him.  It was a very logical question, but he didn’t know how to autocorrect, and he lost his job as a result.

Perhaps if he had only written out his request on an iPad, and was fortunate enough to type something incorrectly, he might instead have asked his coworker if she wanted to make sticks with him, and he might still have that job today.

At Onement

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images-3Perhaps the most solemn of holidays in Judaism is Yom Kippur, which has been translated roughly as the “day of atonement.”  Over the years rabbis I have known have pointed out that the English word “atonement” can also be read as “at-one-ment,” which is a slightly less than clever way of suggesting that atoning for one’s sins can also be seen as a way of being “at one” with God.

Being at one with another person can be viewed as the height of intimacy (or idiocy), and being at one with an activity can be described with that lovely term from the humanistic psychology movement as a “peak experience.”   The gestaltists described those experiences as transcendent moments of joy and elation– moments that float above and beyond everyday life.  Finding unity with God is perhaps the ultimate religious transcendent experience, at least during one’s corporeal lifetime.

Atoning, i.e., asking for forgiveness, is not automatic for humans; we must learn to forgive, because while erring is human, forgiving is not.  It is, as the saying goes, divine.  But on Yom Kippur, the task is not to forgive others but instead to ask for God’s forgiveness of our own sins.   It is repentance.

Now, the sins we are asking forgiveness for are the ones we have done against both God and humans.   God may choose to forgive us for those sins, but the people who we sinned against may not.   That’s up to them.   God’s forgiveness can only save our lives, but it cannot move others to forgive us.

So how does it work that being forgiven for our sins makes us “at one” with God?  I always assumed the word “sin” shared the same presumably Latin root as the Spanish word “sin,” which means “without,” as in “without God.”   But that is, as are many of my suppositions, completely off the mark.  The word translated to “sin” that is used in the Bible is the Hebrew word for what an archer did when he or she missed the gold at the center of the target (“het”).   Hence, at least one biblical view of sinning was to simply fall short of what you were aiming for, or missing the mark.

I tried archery in college, thinking it would be an easy “A,” but it was embarrassingly difficult.   I never got close to the target, let alone the bulls-eye.   So the metaphor isn’t a bad one.   Hitting the bulls-eye might just be one of those transcendent moments, those moments of being at one with God, like swishing a 3-pointer from 25 feet out.

What atonement does, according to tradition, is wipe the slate clean (assuming, of course, that you have done the necessary penitence.)  It puts more arrows in your quiver so that you can go out, take aim, and continue to miss the mark.   That is what it means to be human.

But that is no small thing.   Running out of arrows, missing the mark too often leaves us shy of arrows, whether from guilt or sheer exhaustion.  And shy of arrows, we are in it deep when the inevitable bull’s eyes of fortune come charging toward us.  I don’t like Bob Dylan, and I don’t like quoting him, but he had it right when he said “you gotta serve somebody.”   Getting right with Whom or Whatever You Serve can be transcendent.

 

The 80/20 Rule

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Unknown-2I thought I understood the 80/20 rule pretty well when I first read about it in a management book I was reading.  The author suggested that 20% of a company’s customers took up 80% of the company’s time.  If you got rid of those demanding customers your time would be spent more effectively.

Since then, I have heard or seen several other definitions of the 80/20 rule.  LinkedIn, for example, phrased it this way:

Did you know that only 20 percent of what you do each day produces 80 percent of your results? Eliminate the things that don’t matter during your workday: they have a minimal effect on your overall productivity. For example, on a project, systematically remove tasks until you end up with the 20 percent that gets the 80 percent of results.

This is kind of a reverse way of getting to a similar place.  The basic idea is that one shouldn’t waste one’s precious time on things that don’t have a proportionate yield.  My own thinking about this is that in a life and death endeavor such as flying, it’s the little things that can kill you, so neglecting them may not be such a good idea.

While nearly all accidents occur as the result of a series of mistakes or bad decisions, some of them occur because of neglecting a single detail.

A flight instructor once told me that 80% or more of accidents could be traced to a poor pre-flight inspection.   I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, but because it only takes one accident to ruin your day and perhaps all future ones, it is clear that one should never cut corners on a pre-flight.

I just read an accident report where a newly minted pilot killed himself and his parents because he simply neglected to retract his flaps on takeoff in an unfamiliar airplane.   When his airplane refused to climb, he turned back and spun into the ground.

In the business world, it is often the small things that differentiate between those who get where they are intending to go and those who don’t.  Cold calls, as an example, are tedious and ridiculously time consuming, but they are a necessary part of nearly every sales job.

Investing in the least likely scenario, that is, spending time on the 20 percent, is important when the stakes are large.  In poker, the odds may be 11 to 1 that your flush is going to come up, but you will stay in the hand if the pot is big enough.

For me, investing in the least likely scenario has paid off often enough that I really can’t imagine getting anywhere if I didn’t.  Given the odds, I certainly wouldn’t have had the nerve to start a conversation with that pretty girl in Innsbruck who eventually became my wife.

So perhaps the 80/20 rule is just like all the other rules of The Game; they work most of the time, but are made to be broken.

It’s a Drag, Man

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images-3Every budding pilot learns the four forces that act on an airplane in flight:  the upward force– lift, the downward force– weight (or gravity), the forward force– thrust, and the backward force– drag.   There are many different types of drag.   One of these is called parasite drag, which occurs partly due to friction on the airplane’s skin, and partly due to interference of other objects, such as ice.   The best way to demonstrate drag is what happens when you put your hand out the car window as you are driving.   If you face the palm forward, you expose more of the surface to the wind and your hand gets pushed back.   Unless you want to fly backwards, drag is, well, a drag.

I have been lucky in my life to not have too many stories to tell about parasite drag, either the kind that interferes with flying an airplane or the kind that interferes with navigating through life.

There was the time, however, when I allowed a woodworker to crash in my workshop for two weeks, as he was between places to stay and needed a temporary shelter.   The two weeks turned into nine months, rent-free.    My patience having run out, I did my best to politely evict him.  Even with my considerable charm I was unable to convince him to leave my workshop, so I eventually invited the police to assist me.  Unfortunately, they were no help at all, informing me that I had to go through a legal eviction process to get him out.   That would have cost me a lot of time and money, so out of sheer frustration I eventually resorted to dubious legal and somewhat primitive methods of evicting him, which ultimately did prove effective.  Although it did not exactly come to blows, one could say, I suppose, that enough thrust was used to overcome the parasite drag.

The lesson learned from this misadventure is the same one that aviation textbooks have been advising for years:  the best way to avoid parasite drag such as icing is not to get yourself into that position to begin with.   At times that is difficult to do, because sometimes you don’t see it coming.

While my life hasn’t exactly been like a box of chocolates, there were many times that my life has been a bit like being alone in the cockpit of an airplane with ice forming on the wings.   If I were to let it build up, the parasite drag could have killed me.    For all of us, in those situations the struggle is to find the “warm air,” the place where troubles melt away.    It may or may not come in the expected place, and it may not come right away, but staying where you are is usually not a good idea.

There used to be two small islands southeast of Ireland that have long since disappeared under the rising ocean.   One of them was called “Hook” and the other was called “Crook.”   Once, when Cromwell was asked how he was going to invade Ireland next time, he allegedly said, “By Hook or Crook.”   The phrase stuck, and now we say it when we are determined to get someplace without necessarily knowing how we’re going to get there.  The important thing is to know when enough is enough, when staying where we are is likely going to kill us, and start searching for warmer air.