No hoodies

Jenice Armstrong has an article in the Philadelphia Daily News about discrimination:

On the doors of some corner stores in certain Philadelphia neighborhoods, you'll notice bright red signs announcing: Do not enter with hoodie or mask. In smaller letters, the signs say: If so, you are now trespassing.
They're the brainchild of a Mount Airy-based businessman named Stark who started to sell them two years ago to help stem the tide of holdups inside bodegas and other businesses.
I'm all for anything to make streets safer. But the fact that the signs specifically target the ubiquitous hooded sweatshirt doesn't sit well with many, especially those concerned that it unfairly targets young African-American men.
Two years ago, hoodies became a national symbol of solidarity after unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by a self-appointed neighborhood vigilante while wearing one. But Stark, who's black, rightly maintains that a sign that reminds would-be customers to remove their hoods is not racist. "How could that be? White people wear hoods. Hispanics wear hoods. Black people wear hoods," he told me last week. "This is something I felt was necessary and something I felt should have been done a long time ago." Stark, who has dabbled in a variety of money-making pursuits over the years, got the idea for the controversial signs while watching the news. "I just kept seeing the same thing. The same patterns. Just robberies. Not being able to identify the person because the guy would have a hood on or a mask," he said.
So, in the fall of of 2012, Stark got a graphic artist to design the sign. Stark printed up ten and took them around to local stores on a test run. Priced at just ten bucks, they sold quickly. Stark printed up an additional two hundred signs.
Fast forward to 2014: Stark now has two workers to help with door-to-door sales. Last week, his operation was in New York City.
The internet took notice. DNAinfo.com was the first to note the signs popping up in businesses in Harlem. Since then, news outlets such as New York magazine, Philadelphia magazine, and a number of television news stations have reported on the signs. Stark estimates that he has sold a couple thousand. "A lot of times, as soon as I would show them to them, they would buy them," Stark pointed out. "It doesn't cost much, and it's something you need." Especially since common courtesies such as taking your hat off inside have gone the way of silk stockings.
"When people see the signs, they actually pull their hoods back," Stark said.
Er, sometimes.
Yesterday morning, I watched a slightly built guy with a gray hoodie obscuring his face dash right past a no-hoodie sign and into the 8 Brothers Food Market & Deli at 18th and Dickinson streets in South Philadelphia.
I moved down the street a bit and noticed another business with the sign prominently displayed on the door. When I went inside, I noticed a counter worker with a dark hoodie pulled up over his head. When I pointed out the sign to him, he sheepishly pulled it off. As I stood there, a customer waiting in line for food told me that her thirteen-year-old nephew has informed her that "you're not cool if you don't have your hoodie on."
Freida English, who lives nearby, is glad that businesses have posted the signs. "It's a good idea," she said. "I notice that all of these little stores got that in their windows."
But there's a line between being cautious and profiling customers based on their clothing choices.
That's what troubles Chad Dion Lassiter, president of Black Men at the Penn School of Social Work and a trustee of the Philadelphia Prison System. "When I heard about it, it reminded me of that sign that was down at Geno's," he said ,referring to the infamous sign that read: This is America: when ordering, speak English. "I have a problem with the signs," Lassiter said. "I think they are extremely offensive. However, I agree there needs to be a message that we don't want hoodies worn inside. Young people need to know that you don't go into any building with a hood on or a mask. But I don't think we need a sign," Lassiter added. "Signs can be inflammatory."

Rico says he sometimes wears a hooded jacket when out, so he won't be shopping at these stores, but it does not seem an unreasonable request, except to the thugs involved...

SEPTA idiot for the day

Vinny Vella has an article in the Philadelphia Daily News about a guy caught doing the nasty in public:

It was far from a stroke of genius.
Kevin Fant (photo), 44, a SEPTA Transit Police officer, was placed on administrative leave yesterday after he was literally caught with his pants down, Jerri Williams, a SEPTA spokeswoman, said in a statement.
A video of Fant masturbating on a subway train reached SEPTA's administration last week, according to Transit Police Chief Thomas Nestel. The footage, recorded in August of 2014 on a Broad Street Line train, shows Fant getting in touch with himself while off duty. Members of SEPTA's social-media department found the clip during a routine search of online postings mentioning the transit authority, Nestel said.
After a Transit Police captain viewed the video and positively identified Fant, the department took "immediate action," said Nestel. Investigators obtained a search warrant for Fant's home, where they found clothing matching what the person had worn in the video.
"This is disgusting and shameful," Nestel said, "but I'm proud of the fact that the Transit Police detected the problem, investigated the problem, and made the arrest of one of their own for criminal activity."
Fant, a twelve-year veteran of the department working as a bike-patrol officer, faces charges of indecent exposure and open lewdness, according to Williams. A warrant for his arrest was approved by the District Attorney's Office, and he was expected to turn himself in last night.
The transit authority has suspended Fant while it continues to investigate, Williams said.
Fant faced an unrelated disciplinary charge in 2012, according to Nestel.

Rico says one can only call this stupidity inFantile...

Slavery and economics

Delanceyplace.com has a selection from The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist:

Historians have minimized the terrible legacy of American slavery by characterizing it as a phenomenon isolated in the South, a sleepy, unproductive business made irrelevant by the industrialization of the north. Historian Edward Baptist argues the opposite. He contends that cotton was the world's leading commodity and powered an economic dynamo with tendrils throughout the US, and that "Northern merchants and bankers and factory owners invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery's expansion". He argues that the business of slavery had a ruthless economic appetite that made slavery all the more terrible:

By the early twentieth century, America's first generation of professional historians were insisting that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking, but was, instead, an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy, let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion, and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, Northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.

It didn't. But, even though the data of declining productivity over the ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been the most efficient way to produce the world's most important crop, no one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of Woodrow Wilson's generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt or, increasingly, nostalgia.
I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history, not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre-Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents.
For a long time I wasn't sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre-Civil War United States. Enslavers' surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases, as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of Northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery's expansion.
From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved a million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton, to speak of, in 1790, to making almost two billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States, but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa.
Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood, or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people's creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African-Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

Rico says this will interest his friend Kema, director of the on-line Slavery Museum...

Disaster aid for Hawai'ian town

Per Liljas has a Time article about the volcano:

President Barack Obama signed a Disaster Declaration for Public Assistance to help a small Hawai'ian town cope with the ongoing lava flow threatening its residents.
The declaration comes in response to Governor Neil Abercrombie’s request for Federal aid to boost local emergency protective measures, including repairs, re-establishment of alternate routes in and out of affected communities, and the accommodation of around nine hundred schoolchildren that are expected to be displaced, reports local channel KITV4.
The smoldering lava has been creeping toward the small town of Paho'a since a new vent opened on the Kilauea volcano on 27 June 2014. Currently, the flow has stalled a few hundred feet from Paho'a Village Road.
“We can definitely see a bit of a glow, smell the smoke and the burning vegetation,” says Eric Johnson, a teacher at the Hawai'i Academy of Arts and Science (HAAS), located one road down. “On occasions, I’ve heard loud booms, like shotgun blasts, when methane pockets in the ground explode.”
However, the village of about nine hundred has become known for its independent-mindedness and some people in the community are critical of the government’s response.
“I’m not worried about the volcano, I’m worried about the government,” local resident Robert Petricci tells Time. “The lava has been inching forward for thirty years, now the National Guard is here with humvees and flak vests, like it’s a war zone. Everything’s a mess, with all the checkpoints, asking people who they’re riding with and where they’re going.”
Johnson’s students have meanwhile launched a social media campaign called Hope for HAAS, coming up with projects on how to facilitate living with a volcano, like ideas for bridges over lava streams. “I’m very impressed and proud of the kids, they’ve decided to make a bad situation into something positive,” Johnson says. He points out that diverting lava flows is viewed in traditional Hawai'ian culture as disrespecting the volcano goddess Pele. “The lava flow is very unpredictable, but Hawai'ians have always lived with volcanoes. This project is creating hope, and plays a part in keeping the community who we are.”

Rico says he can't wait for the 'favoritism' crap to start about Obama's home state. (And diverting a lava flow is simple; you just have to pump a zillion gallons of sea water onto the leading edge until it freezes up, and then the rest of it goes where it wants, as ever...)

Obituary for the day

Rico says the Car Guys were long a fixture on the ladyfriend's radio, but Noam Cohen has an obituary in The New York Times for one of them:

Tom Magliozzi (photo, left), who, with his younger brother Ray, hosted Car Talk, for years the most popular entertainment show on NPR, died recently at his home outside Boston, Massachusetts. He was 77. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s, according to NPR.
The weekly hourlong Car Talk, which was broadcast for more than thirty years, was ostensibly about mechanical problems with cars, but the format was mainly an excuse for the brothers, known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, to banter with callers about the mysteries of life, as viewed through an automotive prism: Why does a car suddenly stop working? Should I give this clunker one more chance? Why won’t my husband pay for a mechanic to fix our car?
Callers would frequently reproduce a strange noise their car was making, and the brothers would offer an instant diagnosis. In a segment called Stump the Chumps, selected callers would be asked if the advice they had received proved to be correct.
At its peak, Car Talk reached more than four million listeners a week, more than any other NPR entertainment program, network executives said.
The brothers stopped producing new shows in 2012, but taped episodes are still heard on 660 stations, with an audience of over three million. This weekend, Ray Magliozzi plans to use the show to offer a tribute to his brother, said Doug Berman, who has been executive producer of Car Talk since it went nationwide in 1987, ten years after it was first broadcast in the Boston area. The show will be renamed “Best of Car Talk”.
On the air, the brothers were a team, swapping stories, chortling at each other’s jokes. Ray, who is twelve years younger, has a higher-pitched voice; Tom had the deeper voice and a laugh that tended to run away with itself. Both had unmistakable Boston accents.
When asked who was Click and who was Clack, “they said they didn’t know,” Berman recalled. Another favorite line, he said, was “that they shared one brain, and were each working with a half.”
Thomas Louis Magliozzi (pronounced mal-YOT-zee) was born on 28 June 1937, in a largely Italian-American section of Cambridge, Massachusetts (which the brothers always referred to as “our fair city”). He was the first in his family to attend college, NPR reported, earning a chemical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958. His brother graduated from MIT in 1972.
In addition to his brother, Magliozzi is survived by a sister, Lucille Magliozzi; three children, Lydia Magliozzi Icke, Alex Magliozzi, and Anna Magliozzi; five grandchildren; and his companion of recent years, Sylvia Soderberg. He was married and divorced twice.
By his own account, after graduating from college, Magliozzi took a conventional path as an engineer until experiencing a “defining moment” after being involved in a close call on the highway. He described the incident in 1999, when the brothers shared a commencement speech at their alma mater. Tom described driving on Route 128 to his job in Foxboro, Massachusetts, in a little MG that “weighed about fifty pounds” when a semi-truck cut him off. Afterward, he thought about how pathetic it would have been if he had died having “spent all my life, that I can remember at least, going to this job, living a life of quiet desperation. So I pulled up into the parking lot, walked to my boss’s office and quit on the spot.” His brother chimed in, “Most people would have bought a bigger car.”
The two started a do-it-yourself car repair shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Hackers Haven, but found that their clientele needed more than some work space, a few tools and occasional advice. So they changed the name and philosophy and opened the Good News Garage, a traditional auto repair shop, which is still in operation.
After appearing on a local public radio station, WBUR, the brothers were invited to appear on a new national show, Weekend Edition Sunday, hosted by Susan Stamberg. In an interview, Stamberg recalled how hard it had been to sell NPR executives on the idea of building a radio program around two mechanics talking about cars. But cars, she said, were beside the point: “What I loved was the relationship between them.” Early on she would mention the garage as part of their introduction until they told her to “stop using the name, we can’t handle the traffic”, Stamberg said. Nine months later, in 1977, Car Talk was its own show.
The shows were live, but Berman said the calls were lined up in advance, without the brothers’ knowledge. One of the most memorable calls came in 1997. Not unusually, it was from a man complaining about his vehicle. “It’s rough for two minutes,” he said, “and after these rough two minutes there’s kind of a jolt, and then it runs smooth, but only for the next six minutes; after that, the engine dies.” A few more details emerged: an odometer showing sixty million miles, at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. “This must be a Dodge Dart,” Tom said.
Soon, however, the brothers deduced, correctly, that the caller was in space. As it turned out, he was John M. Grunsfeld, an astronaut on the International Space Station.
He mentioned that he had gone to a “small technical institute up the river.” “Oh, that place,” Tom interjected. Grunsfeld continued: “Around 1977, I used to have this green Sunbeam Alpine, and I would pay a few bucks an hour and some folks would help me fix it. I think they sound kind of familiar.”

Rico says they'll be missed...

History for the day

On 4 November 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States, as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

Addiction is an ugly thing

Rico says that his is to a crystalline white powder (like everyone else's), but his is, fortunately or unfortunately, legal, cheap, and readily available: sugar.
Having, alas, been seduced by the stuff, yet again, Rico will be (expensively, but removing temptation has its price) dumping all traces of the stuff from the house later today...

Mozart, performed unusually

Rico's arch-perv friend Dave forwards this video:

Tomb of the Unknowns

Fold3 has an article about the first Tomb:

On 11 November 1921, President Warren G. Harding presided over the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknowns, also commonly called the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which originally honored fallen American servicemen from World War One whose remains had not been identified.
Congress approved the creation of the memorial in March of 1921. To ensure that the identity of the American really was unknown, the bodies of four unidentified World War One servicemen were disinterred from various French cemeteries. They were placed in identical caskets and brought to Chalons-sur-Marne, France, where Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a war hero, selected one of the four caskets at random during a ceremony at the city hall on 24 October 1921.
The selected casket was placed on board the USS Olympia during another ceremony and sent to the United States, where it arrived on 9 November 1921. The casket was brought with much dignity to the Capitol, where the casket was put on public display on the tenth. An estimated ninety thousand people came to pay their respects to the Unknown Soldier, so many that the rotunda was kept open until midnight to accommodate them all.
On the morning of 11 November, the newly declared Armistice Day holiday, the enormous funeral procession for the Unknown Soldier proceeded from the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery. During the funeral at Arlington’s Memorial Amphitheater, President Harding gave a speech and bestowed the Medal of Honor and Distinguished Service Cross on the Unknown Soldier; other nations also bestowed their highest honors. The casket was then moved to the tomb, where a funeral service was read, and then officials and dignitaries laid wreaths and other tributes. The funeral ended with the playing of Taps and a twenty-one-gun salute.
At the time of the burial, the tomb had yet to be completed. The marble structure that now stands was installed in 1932 and bears the inscription Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known but to God. Unknown soldiers representing the fallen of World War Two and the Korean War were laid to rest at the monument in 1958. A soldier from the Vietnam War was interred at the monument in 1984 but, through DNA testing, the body was positively identified in 1998 and returned to his family.

Rico says that Harding was kind of a dweeb in his day, but you gotta love a guy who carries a middle name like Gamaliel... (And they took out the Soldier part so as not to offend possible dead sailors and Marines...)

Not so important, after all

Rico says that, when your interminably-repeating corporate phone message insists that Rico's call is "very important", and then your system hangs up, all by itself, Rico doesn't feel very important...

A rosary and a medal, seven years later

Morgan Zalot has an article in the Philadelphia Daily News about a good cop remembered:

Seven years after Officer Chuck Cassidy (in poster, center) was gunned down in the line of duty, his wife, Judy, finally received a small piece of her husband, her high-school sweetheart. The memento just surfaced, unexpectedly, inside the Northwest Philadelphia police district where he spent the last eleven years of his twenty-five-year career.
It was on a shelf in 35th Police District locker number 156, which now stands as a memorial to the fallen officer inside district headquarters at Broad and Champlost.
There, a lieutenant on the anniversary of when Cassidy was fatally shot, found a small, black change holder, pants, and a uniform shirt that had somehow been overlooked when the locker was cleared of Cassidy's belongings in 2007. Inside the change holder, something more personal: a rosary and a medal of St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of police.
Captain Joe Fredericksdorf, now commander of the 35th, gave the change holder to Cassidy's wife and their three adult children during a candlelight vigil in his memory.
The ceremony was held outside a Dunkin' Donuts on Broad Street near 66th Avenue, where he was shot in the head when he interrupted a gunpoint robbery the morning of 31 October 2007. He died the next day.
Governor Corbett signed an execution warrant for Cassidy's shooter, Lewis Jordan, now 27, in April of 2014. As is common in death-penalty cases in Pennsylvania, his execution was stayed pending appeal.
The ceremony, though, was about remembering the decorated officer, whom Fredericksdorf said received numerous commendations during his long career, and is remembered daily in the district headquarters, where his portrait is painted outside and his locker still stands. "For seven years, the locker has kept a silent vigil, acting as a sentry for those preparing for work," Fredericksdorf said of the locker, which had fallen into disrepair recently when the locking assembly came loose, leading officers in the district to open it and find the rosary and medal.
"We would like to present this, along with flowers, to the Cassidy family at this time, as the most personal item of Chuck's that just resurfaced, seven years later."
About two hundred civilians, clergy, and police officers, from patrol cops to top brass, stood on Broad Street last night paying homage, despite the biting wind.
"It's overwhelming," Judy Cassidy said during the vigil, her voice faltering as she broke down, crying. "I just can't thank everybody enough for remembering."

Rico says there are good cops...

Wrongly accused suicide victim

Jason Laughlin has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a rush to judgement:

For more than five weeks, the family of Sunil Tripathi (photo) of Radnor, Pennsylvania mobilized a massive effort to find him. The Internet was a major resource. Family posted videos pleading for the Brown University student to come home. Social networks spread the word about the missing 22-year-old, but then, in a matter of hours, they became the medium by which Tripathi was falsely identified as one of the terrorists responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings.
A new documentary, Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi, shows how old and new media's quest to be first with information wrongly accused an innocent man and created a nightmare for Tripathi's family. But the film is about more than media malpractice. It seeks to show who Tripathi really was, and spotlights the depression that led him to take his own life a month before the bombing took place.
"I felt like, as I was approaching this film, in order to tell the story, we have to know who Sunil is," director Neal Broffman said. "Enough was said about him that was not true the night of the misidentification." Broffman said he and his wife, Elisa Gambino, the film's producer, became interested in the case of mistaken identity and media frenzy after befriending Tripathi's older sister Sangeeta while working on a film for Johnson & Johnson in Africa. Sangeeta Tripathi stayed in contact with the couple, and they helped the Tripathi family by editing videos begging the missing student to return.
Broffman began filming at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania memorial service in June of 2013, and finished the documentary in September of 2014. The quarter-million dollar film has been submitted to numerous festivals, including Sundance and Tribeca. The filmmakers expect to hear in December of 2014 whether it has been accepted. They are also seeking a distributor. More information and a trailer are available at helpusfindsuniltripathi.com.
False rumors about Tripathi began when users on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook noted he resembled a picture of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect. That observation cascaded into suspicion, and then a stream of furious and sometimes racist messages. Reddit users posted that police mentioned Tripathi as a suspect over a scanner, though the filmmakers could find no evidence that police ever said that. Commenters called Tripathi a Communist and al-Qaeda, and included threats like "we need to find this guy and beat him repeatedly." Broffman himself received an email accusing him of being a terrorist.
Like a virus, the bad information spread to national media outlets. The Tripathi family, desperate to hear from Sunny, instead received more than fifty calls in one night from reporters asking them to comment about rumors that their loved one was a terrorist.
"I was very upset by what happened, by the misidentification, by how the journalists behaved, by how people behaved online," said Broffman, who worked as a CNN editor and videographer for twelve years.
The film concludes with facts about mental illness. Title cards state that millions of people worldwide suffer from depression, and that suicide is the second leading cause of death among males ages fifteen to thirty.
The signs of Tripathi's illness were obvious. His grades fell, and his interest in music waned, family said. He took a leave from school, but wanted to remain in Providence, Rhode Island. He could cope without medication, he said, and told his family he would never harm himself. "The thought of him ending his life," Tripathi's mother, Judy, said this week, "if you had told me that could happen, I would say no."
Members of the Tripathi family participated in the documentary to highlight who their relative was and the pain depression caused him. They have seen the movie, and seek to screen it locally in 2015.
Tripathi's mother said that family members knew her son was hurting and talked to him constantly about getting help, but were afraid that, if they pushed too hard, he would wall them out or run away. She thinks he could have been saved if he had been taking antidepressants, but he disliked consuming any artificial substances, and may have been embarrassed by his condition. "Mental illness is an illness and should be regarded without any discrimination or judgment," she said.

Rico says it's too bad the kid killed himself, and worse that he was falsely accused...

The impact of meditation on the brain

Delanceyplace.com has a selection from Mind of the Meditator by Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz, and Richard J. Davidson:

Brain imaging shows that when we master a task, such as playing an instrument or an advanced performance in a sport, specific parts of the brain are transformed and certain neural pathways grow and strengthen. Neuroscientists have now shown that the same is true for mastery of meditation with direct benefits for improving focus, overcoming depression, dealing with pain and cultivating emotional well-being:

A comparison of the brain scans of meditators with tens of thousands of hours of practice with those of neophytes and non-meditators has started to explain why this set of techniques for training the mind holds great potential for supplying cognitive and emotional benefits.
The discovery of meditation's benefits coincides with recent neuroscientific findings showing that the adult brain can still be deeply transformed through experience. These studies show that when we learn how to juggle or play a musical instrument, the brain undergoes changes through a process called neuroplasticity. A brain region that controls the movement of a violinist's fingers becomes progressively larger with mastery of the instrument. A similar process appears to happen when we meditate. Nothing changes in the surrounding environment, but the meditator regulates mental states to achieve a form of inner enrichment, an experience that affects brain functioning and its physical structure. The evidence amassed from this research has begun to show that meditation can rewire brain circuits to produce salutary effects not just on the mind and the brain but on the entire body.
The illustration shows that twelve expert meditators had greater overlap of increased activation of attention-related brain regions, while twelve non-meditators had less overlap and activation. Orange hues equal higher correlation between individuals & activation. Blue hues equal little to no correlation between regions of activation.
Neuroscientists have now begun to probe what happens inside the brain during the various types of meditation. Wendy Hasenkamp, then at Emory University, and her colleagues used brain imaging to identify the neural networks activated by focused- attention meditation. Advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the skill of expert musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the 'flow' of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control.
In their Wisconsin lab, they studied experienced practitioners while they performed an advanced form of mindfulness meditation called open presence. In open presence, sometimes called pure awareness, the mind is calm and relaxed, not focused on anything in particular, yet vividly clear, free from excitation or dullness. The meditator observes and is open to experience without making any attempt to interpret, change, reject, or ignore painful sensation. The intensity of the pain was not reduced in meditators, but it bothered them less than it did members of a control group. Compared with novices, expert meditators' brain activity diminished in anxiety-related regions, the insular cortex and the amygdala, in the period preceding the painful stimulus. The meditators' brain response in pain-related regions became accustomed to the stimulus more quickly than that of novices after repeated exposures to it. Other tests in the lab have shown that meditation training increases one's ability to better control and buffer basic physiological responses, inflammation or levels of a stress hormone, to a socially stressful task such as giving a public speech or doing mental arithmetic in front of a harsh jury.
Several studies have documented the benefits of mindfulness on symptoms of anxiety and depression and its ability to improve sleep patterns. By deliberately monitoring and observing their thoughts and emotions when they feel sad or worried, depressed patients can use meditation to manage negative thoughts and feelings as they arise spontaneously and so lessen rumination. Clinical psychologists John Teasdale, then at the University of Cambridge in England and Zindel Segal of the University of Toronto in Canada showed in 2000 that, for patients who had previously suffered at least three episodes of depression, six months of mindfulness practice, along with cognitive therapy, reduced the risk of relapse by nearly forty percent in the year following the onset of a severe depression. More recently, Segal demonstrated that the intervention is superior to a placebo and has a protective effect against relapse comparable to standard maintenance antidepressant therapy.
About fifteen years of research have done more than show that meditation produces significant changes in both the function and structure of the brains of experienced practitioners. These studies are now starting to demonstrate that contemplative practices may have a substantive impact on biological processes critical for physical health.

Rico says that learning to really meditate is non-trivial...

History for the day

On 3 November 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected in a landslide over the Republican candidate, Alfred M. ''Alf'' Landon.

Rico says that no one nicknamed 'Alf' would make it in politics theses days, and this (it's not 'Animal Liberation Front', so it was probably 'Alien Life Form'...) is why:

Frazetta

Rico's friend Kelley forwards this 1954 photo (above) of Ellie and Frank Frazetta, one of the great illustrators of all time, and a favorite of both Rico and Kelley; below is one of his finest:

More alternative history

Rico says some realities are harder to grasp:

and the real thing, with Sean Connery:

and the paratroopers:

More Civil War for the day

Rico says this is one 'alternative history':

Civil War for the day

Rico's friend Kelley, knowing Rico's interest in Da Wawah, forwards this video by Jack Noble:

Watch the entire war unfold in the video.

The Civil War was a crucial moment in American history, a bitter struggle for the nation’s future and, depending on how you look at it, it was basically over before it began. Looking at a dynamic map (video, above) of the war shows just how hard-pressed the Confederacy was from the start, and how the Union attacked from all sides to crush the South.
The video shows the day-by-day progress of the war, and as a tight noose of Union ships form a blockade, it becomes clear that the Confederacy is facing a lopsided fight. Before long, the Confederacy, which had a much smaller industrial base than the Union and was able to field half as many soldiers as the northern states, is split in two along the Mississippi.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s march into Pennsylvania, culminating in the “high water mark of the Confederacy” at the Battle of Gettysburg, is merely a blip on the shifting map.  civil war youtube
“I didn’t realize the move into Pennsylvania to Gettysburg was so insignificant,” one commenter noted. “It was a very narrow corridor that was quickly crushed.”
Little more than a year later, Union General William Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia, featured heavily in the classic tale Gone With the Wind,  shows up as a brutal blue line splitting Virginia and the Carolinas away from the rest of the South. More American soldiers died in the Civil War than in any other war (largely because, of course, both sides doing the fighting were Americans), with some studies estimating that as many as nearly nine hundred thousand soldiers perished in fighting, from diseases and from other causes over the course of the War.

Rico says he's still amazed at how much carnage happened in those four years... 

Toenails can be ugly

Rico says he's still fighting his own toenail problem, but this guy really has one:

Space for the day

Dan Hirschhorn has a Time article about the Virgin Galactic crash:

Billionaire Richard Branson promised that he would find out what caused one of his Virgin Galactic commercial spaceships to crash, in an accident that killed one pilot and seriously injured another. “We are determined to find out what went wrong,” Branson (videos) said at the California facility where the spacecraft was developed.
Branson, the bombastic mogul who also owns airlines, a wireless brand, and many other businesses, has long been at the forefront of efforts to charge wealthy tourists a hefty sum for even a brief moment to enjoy the weightlessness and view of Earth from space. But the commercial space industry is facing tough questions after two accidents in one week: the crash of Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo on Friday and the explosion of the unmanned Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket on Tuesday.
Branson didn’t provide any new details about the accident. Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating. Branson said safety will always come first. “We’re not going to push on blindly,” he said. “We’re going to learn from what went wrong. We’ve always known that commercial space travel is an incredibly hard project,” he added. “We’ve been undertaking a comprehensive testing program for many years, and safety has always been our number one priority.”

Rico says people gotta expect problems with space travel; if it was easy, anyone could do it (remember The Mouse That Roared?)

Winter, 2014

NBC News has an article about the upcoming (bad) winter:

A wintry storm that dumped historic early snow on parts of Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia arrived in the Northeast on Sunday, delivering heavy winds and wet snow to some areas.
More than thirteen thousand power outages were already reported across southern New England by Sunday afternoon, according to NBC-owned station New England Cable News. The National Weather Service issued high wind warnings across the area, with gusts expected to reach sixty mph.
Parts of Maine, especially surrounding Bangor, had already accumulated up to eight inches of snow by mid-Sunday, and more was expected before nightfall, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. Up to a foot of snow was expected in northern and eastern Maine before the storm moved into Eastern Canada on Sunday night and Monday.
Toledo, Ohio, tied its record low for the date at 22 degrees, according to Weather.com, but the north wasn’t the only region seeing the effects of the early winter weather. Record lows were set in parts of Florida, which saw temperatures plunge to the low forties on Sunday morning, Weather.com reported.
In North Carolina, the areas around Asheville were socked by as much as six inches of snow on Saturday. In Tennessee, almost thirteen inches of snow fell near Hartford, a mountainous area. The beginning of the work-week will be calmer, but another storm could be headed toward the Great Lakes region by Friday, Weather.com warned.

Rico says he's not looking forward to any of it, but this particular storm seems to have (fortunately) bypassed Philadelphia...

Bad behavior

Cory Buck has a Time article about sexual abuse of the wrong guy:

If you heard that Mike Tyson was visiting Opie and Jim Norton (photo), you’d expect some kind of debauched conversation to take place that was suitable only for a satellite radio audience. Instead, Tyson opened up about his past in a candid and heartfelt way, discussing how an incident from his youth may have shaped him as a man going forward, even if he doesn’t exactly know how.
In the interview, Tyson discussed how he was snatched up at seven years old by an older man who ‘bullied me, sexually abused me, and stuff… snatched me off the street. I was a little kid. Never seen him again.’
One of the saddest parts is toward the end, where Tyson claims he doesn’t know how the incident affected or shaped his youth, and that going back down to examine those times can be a hard, lonely process.
Tyson lived in poverty as a child and never reported this incident, preferring instead to live with it on his own. Given the roller coaster ride that has been Mike Tyson since the early 1990s, it seems the effects of his abuse are incalculable. At least now, years and years removed from this harrowing time, the former heavyweight champion can look back with honesty and perhaps begin to understand how this may have shaped him.

Rico says the guy better hope that Tyson never sees him again...

History for the day

On 2 November 1976, Jimmy Carter (photo, second from left), the former Governor of Georgia, defeated the Republican incumbent, Gerald R. Ford, becoming the first American president from the Deep South since the Civil War.

Rico says he could never take a President seriously who called himself Jimmy...

Movie review for the day (MitM)

Rico says he and the ladyfriend went to see Magic in the Moonlight, a Woody Allen film starring Colin Firth. It was good, but very Allen-like, with the costar (Emma Stone; photo) standing in for Mia Farrow...

(Rico still wonders: whatever happened to movie stars with tits? Ah, the days of Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale...)

Not just yet for Rico...

...but Rutger Hauer knew when, in Blade Runner:

Another forgotten war...

...and another great BBC series, Sharpe's Rifles, about the British intervention in the Peninsular War in Spain against the French:

The forgotten war

Rico says that we've forgotten about the Mexican-American War of 1846, but they haven't...

The Guns of August

Rico says they won't let him embed it, but you can see The Guns of August here, and it is just past the anniversary of the start of the First World War...

Holmes

Rico says it's not as good as Elementary, or even Sherlock, but it is Holmes:

Reilly, Ace of Spies

Rico says it's the first episode of another of his favorite BBC series:

Rumpole of the Bailey

Rico says they're all good, but this is the first episode:

WTF is up with the Internet?

Rico says there are things happening on the Internet that he fails to understand:

1: Why does he keep getting spam emails in Hungarian, a language almost no one speaks? (Rico forwarded them to an old friend who does, because he was born there, and they're just spam, only in Hungarian.)
2. Where were all these women who keep sending him salacious emails when Rico was single? (The karma lords, having a laugh at Rico's expense, as usual.)

The Giants win the Series

Instagram has a photo (above) by Anthony Quintano of the first fireworks over San Francisco's City Hall following the Giants winning the World Series.

An unusual animal in an unexpected place

The Associated Press has an article at Weather.com about a wolf who apparently wandered south:

Officials say a wolf-like animal has been spotted and photographed in northern Arizona this week. The Fish and Wildlife Service reports that the animal, which resembles a gray wolf, has been seen at the Kaibab National Forest, north of the Grand Canyon.
The animal is said to sport a collar similar to those worn by wolves that are part of a recovery effort in the Northern Rockies. A gray wolf would be a rarity in this area of North America.
Agency spokesman Jeff Humphrey says the animal could be from that population, which now numbers seventeen hundred, or is a lone wolf-dog hybrid. Officials plan to test fecal matter from the animal to help investigate its origins. Humphrey says the animal should be treated as endangered until more is known about it. "Our immediate concern is the welfare of this animal," Humphrey said.
A group of fewer than a hundred endangered Mexican gray wolves lives in portions of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, but Humphrey said the animal does not appear to be from that population. Wolves in the Northern Rockies have fuller bodies and less pointed ears than Mexican gray wolves.
Wolves largely were exterminated early last century across the lower 48 states, except in the western Great Lakes area. They've been absent from the Grand Canyon region since the 1940s.
The Fish and Wildlife Service in recent years lifted protections for the animals in the western Great Lakes and the Northern Rockies. A federal judge recently ordered the protections re-instated in Wyoming after wildlife advocates sued.
Grand Canyon Superintendent Dave Uberuaga said the park has received a couple of reports about an animal that resembles a wolf at the North Rim. He said park officials will be on the lookout for it. Wolves often roam vast distances in search of food and mates. Packs from the Northern Rockies have been found as far south as Wyoming.
Environmentalists said the confirmed presence of a gray wolf around the Grand Canyon would be welcome news, but remain concerned about a proposal to remove them from a list of protected species.
"There's an increasing number of people who have learned about the pivotal role wolves play in natural ecosystems, know they have been persecuted relentlessly over decades and cheer the return of wolves," said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity. "And there are people who are fearful, concerned, and opposed."
Nancy Gloman of Defenders of Wildlife said the group would like to see wolves in suitable habitat from Canada to Mexico.

Rico says it'd be nice to hear wolves howling (though his cats would hate it)...

Self-destructing

Denver Nicks has a Time article about the Antares rocket:

The unmanned rocket that exploded seconds after liftoff recently on its way to the International Space Station did so because the operator hit 'self-destruct' once problems with the launch became apparent, the company that owns it said.
The Antares rocket, operated by Orbital Sciences Corp., crashed in a large fire, scattering debris over a wide area. It was carrying more than five thousand pounds of scientific instruments, food and other supplies for the astronauts aboard the space station when down with the rocket. NASA says the space station is equipped with plenty of food to last while additional resupply missions are organized.
Orbital spokesperson Barron Beneski told CNN that the crash was initiated by the flight termination system. Such an order is typically given after it’s clear the rocket will not meet its intended trajectory in order to ensure that it goes down over a relatively small and unpopulated area. No injuries were reported in the crash.
The problem occurred in the first stage of launch, Orbital said, in a possible sign that its vintage, Russian-designed engines could have been the cause.

Rico says he's still wondering if Denver is Stevie Nicks' brother, but never mind... (And that would've been a long, hard moment before the launch director hit that button.)

Ugh. Winter

Rico says that sometimes just the headline is bad enough, and this one, from Time via NBC News, certainly is:

Eastern U.S. Set for Weekend Cold Snap, Record Lows

The article, of course, is no better:

An arctic blast is giving millions of people a real reason to shiver on Halloween.
Trick-or-treaters from the Midwest to the Mississippi Valley to the East Coast faced a deep chill Friday, and strong, freezing winds took hold across the Great Lakes region. Parts of northern Michigan and Wisconsin saw eight inches of snowfall, according to Weather.com, while other areas through the Ohio Valley and Appalachians got flurries and wet snow.

 

Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (photo) had canceled more than seven hundred incoming and outgoing flights by Friday night because of heavy winds, rain and snow, according to FlightAware.com.
The southern Appalachians are also expected to get up to eight inches of snow by Saturday morning, and Maine could see up to six inches, according to Weather.com. Temperatures would likely fall ten to fifteen degrees below average over the weekend from the Great Lakes all the way south to the Central Gulf Coast, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
“It’s certainly unusual,” Weather Channel lead meteorologist Michael Palmer said. “It’s early for snow in many areas, and the temperatures are definitely lower than we would expect.” In the Midwest, winds gusting to fifty mph and snow showers are expected around a stormy Lake Michigan. Parts of at least a dozen Midwest states were under freeze warnings by the NWS on Friday night.
Freezing temperatures could occur as far south as northern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia on Saturday morning, and in central Mississippi, northern Georgia, and western parts of the Carolinas on Sunday morning, Weather.com said. Record lows are expected Sunday morning in Florida, including the Miami area.
The system is expected to move eastward over the weekend, bringing some rain to New York City and New England.

Rico says it's precisely this shit that makes him long for warmer climates... (But record lows in Miami? WTF happened to global warming?)

Enough, already

Jeffery Kluger has a Time article deriding the 'amateurs' in the space program:

A fatal accident in the Mojave Desert is a lesson in the perils of space hubris. An unmanned Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket exploded shortly after takeoff at Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia on 28 October 2014.
It’s difficult not to feel sympathy for the hard-working people of Virgin Galactic— Sir Richard Branson’s private space tourism company— after the loss of their SpaceShipTwo vehicle in a crash in the Mojave Desert. And it’s completely impossible not to hurt for the families of the two pilots involved in the accident—one of whom was killed and the other of whom suffered serious injuries, according to local police.
But it’s hard too not to be angry, even disgusted, with Branson himself. He is, as today’s tragedy shows, a man driven by too much hubris, too much hucksterism, and too little knowledge of the head-crackingly complex business of engineering. For the twenty-first century billionaire, space travel is what buying a professional sports team was for the rich boys of an earlier era: the biggest, coolest, most impressive toy imaginable. Amazon.com zillionaire Jeff Bezos has his own spacecraft company, because what can better qualify a man to build machines able to travel to space than selling books, televisions, and lawn furniture online? Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has a space operation too because, well, spacecraft have computers and that’s sort of the same thing, right?
Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines, is at least in the business of flying aircraft, but the key part of that compound word is air. Space, as Branson surely knows, has none of that, and that changes the physics considerably.
A Virgin crash always seemed troublingly likely. And, since it is the company’s whole purpose to carry passengers, it seemed equally likely to hurt or kill a lot of people too. I visited Branson’s self-styled spaceport in the Mojave last year to watch a brief test flight of his spacecraft. The mission that day was intended more as an air show than anything else— part of a pep rally for the hundreds of Virgin customers who would be attending to hear about the company’s progress. All of them had reserved a seat and paid a deposit toward their $200,000 ticket for a trip that, if it ever happened, would last just fifteen minutes and ascend to just a hundred kilometers, which technically counts as being in space, but only to the extent that riding a jet ski off the beach in Fort Lauderdale counts as going to sea.
But never mind, because the crowd seemed happy to be there and to take Branson’s word that they really, truly would get their chance to be astronauts. For the record, the demonstration flight they had come to see never took off due to high desert winds.
The Virgin crash comes just three days after the 28 October 2014 explosion of an Antares rocket taking off from Wallops Island, Virginia on an unmanned resupply mission to the International Space Station. That first part of a very bad week for the space industry was especially cautionary, because Orbital Sciences, the Virginia-based manufacturer of the rocket, is by no means a newcomer. It’s been in the business for more than three decades, and has a very good track record of getting payloads— but not passengers— off the ground and into orbit. Yet even it cannot control all of the lethal variables— technical, meteorological, human— that make space travel such a dicey game.
The practice of non-professionals insinuating themselves into the space business is not new. We have a launch facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida, yet built a Mission Control center halfway across the country in Houston, Texas—the least efficient, most senseless arrangement imaginable— because then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson was the White House point man for the space program and he wanted his home state of Texas to get a bite of the big moon pie. Ex-Senator Jake Garn and current Senator Bill Nelson both elbowed their way aboard space shuttle flights since, unlike all of the other American kids who want to play spaceman, they were powerful figures in Congress and could loosen or tighten NASA’s purse strings at will.
Once NASA announced that, after the shuttle program ended in 2011, it would be outsourcing the low Earth orbit portion of its portfolio to the private sector, it was inevitable that there would be a scramble of companies vying for those contracts— and that’s by no means all bad. In some respects, space has always been privatized: North American Aviation, Grumman Aerospace, Boeing, and others have all been major NASA contractors, and they are hardly government-owned operations.
All, however, are deeply experienced in the business of aeronautical and astronautical design, too. Elon Musk, founder of the upstart SpaceX is, so far, defying doubters, with a string of both commercial launches and resupply missions to the ISS and no major disasters. But SpaceX is a rare bird, and still a young one, and it has a while to go before it establishes its true space cred.
It’s Branson, however, who has always been the most troubling of the cosmic cowboys, selling not just himself on his fever dreams, but his trusting customers. One of those would-be astronauts I met in the Mojave that day was a teenage girl, whose parents had put aside enough money to buy her the singular experience of a trip to space. They beamed at her courage as we spoke, and seemed thrilled about the ride she was soon to take. Those plans are, presumably, being rethought now.

Rico says it's not like we (let alone the Russians) haven't had enough spectacular failures, and this guy seems to think all these rich guys are building the rockets themselves...

SpaceShipTwo crashes

Kenneth Chang and John Schwartz have an article in The New York Times about a failed flight:

SpaceShipTwo, a rocket plane that was meant to carry well-heeled tourists on short if expensive rides to space, crashed in the Mojave Desert in California on Friday during a test flight, killing one of the two pilots. The pilots, who have not yet been identified, were flying the plane for Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company created by the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, and Scaled Composites, the company that designed and built the plane.
One pilot was able to parachute from the plane and was taken to a hospital with “moderate to major injuries,” said Ray Pruitt, the public information officer for the Kern County sheriff’s office in California.
The test was the first time SpaceShipTwo had flown using a new, plastic-based rocket fuel. It was the second major accident in a week for the commercial space industry, which has been widely promoted in recent years as an alternative to costly government programs. On Tuesday, an unmanned rocket launched by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, which was carrying cargo to the International Space Station, exploded fifteen seconds after launch.
SpaceShipTwo and the Orbital rocket are very different in design and purpose, but both are part of an effort to bring private investment into the space business, until now largely the realm of government agencies like NASA and the military.
Virgin Galactic, which hoped to begin tourist flights next spring, already has more than seven hundred reservations which initially sold for $200,000 a seat before rising to $250,000 last year.
The list of would-be astronauts includes celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Bieber, and Angelina Jolie.
Experts said it was too soon to tell when the effort would resume. “Virgin was out ahead of everyone else for space tourism,” said Michael Blades, the aerospace and defense industry senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a market research and consulting firm. “It will still happen, but it has been pushed way to the right. It is just like any kind of other new technology, especially when it comes to flight,” he continued. “You have your tests and you have your failures.”
The accident took place tens of thousands of feet above the desert. As planned, SpaceShipTwo was carried aloft by a larger plane, WhiteKnightTwo, then dropped at about fifty thousand feet. In a tourist flight, SpaceShipTwo’s rocket engines would take it to the sixty-mile-high boundary defined as the edge of space.
After the smaller plane was released, its motor ignited. The accident appeared to happen sixty to ninety seconds later, said Stuart Witt, the chief executive of the Mojave Air and Space Port, where WhiteKnightTwo took off. “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “I didn’t know what. It wasn’t obvious at first.” A radio call reported an anomaly. “And we waited,” he said.
The sheriff’s office received a call that an aircraft had gone down about twenty miles northeast of the city of Mojave. “We have located a debris field,” Pruitt said. WhiteKnightTwo landed safely.
Via Twitter, Branson said, “I’m flying to Mojave immediately to be with the team.”
Virgin Galactic grew out of the success of the Ansari X Prize contest in 2004, for the first privately built and financed craft that could rise above the boundary of space. Scaled Composites won the ten million dollar prize with a smaller version of SpaceShipTwo, an effort financed by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.
Immediately after the X Prize, Branson announced his plans for a spaceship that would carry two pilots and six passengers on suborbital flights, in which the plane does not go into orbit but offers a few minutes of weightlessness at the top of an arcing trajectory.
Over the years, Branson has repeatedly said he hoped commercial flights would begin soon. This is the second time tragedy has struck the spaceport in connection with Scaled Composites; in July of 2007, a rocket system test went awry, killing three people. Most recently, he said that with the resumption of powered test flights, he hoped the first commercial flights would take off next spring. He and his family plan to be the passengers on the first operational flight.
Although SpaceShipTwo had flown fifty previous test flights, all but three were unpowered tests in which it glided to the ground. This was the fourth time its motor was ignited.
In May of 2014, Virgin Galactic announced it was switching to the plastic-based fuel from the rubber-based one it had used. Friday’s flight was the first powered by the new motor. The previous version was problematic, causing strong vibrations in the spacecraft. In an article published last month in Popular Mechanics, Brian Binnie, a former test pilot for Scaled, said, “We had start-up instabilities and we had end-of-burn instabilities.”
While troubleshooting the problem, “we did everything but break down and pray to God to show us the light of day,” said Binnie, who has now moved to XCOR Aerospace, another company at Mojave that is building a suborbital space plane for tourists.
Marco Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group, a consulting firm, said that “in an age where it is very expensive to fly these vehicles, the pressure is to do the minimal amount of test flying. So that may be something we have to take a look at,” he continued. “Everyone seems to be in need of more money to conduct more flights, so the pressure is to start operational flight too soon. Maybe we are being unreasonable here.”
Patricia Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, who organizes an annual symposium for people in the commercial space industry, said the accident “helps people understand why it’s never been done before. This is a tough business,” she said. Dr. Hynes has bought a Virgin Galactic ticket, and the news did not change her intention to fly. “No, absolutely not,” she said.
A second SpaceShipTwo plane is currently under construction.

Rico says he won't be going, but somebody will, and relatively soon...