Fancy a little time travel? This time eight years ago, satirical magazine The Onion reported on the new Bush presidency.
Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’
It may have been a joke, but reading it now, it comes across as historical fact. It seems amazing that the prediction was so accurate, but is it really that amazing or was it there for all to see from the start?
(via Agonist)
Thousands of birds collide with aircraft every year but in most cases there is little or no damage to the plane. However in a small proportion of cases aircraft have been destroyed as result of bird strike. In 1988, 35 people died when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 crash landed and caught fire after flying into a flock of speckled pigeons (pdf). The aircraft lost power after birds were sucked into the engines. Authorities believe that bird strike was also the reason US Airways Flight 1549 lost power and ditched in the Hudson River.
Between 1990 and 2007, 79,972 bird strikes were reported to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) (pdf). According to biologist and bird strike expert Richard Dolbeer only around 12 to 15 percent of these strikes result in damage to the aircraft. But in a small proportion of cases, bird strike leads to serious damage and in some cases disaster.
According to Dolbeer and the FAA’s Sandra E Wright (pdf), the most serious bird strike to a civil aircraft occurred in 1960 when a Lockheed Electra taking off from Boston’s Logan Airport flew through a flock of European starlings. One engine shut down and two other engines lost power. Sixty two people died when the aircraft plunged into Boston harbour. Ten people survived.
Researchers say that bird strikes are becoming more common as air traffic increases, bird populations rise and aircraft become quieter. A risk assessment carried out in the late 1990s reported that "in the next 10 years there is about a 25% probability that a large jet transport will be involved in a fatal bird strike related accident in the U.S. or Canada."
Dolbeer argues that it’s important for researchers to be able to identify which species of birds are colliding with aircraft as this data can help biologists create more effective wildlife risk management programs at airports. In a paper for the FAA (pdf) he urged airline staff to send bird feathers, talons, beaks and bones to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution for identification. However he cautioned: "Do not send entire bird carcasses through the mail."
The overheating issue caused the system to crash hard. Our friends in the UCC have rebooted the server, so we’re back on the air.
Sorry everyone.
Troppo will be up and down like a yo-yo today as the airconditioning our server relies on has broken. Please bear with us.
As you can see, it broke at about 8am.
Update: the issue is resolved for now.
Update II: No, it’s not resolved at all. Might be a while folks.
Why Obamas plan is still inadequate and incomplete
Last week, President-elect Barack Obama duly unveiled his American recovery and reinvestment plan. Its title was aptly chosen, for Mr Obama spoke, astonishingly, as if the policies of the rest of the world had no bearing on the fate of the US. He spoke, too, as if a large fiscal stimulus would be enough to restore prosperity. If that is what he believes, Mr Obama is in for a shock. The difficulties he confronts are much deeper and more global than that.I have little doubt that his advisers are telling the president-elect just this. The points they are or should be pressing on him are these.
Mr Obama must be fully persuaded of these last points. If the fiscal deficits are to fall sharply in the medium term, as they need to, the new president needs effective programmes for private sector deleveraging and global reform and adjustment. The fate of the US cannot be determined in isolation. Continue reading
The HyperText Transport Protocol, HTTP, underlies every website visit you make. Your browser negotiates with the server for the website. Once they come to their split second agreement, the server starts to send the web page, along with any other requested files (like images)11. Curious?: If you are using Firefox, install a program called Firebug. This popular programmer’s tool reveals all this under-the-hood magic. [↩]
The governing document specifying the protocol is RFC-2616, published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an anarchic nerdopoly that authoritatively defines hundreds of protocols and file formats for internet use.
In common with many other IETF protocols, HTTP allows servers and browsers to send information not given in the RFC document using X- headers. Originally the ‘X’ stood for ‘experimental’. Today X-headers are used to create important de-facto sources of information and to facilitate services that build on the basic HTTP model.
I think that a useful additional header would be X-Torrent.
Continue reading