The National Transportation Safety Board office is not like my office.

Instead of hanging prints of famous art in cheap poster frames on the walls, they hang posters of airplane crashes, train wrecks, and highway accidents in cheap poster frames.

They have a metallurgy lab with an electron microscope. In this lab, they can determine whether a light bulb was on or off at the time of a crash. (The filament breaks differently.)

They have a Flight Data Recorder room where they keep the so-called "black boxes" from airplanes. The boxes are actually hazard orange. They used to record data on foil; now it's solid state. No, I don't know what that means either.

They have a Voice Data Recorder room, off-limits to visitors and even to the nice woman who gave us the tour. When we asked if they used any voice recognition software for analysis, she sheepishly responded that it was pretty low-tech: They all listen to the tape over and over until they agree on what was said. She shouldn't have been embarrassed; humans are probably the best voice data analyzers. They listen not just to the words said, but for hints of fatigue or hypoxia in pilots' voices. They sometimes analyze the tapes for other aural data, like sonic booms.

They have a Flight Simulator room, where they put all these data together and try to create a simulation that matches all the data.