In case you felt like the Armageddon simulation we’ve been living in wasn’t realistic enough already, Congress’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee will soon hold a hearing “to examine ways to better identify and address asteroids that pose a potential threat to Earth.” Cue Aerosmith.

This morning’s meteor explosion in Russia resulted in more than 900 injuries, making the fact that the hurtling space rock was undetected by any Earth-based telescope more than a little disconcerting. Couple that with a close call to a 150-foot-wide asteroid in less than 24 hours, and it makes sense that an effort is being made to, at the very least, create the appearance of attempting to address the situation. In the announcement made by Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas):

Today’s events are a stark reminder of the need to invest in space science. Developing technology and research that enable us to track objects like Asteroid 2012 DA14 is critical to our future. We should continue to invest in systems that identify threatening asteroids and develop contingencies, if needed, to change the course of an asteroid headed toward Earth.

Fortunately, the chances of you or a loved one actually being hit by a projectile from above are absurdly small, so there’s no need to erupt into mass hysteria just yet. You can save that for February 5, 2040, when the next great threat to Earth may or may not pass us by, and we’ll see if these hearings actually produced anything of use. [Cnet]

Image: Shutterstock/Mopic

Today, we dealt with an asteroid and a meteor. The 2012 DA14 asteroid zipped passed Earth today and a meteor exploded over Russia. What the heck is the difference between an asteroid and a meteor? And a meteorite? And a meteoroid? Not too much, apparently!

An asteroid is a rocky object in space that’s not as big as a planet and isn’t a moon. There are millions of them, think the asteroid belt in space. A meteor is an asteroid that burns up as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere, think shooting stars. A meteorite is a meteor that actually lands on the surface of Earth, think about Russia today.

As for a meteoroid? No one really knows. They’re just kind of like smaller asteroids. [Space, Image by Don Davis via NASA]

i think about the women

who have entered my room

and most

of the women,

they’re like bad poems i’ve read

and bad poets i’ve met

with their

gruelling attempts

of emotion that never

leave their fingers,

or mouths,

or souls

they just fill

themselves

with fucking hedonistic

bullshit

and their remains always

seem to sprawl themselves

all over my sheets

and i guess

thats what leaves them undone,

and you try,

you read it

like it was the first

time you’ve ever

seen such splendour

and say you love it

that it’s beautiful

so they take

their withering hearts

 out of the cage

and try again

so they might

at least try

to want the pen

on the paper

one more time

but they just

seem to evaporate

from the place

and

i forget about them

for the rest

of the year

not all women

though,

 some,

the select saints,

they make an impact

but unfortunately

they’re born under blue moons

with king tides and meteor showers

but thats

why they’re only the best,

they’re like spectacular plays

or the words shakespeare

couldn’t properly scratch out

onto paper

some

like bukwoski, groves,

t.hull and brecht

they’re the ones

i’ll remember

but

unfortunately,

most are just

like bad poems

i’ve read.

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Meteor is a dark olive green, a real murky colour with a green and gold flakie top coat.  This is actually one of my favourites.  The topper here applies more smoothly than some of the others in the range, meaning extra thick coats of top coat are not required.

Anyway, the base creme is almost a one coater, like the rest of the range.  Although I did two to prevent streaking when applying the top coat.  Its worth waiting until the base colour is dry before applying the topper, otherwise the colour drags and you get light spots.  But this one was a dream to apply.  I used Seche Clear as a base and Seche Vite as my top coat.

Revlon Moon Candy can be found in larger Boots stores for £7.99 or via their website.  They aren’t listed on the Revlon UK site, but you can see the range on the US site here but note only seven shades appear on the Boots website currently.

Have you picked up any yet?

Perhaps this addition is somewhat late to the party, but Tyson brings up a good point: It took a massive meteor collision in the Ural mountains to help us understand the cosmos’s potential for hostility. Like Tyson says, “We live in a cosmic shooting gallery.”

Scientists since the 80s have been trying to tell us about the epic tragedy that exterminated life on Earth at the end of the Mesozoic Era, but it’s time we listen and start thinking about how to defend ourselves. Although the universe may be endlessly beautiful, it can also extinguish all life on Earth with the toss of a cosmic pebble.

Related articles

• We Live in a Cosmic Shooting Gallery (bigthink.com)
• Neil deGrasse Tyson: We Live in a Cosmic Shooting Gallery (disclose.tv)
• Meteorites strike Earth every few months (thehindu.com)

All things must pass. A bit of billion-year-old comet dust disintegrates above a decaying pioneer farm.

This was a lucky shot to be sure. Last night I returned to my favourite farmstead site to shoot a time-lapse sequence of the stars turning over the moonlit rustic buildings. I started shooting some test frames to get the settings right — the camera was on a motorized dolly to move it along a track for the next three hours, so you want to make sure you have all the settings right. I opened the shutter to start a test series, and whoosh! A bright meteor appeared. Right on time and in frame. That doesn’t happen very often!

However, shooting hundreds of shots for a time-lapse sequence, now a common practice among astrophotographers, does boost your chances of picking up a bright meteor on one of the frames. But having it appear nicely framed is often too much to ask. I was lucky. But … I was out with a camera aimed at the sky, and for getting good shots that’s the first requirement!

– Alan, April 26, 2013 / © 2013 Alan Dyer

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top of page ^

Prophetic news from today:

Hezbollah faces mounting pressure to leave Syria

Less that ten percent of Born Again Christians have a Biblical world view

World Health Organization says new bird strain is “one of the most lethal” flu viruses

America The Fallen: 24 Signs That Our Once Proud Cities Are Turning into Poverty-stricken Hellholes

Meteorite sighted in skies above central Israel

Iraq’s Sunnis gear up against the country’s army

Pentagon Blocks Access to Southern Baptist Website

Moroccan Fatwa Demands Death Sentence For Christian Converts

Hobby Lobby Defies Obama HHS mandate For Religious Liberty

I prefer CoffeeScript over JavaScript so I wondered, if I can write the package code in CoffeeScript. Well that was a must-have requirement. If I couldn’t get this working anyhow, I would have abandoned the idea of packages, yet again, I think. At the moment of this writing, the Meteor package API is still not documented. So I had to experiment a bit. After looking in the relevant sources of Meteor (packages.js under tools), I made at first a rather complicated solution.

I decided to look at the source code of some standard packages and found out, that you can use other packages in your package definition. I tried the following:

And it worked like a breeze. I just have to add all “.coffee” files I have in the package and can access globally defined variables form my normal app code. As you might see from the sources I plan to build a very basic fulltext search (n-gram) for my app. I haven’t found anything simple that integrates well with Meteor. Maybe you can point something out.

In case you wonder why I didn’t use Meteorite. Well, I don’t know exactly. I simply didn’t want to go the Meteorite way. I find it questionable that there exists yet another mechanism for the same purpose, and since the Meteor native package system is included and works quite well (for the built in packages), I decided to stick with it and ignore Meteorite and those Atmosphere “Smart Packages”.

I don’t know if this is a wise choice. Time will tell.

cd [YOUR METEOR APP FOLDER]
mkdir packages
cd packages
mkdir tedious
cd tedious
touch package.js
kate package.js

In your app directory create a folder with the name: “packages”, if it doesn’t exist already. Change into it and create a folder for the Npm module you like to include. I made a “tedious” folder. Again change into it and create a single file with the name: “package.js” there. Open the file with your favorite editor and define the package in the following way:

To actually use tedious in the rest of the app, you have to provide a way to access it. You can do this by adding a variable to the global scope. Unfortunately you have to do this in a separate file. Add a file:

touch load_tedious.js
kate load_tedious.js

And put the following content in it:

When you start your Meteor app, it will pull tedious and all of its dependencies from Npm. Now you can access tedious by simply using the variable name. For example this way:

Afterwards you can proceed as before and outlined in the post referred above.

So I started with the classic “Meteor way” solution:

{{#each thumbnails}}
    <img src="{{thumbnail.src}}" class="thumb" 
         height="{{height}}" width="{{width}}">
{{/each}}

Handlebars.myTemplate.height = -> Session.get("heightThumb")
Handlebars.myTemplate.width  = -> Session.get("widthThumb")

It works (for the sake of this discussion lets not argue if I should change height/width or style). But at what cost? Lets consider what Meteor does behind the scenes. When the Session variables heightThumb and widthThumb change it triggers re-computation of the template. After the templates has been re-computed, Spark executes the update logic and checks which elements should be added/removed/updated. Everything is run by the javascript interpreter and multiple DOM changes occur. Meaning that for large image galleries a noticeable lag would occur.

So I tried another approach. jQuery:

Meteor.autorun( ->
    $('.thumb').css({width: Session.get("widthThumb"), 
                     height: Session.get("heightThumb")})
)

Well, it runs significantly faster but still a bit laggy. I’m not a jQuery expert but updating style using jQuery seems cheaper than re-rendering templates using Spark. But now we mix Meteor style DOM manipulation with jQuery DOM manipulation and we are dependent on the jQuery library. Can we do even better?

In my last attempt I tried something which might be not very elegant at first glance. Using css embedded in the template code:

<style type="text/css>
.thumb: {
    height: {{height}};
    width: {{width}};
}
</style>

And that’s it. So let us analyze what happens now. When the height/width value changes, the template updates the css rule. Updating the rules causes the desired change, but this time we delegate the responsibility to the browser which is efficiently implemented (no interpreter), avoiding iterating over multiple objects in javascript. I tested this method was tested under the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome and it seems to do the trick.

This way might not even be so ugly as it might seem. The idea behind separating styling and structure is meant for scenarios when the style is independent of the structure/behavior/interaction. Clearly this is not the case in our example. Therefore, my conscience is clear.

For those of you who didn’t know, the Lyrid Meteor Shower peaked this past Sunday night. Unlike some of the more rare meteor showers that happen once a lifetime, if even, the Lyrid Meteor Shower happens roughly every April. In the right conditions, it is a really cool sight to see.

Between the smog, fog, and lights in Los Angeles, it is safe to say I haven’t seen stars or even pure darkness in quite some time. I took the opportunity to venture up to Santa Barbara and into the Los Padres Forest with a friend for a better view. It was worth the trip, but unfortunately still wasn’t the best night for stargazing. The combo of a nearly full moon and the marine layer on the coast made it a bit bright in the mountains. Rest assure, I did get a few short star-trails so it wasn’t a complete waste.

A suspected meteor lit up the night sky in Argentina.

It reportedly happened Sunday.

In one of the videos, you can see a big flash of light at a concert.

The video below appears to show the suspected meteor from another camera.

[ndn id=24751586]

What appears to be a meteor flash turned the nighttime skies over Argentina as bright as day on Sunday.

Amateur video shows the green streak and flash in the background of a concert setting.

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There was a meteor that lit up the sky in Argentina Sunday.

That’s what they’re trying to figure out in Wolcott.

Police say just before 10:30 Saturday morning, resident Larry Beck called them to report that a baseball sized rock had crashed through the roof of his home on Williams Court the night before.

Police say Beck thought a rafter had broken.  It was after checking the attic that he noticed a hole in the roof.

Initially it was believed the rock was a piece of runway concrete from a plane’s landing gear.

However, police were informed yesterday of a meteorite shower that had taken place Friday night.

In addition the the New England regional FAA office, the Peabody Museum in New Haven has been contacted to deter if the rock is, in fact, a piece of meteor.

[ndn id="24752958"]

A bright fireball lit up the night sky in north and central Argentina at about 3:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, reports NBC News, wowing all observers who witnessed the flash.

Amateur video of the suspected meteor was captured at an outdoor concert as the folk music band Los Tekis performed, and briefly shows the bright flash turning a pitch-black night sky into daylight.

Watch the video below.