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The code for Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton airport in Pennsylvania is ABE. And Zurich, Switzerland is ZHR. Makes sense for those two outliers on the aviation “Locator Identifier” scale. But what’s up with O’Hare Airport in Chicago called ORD? Or Ottawa being YOW? And New Orleans with MSY… how did that happen?

Turns out there is a method to this seeming chaos. Canada reserved all the Ys for their airports, so Ottawa actually makes sense. And New Orleans airport once was called Moisant Field. For all the details about naming airports, check out this interesting piece from the Air Line Pilot, a publication from the Air Line Pilots Association in December of 1994.

And what about ORD, the world's busiest airport? You can skip right to the final paragraph for that answer in the jump.

Here i sthe last paragraph of the article:

Oh, still wondering about the world's busiest airport, O'Hare International, and its ORD code? Well once upon a time, before the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert McCormick suggested a name change as tribute to pilot Lt. Cmdr. Edward "Butch" O'Hare, United States Navy, there was an airstrip well to the northwest of Chicago with a quaint, peaceful name—Orchard Field.

Posted by Edd at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From a DailyKos diarist, “Inland”. We don’t normally cite anonymous sources here, but this one seems legit. Inland says he is an attorney, and has had lots of experience with clients who were economical with the truth. His explanation for Bush’s articulation lapses has to do with how much lying Bush has been doing over the past six years. He says:

I think it's because lying is hard work, and he's trying to hold several different false scenarios in his head while not blurting out what he's really being told behind closed doors.

Bush looks like a person stumbling over the easiest things, but in fact, he's not a person unable to relate simple facts. He's a person trying hard to NOT relate simple facts. He's a person trying to avoid the pitfalls of saying what's on his mind, and trying to keep his stories straight.

Intriguing possibility. Here is the entire entry.

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The editors of the Jewish Daily Forward’s present some important questions in their most recent editorial, Asking the Right Question.

Israelis should not be asking why this war didn’t resemble the Six Day War. Rather, they should ask why it looked so much like America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, or like Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan, or France’s wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Why do generals insist on believing in the fantasy that guerrilla insurgencies can be wiped out by jets and tanks?

Had Rabin not been assassinated, but rather permitted to carry out his plans, things might look very different today in the Middle East and, perhaps, beyond. Too many lives have been lost, too many homes destroyed, too much hope extinguished in the decade since he and his vision were cut down. Yet the truths remain the same. Wisdom lies, as always, in knowing when to shoot and when to talk. Now is the time to talk.

Here is the entire editorial.

Posted by Edd at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

YouTube may well become one of those incredibly disrupting technologies. There are videos in archives all over the world, and they are now easier than ever to get them posted and seen by millions.
One video that was posted in January 2006 and has steadily gotten more traction (108,263 views so far) is called Bush Video 10 years ago! This video shows a striking and troubling difference between then and now. When he ran for governor of Texas, he appeared to be much more articulate than he is today. Hard to account for such a drastic decline. Eerily reminiscent of the later Reagan years.
See the original for yourself.

Posted by Edd at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dead zones are areas in the sea where there is insufficient oxygen to sustain living things. They occur in many places around the world, and usually come in the spring and last for a few weeks. And they have occurred off the coast of Oregon. That is no big whoop by itself. However, this is the fifth consecutive year that one of these dead zones has appeared off her coast.
One marine biologist, Jane Lubechenco, from Oregon State University cannot link it to any of the usual suspects – El Niño of La Niña – and so she is wondering if it might be connected to global warming. She said,

“There is no other cause, as far as we can determine.”

Here is the rest of the story in the paper of record.

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Henry Rollins writes letters. Lots of letters evidently. And he shares them on You Tube. In this one he asks Laura for help. It is very funny. See it here.

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Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of suburban sprawl? Some in the real estate industry think we are. The cost of commuting in both time and money are beginning to take their toll. Many young buyers, who in the past have fed the trend of expanding suburbia and exurbia are beginning to look at downtown sections of cities, and the market seems to be slowly responding.
This trend can’t come too soon.
Here is the article.

Posted by Edd at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first political cartoon in America was Benjamin Franlin’s famous “Join or Die” depicting a snake representing the colonies cut into segments. This cartoon by John de Rosier is an extraordinarily powerful one as well. It is worth a look.

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Voyager 1, or ‘Vega” from the days of Star Trek The Motion Picture, made interstellar history yesterday. The little spacecraft just passed the 100 astronomical unit (AU) mark. This means that Voyager is now 100 times farther away from the sun than the sun is from the earth, or about “9.3 billion miles out there”.

Voyager 2 is chugging along about six years behind.

Here are all the astronimicals.

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In an article from The Sunday Times in the UK comes this story of an old suitcase made of cardboard that is part of a Holocaust exhibit currently in France. The artifact is a rare one in that it has the name of the owner clearly visible. As it happened, the son of the suitcase’s owner saw the suitcase and now wants it back. The museum does not want to return it, saying that the fact that the suitcase has a name attached to it makes for a more powerful experience for those viewing the exhibit.

The museum has a point. Except… this is property stolen by the Nazi regime and belongs to the family. If the son of this victim of the Holocaust wants to loan the suitcase to the museum, that would be great. But to retain stolen property that has a clear ownership thread seems to be wrong on the face of it.

Again, here is the link.

Posted by Edd at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is the TSA, the government organization that now wants us all to take our shoes off before each flight we take, part of the fact-based community? It is difficult to tell. An entry on their homepage trumpets: The System Worked: TSA Security Officers Respond to Threat in Huntington. It goes on to say that the technology at the West Virginia airport was able to pick up traces of explosives in the hand luggage of a Pakistani woman going through security.

Yet, here is an article about the same incident in The Independent saying that this wasn’t the case, that no explosives were found, and that the issue and more to do with her traditional Muslim garb than anything else. Here is that take on reality.

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With all the ink being sacrificed about the dangers of flying, it is good to note that it is still much safer than slipping into something comfortable – like a Toyota or a Honda. Just how much safer? Researchers Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan published their findings in American Scientist Online in 2003.
So how much riskier is driving than flying? Their findings:

... we estimate that driving the length of a typical nonstop segment is approximately 65 times as risky as flying.

Posted by Edd at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it is big. Today, according to Technorati (a company that tracks such things) there are more than 50,000,000 blogs in the blogosphere. In the beginning of 2003 there were none. The blogosphere is doubling in size at an ever-increasing rate – 75,000 new blogs created every day.
Here is the graph.

Posted by Edd at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The world’s first motel – yes it is still in existence in San Luis Obispo – is so dilapidated that it may not be around long. Is it worth saving? Is it really a piece of history? You be the judge. Here is the story.
And another photo link here.

Posted by Edd at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The question is: How many humans has God killed according to scriptures? That’s not including Sodom and Gomorrah, and The Flood.
Here is the fine print.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana are transforming pig manure into a slurry slushy kind of oil in about an hour. And it smells like wet coffee grounds. While not likely to alleviate our oil addiction soon, it may well turn pig farms into aromatherapy spas. Well not exactly. The exact story is in The Chicago Tribune here.

Posted by Edd at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One lump turns out to be the correct answer. A sugar cube, that is. Marcus Chown, the author of The Quantum Zoo, was on KQED’s Forum program this morning, and he said that if we could remove all the empty spaces inside the atoms of all the people in the world, then the whole of humanity - all five billion or so of us - would fit inside one cube of sugar.

To give added credence to this proposition, here is a site that graphically illustrates just how much space there is between the proton and the electron of a hydrogen atom.

Posted by Edd at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While we worry about shampoo and hair gel getting zapped by an iPod by a passenger in the airline seat next to us, here is something actually worth a rapid heartbeat or two. A recent poll published in the journal Science showed:

A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries [and] finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.

And this from the study co-author, Jon Miller of Michigan State University:

American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close.

So while other countries are cutting at the edge of science and stemming a few cells here and there, we in the US are thwarting such efforts, and even refusing to “believe” in such matters.

Now that’s terrifying.

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Here is one that explains Al Qaeda's thinking better than anything we have seen from the experts in Washington.

Posted by Edd at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What makes one face more beautiful than another? And what makes one image of the same face more or less attractive than another image? Some researchers in Tel Aviv have been working on a Digital Face Beautification project, and judging from some of the before and after pictures, they seemed to have cracked the code.

Posted by Edd at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times has a piece about the impact of the Buffett Bequest on the Gates Foundation. We wrote about that here a few weeks ago. (Good to see them catching up to us!)

A few new factoids have come to light:
Soon one of every ten foundation dollars will come from The Gates Foundation.
A recent proposed $93.5 million cut in funding for small schools was proposed by the Bush administration citing “nonfederal funds” from Gates and Carnegie.
Currently, only four people are deciding how to spend the foundation's money - Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, his father, William Gates, Sr. and Patty Stonesifer, the foundation president.
One the positive side the staff at Gates will have a few years to ramp up to meet the new work load.

The impact of megafoundtions on public policy is yet to be determined, but nonetheless potentially troubling. No doubt this will all be tracked very closely. One can only hope.

Here is the article.

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Coming to a theater near you. This film bill itself as “… a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America's political future.”
And the children are as young as six years old.
Here is the blurb.

Speaking of film…
The ubiquitous font, Helvetica, is turning fifty and next year a new documentary film about the font will be released. I guess if they can make a gripping film about crossword puzzles, like Wordplay, then perhaps filmmakers can do the same with a font. Here is the website.

Posted by Edd at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The state’s Climate Change Center has released a report, Our Changing Climate, about the future climate considerations, and the results are truly alarming for everyone in the state. Water shortages, more wildfires in rural areas, longer heat waves, flooding in the coastal regions, parched farmland in the Central Valley. No part of the state gets a reprieve. While California is burning, the federal government is concerned with gay marriage and stem cell research. We are so hosed.

Posted by Edd at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to a recent Harris Poll, even today half of all Americans still believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Distruction when the administratin decided to invade the country in 2003. These opinions persist even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - evidence that even the Bush adminsitration accepts as fact.
Here is the link.

Posted by Edd at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)