You may have heard by now that a man entered the Maryland offices of Discovery Communications, the parent company of The Discovery Channel, Investigation Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet and several other television channels.   The man carried firearms and had explosives strapped to his body, which he threatened to detonate.   The standoff ended when police sharp-shooters managed to shoot and kill the suspect.

The man, James E. Lee, had been protesting the programing of the Discovery Channel and its other networks, including programs which documented children and families.   These include reality tv shows like “Kate Plus 8” and “19 Kids and Counting.” You can read more in this LA Times Article.

What is especially disturbing about this incident is the motivation of Mr. Lee, which he made very clear on his website savetheplanetprotest.com Lee had previously protested at the building and elsewhere and had been arrested for disorderly conduct related to his protest activities.

There’s a good liklihood that the website will be taken down in the near future, so I am copying the entirety of the site, which consists of one page of text.   The page is titled “My Demands”

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Tomorrow night, the 29th of August, the show “Bad Universe” will premier on the Discovery Channel at 10 o’clock eastern time.  If you don’t live in the eastern US, check your local listings.   The show looks pretty cool, and it stars my friend Phil Plait, (AKA The Bad Astronomer) who is a very active member of the skeptic community and has been debunking bad science for years.   It’s really huge that Phil would get a show like this on a major television network, and it’s definitely a great way for him to help spread skepticism and good science.

One nitpick: Phil can’t actually shoot rays of energy out of his eyes. If he could, I’m pretty sure I would have been zapped by now.

Alaska has more aircraft per capita than any other state in the US and most places in the world.   Small aircraft are a vital means of travel in the massive and largely unpopulated state, and it’s also one of the most dangerous places to fly.  While the relative risk is still fairly low, many lives have been lost in plane crashes in Alaska.

It seems that yet another one has been lost – that of former Senator Ted Stevens.   Stevens plane crashed on a remote mountainside killing Stevens.  The plane also carried NASA’s former chief administrator, Sean O’Keefe and his son.   O’Keefe and his son survived the crash and, at last report, both had sustained injuries that were thought to be non-life threatening.  Luckily for them, it seems rescuers got to the sight of the crash fairly quickly.

Via the Associated Press:

JUNEAU, Alaska — A float plane carrying former Sen. Ted Stevens and ex-NASA chief Sean O’Keefe crashed into a remote mountainside in Alaska, killing the longtime senator and four others, authorities said Tuesday. O’Keefe and his teenage son survived the crash with broken bones and other injuries, said former NASA spokesman Glenn Mahone. The O’Keefes spent Monday night on the mountain with several volunteers who discovered the wreckage and tended to the injured until rescuers arrived Tuesday morning.

Plane crash + NASA big shot + former senator =  conspiracy theories in 5…4…3…2…

Oh I just love seeing a post like this on a site like “Age Of Autism”, an anti-vaccine, anti-science site that promotes every wacky idea on how to treat autism and what causes it.

Health Fascism in Australia.

The sinister Skeptics group, agents of what used to be CSICOP now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) organised from the US and linked to the major corporate lobby groups, American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) and American Council Against Health Fraud (ACAHF), which is in turn linked to the Australian CAHF) are making ground in Australia. Supported by authoritarian ideological influences in government and Big Pharma, the Skeptics are running constant attacks on homeopathy, natural cancer treatments, those who question vaccination and those who support any form of alternative medicine.

With the present world fiscal crisis, all those linked to Big Pharma and Science are fighting a bitter battle to preserve drug company competitiveness. But where fascist influences in government and health with most force come together is in attacking anyone who speaks out about freedom of choice and expression in relation to vaccination.

Over the last year the international corporate lobby Skeptics, have been behind a campaign against the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN). In 2009, one of their trolls, a lay person with no standing in medicine or government complained about the web site of the AVN to the office of the State Government funded Health Care Complaints commission (HCCC) an organisation that accepts complaints against groups found be giving out false information about health.

The remit of the HCCC, did not actually cover parent groups which discussed the pros and cons of vaccination, so the State government slightly changed the remit to satisfy the Skeptics. The government then proceeded with a year long investigation into Meryl Dorey the woman who established and runs the AVN and the AVN itself.

Dorey was asked to answer their first 30 odd page report against her and the organisation, within a few weeks. She did this with a magnificent document that argued every point with brilliance. The complaint investigation actually argued against almost every sentence that had appeared on the AVN web site. If the AVN had said that vaccines contained toxic elements, such as mecury and aluminuim the HCCC argued with pseudo science that this was not true, giving pages of bogus evidence to support the vaccine manufacturers.

Oh how very sinister!
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Back from The Amazing Meeting 8, which was indeed Amazing, I’ve found a pile of work to get to even as I get over the modest jetlag that traveling across three time zones will cause.   Luckilly, I don’t have to describe the event all by myself because others have.   Better still, my friends at the Greater Edmonton Skeptics Society (GESS) have put together a roundup of links from other blogs and news sites describing the amazing events of the Amazing Meeting!

Check it out here

From NASA’s confused, convoluted and underfunded Constellation program to the de-funding of it in favor of a non-existant plan, there has been little good news from the American space program.   There is one exception, however.   SpaceX has been making great progress in the design and testing of the Falcon 1 and 9 rockets.   The Falcon 9 is especially exciting.  It’s the first space launch vehicle to be developed 100% privately, the first completely new liquid-fueled rocket in decades and the first American rocket capable of completing a mission with an engine failure since the last Saturn-IB lifted off in 1975.

The Falcon-9 is designed to be human rated and is complete with the Dragon capsule, designed to carry cargo and eventually humans to Low Earth Orbit.   The rocket also can be configured as the Falcon-9 Heavy, which consists of three core boosters and is capable of lifting 28 metric tons to LEO, putting it ahead of the mighty Russian Proton rocket, the current most popular heavy lift ELV, and exceeding the capacity of all current ELV’s with the exception of the ultra-heavy configuration of the Atlas-V.

SpaceX also hopes to make the Falcon-9 considerably cheaper than other rockets.   The vehicle is intended to be partially reusable, with stages being retrieved after parachuting back to earth.  If the design meets projections, it may set a new standard for the economics of heavy lift vehicles and possibly help reestablish the United States as a major player in the commercial satellite launch business.

Today the first Falcon-9 lifted off and sent its payload, a test version of the Dragon capsule into low earth orbit!

First time trials of rockets are certainly not assured successes and SpaceX has spent some time testing the design on static test stands and dry runs for launch.    This flight is the culmination of years of development and an enormous step in making the Falcon-9 a cargo and human-carrying rocket we can rely on.

Some may have noticed some annoying popups or fake computer security messages over the past couple of days.   It turns out that a worm had exploited some weaknesses in Wordpress and attacked self-hosted blogs on my hosting service.    I thought I had it fixed yesterday but apparently did not.   Since then I’ve replaced all the major system files with new versions or backups and I’m not pretty sure that the site is back to normal.

However, the nasty thing about the little script that infected the site is that if any files remain infected it will spread to the remaining good files by replicating itself to the PHP headers.   Thus, if I missed any it may come back.  Please let me know if it does or if any other strange behavior occurs.

One week ago today I attended NECSS, the North East Conference on Science and Skepticism. The event was held in New York City and attracted several hundred local science and skepticism enthusiasts. All in all it was a great event, both for the presentations and for the general crowd and socialization which occurs between lectures and panels and after the formal event.   This was the second NECSS conference, the first one being held back in October of 2009.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe did a live podcast to kick off the event and were followed by a number of different panels and speakers.   I was happy to see James Randi was able to make it to the event.  Mr. Randi is one of the most outspoken and iconic members of the skeptical movement.  Randi helped found what is currently the modern skeptical community back in the 1970’s, a time when a lot of questionable research was beginning to come back into vogue.

Randi is the type whose always ready and willing to attend any event that can help increase education and awareness.  Last year he had planned on attending NECSS but had to cancel and appeared only in a pre-taped video due to his health problems.   At the time Mr. Randi had just been diagnosed with colon cancer and had to have a section of his large intestine removed.   This was followed by chemotherapy for several months.   Thankfully, Mr. Randi was looking perfectly at NECSS last week and it appears that the cancer was taken care of before it could spread and become a bigger problem.

As with last year, the event was MC’ed by Jamy Ian Swiss and featured the talent of George Hrab.  D.J. Gorthe, the program director of the Center for Inquiry and president of the JREF also contributed as did Steve Mirsky of Scientific American.

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I know this might sound like a shock, but I will soon be leaving the blogging world and no longer keep this site online.   I feel that this is necessary for personal reasons.  It’s not because of spelling errors or because of the cost of hosting, but because I have other things to focus on in my life.   I need the time and space to make my transition

Recently, I made the difficult decision to begin the process of becoming a woman.  I’ve always felt like a woman trapped inside the body of a man, trapped inside the body of a horse, trapped inside the body of a woman, trapped inside the body of a man.   While there’s nothing I can do to completely untrap myself from all the layers of entrapment, I can at least remove one layer.   As such, I will be having a sex change operation.   Before I can do this, I need to move somewhere that such surgery can be had at bargain basement prices.  Thus, I shall soon be bidding my beloved country goodbye and moving to Guatemala to begin the gender reassignment process.

I have struggled with this decision for many years, but last night, as I lay in bed, Jesus came to me in a dream and told me he would still love me no matter what or where I was.   Thank you, Jesus.  I now know what I must do.

After my transition is complete, I’m not sure what I will do, but tentatively my plans are to return to the United States, to live in the shallow water channels of Florida, where I will become a member of the peaceful community of manatees.  Did I mention that somewhere in those layers of entrapment is a manatee?   I might have forgotten that.   Manatees are also extremely accepting and very peaceful creatures.   Best of all, manatees don’t have nuclear arms.   You can’t hug your children with nuclear arms!   Of course, they also don’t have regular arms either, but they do have flipper-like things that are a bit like arms.

Finally, I just want to wish everyone a blessed April Fools Day.

For a while I’ve been working on putting together a map of sites associated with coal, including coal ash and slurry spills, coal ash ponds, coal mine disasters, coal burning power plants and other areas where the impact of coal can be seen.   Initially, I had planned on doing the world, but it’s just too much to take in one bite, so I decided to limit myself to the United States.   If you happen to be from another country, it’s still worth a look.  You can consider the United States a representative model of what coal’s impacts are on a country – any other country that uses coal heavily will face similar problems.

To see these sites you’ll need Google Earth, which is free and is a great program that you should have anyway.  Just download and open this file:  Costofcoal.kmz

This is still a working copy, so it may have a few typographical errors and needs to have more complete details added for each location and incident as well as citations.  I’m posting it in order to get some feedback and any suggestions for additions.   If anyone knows where I can find a comprehensive list of coal dust explosions and fatalities, that would be great, as it is one thing I’ve had a great deal of trouble finding.  Of course, the map is, thus far, incomplete.

I suggest that you zoom into several of the ash ponds, major coal power plants and the surroundings.  Just looking at the overview from a distance shows how many locations there are, but a closer look is required to get a better impression of the sheer scale of these facilities.   It’s almost mind-boggling to realize how large many coal ash ponds, power plants, mines and other such areas are.   Also, I recommend checking out some of the coal fires in Colorado, as a few actually have obvious visible footprints at ground level, such as smoke spewing from cracks in the ground.  Most coal fires are not as obvious.

You may also find it helpful to turn off some of the categories (by unchecking the folder) in order to view one type of location or another and reduce screen clutter.

Any suggestions for additions or sources that provide lists of coal-related locations such as disasters or spills would be appreciated.  I do plan on adding locations that show the result of “Mountain Top Removal” mining soon, and if there are any good geographic sources for that, I’d very much appreciate hearing about them!