Someone on Quora asks the question “what do all the controls in an airplane cockpit do?” A pilot named Tim Morgan then provides a 9,000 word answer, using the Boeing 737 as his guide. Tim’s reply gets it’s own writeup in the Atlantic. Being somewhat familiar with aviation of the military speciality, here is a list of things missing from Morgan’s tour-de-force:

• A switch to arm the gun
• A trigger to fire aforementioned gun
• Similar arm and fire switches to drop other weapons
• More arm and fire switches for chaff and flares
• Switches to manage the radar warning receiver and jammer
• Knobs to operate the air refueling system
• An emergency switch to jettison all stores
• Switch to operate the Heads Up Display (HUD) camera
• Come to think of it, switches to operate the HUD
• Switches to operate the secure radios so that in case the bad guys are listening, they don’t hear us talk about how we are about to blow them up
• Various knobs and switches that control the system that alerts the pilot he is about to hit the ground. Actually, I hope airliners have these too.
• And last, and most hopefully least…ejection handles.

I’m 100% sure that airline pilots don’t have ejection seats. If they did, trust me when I say that you don’t want to fly on that airline.

Browsing through my Longform iPad app, I came across this snarkfest between the Harpers and Atlantic. Some interesting points…I’m pretty much on the Atlantic’s side of this (silly) argument—whether online content is good or bad—but what I found slightly more interesting is when I clicked to the Atlantic page to read the byline and noticed that the author, one Alexis Madrigal, wrote a book called “Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.”

Yeah…how is that “dream” and “promise” working out so far? Oh, wait, I think another green tech firm just went bankrupt.