Blackmoor Vituperative

According to the CDC, roughly 440,000 deaths each year are associated with smoking.

Also according to the CDC, roughly 400,000 deaths each year are associated with obesity.

Many more people die each year in the USA from motor vehicle accidents (roughly 40,000) than in airplane crashes (fewer than 1,000). But people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes. The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying is about equal.

And according to the NIH, roughly 12,000 deaths (excluding suicides) each year are associated with firearms.

The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435 000 deaths; 18.1% of total US deaths), poor diet and physical inactivity (400 000 deaths; 16.6%), and alcohol consumption (85 000 deaths; 3.5%). Other actual causes of death were microbial agents (75 000), toxic agents (55 000), motor vehicle crashes (43 000), incidents involving firearms (29 000), sexual behaviors (20 000), and illicit use of drugs (17 000).

(from CDC: Obesity approaching tobacco as top preventable cause of death, DoctorsLounge)

So “sexual behavior” is just behind “firearms” in terms of the raw number of people killed — and is far ahead of firearms when the roughly 17,000 suicides who used firearms are excluded (as they should be, for obvious reasons).

Interesting.

Another piece of science fiction is on its way to being science fact. “Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated quantum holographic storage, shattering long-held assumptions about the information limits of matter. Moving into the sub-atomic realm, they permanently stored 35 bits in the quantum space surrounding a single electron.” (from ZDNet)

Over the past 20 years, huge swaths of the sky have been searched for slowly moving bodies, and well over 1000 KBOs found. But these wide-area surveys can spot only large, bright objects; longer-exposure surveys that can find smaller, dimmer objects cover only small areas of the sky. A Mars-sized object at a distance of, say, 100 AU would be so faint that it could easily have escaped detection.

That could soon change. In December 2008, the first prototype of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) was brought into service at the Haleakala observatory on Maui, Hawaii. Soon, four telescopes – equipped with the world’s largest digital cameras, at 1.4 billion pixels apiece – will search the skies for anything that blinks or moves. Its main purpose is to look out for potentially hazardous asteroids bound for Earth, but inhabitants of the outer solar system will not escape its all-seeing eyes.

(from Is there a Planet X?, New Scientist)

Strange days ahead for NASA. They announced a while back that they were going to start relying more on the private sector, and now the Obama collective seem intent on dismantling the agency altogether.

President-elect Obama seems intent on burning down the house of cards that is NASA, presumably to replace it with an agency that can actually design worthwhile missions without wholesale wasting of taxpayer dollars. First, we learned that the transition team has been circling around NASA’s Constellation program.

Now, today I read that Obama is basically going to outsource a good bit of NASA engineering to the Defense Department. Bloomberg reports that Obama may force NASA to use DOD rockets, which will be cheaper and ready sooner than NASA’s planned Ares (right), which isn’t slated until 2015.

And this is all in the context of China’s rapidly advancing space program, which definitely has Pentagon eyebrows raised.

China’s military carried out a spacewalk in 2008, plans to land a robot on the moon in 2012 and a man on the moon thereafter. Meanwhile, the US will be hitching rides with Russia between 2010 when the shuttle is scrapped and 2015 (at the soonest) when Orion is to be launched.

It’s no secret Obama’s team wants to scrap NASA’s Ares rocket. The Pentagon’s Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are “basically developed,” says John Logsdon of the National Air and Space Museum. “You don’t have to build them from scratch.”

(from NASA craft may ride on Pentagon rockets, ZDNet)

This is cool. HP will send you a postage-paid envelope to send back empty inkjet and laserjet cartridges to be recycled.

A very sad article about plastic.

Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there,” said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London’s The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

( The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”, from TreeHugger)

Sheryl Crow and Laurie David were on Bill Maher’s show this evening, publicizing a tour they are doing to promote awareness of “global warming”. You know, I don’t mind that they believe that planetary temperature shifts are a real, human-caused phenomenon. What I do mind is that they call it a “fact”, based on the experts they choose to believe, and completely discount the experts who disagree [1] [2] and the people who choose to believe to those experts. It’s a theory, not a fact, and claiming it’s a “fact” is just an attempt to prevent informed discourse.

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

(from NASA, NASA – Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn)

Proof that the masters of Saturn are gamers.

Check out this giant crystal cave in Mexico.