John E duPont, the multimillionaire (heir to the DuPont chemical fortune), the trained ornithologist who discovered and officially named more than a dozen new (sub)species of birds, collector of stamps, birds and shells, founder of the Delaware Museum of Natural History, the paranoid schizophrenic who was jailed after murdering an Olympic wrestler in 1996, died […]
Tag: Death
Able on marijuana
Ernest L. Abel, the Detroit doctors who say the letter “D” foreshadows death, is not only the same Ernest L. Able who compiled and edited the highly stimulating (in its time) book Drugs and Sex, ISBN-13: 978-0-313-23941-0, 129 pages, Greenwood Press, 1983. He also wrote the highly provocative (in its time) book A Marihuana Dictionary, […]
Creator of ‘Stalin World’ still alive
Luckily, Vilumas Malinauskus, winner of the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for creating the amusement park popularly known as “Stalin World,” in Lithuania was not murdered today. That fate met Vasily Bukhtiyenko, who set up the Stalin museum in 2005 in Volgograd, previously called Stalingrad. According to a Reuters report he was electrocuted and bludgeoned […]
TV: Inside the operating room: Live!
Paul Raeburn writes, in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker: It’s gripping TV, there’s no question about it. The Today Show, with its new medical correspondent, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, launched a week-long series Monday showing patients undergoing surgical procedures live on television. In the first episode, Dr. Nancy (as [Today Show host] Meredith Viera calls her; […]
Televised warning about TV and death
Does watching a televised media briefing about a study that asks “Is sitting in front of the TV shortening your life?” shorten your life? Watch a televised media briefing by the Australian Science Media Centre, and maybe you’ll find out. Their press release says: MEDIA BRIEFING: TV time may cut life short Is sitting in […]
Detroit Doctors: D for Death
Two doctors in Detroit say the letter “D’ foreshadows death: “Athletes, Doctors, and Lawyers with First Names Beginning with ‘D’ Die Sooner,” Ernest L. Abel and Michael L. Kruger, Death Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, January 2010 , pp. 71-81 The authors, at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, report: “a possible explanation for the association […]
Slemrod sees US tax/death experiment
Ig Nobel Prize winner Joel Slemrod (of the University of Michigan) celebrates/rues/assesses a grand US government experiment that will test his prize-winning theory: A few years ago I called Marc Abrahams offering to return my 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in economics (won jointly with Wojciech Kopczuk [of Columbia University). Our prize-winning research showed that when […]
School days (lethal): Pen was mightier than sword
Our Edinburgh desk chief Steve Farrar reports: “Saint Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death with metal nibs and now is, curiously, the patron saint of short-hand writers and parish clerks. Which makes him the ultimate pen pusher in more ways than one.” BACKGROUND INFO FOR NIB NEWBIES: this video shows a nib in non-homicidal […]
Forensic Adventures: Birthday Boy
The accidental death at home, by hanging, whilst wearing a tutu, of the 13th Earl of Gurney, strikes some people as being both absurd and, if you’ll pardon the expression, a one-off. True, that particular death is fictional (it occurred near the beginning of the 1972 film The Ruling Class). True, absurdity can be difficult […]