Month: November 2015

That unique brand of American right-wing crazy applied to the newly released dime design in the mid-1940s,

The dime was released to the public on January 30, 1946, which would have been Roosevelt’s 64th birthday. Sinnock’s design placed his initials (“JS”) at the base of Roosevelt’s neck, on the coin’s obverse. His reverse design elements of a torch, olive branch, and oak branch symbolized, respectively, liberty, peace, and strength.

Controversy immediately ensued, as strong anti-Communist sentiment in the United States led to the circulation of rumors that the “JS” engraved on the coin was the initials of Joseph Stalin, placed there by a Soviet agent in the mint. The Mint quickly issued a statement denying this, confirming that the initials were indeed Sinnock’s.

(Source: Wikipedia)

According to a story at Vice, a Paris airport was shut down in early November 2015 after a failure in the computer system that is used by air traffic controllers to communicate weather information to pilots. And, according to Vice, that weather system (known as DECOR) runs on Windows 3.1.

DECOR’s breakdown on Saturday prevented air traffic controllers from providing pilots with Runway Visual Range, or RVR, information — a value that determines the distance a pilot can see down the runway. As fog descended onto the runway and engineers battled to find the origin of the glitch, flights were grounded as a precaution.

“The tools used by Aéroports de Paris controllers run on four different operating systems, that are all between 10 and 20 years old,” explained Alexandre Fiacre, the secretary general of France’s UNSA-IESSA air traffic controller union. ADP is the company that runs both Orly and Paris’ other airport, Charles de Gaulle, one of the busiest in the world.

“Some of ADP’s machines run on UNIX [an operating system favored by universities and start-ups in the ’80s], but also Windows XP,” said Fiacre, who works as an aviation security systems engineer.

Using Windows 3.1 to help air traffic controllers land $300 million planes. Makes sense.

I was debunking some misinformation my son received at school about alcohol intoxication, when we happened upon a Wikipedia page that included a list of people (many who died) who had been found to have blood alcohol levels of > 1 percent. Of those, the most bizarre case was of a person who died from alcohol poisoning where the alcohol was believed to have been largely absorbed through the skin. The case occurred in Taiwan and is documented in an article in the May 10, 2005 issue of Forensic Science International. According to the article,

Alcohol (ethanol) can be absorbed through the skin, but intoxication caused by skin absorption is rare, especially in adults. During the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Taiwan, a 45-year-old woman was found deceased in a bathtub filled with alcohol. She had put herself into the fluid from around 11 p.m. believing it could prevent SARS and was found dead at about 11 a.m. the next day by her family.

Her head was above the fluid level and there was no sign of drowning. Neither trauma nor ingestion of drugs was detected on analysis. No significant fluid was found in her stomach. The fluid in the bathtub was found to contain 40.5% (v/v) of ethanol, and her blood alcohol concentration (BAC) was 1350 mg/100 mL (1.35%). A BAC near 400 mg/100 mL can be lethal. In order to reach this BAC, she should have absorbed about 1500 mL of 40% alcohol according to the formula: BAC = ethanol (mg) ÷ [volume of distribution (L/kg) × body weight (kg) × 10]. Since the bathtub was too small to fit her whole body and her head was above the fluid, she was not likely to have drunk a large amount of alcohol. Nevertheless, she might have inhaled some alcohol, which would have accelerated her intoxication. It is likely that the woman would have exhibited some CNS depression at a BAC of about 100–200 mg/100 mL, inhibiting her ability to climb out of the bathtub.