AP writer Meghan Barr has an article about dead letter handling for zipcode 10048: It is the kind of holiday mail that might have been tossed aside, discarded like any other piece of junk mail: a special gift offer for a facial at a local spa. Only the address on the letter no longer exists. And the woman the letter is addressed to died more than five years ago in the … [Read more...] about Dead Letters
9/11
2,996
2,996 By one estimate, that's how many people died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It's also the number of people being memorialzed today in the blogosphere. Each person is being memorialized by at least one blogger. The official list is here: http://www.dcroe.com/2996/?page_id=2 That page is down right now because their hosting service has cut them off, presumably … [Read more...] about 2,996
Fourth Anniversary
Reason magazine has an open comment thread for 9/11 thoughts. Here's mine: I remember watching the towers burn in real time as it was happening, and I remember wrestling with the fact that it was too late. No matter how rich and powerful and capable we are, we could never bring back all the people who were murdered by the crashing planes, by the roaring fireballs, and by the … [Read more...] about Fourth Anniversary
Sally Goodrich
Some people are amazing. Sally Goodrich, whose son died in the Sept. 11 attacks, kept a grip on her grief as she surveyed the foundations of the Afghan school being built with money she raised in the United States. ... Goodrich, a native of Bennington, Vt., and an administrator for schools in nearby North Adams, Mass., has helped raise about $180,000 for the new girl's school … [Read more...] about Sally Goodrich
Evacuation Engineering.
In one my September 11th anniversary postings I mentioned my initial back-of-the-envelope calculations on the World Trade Center death toll. My first thought had been that the World Trade Center holds 50,000 people and I might have just seen them all die. My brain eventually started working and I realized that people must have been streaming down the emergency stairs the whole … [Read more...] about Evacuation Engineering.