This is it!  The last day to get your questions in for Assassin Creed’s Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad (aka Cas Anvar)!

Learn the secrets of the Levantine Brotherhood of Assassins.  Ask him now!

Lulu is a huge fan.

Hey, on the heels of yesterday’s Kickstarter entry, I received an email from space lawyer and author Virgilu Pop who has asked me to put the word out.  He needs YOUR help in the fight against Apophis.  No, really…

Save Earth from killer asteroids – just like SG-1 in Fail Safe!  Learn more here: www.apoph.is

And one more shout out for the SF web series, Nobility -

Starring Babylon 5′s Claudia Christian and Assassin Creed’s Cas Anvar…

http://goo.gl/rLERO

NobilityTheSeries.com

VEGETARIAN ALERT!  VEGETARIAN ALERT!  Tomorrow night, I’ll be entertaining one of my two vegetarian friends.  She’ll be coming over for dinner and, apparently, a fancied-up side dish masquerading as a main course aint gonna cut it.  I can’t simply substitute an entire eggplant for a chicken in that roast chicken recipe.  I need a tasty vegetarian dish.  And this, my friends, is where you all come in.  Please be so kind as to post your best, can’t fail, delicious, vegetarian main course recipe.  Help a non-vegetarian help a vegetarian out.

CAPE CANAVERAL Reuters- NASA chief Charles Bolden has advice on how to handle a large asteroid headed toward New York City: Pray. That’s about all the United States – or anyone for that matter – could do at this point about unknown asteroids and meteors that may be on a collision course with Earth, Bolden told lawmakers at a U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee hearing on Tuesday.An asteroid estimated to be have been about 55 feet in diameter exploded on February 15 over Chelyabinsk, Russia, generating shock waves that shattered windows and damaged buildings. More than 1,500 people were injured.

Later that day, a larger, unrelated asteroid discovered last year passed about 17,200 miles from Earth, closer than the network of television and weather satellites that ring the planet.

The events “serve as evidence that we live in an active solar system with potentially hazardous objects passing through our neighborhood with surprising frequency,” said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat.

“We were fortunate that the events of last month were simply an interesting coincidence rather than a catastrophe,” said Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, who called the hearing to learn what is being done and how much money is needed to better protect the planet.

NASA has found and is tracking about 95 percent of the largest objects flying near Earth, those that are .62 miles or larger in diameter.

“An asteroid of that size, a kilometer or bigger, could plausibly end civilization,” White House science advisor John Holdren told legislators at the same hearing.

But only about 10 percent of an estimated 10,000 potential “city-killer” asteroids, those with a diameter of about 165 feet have been found, Holdren added.

On average, objects of that size are estimated to hit Earth about once every 1,000 years.

“From the information we have, we don’t know of an asteroid that will threaten the population of the United States,” Bolden said. “But if it’s coming in three weeks, pray.”

In addition to stepping up its monitoring efforts and building international partnerships, NASA is looking at developing technologies to divert an object that may be on a collision course with Earth.

“The odds of a near-Earth object strike causing massive casualties and destruction of infrastructure are very small, but the potential consequences of such an event are so large it makes sense to takes the risk seriously,” Holdren said.

About 66 million years ago, an object 6 miles in diameter is believed to have smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, leading to the demise of the dinosaurs, as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

The asteroid that exploded over Russia last month was the largest object to hit Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over more than 830 square miles (2,150 sq km).

 Related articles

• Earth gets a rush of weekend asteroid visitors (news.yahoo.com)

CAPE CANAVERAL Reuters- NASA chief Charles Bolden has advice on how to handle a large asteroid headed toward New York City: Pray. That’s about all the United States – or anyone for that matter – could do at this point about unknown asteroids and meteors that may be on a collision course with Earth, Bolden told lawmakers at a U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee hearing on Tuesday.An asteroid estimated to be have been about 55 feet in diameter exploded on February 15 over Chelyabinsk, Russia, generating shock waves that shattered windows and damaged buildings. More than 1,500 people were injured.

Later that day, a larger, unrelated asteroid discovered last year passed about 17,200 miles from Earth, closer than the network of television and weather satellites that ring the planet.

The events “serve as evidence that we live in an active solar system with potentially hazardous objects passing through our neighborhood with surprising frequency,” said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat.

“We were fortunate that the events of last month were simply an interesting coincidence rather than a catastrophe,” said Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, who called the hearing to learn what is being done and how much money is needed to better protect the planet.

NASA has found and is tracking about 95 percent of the largest objects flying near Earth, those that are .62 miles or larger in diameter.

“An asteroid of that size, a kilometer or bigger, could plausibly end civilization,” White House science advisor John Holdren told legislators at the same hearing.

But only about 10 percent of an estimated 10,000 potential “city-killer” asteroids, those with a diameter of about 165 feet have been found, Holdren added.

On average, objects of that size are estimated to hit Earth about once every 1,000 years.

“From the information we have, we don’t know of an asteroid that will threaten the population of the United States,” Bolden said. “But if it’s coming in three weeks, pray.”

In addition to stepping up its monitoring efforts and building international partnerships, NASA is looking at developing technologies to divert an object that may be on a collision course with Earth.

“The odds of a near-Earth object strike causing massive casualties and destruction of infrastructure are very small, but the potential consequences of such an event are so large it makes sense to takes the risk seriously,” Holdren said.

About 66 million years ago, an object 6 miles in diameter is believed to have smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, leading to the demise of the dinosaurs, as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

The asteroid that exploded over Russia last month was the largest object to hit Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over more than 830 square miles (2,150 sq km).

Related articles

• Earth gets a rush of weekend asteroid visitors (news.yahoo.com)

The Asteroid Ida

Rocky and metallic, asteroids are minor planets mostly found in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Apollo and Aten asteroids cross Earth’s orbit and Trojan asteroids in the Lagrangian points are within 60 degrees of Jupiter’s orbit. If asteroids are far from the Sun, their compositions are similar to that of comets (carbonaceous ice). If asteroids are closer to the Sun, their compositions are molten ice and iron core. Asteroids that crash into other cosmic objects are called killer asteroids. The three major types of asteroids are the C-type (carbonaceous, 75% of known asteroids), the S-type (silicaceous, 17%), and the M-type (metallic, 8%). Asteroids and comets are now classified as “small solar-system bodies.”

Meteoroids

Meteoroid

Meteoroids are debris in space from comets or asteroids; meteors are shooting stars or fire balls in air; meteorites are meteoroids that invade Earth’s atmosphere and impact the ground; micrometeorites are perfect shiny spheres microscopic in size and the major cause of small-scale erosion on the moon. The three major types of meteoroids are stony, stony iron, and iron.

Comets

Halley’s Comet

A comet has a head (nucleus and coma) and tails (dust, iron, and sodium). The nucleus is a few miles in diameter and composed of ice with dust mixed in, hence the term dirty snow ball. The coma is gases vaporized from the nucleus by sublimation (solid to gas). The two types of tails are dust tails (sunlight reflected off particles) and ion tails (sunlight emitted by ions blown back by solar wind). Comets either come from the Oort Cloud (50,000 to 150,000 AU in radius, a billion swarming comet nuclei) or the Kuiper Belt (30 to 100 AU beyond Neptune). Nuclei detached by gravity are caught by the Sun’s gravitational field and pulled into orbits. Short period comets are less than 30 AU away and long period comets are thousands of AU away. The most famous comet, of course, is Halley’s Comet, which is only visible every 75 or 76 years.

DWARF PLANETS

Pluto and Its Moons

PLUTO: Named for the Roman god of the Underworld, Pluto, originally a planet, is now classified by astronomers as a dwarf planet. With the most eccentric orbit and the greatest inclination to the ecliptic, Pluto has a revolution period of 249 years. For 20 of those 249 years, Pluto is closer to the Sun than Neptune. Pluto has density similar to satellites of outer planets, a rocky core with an icy surface of water and methane, and a tenuous atmosphere of methane. Pluto has four moons— Charon, Nix, Hydra, and P4; the latter three, however, are much smaller than the former.

THE DEBATE OVER PLUTO: Why Pluto IS a Planet— 1) Massive enough to be spherical; 2) Orbits of objects in Kuiper belt affected; 3) Mercury’s orbit is elliptical; 4) Asteroid hunters mistakenly discovered Neptune; 5) Each planet is unique; 6) Earth-moon system. Why Pluto IS NOT a Planet— 1) Smaller than other planets; 2) Gravity too weak to affect other planets; 3) Wildly elliptical orbit; 4) Nearly always mistaken for an asteroid in searches; 5) Properties do not follow the pattern; 6) Charon closely resembles Pluto and is large as moon

DEFINITION OF AND THREE CRITERIA OF PLANETS: 1) large enough that, when it is formed, condenses under its own gravity to be shaped like a sphere; 2) orbits a star directly and is not a moon of another planet; 3) clear its path of all debris in its neighborhood. To be a dwarf planet, the first two criteria must be met.

Use a Gravity Tractor

This involves sending a robotic probe into space to latch onto the asteroid, and slowly moving it out of the way, bit by bit so it glides on past us. These probes have actually been successfully used before, as crazy as that seems, including NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is orbiting the space rock Vesta, and Japan’s Hayabusa probe, which has been used to take chunks out of asteroids and bring them back to Earth for further study.

Smash ‘Em

Again using a robotic probe, this time to slam into the asteroid and force it off course. This method is not as precise, and so far we have only done it to a comet, to see how it would change its orbit.

There has also been talk of what I will call the Armageddon technique, which involves, yes, nuclear weapons. But this would be a last resort, and only if the asteroid were too big for an impactor probe, because obviously it has the potential to do more harm than good, merely sending slightly smaller chunks smashing into many different parts of the Earth.

Mirror Bees

This involves launching a swarm of small, mirror bearing probes, who would focus the sun’s rays on a specific point on the asteroid, heating it up to the point where the rock is vaporised, causing jet propulsion to carry it out of the Earth’s path. This concept is not quite a reality, but could be ready in about 5 years, plenty of time to set it against 2011 AG5.

Foil Wrap

This one is hilarious. Apparently wrapping an asteroid in foil like a baked potato could potentially move an asteroid, as the photons from the sun hit the foil. I’m just gonna take your word on that one, NASA.

Currently the impact probability is 1 in 625, though that’s not set in stone. A lot can happen to the asteroid’s course in 28 years, although simply having our eye on it now will give us plenty of time to figure out what to do about it, and avoid the fate of the dinosaurs.

But mark February 5th, 2040 off on your calendar, just in case. And if all else fails, Bruce Willis will still be alive, right? Right??

• Your Europa League roundup (bold teams advance): Liverpool 4-1 Benfica, Wolfsburg 0-1 Fulham, Standard 1-3 Hamburg, Atletico Madrid 0-0 Valencia.
• Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina has extended his contract; the new deal keeps him at Anfield through 2016.
• That fifth official in the Europa League – the dude who’s supposed to be watching for penalties – somehow missed Atletico defender Juanit0 tearing the shirt off of Valencia striker Nikola Zigic in the penalty area..
• Both Zlatan Ibrahimović and Kaká will miss tomorrow’s Clasico with injuries.
• Tomorrow’s Clasico will be Guti’s last; the Real Madrid playmaker sees himself moving on after this year.
• Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has told UEFA that Turkey would totally hold the best Euros, like, EVER if they were granted the 2016 hosting bid.
• Bayern Munich have been holed up in their Fortress of Solitude to reflect on beating Bayer Leverkeusen over the weekend.
• Sergio Aguero fancies a move to Inter Milan.
• Sir Alex Ferguson has “no reason” to doubt Dimitar Berbatov’s quality as a striker.
• Manchester United (who totally have money to spend if they want to spend it; seriously, just ask them) apparently can’t afford don’t believe Valencia striker David Villa is worth £40 million.
• They do, however, rate Chivas de Guadalajara striker Javier Hernandez; pending approval of his work permit, the Mexican will move to Old Trafford in July. No transfer fee was disclosed.
• Now that they’ve secured promotion, Newcastle have started planning out their transfer strategy.
• Steve McClaren’s FC Twente will be hoping to extend their eight match unbeaten run when they host Heerenveen this weekend; Twente are four points clear at the top of the Eredivisie table.
• New York Red Bulls manager Hans Backe is out indefinitely while he recovers from gall bladder surgery will probably travel with the team this weekend and may coach against Chivas USA on Saturday.

Was I "wasting my time" in the 80s? I'd like to think I was merely "preparing."

This trivial little news item flew under most people’s radar (pun intended):

US Report: NASA Can’t Track Deadly Asteroids

Now here’s the truly baffling part of the story: It’s not that NASA doesn’t have enough funding for their program because saving the Earth from annihilation isn’t a big enough priority to the U.S. Congress.

No, what’s really disturbing is that the original goal of the program was to track down 90% of all killer asteroids. Who’s in charge of this program? Purell? (“Kills 99.99% of all germs” reference. See earlier post).

Dear Folks at NASA,

This isn’t sugarless gum we’re talking about here. I’m sure Dentyne is thrilled to have 4 out of 5 dentists recommend their product. That achieves their modest goals quite nicely. But I personally think things need to be a little more absolute when dealing with killer asteroids.

I’m no mathematician, but I would think that anything short of preventing –oh, I don’t know — 100% of all killer asteroids IS GOING TO BE A MAJOR PROBLEM.

Matter of fact, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the only thing more useless and depressing than an under-funded Killer Asteroid Finding Program is a fully-funded 90% Killer Asteroid Finding Program.

They say never marry a Chef because they never want to cook when they get home.  Same principle applies to those in the building industry.  Marry one and you will be cleaning up after them forever.

So the (Under) insulation goes in next week and they increased the amount of insulation in the ceiling last Friday.  So with all the other “energy efficient” changes that have been made we are looking good to lower heating/cooling usage and the subsequent costs.  At this rate we will have saved the entire plant by next Thursday, some time around 3 or 4pm, depending on whether you’re on Daylight Saving Time or not.

Am I the only one or does anyone else (besides George Carlin) hate the line, “Saving the Planet”.

Everything we do is purely for “us” and our own self interest.  I suppose the marketing people didn’t think “Save the Humans” was sexy enough.  Not that I’m really complaining.  I don’t want to be drafted when the next world war breaks out and we are all fighting over the polar regions to source drinking water.  But in the end the Planet will be fine.  She’s been around four and half billion years and survived killer asteroids and 80’s Glam Rock.  She’ll be alright and humming along long after we are gone and only of passing interest to some alien archaeological “Time Team” who may give us a quick visit in a million years or so.  So let’s start taking care of ourselves, and leave the plant to have some alone time.

The thing that worries me about our “Save the Humans” campaign and it’s a major worry.  Is that in our attempt to do the “right” thing we somehow stuff it all up.  A sort of, “The road to hell is paved…” scenario.  You read the stories about how people are protesting wind farms because the birds are being killed by the blades.  Or how the production of energy efficient light bulbs is poisoning workers in China with mercury.  You start to think “can we get anything right”.  Then there’s the problems that we don’t even know about yet, or can’t even imagine.  Until we have an “Oh shit!” moment, smack ourselves in the forehead, and state as we are blinking out of existence, “Should have seen that one coming”.

Well, I’ve done my bit today in “Saving the Planet”, “Saving the Humans”, “Saving the Whales”.  So here is a picture of John waving thanks.
“No probs dude, my pleasure”.

Photo credit: matthew_hull from morguefile.com

Astronomer Robert Jedicke: killer asteroid hunter!

Charae’ interviews Prof. Robert Jedicke from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.  Robert works with the Pan-STARRS project, a survey that plans to image the whole sky repeatedly to search for moving and variable sources, from nearby asteroids and comets to the most distant supernovae in the Universe.  Robert is manager of the Pan-STARRS moving object processing system that will discover more asteroids and comets each month than have been found in the past two centuries, including ones that may get dangerously close to the Earth (such as Apophis).  He’s also had a very non-traditional career path, going from professional football to particle physics to software engineering to astronomy.  Robert describes how he got interested in astronomy, and what the chances are that we might get hit by the “big one” in the next century.

Listen here [15:48m]:

Original air date 16 July 2009.

One of the things you have to contend with when you put something on the internet and then open it up to comments from the public are spammers, or people who will only comment on your article in order to include a link back to their own website.  Most of the time, they don’t even read what you wrote.  These comments are usually easy to spot, but some bottom-feeders are trickier than others.  I was almost fooled by this guy…

Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Tectonics!

I have A Bunch of Wordz set up to approve all comments, so I have to read them first, and I almost put this one through.  But then I looked at the post it was attached to — a very well written and easy to understand piece by guest blogger Lincoln Crisler about how to get published.  What’s there to get lost in translation?  Nothing.

So I decided to take part of the comment, put it in quotes, and google it.  Up came 28 pages of of the same exact comment, all obviously posted by the same person, but signed with different names.  The links all go back to various free lycos websites, none of which have anything on them (they all say “under construction”).  So I don’t even know why this scumbag is spamming everyone when he or she doesn’t even have a website.

Anyway, here’s the dirtbag’s IP address and email:

IP:  61.40.170.195

Email:  degreearm@gmail.com

I couldn’t find their name from the IP address, or I would have posted it.  If you’re more savvy about researching that sort of stuff than I am, feel free to add a comment with the information. 

And please, feel free to email this person, as well.  (Although I would guess, based on all their different names and websites, they have a large number of email accounts.  So I’m not sure if they would read their email any more than they would read an actual webpage they were commenting on).

Gah!  I hate these people.  Anway…end of rant and lemons to lemonade and all of that.  Here are a few posts that this person spammed.  You will find some interesting reading here.

• In a next evolution of the web public interaction will be less important — from Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior – predictions of how social media will be used in the future
• Cosmosprophecies talks about the odds of a recently discovered asteroid hitting the earth in the year 2029 (read about how you may only have 21 years left to live)
• khengze from Webs@Work tells how China’s horrible May earthquake, combined with the media spotlight currently on this country due to the upcoming Olympics, brought about an uncharacteristic lack of censorship on China’s internet recently  (If this topic interests you, you might want to also read my previous post on Chinese Interent Censorship.)
• Paperback Rider blogs about the very moment he went insane, the literary monkey on his back, and 5 different and interesting looking books he has recently read (by the way, it looks like he has taken the spam comment off his blog now — good for him)

Taken from Wired.com

Omigod, Earth’s core is about to explode, destroying the planet and everything on it! That is, unless a gigantic asteroid strikes first. Or an advanced physics experiment goes haywire, negating space-time in a runaway chain reaction. Or the sun’s distant companion star, Nemesis, sends an untimely barrage of comets our way. Or …

Not long ago, such cosmic thrills, chills, and spills were confined to comic books, sci-fi movies, and the Book of Revelation. Lately, though, they’ve seeped into a broader arena, filling not only late-night talk radio, where such topics don’t seem particularly out of place, but also earnest TV documentaries, slick mass-market magazines, newspapers, and a growing number of purportedly nonfiction books. Everywhere you turn, pundits are predicting biblical-scale disaster. In many scenarios, mankind is the culprit, unleashing atmospheric carbon dioxide, genetically engineered organisms, or runaway nanobots to exact a bitter revenge for scientific meddling. But even if human deployment of technology proves benign, Mother Nature will assert her primacy through virulent pathogens, killer asteroids, marauding comets, exploding supernovas, and other such happenstances of mass destruction.

Fringe thinking? Hardly. Sober PhDs are behind these thoughts. Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years.” Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired‘s own 2000 article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on “15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It.” University of Maryland arms-control scholar John Steinbruner is lobbying organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Medical Association to establish an international review board with the power to ban research into the Pandora’s box of biomedicine.

If we’re talking about doomsday – the end of human civilization – many scenarios simply don’t measure up. A single nuclear bomb ignited by terrorists, for example, would be awful beyond words, but life would go on. People and machines might converge in ways that you and I would find ghastly, but from the standpoint of the future, they would probably represent an adaptation. Environmental collapse might make parts of the globe unpleasant, but considering that the biosphere has survived ice ages, it wouldn’t be the final curtain. Depression, which has become 10 times more prevalent in Western nations in the postwar era, might grow so widespread that vast numbers of people would refuse to get out of bed, a possibility that Petranek suggested in a doomsday talk at the Technology Entertainment Design conference in 2002. But Marcel Proust, as miserable as he was, wrote Remembrance of Things Past while lying in bed.

Of course, some worries are truly worrisome. Nuclear war might extinguish humanity, or at least bring an end to industrial civilization. The fact that tensions among the US, Russia, and China are low right now is no guarantee they’ll remain so. Beyond the superpowers, India and Pakistan have demonstrated nuclear capability; North Korea either has or soon will have it; Japan may go nuclear if North Korea does; Iran and other countries could join the club before long. Radiation-spewing bombs raining from the sky would, no doubt, be cataclysmic. If you’re in the mood to keep yourself up at night, nuclear war remains a good subject to ponder. But reversal of the planet’s magnetic field?

At a time of global unease, worst-case scenarios have a certain appeal, not unlike reality TV. And it’s only natural to focus on danger; if nature hadn’t programmed human beings to be wary, the species might not have gotten this far. But a little perspective is in order. Let’s review the various doomsday theories, from least threatening to most. If the end is inevitable, at least there won’t be any surprises.

To view the entire article, click HERE

Posted by: D.Dig
Contact: DDIGtheRESEARCH@gmail.com

Are you ready?

Sure?

Really sure? What I’ve got to say will make you crap your pants.

Well…I’m not going to tell you. It surely doesn’t involve nuclear weapons because we know that would create hundreds of killer asteriods from one killer asteroids. Maybe you’ll experience the shame and humilation of a giant tractor beam or a huge magnet altering your orbit. How would you like that? We can choose from a number of ways to show you the smackdown! I bet you’ll be veering off course to some other galaxy at the thought of our mighty scientific powers.

Sincerely,

Fergis T. McGillicuddy

PS: Chicken! Bawk-Bak-Bak-Bawk!