This one’s for my boys in the Boroughs.

Between 2003 and 2005, 1,662 murders were committed in New York. Men and boys were responsible for 93 percent of the murders; their victims tended to be other men and boys; and in more than half the cases, the killer and victim knew each other.

In addition, an interesting, though uncommon, group of murders involved a handful of victims who died of injuries one or more years after being stabbed, shot, beaten or burned and were counted as murder victims in the year in which they died. Click on the map to view all of the homicides by borough.

Happy Birthday from your fellow Once-a-Dayers…

Who cares about greenhouse gases when we can have space shades?

And when we can simply mimic a major volcanic eruption (which cools the earth with all the junk in the air) by releasing sulphur?

WE MAY HAVE GONE PAST THE TIPPING POINT, but there’s still time to save our lives!

NEW YORK—Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.

At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, the sun began to lower from its position in the sky in a westward trajectory, eventually disappearing below the horizon. Reports of this global emergency continued to file in from across the continent until 5:46 p.m. PST, when the entire North American mainland was officially declared dark.

As the phenomenon hit New York, millions of motorists were forced to use their headlights to navigate through the blackness. Highways flooded with commuters who had left work to hurry home to their families. Traffic was bottlenecked for more than two hours in many major metropolitan areas.

I have always wanted to do this.
Google answers hard at work.

Here’s a great map of the world colored in relative civil and political liberties.

And here is an article by Fareed Zakaria that I read in Newsweek this morning:

George W. Bush is not a man for second thoughts, but even he might have had some recently. Ever since 9/11, Bush has made the promotion of democracy in the Middle East the center-piece of his foreign policy, and doggedly pushed the issue. Over the last few months, however, this approach has borne strange fruit, culminating in Hamas’s victory in Gaza and the West Bank. Before that, we have watched it strengthen Hizbullah in Lebanon, which (like Hamas) is often described in the West as a terrorist organization. In Iraq, the policy has brought into office conservative religious parties with their own private militias. In Egypt, it has bolstered the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest fundamentalist organizations in the Arab world, from which Al Qaeda descends. “Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror,” Bush said last week in his State of the Union address. But is this true of the people coming to power in the Arab world today?

also, mad statistics

We’re #1 … in a Google search for: “OaD, The Once a Day Blog”

and some metafunniness

[post has been censored]

6 Feb 2056 - Now that all the fossil fuels are definitely gone for good, get used to seeing more of these, our clean and cheap energy future!

Fortunately, our Chairman at Sky WindPower, Australian Professor Bryan Roberts has long been aware of the wind facts and material improvement trends, and convinced that, by application of an appropriate technology, this high altitude wind energy can be captured. He set out to prove that long ago, and has demonstrated that Flying Electric Generator(FEG) technology is practical and should work at high altitudes. This is the “Flying Windmills” technology you may have read about first in the Canadian “National Post”, and since then in major newspapers overseas and many U.S. publications other than newspapers.

[via]

Yes it is! Reason #73625: whitehouse.org, as compared to whitehouse.gov. True excellence from the patriotic poster page.

A guy thought to himself, “how could I make a million dollars?” Then he had an idea. Sell clickable real estate on a million-pixel image for a dollar per pixel…the Million Dollar Homepage. Somehow, there are only a thousand pixels left. WaPo story. [via]

Once a Day now has an email address:

onceadayorso at yahoo dot com (you would need to replace the at and dot and dispense with the spaces of course)

a Flickr photostream, and

a Clustrmap (see sidebar, updates begin tomorrow).

Go Team Once a Day!

StumbleUpon is a way to explore new websites. Take 2 minutes to indicate what kinds of things you are interested in and then off you go. In the last 15 minutes I have seen

An AMAZING Kaleidescope
Fly Guy
European Countries Quiz (it’s hard!)
The World Sunlight Map
Steet Paintings
Play

If you like it, click the button, if not, click that you don’t. Or don’t click at all. Just go to the next site. So far I haven’t seen any that aren’t sweet.

It’s like a random channel changer for your computer except every new channel is interesting.

-from mechum.com

Once a Day Haiku

that once a day
is not as good as this one;
well it’s different

it also is not
updated every day
actually…hmm

it’s a photoblog
this is not; it ends in “spot”
while we end in “some”

philipino/a
we like your photos a lot
sorry for biting

love,
http://onceaday.blogsome.com

So what are we in for with this whole bird flu thing? Well first let’s understand a little about this avian influenza, and specifically the one making all the headlines right now, H5N1. The H’s and the N’s refer to where certain proteins are (the Spanish flu, discussed below, was caused by H1N1); effect on you? None. Just a name. So anyway this type of influenza virus (virus, not a bacteria) is carried by fowl. And it is infecting humans in some cases. In this limited sense, also not a big deal for most people of the world. So what’s the big deal? Right now people are only getting this stuff from birds so, well, stay away from birds and you’re cool. And that would be that if it weren’t for the ability of influenza viruses to undergo antigenic shifts, in which their characteristics can drastically change (the surface antigens are the H’s and N’s from above). So if (when) this happens, and the virus can spread from human to human, it’s like bullfrogs in Australia: the human immune system has no prior history with the invader so it doesn’t know what to do.
So when’s the last time this happened? There was the Asian Flu (H2N2) of 1957-1958 (between one and four million casualties), and related to that was the Hong Kong Flu (also H2N2) of 1968-1969 (between 750,000 and two million worldwide, including the US). But the big one, the granddaddy, was La Grippe, the Spanish Flu (H1N1), of 1918-1919. La Grippe killed between 25 and 50 million people worldwide. It started in Kansas but quickly shifted again to a more deadly version and spread to Brest, France, Boston, Massachusetts, and Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was commonly called the Spanish Flu partly because Spain had one of the worst initial outbreaks (around eight million dead) but probably more because Spain wasn’t involved in the other big news of the day, World War I. La Grippe killed more American soldiers during WWI than died in combat.

The strain was unusual in commonly killing many young and healthy victims, as opposed to more common influenzas which caused the bulk of their mortality among newborns and the old and infirm. People without symptoms could be struck suddenly and be rendered too feeble to walk within hours; many would die the next day. Symptoms included a blue tint to the face and coughing up blood caused by severe obstruction of the lungs. In further stages, the virus caused an uncontrollable haemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and patients would drown in their own body fluids.

But don’t worry. Maybe get a mask though.
Avian Flu: CDC, WHO, all else from the always wonderful Wiki.