Chairman emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund and main champion and former Administrator of the EPA Russell Train (92) died yesterday at his farm in Bozman, MD.
Former Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern (90), whose campaign was the target of the 1972 Watergate break-in, died earlier today at a hospice in Sioux Falls, SD.
Dr. Edward Donnall Thomas, winner of the Nobel Prize for developing bone marrow transplants to treat leukemia, sickle cell disease, and other blood diseases.
strange, we had quite a spate of droppers recently, and now appear to have fallen into a lull in the action
After many years as a hospital chaplain my wife has learned there is a definite tendency for dying people to live to some significant event such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries before giving up the ghost. Sometimes they don't make it to the desired date but still and all it results in a clustering of natural deaths around major holidays.
"All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to fill your head with information" --Walt Disney
While I wholeheartedly agree with the holiday theory, that should produce many more clusters than we actually see, depending on the national and cultural backgrounds of both posters and decedents. The 'lull' here most certainly is a lack of effort on our behalf...
XKCD has a good panel showing occurrence of dates in historical documents, it'd be interesting to see such a thing that quantifies the amount of people that die on a given day of the 365.
Yet another massacre by a gunman, this time at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT. Current death toll 28, including at least 20 children. As if this weren't bad enough, such horrors will keep on happening regularly as the inevitable price of the (current interpretation of the) Second Amendment.
It's just too too horrifying, too incomprehensible. Children….. the epitome of innocence, who never did anything to anybody.
It is impossible to assign rational motives to a person with a disturbed and totally irrational mind. In the killer's distorted thinking those children may have been seen as the cause of his own anger and self hate.
"All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to fill your head with information" --Walt Disney