NASA releases safety data... almost

In perhaps the most grudging of festive season gifts, NASA has made public its data on airline safety in the US. Only it's been fudged and munged to the point of almost being unusable:

NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, said his agency had no plans to do additional work with the material, which he sought to disown in a conference call with reporters.

“It’s hard for me to see any data here that the traveling public would care about or ought to care about,” he said. “But it’s also not for me to prescribe what others may care about. We were asked to release the data and I said that we would, and I’ve done that.”

The agency went to extreme lengths to make the information useless, just stopping short of translating it into Reformed Egyptian and hiding it under a rock in the middle of the woods.