Friday, April 30, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Volcanic Eruptions
See Icelandic broadcaster's videos of the volcanic eruption. I recommend the video at the second link.
I see that a Lufthansa representative complained that the German government should not have relied on the British data and that the German government should have done it its own testing. I'm betting that the Brits (and other European governments) overreacted.
But there is an upside: Perhaps regular transatlantic passenger boat travel will return."But German officials defended their decision to close the skies. 'What’s more important, the safety of passengers or business?' asked Mr. Malewski of the German Weather Service." NYTimes article (April 17, 2010). It might be noted, however, that the decision to close the skies was not costless. Did the decision cost or shorten some lives? (For example, was the shipment of some medical supplies delayed?) And should we assume that the estimated $200,000,000 in daily losses to the airlines would all have been spent on spas by wealthy vacationing airline executives? (I'm not much of an economist but I think it's bit too simple to say that the tradeoff is the value of lives versus the value of business.)
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Harvesting Spaghetti from the Spaghetti Tree
The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled."[1]
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_tree
&&&
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)