The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and it is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
But it’s OK, because all that really happened is a few dozen people died in the explosion and fire, several thousand children had their thyroids cut out, and farmers across much of eastern Europe got an extended vacation.
Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from …) led her to look further, and to ask: Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs? At the INK Conference, she talks through her new research, discovering healing cells in some surprising places.
From 2000 through 2007, inclusively, approximately 780 thousand people in the United States took a bullet. Most of them were wounded by another person in an act of violence. A fairly large number were wounded by accident, killed by a bad guy, or killed themselves. A small number died in a shooting accident, tried to kill themselves but messed up, or were wounded or shot by a cop. Here’s the data culled form the CDC databases on injuries and deaths in the US, in crude rate per 100,000:
First observation: Far more men are killed in this manner than women. Boys with their toys. Presumably, women are being killed by something else. Second observation: There may be a trend towards decreasing rates of death by accident involving firearms. This could be a simple increase in the effectiveness of medial intervention, or perhaps it is something else.
Since this came up I thought you might like to see the data.
NOTES: It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatal to non fatal over long time spans (before/during/after transition to high quality trauma treatment in the US); I would like to see good data breaking down suicide by age that tracks along with the CDC surveys; Most importantly would be information of similar quality and sources indicating attempted suicide and successful suicide with means other than guns. From the numbers we do have, we can say that there is a bias towards minors in the suicide category, and non-gun attempts are successful less than half the time but gun-attempts are successful a large percentage of the time (which you can see on this table); What is key the current discussion is the nearly 24,000 people shot in this sample year by a gun by accident; The phrase “shot by cop” is probably an oversimplification.
By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand — not approve of, but understand — the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?
Archaeologist Lew Binford has died at the age of 79 at his home in Kirksville, Mo. He died of a a heart attack.
I knew Lew a little, having spent some time with him while I was in graduate school, and having met him at the occassional conference (he was famous for NOT going to conferences very often by the time the 1980s rolled around).
Lew was a dick, a very smart guy, and probably had as much influence on archaeology as any other individual. Those who have taken classes from me know that I’ve got a few stories to tell about him. But not now.
RIP Lew Binford. May your bones be dug up some day by someone with a strong grounding in Middle Range Theory.
iPhones know where they are, so they probably know where you are, and these data have been captured and maintained by the Apple devices and have been used by police in geoForensic investigations. Crushing civil liberties? There’s an app for that!
Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I’m not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell’s book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”.
Ironically, or perhaps expectedly, there is little in the computer world more Orwellian than a widely used and much loved hand held device being distributed widely and lovingly, which secretly keeps track of your location, and secretly storing those data where they could later become available to The State. I wonder what else they are keeping track of? I wonder if we know where all the copies of these data are stored?
The Linux-based Android system also collects these data but does not send it to Big Brother unless you tell it to.
Following is a summary of recent posts and news reports on this and closely related topics to give you an idea of the nature and magnitude of this problem. Continue reading iKnowwhatyoudidlastsummer→
I’m not sure what I think of Gnome 3’s Shell Interface. Imma try it out but I think they may have fallen into the trap of making the desktop the point rather than, well, emacs and a web browser the point (the only two pieces of software I use every day and both days). Either way, Fedora 15 looks interesting, and it does use Gnome 3 Shell.
Linux in Exile has a review. The LIE author is really into Fedora, and seems to know a lot about it, so this is rather useful. Here.
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA is releasing the first images and sounds of an electrical connection between Saturn and one of its moons, Enceladus. The data collected by the agency’s Cassini spacecraft enable scientists to improve their understanding of the complex web of interaction between the planet and its numerous moons. The results of the data analysis are published in the journals Nature
Scientists previously theorized an electrical circuit should exist at Saturn. After analyzing data that Cassini collected in 2008, scientists saw a glowing patch of ultraviolet light emissions near Saturn’s north pole that marked the presence of a circuit, even though the moon is 240,000 kilometers (150,000 miles) away from the planet.
The patch occurs at the end of a magnetic field line connecting Saturn and its moon Enceladus. The area, known as an auroral footprint, is the spot where energetic electrons dive into the planet’s atmosphere, following magnetic field lines that arc between the planet’s north and south polar regions.
“The footprint discovery at Saturn is one of the most important fields and particle revelations from Cassini and ultimately may help us understand Saturn’s strange magnetic field,” said Marcia Burton, a Cassini fields and particles scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It gives us the first visual connection between Saturn and one of its moons.”
In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Josh presents the “Three Pillars of Creationism”, the beliefs and claims of creationists. He describes their rhetoric and propaganda, and the setbacks they cause for science, from legal cases to creationist theme parks.
Tennessee’s Senate Bill 893 — nicknamed, along with its counterpart House Bill 368, the “monkey bill” — is on hold, “almost certainly postponing any action until next year,” according to the Knoxville News Sentinel’s Humphrey on the Hill blog (April 21, 2011). Its sponsor, Bo Watson (R-District 11), assigned the bill to the general subcommittee of the Senate Education Committee on April 20, 2011, which was the last scheduled meeting of the committee; he told the blog, “Practically speaking, I probably am not going to be able to run the bill this year,” although it is still possible that the committee might have a further meeting.
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