I don’t know about you, but I think 100:1 odds of death for an occupation aren’t great. That’s what the most recent space shuttle crew has been informed of to quantify the risk they’re signing up to in the next planned launch (STS-121).
Consider other occupational statistics:
They missed space shuttle crew where there have been 14 deaths out of 703 opportunities in 114 missions.
Technorati Tags: Space Shuttle Jobs Death
Mike Davis recently showed me a cool mashup of the Sun Knowledge Connection with his Google homepage. Way cool. Also, Software Update moved to a new provider over the weekend which included an upgrade to Solaris 10, T2000s, and some new switches. The punchline? The performance has improved 3x and the cost has dropped by 50%. Amazing. If service providers aren’t using this technology, they’re bad at math.
Technorati Tags: Mashup Solaris T2000
Here in the US football is played with an oblong ball that is only, on special occasion, kicked. However, right now the rest of the world is crazy for football (soccer) played with a round ball that is primarily kicked. The ultimate event is well underway, the FIFA 2006 World Cup.
Since the US team is in, and some of our colleagues are “worldly” caring about the event a bunch, we decided to have a little challenge using the BBC’s World Cup DAQ game. This is a market economy where one competes by buying and selling shares in teams, angling for special bonuses (dividends if you will,) and hoping for an outcome of the highest percentage gain in a week. Thus we’ve assembled a league. What’s at stake? Pride.
The thing I wasn’t prepared for is how sticky this is. We’ve got people who’ve never participated in such an event and are typically non-sporting buying up shares of Poland because of win bonuses and wondering if that’s the right selection of if Costa Rica will recover from the thrashing Ecuador provided this week.
If you ever doubt the network is the computer and that fact fuels the participation age, try one of these online events. It’ll cure you of that doubt in a heartbeat. Meantime, go Poland! (and US team, I hope you can beat Italy!)
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Death toll passes 2,500 for US military deaths. Grim. Very grim. It’s a good thing the mission was accomplished May 2, 2003….
Technorati Tags: Iraq War Politics
Recently I heard a news interview with a techie nicknamed Aardvark in New Zealand who has undertaken an “interesting” project to build his own cruise missile. Not really a toy. Specifications include: 100 mile range, 400 mph speed, powered by propane, costs less than $5,000.
I am at turns fascinated and horrified by this. The project leader indicates that he’s doing this to raise awareness of just how easy this is to do and get attention focused upon this before it’s used as a weapon…..
Technorati Tags: Cruise Missile Defense Terrorism
