Random Linkage

The last fatal crash to occur within the United States was 2.5 years ago — the crash of a Comair Bombardier CRJ-100 near Lexington, KY that killed 47 people. The crash in January of US Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson River resulted in no fatalities.

According to the National Transportation Safety Bureau, which investigates air crashes, U.S. air carriers transported an estimated 770 million passengers in 2007, with a total of 44 fatalities in 62 air carrier accidents. In contrast, more than 44,000 people died in vehicle accidents in the United States in 2007.

While humanity eventually might need sunglasses and seat belts for the rocky cosmic ride, there’s no immediate need for panic. The smashup won’t even begin to occur for another 2 billion years.

But James Lombardi Jr., an associate professor of physics at Allegheny College in Meadville, Crawford County, has worked for years to develop a computer model to explain stellar collisions. That knowledge also has provided him insight into the dynamics of intergalactic collisions.

IBM has filed a patent (US 7484451) for Bionic Body Armor, that could essentially allow us to dodge bullets like Neo in The Matrix. The armor would scan areas for incoming projectiles and when one is detected the system would deliver a shock to the muscles causing a swift reflexive action away from the projectile. Here’s what the patent describes the body armor as:

Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing technology to give battlefield medics a helping hand–literally. Howie Choset, an associate professor of robotics at CMU, has engineered a snakelike robotic arm equipped with various sensors that can monitor a soldier’s condition. The robot can be wirelessly controlled via a joystick, so that a doctor at a remote clinic may move the robot to any point on a soldier’s body to assess his injuries as he’s being carried to a safe location. The robot’s serpentine flexibility allows it to maneuver within tight confines, so that, in case a casualty can’t be extracted from the battlefield immediately, the robot can perform an initial medical assessment in the field.

n a separate analysis, the FDA office that handles painkillers said Darvon is a weak pain reliever. Most studies show that in Darvocet, the widely used combination drug, the Darvon component appears to contribute “little or no” additional pain relief beyond that provided by the acetaminophen component, reviewers said.

Wolfe presented the advisory panel with new data from the government’s Drug Abuse Warning Network, which tracks emergency room visits and deaths. It said that Darvon-related deaths rose to 503 in 2007, from 446 in 2006. In both years, about 20 percent were suicides. The network covers only about one-third of the U.S. population.

Jobs correctly predicted that attempts by the major labels to find a technological solution to piracy would fail. When it came to subscription music services, he said the public would reject them. He foresaw a day when iTunes would sell 1 billion tracks a year–a bold statement, considering that at the time, iTunes had only sold 20 million songs.

The Sakshat is a 10″x5″ plastic box which, despite an official unveiling at India’s Sri Venkateswara University yesterday, still contains only mystery parts. There’s another disappointment, too. The $10 laptop is no longer $10 — the expected price is closer to $30.

Pope said pilots only fired upon UFOs in cases where the objects appeared threatening.

In the case of UFOs, whether the object is causing a threat is very much a pilot’s judgment call. The public won’t know unless it comes down in a heavily populated area, he said.

But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do–perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24–can’t work. “If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so.”

Austin drivers making their morning commute were in for a surprise when two road signs on a busy stretch of road were taken over by hackers. The signs near the intersection of Lamar and Martin Luther King boulevards usually warn drivers about upcoming construction, but Monday morning they warned of “zombies ahead.”

Scientists aren’t content to get just half of the picture, so they’ve launched the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories) mission, a pair of NASA spacecraft that will orbit the sun simultaneously to provide a complete view of all sides of the star at once.

. . .

The perfect spherical view will come on Feb. 6, 2011. Right now the satellites, which were launched in October 2006, are about 90 degrees apart, which allows a picture of about 270 degrees of the sun — the fullest view yet.

During the summer of 1950, on the outskirts of Harrisburg Pennsylvania U.S.A., my sister’s boyfriend “Skip” was sitting on the glider on the front porch of our house. He said to me - “Hey Mike… bring me a sheet of paper.” I answered why? and he responded with his make believe impatience “Just bring it!” I obeyed and he said that he was going to build the best paper airplane in the world. I was eight years old at the time and my meager knowledge of paper airplanes was the traditional flying wedge that spiraled into tight loops and fell head first to the ground.

When he started folding the paper, I knew this was something different, something special. He never explained how he did it but every move, every fold, every detail was burned into my memory. After he finished, we walked the porch handrail and he gently tossed it horizontally towards the street. It glided like no paper airplane I have ever seen before, it was acting like a REAL airplane. It gently curved into the slight breeze and began to rise vertically without moving forward. The craft then began to lower as if it were a helicopter and gently came to rest on the asphalt below.

During McNealy’s reign at Sun, the only consistent aspect of his relationship with open source software was his unwavering inability to formulate an effective strategy for using it. He wore a penguin costume to LinuxWorld and proclaimed a love for Linux, then (only months later) told the press and analysts that open source was only for the basement-dwellers.

What’s particularly disturbing about this incident is that it suggests how easily herd immunity can be compromised for Hib. If it were up to full protective levels, then even the children whose parents were foolish enough not to vaccinate them would have been protected. Take a look at this figure from the MMWR:

When a Yugoslav DC9 exploded in mid air, as a suspected result of a terrorist bombing, Vesna Vulovic plummeted over 33,000 feet to land on a snowy slope.

Former Sen. Tom Daschle, tapped by President Obama to lead his healthcare reform campaign, failed to pay more than $128,000 in taxes in the three years before Obama nominated him in December to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

The disclosure — involving unreported income and the use of a car and driver provided to Daschle — comes 2 1/2 weeks after Obama’s choice to head the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, admitted that he had not paid about $43,000 in taxes.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made clear that the era of defense spending largesse is over. “The spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing. With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department,” Gates said, “we will not be able to do everything, buy everything.” New budget realities will force DOD to “critically and ruthlessly separate appetites from real requirements – those things that are desirable in a perfect world from those things that are truly needed in light of the threats America faces and the missions we are likely to undertake in the years ahead.”

It’s no secret. He sat down every morning, without fail, and wrote. His daily goal was to produce three pages of writing that were up to his standards. He stuck to that goal for decades; through all the ups and downs of daily life, John Updike produced his three pages every day.

And it added up. Over the course of years, those daily three pages added up to a body of work that is truly monumental.

The cutout was pulled from the line recently, Hoagland said, because the firm learned that Obama does not wear glasses. (The original Obama cutout is holding a pair of glasses and isn’t wearing a wedding ring.) As Hoagland tells it, a retailer contacted Advanced a couple of weeks ago to report he had heard from a customer who said the real Obama signed his cutout and remarked that he knew the hands weren’t “his” because he wouldn’t be holding glasses.