I have to keep up with the news for my job. At the same time, I like to know what news everyone else is keeping up with. My favorite tool for this is the Yahoo! list of most popular news stories.
This feature puts the news stories, columns, and pictures that people click the most on one page, along with the most emailed and highest-rated content. So on this one page, I can see what people are reading and sharing most on the most popular news site in the world (as ranked by Alexa).
Sometimes this page can be surprising (like when an obscure science story makes it to the top of the list), sometimes it can be disappointing (when both lists fill up with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton “news”), and sometimes it can be downright bizarre.
So there you go: in one place, you can learn about secret jails in Ethiopia, doggie yoga, where to buy the car from Knight Rider, and of course the above story of a rocker mixing his father’s actions with cocaine. And the best part is, you can see how much people care about all of these things.
American astronaut Sunita Williams will run 26.2 miles on a treadmill on Patriots’ Day (April 16th for those of you outside of Massachusetts) while runners on the ground will compete in the 111th Boston Marathon, according this New Scientist article:
She says she is doing it to motivate children to be fit. “I encourage kids to start making physical fitness part of their daily lives,” Williams said. “I think a big goal like a marathon will help get this message out there.”
And yes, she is an actual registered participant who qualified by finishing among the top 100 women in the Houston Marathon in 2006. NASA’s press release touts this as yet another space first:
She will run the famed race in April as an official entrant from 210 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. This will be the first time an astronaut in space will be an official participant in a marathon.
I found this article on the word evolution last month, and today I finally tracked one of the researchers down for the phone interview below (for release on the Museum’s podcast tomorrow). The paper is about the use of the “E-Word” in scientific articles and popular news stories. I found the topic very interesting, and I’m proud of the way the interview came out.
Last night, a private launch vehicle from SpaceX Corporation made it most of the way to orbit. According to their website:
Falcon flew far beyond the “edge” of space, typically thought of as around 60 miles. Our altitude was approximately 200 miles, which is just 50 miles below the International Space Station. The second stage didn’t achieve full orbital velocity, due to a roll excitation late in the burn[.]
That means they had a failure late in the flight that made the spacecraft fall back to Earth. Not a complete failure, but seeing as the goal was to get something up into space and have it stay there, this certainly wasn’t a success.
Why then do we have Space.com (first below) and New Scientist Magazine (second) reporting the exact same story in opposite ways?
Everyone knows about the Boston Duck Tours, but there’s a new outfit in set to start tours from Charlestown soon: Super Duck Tours. I saw this one this morning at the intersection of Causeway and North Washington Streets, headed over the Charlestown Bridge.
According to an article about the amphibious tours in Maine, these Ducks are custom made for tourism (the Boston Duck Tours boats are old WWII military vehicles). A piece at CharlestownBridge.com says that they will leave from the Navy Yard and tour a route different from the Duck Boats:
The vehicles will load at Terry Ring Way in the Navy Yard, follow the truck route down Chelsea Street to the seaport and enter the water at the Little Mystic Channel. The Autoport on Terminal Street will serve as the maintenance and storage site for the vehicles. The tours begin daily at 9 a.m. and will take between one hour and one-quarter and one hour and one-half. Up to five tours could run each day, and the season could typically run from April through the end of November, depending on demand.
Now I know that Boston Duck Tours currently has a monopoly on the city’s amphibious tourism industry, but do we really need choice in our Ducks?
I usually read my news online (Reuters and AP wire stories via Yahoo! News), where it seems that speed is valued above quality. Stories are truncated, the same facts are given at both the beginning and the end of articles, and the pictures rarely relate well to the text. I’ve gotten used to these thrown-together stories that don’t completely make sense, but today I found what is probably the worst one I’ve ever seen.
This Associate Press story on the first transatlantic flight of the AirBus A380 is horrible. You can read it if you’d like but I’ll excerpt some of the “best” parts here (emphasis mine):
The four-engine Airbus A380 touched down at Kennedy International Airport at about 12:10 p.m., to the cheers of onlookers gathered to watch the arrival. As the plane taxied, a pilot waved an American flag. A separate A380 was flying to Los Angeles time but devoid of any passengers.
The air show began early Monday at Frankfurt International Airport when the took off as Lufthansa Flight 8940 for the eight-hour flight to Kennedy, scheduled to land at 12:30 p.m. EDT.
That one does double duty as a non sequitur (this is the only time in the article that an air show is mentioned) that also has words missing.
Using the performance results from this circuit — flying the plane as it would be done so if it were in service — Lufthansa’s goal is to match the A380’s turnaround time from landing to takeoff with that of much smaller long-haul jets already in operation.
The company revised its plan to allow for arrival at both locations. Los Angeles sped up construction of a $9 million gate for the giant gate to accommodate the plane.
In addition to these blatant errors, the wording of the whole article is off, and it is quite obvious that parts of it were pasted in from other places.
I wish someone would read the news before it was released to the public.
