In an attempt to cut as much weight as possible from their aircraft, Jazz Airlines, a subsidiary of Air Canada, recently decided to pull all life vests from their aircraft. Now, in the unlikely event of a water landing, passengers will be advised to use their floating seat cushions for buoyancy.

Will this affect the safety of the passengers? Well, purely from the flotation standpoint, life vests have an advantage in that they don't need to be held onto, which can be tough to do when you're in ice-cold Canadian water. They also help the passenger's body face upward, out of the water versus the opposite position that holding a seat cushion would require (an article on TheStar has better diagrams). But government regulators don't require one or the other.

How much do these life vests weigh? About a half kilogram. For the seventy five people that might be on this Jazz aircraft, that's a total of thirty-eight kilograms or about eighty three pounds per flight.

It seems to me that there's enough swing in the passenger and luggage loads such that the weight shouldn't make much of a difference. Suppose a men's rugby club books a dozen tickets instead of a middle school girl's gymnastics team. Each one of those guys could weigh three times as much as the girl. What do you do about that?
Sure, many domestic airlines no longer have life vests, but for the eighty pounds of weight saved, is it really worth the drama and customer disgust?

I've been waiting for an excuse to slip a Colbert Report video clip here, and this is my chance. Stephen Colbert has had a running joke about how horribly backwards the various cities/villages/"incorporated outhouses" of Canton are in the states.

He first started by taking a jab at Canton, Ohio, which caused a media brouhaha. While "apologizing," he happened to insult Canton, Georgia, and then the ones in Kansas, Texas, South Dakota, etc.

Here's a clip from last night's show.

Just like the Oscars have "seat-fillers" to hide the empty seats when people go to the bathroom, the Chinese are busing in state-trained "cheer squads" to fill the surprising numbers of empty seats at the Olympics.

Dressed in identical bright yellow t-shirts, the cheer squads are meant to improve the Olympic atmosphere and avoid embarrassing television shots of all the no-shows at the Games. As the Washington Post notes, "The U.S. softball team played in a stadium only about 30 percent full on Tuesday, while the day before, 10 of 18 venues did not reach 80 percent capacity."

Officials blame the poor crowds on everything from the weather to strict visa regulations to spectators not wanting to watch the less exciting sports.

Beijing hotel owners, who were expected to be some of the biggest beneficiaries of the 2008 Olympics, have been underwhelmed by the amount of business the Games have brought. From the Washington Post: "'Business is worse than at this time last year,' said a receptionist at a 22-room hotel in Beijing's Chongwen district, where rooms cost $28 a night. 'It's the season for traveling and last year the hotel was full. The Olympics should have brought business to Beijing, but the reality is too far from the expectation.'"

Frequent travelers on any metropolitan subway system know that the two major means for fare tracking and billing are via magnetic strip and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And every nerd and his RPG character know that those systems can be both readable and exploitable.

To see how secure the Boston subway system was, several MIT students decided to run an analysis on the security of the infrastructure; what they found was a little disturbing. By simply wandering into unlocked doors, opening unlocked cabinets and peering around they were able to find keys to the system, get access to network hardware and find and copy employee identification.

On looking into the security of the magnetic and RFID systems, they were able to reverse engineer the code on the magnetic stripes and reconfigure the data to post $653 to a subway card. Similarly, the group analyzed the RFID contents and were able to disassemble the code.

The students point out that numerous transportation systems around the globe use these systems and technology.

Naturally, all of this quite illegal -- the students were just illustrating a point to the MBTA that there are security vulnerabilities in the system that can fairly easily be exploited. Hopefully, they and the company that makes subway infrastructures perks up and makes some serious security changes as a result of this reserach.

Check out the full 87 page presentation on the execution hosted at MIT.

Murphy, a 8 lb gnome, returned to the doorsteps of an old Gloucester couple with a bag of photos and immigration stamps hailing from Mozambique, New Zealand, Singapore, Laos, Australia, and some dozen other countries. In an attached note, he wrote:

Hello! First of all I feel I should explain my prolonged absence. A gnome's life is full of time for reflection, and whilst surveying your garden one summer morning, I began to get itchy feet.

I came to the conclusion that the world is a big place and there is more to life than watching the daily commuter traffic, and allowing passing cats to urinate on you. So I decided to free myself from the doldrums of the Shire and seek adventure. My travels have taken me across three continents, 12 countries and more time zones than I can possibly remember.

There have been high points, low points, and positively terrifying points. But I have survived - small thanks to the companion with whom I have shared all these moments.

Now the caper has been solved. Read more about the 22-year-old law grad who took Murphy on a worldwide tour.

You have to give the Chinese credit for trying to clean up Beijing during the 2008 Olympics. Their methods, while borderline authoritarian, have resulted in a significantly cleaner and friendlier looking China -- the perfect reflection of a global economic superpower that should be hosting the games.

Several weeks before the games, officials attempted to curtail pollution by shutting down or constraining many of the factories in the region. While air quality has still been poor -- one out of three cyclists in a recent race had to drop out because of the conditions -- rain and cooler temperatures are now helping the conditions improve.

Other measures taken have had broader, more ominous impact among the resident population. At the same time that factory pollution cuts were mandated, residential vehicle traffic was also halved to cut down on emissions. Commuters were forced to take other transportation to work and trains and buses hemorrhaged with passengers as millions of Chinese jockeyed through Beijing trying to get to work.

In another district of the capital, developers decided that a particular neighborhood reflected poorly on the image of the country. Their solution? Build a wall around it. Despite the fact that multiple businesses and storefronts faced the street, an eight foot wall was erected around the region, blocking out the questionable content and creating a cleaner, more "tourist friendly" look.

Take a look at this brief video put together by the Boston Globe. Would you be happy with a wall like this in front of your storefront? .

#3. So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places--Elinor Burkett

When I chose this book as one of my road trip to Montana books, the title caught my attention. As an American woman, also hooked on travel, I wanted to delve into someone else's experiences. What I found is a book that taught me much--always a delight when on the road.

Excerpt:

But as I trudged to school each day and ambled through the markets, I couldn't find the face of hatred. I saw worry that a flood of Afghan refugees might flee north, washing extremists across the border. I heard fear that homegrown fundamentalists might be emboldened by the fires lighting Manhattan's night. Mostly, I sensed the same resignation that had engulfed everyone I knew, all across the plane, that we were captives to forces we had not yet begun to dissect.

If you've passed through airport security at more than a few airports in the past year, you've probably noticed Clear security lanes. The Cliff Notes version of their service is that they take a retina scan, store some info and let you get through screening faster -- for a fee, of course.

I have to admit, I don't know anyone that uses it. Most business travelers I know fly either in First Class (so don't have to go through the long security line) or plan well enough in advance to anticipate long security lines (so don't worry about it). And I think that some people are concerned about giving biometric and personal data to a third party to store in a database -- you know, that whole privacy thing.

But surely a security company would keep tight control over and even encrypt that private data, right? Not necessarily. According to cbs5tv, a Clear laptop at San Francisco International airport was boosted the other day, along with the personal data of over 30,000 members in the system. New applications are on hold while the company that operates the checkpoint, Verified Identity Pass Inc., tracks down the notebook.

I'm glad I didn't apply for a Clear Pass last year.

Our good friend over at Airfare Watchdog, George Hobica, rolled up his sleeves this past week and dug deep into the muck of rule 240, the near-mythical term dictating how an airline needs to treat you in the case of a cancellation or misconnection. It's kind of a tricky rule to wrap your head around, so I'll let George explain it for you here:

"Rule 240 originally stated that in the event of a cancellation or flight misconnection, the airline would have to put you on their next flight out, or, if that wasn't "acceptable," on the next flight out of a competing airline if that flight would get you to your destination sooner, all at no additional cost to you. If only first class was available on the other airline, then they had to upgrade you. This only applied in circumstances under the airlines' control, such as crew failing to show up, or mechanical problems."

Back in the day each airline had one of these rule 240's, but since deregulation in the industry many have stricken this rule from their operations. Each carrier, however, now has some derivative, which is where Airfarewatchdog came in and compared the differences.

It's a handy guide if you ever get marooned by the airlines on the road and need to leverage a trip back. But a word of warning from a frequent traveler if you want to invoke rule 240 or some manifestation thereof: make sure you do your homework, know your airline, its rules and how they can apply them – you need to stay on the offensive if you're going to get what the carriers have promised you.

Grab a scotch, take a deep breath and start reading the rules per airline over at Airfarewatchdog.com here.