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A flight attendant ran out of patience on a plane that just landed at JFK on Monday afternoon, so he allegedly cursed a blue streak over the p.a. system, grabbed some beers,  pulled the emergency chute, slid down and ran from the plane,  sources said.

Jet Blue employee Steven Slater, 38, was working on Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh to Kennedy Airport, which landed at around 12 p.m., when he got into a verbal altercation with a passenger, law-enforcement sources said.

The argument began when one of the 100 passengers on the flight, got up early to get her luggage from an overhead compartment, according to sources. Slater told the passenger to sit back down — but, as he approached, the woman continued to pull her belongings down and struck him in the head with her bag, authorities said.

Slater asked for an apology but the woman cursed him out, saying in effect “go f–k yourself” and calling him a “mo-fo,” according to law enforcement sources who are still sorting out the specifics. Then Slater got on the flight’s announcement system and allegedly cursed out  everyone on the plane — especially the person who mouthed off to him, according to law enforcement sources.

When his tirade was through, he then took a some beers from the galley and pulled the emergency chute and slid off the Embraer 190 plane.  According to police sources, he threw his luggage down first and said something to the effect of “there goes 28 years,” before he took the plunge.

Slater was later arrested at his home in Belle Harbor, Queens by Port Authority officials.  Police sources said that when authorities found Slater he was either having sexual relations — or had just finished. Read more at www.nbcnewyork.com

NASA researchers have created an online resource that dramatically changed how the agency fosters collaborative research. In this new innovative method capitalizing strengths of the Internet, scientists can share information about systems health and data mining while aiming to help improve aviation safety in ways never before possible. The web site is called Dashlink. DASH stands for Discovery in Aeronautics Systems Health. The name hints at the identity of the particular group of scientists who created this online gathering place in 2008. The site has more than 410 registered users. “The primary goal of Dashlink is to disseminate information on the latest data mining and systems health algorithms, data and research,” said Ashok Srivastava, principal investigator for NASA’s Integrated Vehicle Health Management Project at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California.

Dashlink allows researchers, whether inside or outside NASA, who are working on a particular software application to share the applications they have written, test each other’s work, and openly discuss the results. “It’s totally different from how other projects are run,” Srivastava said, noting that the usual form of communication among scientists is published papers, which can take months to distribute and offer no immediate interaction with the author. Interaction is important because a staple of scientific research is the ability of one group of scientists to duplicate the work of another group and achieve the same results. In the data mining field, duplicating results can be difficult and infrequent.

Dashlink is available to anyone with an interest in integrated vehicle health management software and sensor applications. Those outside NASA can join if a NASA civil servant sponsors the registration. That is what Suratna Budalakoti did when he joined the site in September 2008. Read more at www.nasa.gov

ONLY three times in my life have I been so scared that I trembled — legs quivering, hands jittering, heart out of control. The first was at 12, when I watched “The Exorcist” before I should have. The second was at 41, when, on the kind of dare to which middle-aged men seem peculiarly vulnerable, I got into a canvas harness and prepared to jump some 250 feet into a gorge in Zambia.

The third was a few months ago, on Staten Island, when I was asked by an examiner for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull out of a parking spot and drive toward a nearby stoplight.

A humdrum task, you say? Undeserving of horror? You’ve never met the examiner. And you don’t yet understand what a crazy-making path I’d traveled to that fraught and climactic point — to the possibility that, at 45, I just might be able to drive legally again.

This is a cautionary tale. Like too many harried New Yorkers without cars or much cause to use them, I let my driver’s license expire — in October 2006. Then, in an unlucky development the next May, I was pick-pocketed. The double whammy of an expired license that I could not physically produce meant I could no longer right the situation with a written exam and a vision check. I was effectively 16 again, on the hook for a five-hour class and the dreaded road test, which I came to fear I’d never reach, given the labyrinth of civil-service incompetence, bureaucratic nonsense and simple misfortune I had tumbled into. Kafka could have had a field day with me. Read more at www.nytimes.com

At precisely 10:30 a.m., with quiet jazz wafting from its speakers, AVE Train 3103 glides out of Atocha Station in central Madrid, its sleek nose pointed east toward a rising sun and Barcelona. Even with a stop in Zaragoza, the 385-mile trip, which takes seven hours by car, is scheduled to last two hours, 52 minutes. Without the stop, it’s two hours, 38 minutes. Cruising speed: 186 m.p.h. Of course, the train will be on time: If it’s more than five minutes late, the passengers get their money back. Compare that with the Pennsylvanian, the daily Amtrak train that travels a similar distance – 353 miles – from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. That laborious journey takes almost three times as long: seven hours, 23 minutes, a half-hour longer than it took in 1941. Twelve station stops. No jazz. No refunds. Or compare it to Amtrak’s Acela Express between Philadelphia and Boston: When it’s on time, the train makes that 318-mile trip in about five hours. Slightly faster than driving, but slower and more expensive than flying. And it’s late 30 percent of the time.

In Europe, fast trains are transforming the continent, bringing cities and countries within a few hours of one another, erasing centuries-old regional divisions, resuscitating long-dormant towns, cutting air pollution, creating new economies and manufacturing jobs, and, in a reversal of 20th-century fortunes, making some air travel obsolete.

For a country mired in automotive gridlock and air-traffic jams, increasingly dependent on foreign oil and polluted by its own toxins, the stakes could not be higher.

Here’s the price Americans pay for a transport system that has become overcrowded, wasteful, slow, and expensive: $87.2 billion a year lost in automotive gridlock, more than $750 for every U.S. traveler. That’s more than 2.8 billion gallons of gas wasted – three weeks’ worth per traveler. And time wasted in traffic jams totals 4.2 billion hours – nearly one full workweek for every traveler.

The cost of domestic air-traffic delays, according to a 2008 analysis by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, is as much as $41 billion annually, including $19 billion in increased operational costs for the airlines and $12 billion worth of lost time for passengers.

The environmental price tag has become starkly clear ever since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 people and spilling 210 million gallons of oil. More than 57,000 square miles of the gulf, rich in fish, shrimp, oysters, and crabs, remain closed to fishing because of the disaster. Read more at www.philly.com

A large group of armed robbers struck the Sealdah—New Delhi Lal Quila Express today, fired at GRP personnel, assaulted passengers and looted them near Bhalui halt in Bihar’s Lakhisarai district, leaving 21 people, including a jawan, injured. Enraged over the incident, passengers, mostly kanwarias (devotees of Lord Shiva), shouted slogans and ransacked the office of the station master in Kiul. Around 35 robbers boarded the train at Jamui station and walked into AC and sleeper coaches of the train and started looting cash and valuables, including jewellery and mobile phones worth Rs 2.50 lakh, from the passengers, official sources said quoting the FIR registered by six passengers. As the unarmed GRP personnel resisted them, they opened fire critically wounding one of them. The jawan has been hospitalised at a nearby hospital, Deputy Superintendent of Police (Railway) R K Sharma said.

According to the sources, four robbers had earlier boarded the train at Jamui railway station, but passengers and the jawans overpowered them and caught two of them. The other two who managed to escape, alerted their accomplices and the robbery took place at the next halt. Read more at www.thehindu.com

If we saw a patent for an iPod Touch with a camcorder, we wouldn’t bat an eyelash. A Mac with a touchscreen? Unremarkable. But we did a double take when we read that Apple filed a patent for a smart bike.

The company, known more for its must-have consumer gadgets than any niche products, has imagined a smart bicycle system that would let users communicate electronically with other cyclists, sharing such data as speed, distance, time, altitude, elevation, incline, decline, heart rate, power, derailleur setting, cadence, wind speed, path completed, expected future path, heart rate, power, and pace.

To bicyclists, this idea might not seem novel; they can buy attachable computers now. But they also have to pretty serious about the sport: high-end models can cost upwards of $200. Even the LiveRider iPhone bike computer kit costs $100. Read more at www.wired.com