An Afriqiyah Airlines jet from Johannesburg crashed during landing at the Tripoli airport today, killing 92 people and leaving an 11-year-old boy as the sole survivor. While it’s early in the investigation, with an 8-month-old plane, an otherwise-sterling safety record, and clear conditions at the time of the crash, I’m betting the pilots simply forgot to check their fuel.
Check It Out
Links to cool places or things.
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Greenway ride to lunch
Today Kelly wanted to take advantage of the beautiful Mother’s Day weather to ride our bikes someplace for lunch. We opted for the Quizno’s sub place on Six Forks Road. Rather than pile our bikes in the van and haul them to the greenway, this time we let our kids ride with us through the neighborhood to the greenway.
It worked like a champ! We got to Quizno’s within 30 minutes and greatly enjoyed the novelty of getting there without a car. We enjoyed a fun lunch on the restaurant deck before moseying over to Borders to browse books. Then it was back home via the greenway. Easy! The kids didn’t even balk at the long, slow climb up Dennis Avenue: the home stretch.
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Farmville maker raking in the cash
We were in Borders today chatting with one of the staffers. Somehow the conversation veered to Facebook, when mentioned an amazing statistic about the service. He told us the company that makes the (addicting or annoying, depending on your point of view) games Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook is on track to make $450 million this year, selling non-existent livestock and guns.
Sure enough, Business Week has the scoop on this three-year-old company named Zynga. Now where can I find a book on the Facebook API?
An expert’s take on the Deepwater Horizon?
Deepwater Horizon burns
My dad sent me a PDF written by an apparent expert on oil drilling who discusses the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I found a webpage of the document here.
Treasure Ship burns
The Treasure Ship, a landmark from my childhood visits to Panama City Beach, Florida, was damaged by fire yesterday.
The Treasure Ship was one of the last places there that I still recognize. I hope it can be repaired but I’m not optimistic.
Court rules against FCC in Net Neutrality case
A federal appeals court ruled today that the FCC lacks the authority to enforce Net Neutrality in a case against Comcast.
“This decision destroys the F.C.C.’s authority to build broadband policy on the legal theory established by the Bush administration,” said Ben Scott, the policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit organization that advocates for broad media ownership and access.
The value of preventative health care
A commenter on Gawker, apparently a doctor, had an insightful comment on the value of preventative health care, something that the health care legislation might help. It describes how a patient with a simple, treatable issue, could rack up a tremendous hospital bill that the hospital will inevitably absorb because the patient can’t afford health insurance.
This kind of thing goes on all the time at my neighborhood hospital, WakeMed. See below for the Gawker comment:
40% of the patients at the hospital I practice at are uninsured. Those 40% cannot afford the $100 cost of a clinic visit. Here’s the way this thing normally works:
1) Patient comes to the ER for something simple. Let’s use an ulcerated lesion on the forearm as an example. EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) states that we are required to stabilize the patient if they are in distress. The patient is not in distress, so they are given an appointment for a dermatologist and discharged. they receive a bill for $500-$1500 (which they do not pay).
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Time Warner Cable porn screwup makes headlines
The local Time Warner Cable office screwed up royally when it switched Playboy Channel promos onto two kids’ cable channels. The story was buried in today’s N&O but is the second most-popular story on the BBC News website now. Those randy Brits!
Supersonic aerodynamics
I was checking my feed for the BBC’s news stories today when I came across a story about an experimental car designed to go 1,000 MPH called the Bloodhound SSC. The article mentioned the car that set the current the world-record speed of 763 MPH in 1997, known the Thrust SuperSonic Car.
I searched for this car but didn’t find an entry for it on Wikipedia. However, I did find a fascinating article on the topic of supersonic. I know a little about aerodynamics from the pilot ground school I took 15 years ago but I had no idea how much different supersonic flight is from subsonic flight.
For instance, from the Wikipedia page:
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China’s oil demand ‘astonishing’
Astonishing, indeed.
China’s demand for oil jumped by an “astonishing” 28% in January compared with the same month a year earlier, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.