Here is a nice animation to use as a screensaver for your laptop if security wants to check it at the airport.

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Comparing official mortality data with the number of Americans who have been killed inside the United States by terrorism since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma reveals that scores of threats are far more likely to kill an American than any terrorist — at least, statistically speaking.

In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.

With that in mind, here’s a handy ranking of the various dangers confronting America, based on the number of mortalities in each category throughout the 11-year period spanning 1995 through 2005 (extrapolated from best available data).

S E V E R E Driving off the road: 254,419 Falling: 146,542 Accidental poisoning: 140,327

H I G H Dying from work: 59,730 Walking down the street: 52,000. Accidentally drowning: 38,302

E L E V A T E D Killed by the flu: 19,415 Dying from a hernia: 16,742

G U A R D E D Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536 Electrocution: 5,171

L O W Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949 Terrorism: 3147 Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554

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Hope Glenn was frustrated because she, her husband and her son’s friends couldn’t seem to calm her drunken, agitated 18-year-old son early Saturday. So she called 9-1-1 at 3:05 a.m. for help.

She told a dispatcher her teenage son, Lukus, was suicidal, standing outside their house in the Garden Home area of unincorporated Washington County with a knife to his throat.

“When I called 9-1-1, I called to save my son, to get some professional help,” she said in an interview Sunday. “Maybe I’m naive.”

Minutes after Washington County sheriff’s deputies and a Tigard police officer arrived and Glenn’s son, Lukus, refused to drop his knife, officers fired bean-bag rounds at him. When Glenn turned toward the house, two deputies fired several gunshots. Relatives said the teenager collapsed by a doorstep. He died at the scene.

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At a time when the Earth’s climate is at the top of practically every nation’s agenda, it might seem perplexing that there’s a $100 million, fully completed climate-sensing satellite stored in a warehouse in Maryland.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was supposed to be delivered five years ago to the L1 Lagrangian point—a gravity-neutral parking spot between the Earth and the sun that affords a continuous, sunlit view of the planet. From here, DSCOVR would measure the planet’s energy balance and reflectivity, known as albedo, which is critical data for calibrating climate change models and monitoring the ozone layer. Yet the mission was quietly killed this year, so the satellite is sitting in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center.

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The Ukrainian government offered to lau­nch DSCOVR free of charge, France made a similar offer. But NASA’s response so far has been “no thanks.”

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a very impressive 8 minute animation created for Harvard’s Molecular & Cellular Biology program that “transports Harvard Biology undergraduate students into a three-dimensional journey through the microscopic world of a cell”. the animation illustrates the mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings & respond to an external stimulus.

see also cell evolution infographics & biochemical pathways map.

[links: xvivo.net (press release) & aimediaserver.com (large size video)|via slashdot.org]

The yellow lines represent buses in real time and the red corresponds to density of people.

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In today’s world, wireless mobile communications devices are creating new dimensions of interconnectedness between people, places, and urban infrastructure. This ubiquitous connectivity within the urban population can be observed and interpreted in real-time, through aggregate records collected from communication networks. Real-time visualizations expose the dynamics of the contemporary city as urban systems coalesce: traces of information and communication networks, movement patterns of people and transportation systems, spatial and social usage of streets and neighborhoods. Observing the real-time city becomes a means to understanding the present and anticipating the future of urban environments. In the visualizations of Real Time Rome we synthesize data from various real-time networks to understand patterns of daily life in Rome. We interpolate the aggregate mobility of people according to their mobile phone usage and visualize it synchronously with the flux of public transit, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic. By overlaying mobility information on geographic and socio-economic references of Rome we unveil the relationships between fixed and fluid urban elements. These real-time maps help us understand how neighborhoods are used in the course of a day, how the distribution of buses and taxis correlates with densities of people, how goods and services are distributed in the city, or how different social groups, such as tourists and residents, inhabit the city.

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In four simple words last Friday, the President brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely clear these past five-and-a-half years – the way the terrain at night is perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later, all again is dark.

“It’s unacceptable to think,” he said.

It is never unacceptable to think.

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If Mr. Powell’s letter — cautionary, concerned, predominantly supportive — can induce from you such wrath and such intolerance, what would you say were this statement to be shouted to you by a reporter, or written to you by a colleague?

“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.�?

Those incendiary thoughts came, of course, from a prior holder of your job, Mr. Bush.

They were the words of Thomas Jefferson.

He put them in the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Bush, what would you say to something that anti-thetical to the status quo just now?

Would you call it “unacceptable” for Jefferson to think such things, or to write them?

Between your confidence in your infallibility, sir, and your demonizing of dissent, and now these rages better suited to a thwarted three-year old, you have left the unnerving sense of a White House coming unglued – a chilling suspicion that perhaps we have not seen the peak of the anger; that we can no longer forecast what next will be said to, or about, anyone who disagrees.

Or what will next be done to them.

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Kevin Wiskus, a candidate for Iowa House District 94, has switched his party affiliation from Republican to Independent following what he said was a “shocking and tasteless�? mass-mailed brochure attacking his opponent.

The move, he said, was in response to a brochure from the Republican Party of Iowa attacking current state Rep. Kurt Swaim, D-Bloomfield.

“I do not support any kind of attack campaign tactics,�? Wiskus said. “Voters should be able to choose between qualified candidates based on individual merits. At no time should voters have to make a choice based on which candidate can throw the most mud.

“Though I had no prior knowledge of this vicious attack on you, I ask that you please accept my most sincere and humble apology to you and Julie,�? he wrote in an ad to appear in the Centerville Daily Iowegian.

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Protesters clashed with police and stormed the headquarters of Hungary’s state television early today, enraged at a leaked recording in which the prime minister admitted the government “lied morning, evening and night” about the economy.

Shiver me timbers, matey!

Remember the gerrymander from high school history class? Well, Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts politican (and later Vice President of the United States) is now dead and gone, but his spirit lives on. The basic idea is simple: draw the map to maximize the number of congressional seats for the party drawing the map. We saw this tactic being brazenly employed in the middle of a decade by Texas and _Georgia recently.

To make the concept clearer, consider a state with 8 million people and 12 congressional districts, for simplicity. If half the people are Democrats and half the people are Republicans, you might get 12 CDs, each with, say, 300,000 Democrats and 300,000 Republicans and competitive elections (assuming 800,000 children in the state). On some other planet maybe.

In reality, if the Democrats control the state government, they might draw eight districts with 350,000 Democrats and 250,000 Republicans, ensuring eight seats in Congress by margins of 58% to 42%. The remaining people would be stuffed into districts with 200,000 Democrats and 400,000 Republicans each. If the Republicans got to draw the map, they would do it precisely the other way. Either way, the guys drawing the map could be sure of 8 of the 12 seats.

Of course, to pull this off, they need the precinct-level election results from the previous election, which they have. The result is some mighty strange looking districts. Below are maps of some actual current CDs.

Check out our list of House races to see how much the incumbent won by in 2004.

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The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

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Our security research team has observed a new zero day exploit being used to infect systems. Coming from a porn website, this particular one is a vulnerability in VML inside of Internet Explorer.

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This exploit can be mitigated by turning off Javascripting.