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Occupational Health News Roundup

Before BP's name was linked in everyone's mind to the Gulf oil disaster, the company was infamous for its unsafe Texas City refinery, where a March 2005 explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170. In September 2005, OSHA cited BP for $21 million, and BP paid the fine and entered into an agreement with OSHA under which the company would identify and correct safety problems. But when OSHA conducted a follow-up investigation in 2009, it found that the company "failed to live up to several extremely important terms of that agreement." OSHA issued failure-to-abate citations to the tune of $50.6…

Hard Choices Made Harder by the Healthcare System

If you haven't already, go read Katy Butler's powerful New York Times Magazine piece about her aging father's years of decline and the hard decisions she and her mother had to make about his care. Butler's father suffered a stroke at age 79, and she writes of its effect: His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member. ... Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad…

News from Sunstein's OIRA on worker and environmental health regs

When President Obama nominated Prof. Cass Sunstein to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) many of us in the public health community were worried. He was, afterall, an academic who authored a paper entitled, "Is OSHA unconstitutional?" and another "Is the Clean Air Act unconstitutional?" Our colleagues at the Center for Progressive Reform have tried their best to keep an eye on happenings at OIRA under this regulatory czar's leadership. This includes excellent analysis by CPR's James Goodwin on OIRA's meddling in EPA's policy on coal ash waste. Here are two new…

Occupational Health News Roundup

In 1999, two machinists who worked next to each other at a Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant in North Haven, Connecticut were diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare and fatal brain cancer. Their wives started compliling information about other employees at the same company who'd received similar diagnoses, and focused attention on the workers' illneses until Pratt & Whitney agreed to hire University of Pittsburgh biostatistician Gary Marsh to conduct a study. Carole Bass reports for the New Haven Independent on the findings, the second phase of which have just been released: Marsh and…

House Passes Combustible Dust Bill

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 247-165 to approve the Worker Protection Against Combustible Dust Explosion and Fires Act (H.R. 5522), which requires OSHA to issue an interim final combustible dust standard within 90 days and a final standard within 18 months. This legislation wouldnât be necessary if OSHA were doing its job. Combustible dust is a serious workplace hazard; according to the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), 281 combustible dust incidents between 1980 and 2005 killed 119 workers and injured 718. In fact, the CSB recommended in 2006 that OSHA…

Swine flu: jumping the wrong way in New York?

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure Five more schools in the New York City borough of Queens have closed because of suspected swine flu cases. Eleven schools have now been closed there and hundreds of students are down with a flu-like illness. Parents are understandably concerned, the more so because not many days ago Mayor Bloomberg and the city's health commissioner (just named by Obama as the next director of CDC) were reassuring city residents this was pretty much lie seasonal flu. We thought that was something that might come back to bite them, and now it has: The cityâs schools…

To Be or Not to Be: Reimagining the EPA

By Kas What happens when Founding Fathers question the existence of the system they helped to create?  No, not those Founding Fathers.  Here weâre referring to William D. Ruckelshaus and J. Clarence âTerryâ Davies, two of our environmental policy champions and USEPA bricklayers.  In the April 2009 publication Oversight of Next Generation Nanotechnology from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, Ruckelshaus provides a preface to Daviesâ report that only hints at the innovative facelift soon fleshed out in approximately 30 pages of text.…

This year's flu season

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure This year's flu season isn't over, but it's almost over, and it was fairly typical and much better than last year, which was nasty. It began at the end of September but didn't take off until early January, peaking in mid Februrary. New cases are still appearing but much less frequently and they are mainly influenza B, which tends to be milder than influenza A. Most of flu/A this year was also of the milder H1N1 sort, which probably contributed to the better outcomes. Here's where we are (source for all charts here): Comparing this year with…

Las Vegas Sun Honored for Construction Deaths Reporting

Weâve written before about Alexandra Berzonâs fantastic Las Vegas Sun articles on construction-site dangers, so we were delighted to learn that the paper has won the 2009 Roy W. Howard public service reporting award from the Scripps Howard Foundation for its coverage of Las Vegas construction deaths. In all, Berzon wrote 53 stories and the Sun carried 21 editorials related to construction safety. The Sun began its reporting in response to a horrific death toll among construction workers: nine had died on Las Vegas Strip construction site during a 16-month period. The coverage explored how the…

Obama on the Train

Tomorrowâs Inauguration events are the main attraction this week, but thousands of people also turned out along train tracks over the past several days to cheer President-Elect Obama as he made his way from Chicago to Washington in a historic rail car. The journey was noteworthy not only because it symbolically repeated the trip Lincoln made on his way to assume the presidency, but because it suggests that our soon-to-be president appreciates public transportation. (And Vice President-Elect Joe Biden is assumed to be even more pro-train, having ridden Amtrak between DC and his home in…

Public health: how to join the conversation

by revere cross-posted at Effect Measure The Holiday Season is upon us so we won't post daily on the Public Health Conversation series. But you can join in at any time, in two ways.  Effect Measure and The Pump Handle, the two blog sites hosting the discussion, have comment threads for each post.  You can make a comment at any time on any post.  If you want to see all the posts on this topic, just click the Progressive public health category on the left sidebar on Effect Measure.  We will put an appropriate tag on The Pump Handle posts as well.  If you have produced a more polished piece…

MSHA seeks criminal probe in Crandall Canyon disaster

The Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) confirmed yesterday that it has referred evidence related to the Crandall Canyon disaster to a federal district attorney for a possible criminal investigation.  Murray Energy was assessed a $1.34 million civil penalty on July 24 for violations related to the massive ground failure which took the lives of nine men, but the Mine Act of 1977 also provides for criminal penalties which include up to one year in jail.  (In contrast, the OSH Act's criminal provisions only allows up to 6 months in jail.)  The referral was…

Occupational Health News Roundup

An gas explosion in a coal mine in Chinaâs Shanxi province has killed 105 miners. Xinhua reports on factors that contributed to the tragedy: [Li Yizhong, head of the State Administration of Work Safety] said the number nine coal bed, where the accident occurred, was not approved for mining. However, it had been mined since February 2006. Owners of the mine faked the documents and temporarily blocked the coal bed to deliberately elude inspection. At the time of the accident, ten mining teams were working at the site, with 54 motor vehicles that did not meet safety requirements. The gas level…

Conspiracy Theorists are Just Like the Westboro Baptists

And Alex Jones and Mike Adams are their Fred Phelps. It's a wonder that Anonymous doesn't retaliate against these ghouls as well as against Westboro who are planning to picket the Boston Marathon funerals. Why are the the same thing? Because they're all ghouls, and they all use any tragic event to bolster their warped, abhorrent world view no matter what the facts are, and no matter how offensive to the victims. Within minutes, with no one knowing any facts, Jones claims this is a false flag attack. The only appropriate response to an event like this, within the first minutes and hours,…

Good News, Max snubs PETA, will give to a local shelter

Maybe my email worked? I got a one sentence reply from Max last night saying he agreed, and today Tucker Max says hellz no to PETA and instead wants to give to a local shelter: I do not agree AT ALL with the mission of PETA. ... If we're talking about what an awful organization PETA is, that's really just the beginning. They're so ridiculous, they compared the holocaust to killing chickens. Not only that, but they have a history of shitting on celebrities they've worked with in the past. And perhaps worst of all, they are the ones that think violence against women is OK. Their stated…

What is health care like in the UK, Canada and New Zealand?

Three systems widely cited as examples of universal health care are the so-called single-payer systems in the UK, Canada and New Zealand. These systems I would describe as "socialized", and rely for the most part on taxation for funding. The system in Canada for instance, uses taxes to pay for health care administered by the individual provinces, and provided by a mixture of private and public hospitals and health care providers. Private health care is restricted in Canada, but is available in some provinces under publicly-funded private organizations called P3s. Private health…

Have you written your letter to Oprah yet?

If you have been keeping up with Pal or Orac in my absence, you already know the bad news. Oprah has decided to up her woo quotient from promotion of the Secret and relatively harmless nonsense to actively promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories in the form of a Jenny McCarthy TV show. Gawker suggests a good title, "Finding Someone to Blame When Bad Things Happen". Jenny McCarthy is an insipid, dangerous idiot. And a Wacko. Oprah's move isn't just some harmless addition to the drivel that occupies our screens known as "daytime TV". This is actively dangerous. This is, as Pal says,…

Why be in such a hurry (to kill someone)?

Once again, I find myself straying into a political issue (although I'd argue that it's more a human rights issue). I understand that I'm probably in the minority in this country in my opposition to the death penalty. My fellow Americans generally vote to allow it, and my vote only counts once. One area where my opinion my carry a bit more weight (or maybe not) is in the area of medical ethics. Given that the death penalty is legal in the U.S., what role should doctors play? Troy Anthony Davis is a guy that Georgia wants dead so badly that they can't be bothered to wait for the U.S.…

Domestic violence is bad for your health

A new study this month in The Lancet examined the health impact of domestic violence (of women by men). This was a very large WHO-funded study looking at multiple physical and mental health problems in abused vs. non-abused women. This is necessarily an observational study, but appears to be well done, and included a large and diverse sample of women. A few findings are worth a specific mention. First, intimate partner violence is very common across cultures, with numbers ranging from 15-71% of women who had ever been partnered with a man. Next, mental health problems, which were self-…

Whoopie!

Last night I was reading a book to my daughter at bedtime. It was all about a kid who had chickenpox. I looked at my wife and said, "this is a bit outdated." "So what, it's cute," she accurately replied. Wow. I hadn't thought about it much lately, but chickenpox in the U.S. is disappearing rapidly. "Pox parties" are gone. Kids aren't missing weeks of school. Pediatric ICUs aren't seeing much varicella pneumonia. Now that I think about it, a number of important lessons I learned in medical school are becoming historical oddities. On my pediatric rotation, we learned to watch for the…

Flu roundup

This was a really crappy season. The system for developing flu viruses is the best we've got, but it's imperfect. This year, we had significant mismatch between the vaccine and the circulating strains. According to the CDC, this season peaked in mid-February, and was "moderately severe"---and the worst season in four years. Improving our system of flu prevention will take lots of work, including epidemiology, basic science, and front-line medicine. A lousy flu season not only causes suffering and death, but also fuels denialits, who sit at their keyboards drooling at the prospect of…

Merry X-Mas

I had an interesting X-mas week, hanging out with the parents, seeing patients at my mom's general practice and a very different set of patients in clinical studies at the NIH with my father. That, studying, and fulfilling the role of the good son by fixing every piece of technology in the parents' house has been keeping me busy. And then there was the fun of helping deliver my mom's portuguese water dogs. This further reinforced my feeling that the human reproduction could be improved after watching this dog deliver puppy after puppy about twenty minutes apart with, on average, about 5…

Ebola: Back in the DRC

August, 1976. A new infection was causing panic in Zaire. Hospitals became death zones, as both patients and medical staff succumbed to the disease. Reports of nightmarish symptoms trickled in to scientists in Europe and the US, who sent investigators to determine the cause and stem the epidemic. Concurrently, they would find out, the same thing was happening hundreds of miles to the north in Sudan. In all, 284 would be infected in that country, and another 358 in Zaire--over 600 cases (and almost 500 deaths) due to a mysterious new disease in just a few months' time. The new agent was Ebola…

The war on women's health continues

PZ and others have already blogged about this, but since it deals with public health in a big way, I thought I'd give it a mention here as well. Seems Bush has made yet another highly questionable appointment in the Department of Health and Human Services. Shocking, I know. The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women." More after the jump... Eric Keroack, medical director for A…

Darwin and medicine, redux

The summer 2006 edition of Stanford Medical Magazine has devoted their issue to "The evolutionary war." Being the alumni magazine of a medical school, of course they have an article on "Darwin in medical school." It's a nice overview, discussing a bit of the history of "Darwinian medicine" and the pros and cons of teaching it in an already over-scheduled medical school curriculum. More after the jump... Randolph Nesse, who I mentioned in this post and is considered one of the fathers fo "Darwinian medicine," argues for the inclusion of evolutionary medicine in med school curricula: ...…

Donohue rants some more

Bill Donohue, the vitriolic cranky grandpa of the Catholic League, has a guest column in the Washington Post. It's not very interesting — it's more of Donohue's tedious yapping about communists, godless libertines (that is, those wicked gays), and how the ACLU is out to smash Judeo-Christian culture — but it ends on a strange note I hear a lot lately. The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it…

Defining Math using ZFC Set Theory

One of the things that we always say is that we can recreate all of mathematics using set theory as a basis. What does that mean? Basically, it means that given some other branch of math, which works with some class of objects O using some set of axioms A, we can define a set-based construction of the objects of S(O), and them prove the axioms A about S(O) using the axioms of ZFC. Let's take a look at what that means, by showing how all of the proofs of number theory using natural numbers can be wrapped up in set theory. First, we need to define the class of objects that we're going to talk…

Innumerate School Administrators

Have you ever wondered about the real reason why math education in our schools is so awful? Why despite the best efforts of large numbers of parents, the schools seem to be incapable of figuring out why they're so dreadfully bad at recognizing the difference between a halfway decent math curriculum and a trendy piece of garbage? Read below the fold for a perfect example of why. The short version: the people who are involved in running education in America consider it perfectly acceptable to be idiots when it comes to math. My kids go to school in the Arsdley school district in Westchester…

Normal Forms and Infinite Surreals

When I left off yesterday, we'd reached the point of being able to write normal forms of surreal numbers there the normal form consisted of a finite number of terms. But typically of surreal numbers. that's not good enough: the surreals constantly produce infinites of all sorts, and normal forms are no different: there are plenty of surreal numbers where we don't see a clean termination with a zero term. For me, this is where the surreal numbers really earn there name. There is something distinctly surreal about a number system that not has a concrete concept of infinity, but allows you to…

The Truth Behind the 'Cala Boca Galvão' Campaign

tags: Cala Boca Galvão, hoax, fraud, prank, humor, funny, satire, meme, World Cup football 2010, Brasil, Rede Globo, Galvão Bueno, Carlos Eduardo dos Santos Galvão Bueno, streaming video Anatomy of an elaborate hoax: If you know anything about birds, then you knew immediately that none of the parrots portrayed in these videos are known as the "Galvão", nor are (most of them) endangered, nor are their feathers used in any sort of Brazilian celebration. If you do have even a rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese, then you know that Cala Boca Galvão actually means "shut your mouth, Galvão…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Gene Expression In Alligators Suggests Birds Have 'Thumbs': The latest breakthrough in a 120 year-old debate on the evolution of the bird wing was published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, October 3, by Alexander Vargas and colleagues at Yale University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Galloping And Breathing At High Speed: The coordination of two systems are key for any horse to walk, trot, gallop or win a race. The first are the lower limbs, which allow the animal to move along on a "spring-like" tendon. The second is a complicated…

This is your honeybee. And this is your honeybee on drugs.

A well-written press release on a very well done and exciting study: Honey bees on cocaine dance more, changing ideas about the insect brain: In a study published in 2007, Robinson and his colleagues reported that treatment with octopamine caused foraging honey bees to dance more often. This indicated that octopamine played a role in honey bee dance behavior. It also suggested a framework for understanding the evolution of altruistic behavior, Robinson said. "The idea behind that study was that maybe this mechanism that structures selfish behavior - eating - was co-opted during social…

Dangerous idiot with bogus medical advice

I have just read the most awesomely insane but calmly stated collection of dangerous medical advice ever. Andreas Moritz claims cancer is not a disease — it's a healthy response to stress. Guess what causes cancer? Guilt, low self-esteem, and insufficient spirituality. Cancer has always been an extremely rare illness, except in industrialized nations during the past 40-50 years. Human genes have not significantly changed for thousands of years. Why would they change so drastically now, and suddenly decide to kill scores of people? The answer to this question is amazingly simple: Damaged or…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Seeing A Brain As It Learns To See: A brain isn't born fully organized. It builds its abilities through experience, making physical connections between neurons and organizing circuits to store and retrieve information in milliseconds for years afterwards. Looming Ecological Credit Crunch?: The world is heading for an ecological credit crunch as human demands on the world's natural capital reach nearly a third more than earth can sustain. Extreme Weather Postpones Flowering Time Of Plants: Extreme weather events have a greater effect on flora than previously presumed. A one-month drought…

Crackpottery

Just an hour or so ago I was in the car, listening to This American Life on NPR, when this story (Act Three) came up on the air: Bob Berenz had a good job as an electrician. But he wanted to do something bigger. He came up with an idea for an invention. But as he studied physics texts to see if his invention could work, he happened upon the biggest idea of his life: a revelation about physics that would disprove Einstein, and Newton. That is, if Bob's right. It is a great story to listen to, and quite revealing about the psychology and the emotional motivations for crackpottery. Ah, what a…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Birds Migrate Earlier, But Some May Be Left Behind As The Climate Warms Rapidly: Many birds are arriving earlier each spring as temperatures warm along the East Coast of the United States. However, the farther those birds journey, the less likely they are to keep pace with the rapidly changing climate. Scientists at Boston University and the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences analyzed changes in the timing of spring migrations of 32 species of birds along the coast of eastern Massachusetts since 1970. Researchers at Manomet gathered this data by capturing birds in mist nets, attaching…

New and Exciting on PLoS-ONE

A whole bunch of papers got published on PLoS-ONE yesterday. I did not have time to check them out very closely yet, but a few titles immediatelly caught my attention: High Costs of Female Choice in a Lekking Lizard by Maren N. Vitousek, Mark A. Mitchell, Anthony J. Woakes, Michael D. Niemack and Martin Wikelski The cost to males of producing elaborate mating displays is well established, but the energy females spend on mate choice is less clear. This study monitored the heart rates of female Galápagos marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) and found they expended almost a days' worth of…

Survivor: Pharyngula! Day Three.

Well, gang, the voting is closed on our first Survivor event. I would never have expected such a dramatic turn-around. From out of nowhere, John Kwok surged out of fifth place in the field — I had written him off as a bad bet — to rally astonishingly by doing one simple thing: commenting. He clobbered Pete Rooke and Simon, even, just by writing one threat (to sic his facebook friends on me), and doing his usual irritating name-dropping nonsense. He showed real heart in this race, and I'm sure that if he just continues to babble, he will eventually win his place in the fabulous Pharyngula…

New on....

Far too busy today, so just news in brief.... New on science blogging: You can now subscribe to the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap: Bonus: people who sign up now will be automatically entered in the ScienceBlogs 500,000 Comment contest, for a chance to win a trip to the greatest science city. Our friends on The Intersection are looking for a new banner. There are prizes to be awarded! Can they possibly get a banner prettier than mine? Give it a try! Another blogging contest! Win real money for student blogging. Nominate your favourites today. Let's have some science bloggers up in the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Circadian Disorders And Adjusting To The Night Shift: Guide For Professionals: Practice parameters are a guide to the appropriate assessment and treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders (CRSDs). The standards will have a positive impact on professional behavior, patient outcomes and possibly health care costs. Sleep-related Breathing Disorder Linked To Increased Heart Rate Variability: A sleep-related breathing disorder, common in heart failure, increases one's heart rate variability. Further, central sleep apnea (CSA) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) produce different patterns of heart…

My Picks From ScienceDaily (Psych edition)

These are always more controversial than articles about "hard sciences" so have a go at them: Sperm Donors Valued Less Than Egg Donors: When Sociologist Rene Almeling decided to look into the operations of U.S. sperm banks and egg agencies, the UCLA Ph.D. candidate in sociology thought she knew what she would find. She figured that any discrepancies in compensation rates for the building blocks of assisted reproduction could be explained by either market forces or the biological differences between female egg donors, who must undergo hormone therapy and outpatient surgery, and their male…

Toyger, Toyger, Burning Bright ..

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright In the forest of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And, when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did He…

Where's My GoodBye Card?

I have not yet been released because the fearless leader for the hospital was unable to speak with me today (she makes the ultimate decision), but it looks as though tomorrow will probably be my discharge day. The social worker found three potential programs for me to attend on the outside -- programs that are either support groups or a program with a psychiatrist/psychopharmacologist -- which I prefer. But both of which will cost a fair amount of money, even though they are on a sliding scale. Unfortunately, attending one of these programs will be the only way I can maintain my…

What is LabLit?

I found an interesting commentary in Nature about a new genre of literature, LabLit [text or PDF]. Even though I read widely, I was surprised to learn that I had never heard of this genre, and the titles mentioned in the article were also new to me. The author of the article, Jennifer Rohn, was trained as a molecular biologist and is now the editor for LabLit magazine so she obviously knows what she is talking about. LabLit is not science fiction. According to the LabLit website, "'lab lit' depicts realistic scientists as central characters and portrays fairly realistic scientific practice…

Bloody Nutter or Alternative Behaviour?

A man named Danny holds his own personal protest against walking through life half awake (or is it half asleep?). He seems like a "bloody nutter" (as the police descibed him when they showed up after I snapped these pics), but if you talk to him for a few minutes, you find that he is actually quite rational. Image: GrrlScientist 31 August 2008 [larger view]. When I was in the Victoria Train Station, purchasing tickets to South Bromley, where Darwin's Down House is located, I ran into this man. I watched him for a few minutes and then decided that the Brits are truly strange if they pay a…

The Amazing True-Life Adventures of A Peeponaut

tags: peeponaut, astropeep, marshmallow peeps, science, space travel, astronomy, Adler Planetarium Astropeep strength training program, part of the selection process for identifying those marshmallow peeps who had "the right fluff". These special peeps would be recruited as peeponauts who would be sent into space on a weather balloon. Image: Adler Planetarium [larger view]. Like most scientists, I am a big fan of marshmallow peeps, which are my favorite experimental animals. So I was thrilled when a friend sent me an absolutely adorable story about a peeponaut -- that special marshmallow…

Explaining Research with Dennis Meredith

Last week, at the SigmaXi pizza lunch (well, really dinner), organized by SCONC, we were served a delicious dish - a lively presentation by Dennis Meredith about Explaining Research, the topic of his excellent new book - in my humble opinion the best recent book on this topic. His presentation was almost identical to what he presented on our panel at the AAAS meeting in February in San Diego, and you can check out the slideshow (with the audio of his presentation going on with the slides) here. Dennis and I are friends, and he attended 3-4 of the four ScienceOnline conferences to date and you…

More on mindcasting vs. lifecasting

About a week ago I posted Twittering is a difficult art form - if you are doing it right. While Griff Wigley agreed, I also got two interesting and somewhat dissenting reactions from Kate and Heather. First, in my defense, that post was targeting journalists and professional communicators, just one of many posts in a series, especially in this vein, exploring the best ways for media and comms folks to use Twitter. Twitter is just another medium. Like blogs, Twitter can be used in any way one wants. I am not going to tell anyone "you are doing it wrong". Some media companies just broadcast -…

Aircraft Crashes Into Manhattan Condominium

A small airplane (some observers in the area) or helicopter (FDNY report, some people in the area) or small fixed-wing airplane (FAA report) crashed into the Belaire Building in NYC's fashionable Upper East Side on 72nd and York streets. It crashed between the 30th and 31st floors of the 50-story building. The crash occurred at 242pm today and 3-6 buildings are reportedly affected. Two people were reported killed. They were on the airplane. The plane belonged to Yankees Pitcher, Cory Lidle, 34 (pictured. Photo: Mary Altaffer, AP). Lidle had been a licensed pilot for 8 months and purchased…

In defence of space cadets

So Stephen Hawking spoke in defence of off-planet colonization and got pounced by, among others, a trio of tough sciencebloggers. Shelley, grrlscientist, and PZ. Also Chris Clarke... Sagrada Familia This is an interesting situation - Stephen is at the best of times terse. He is unlikely to expound in detail on his rationalisation or start commenting in blogs. People who listen to him, and who are on the same page to begin with, tend to fill in the gap, under the assumption that he has made the full reasoned argument without expounding it - when I gave a talk to his group at DAMTP a few years…