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Congratulations to Roth and Shapley and John Novak

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has just been announced, and goes to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design." I know basically nothing about these guys, but I assume they've earned their Sveriges Riksbank Prize, so congratulations to them. And congratulations also to John Novak, who correctly called Shapley in the annual betting pool. I think that's all the winners for this year, both of Nobel Prizes and from the betting pool. If I missed one, please point it out to me. And if you…

Langobard

On a whim, I've grown one of my infrequent beards, and it's starting to itch. The beard hairs are hard and bristly, and the mustache feels like having the skeleton of a herring glued to my upper lip. Kissing and snuggling my loved ones isn't at all as nice a usual, since the 'stache makes contact with them long before I do. Judging from the compliments I've received, though, a beard seems to be the way to go if you're into ladies born in the 1940s. Another possible explanation for the data I have is that women of all ages love my beard, but that only ones of a certain age are daring enough…

Hexapus!

OK, I say uncle. Everyone's been sending me the story of the hexapus, the six-armed octopus found in England. Sure, he's cute… …but I'm afraid it's not that big a deal. It's an ordinary sort of error — we know that cephalopod limbs develop from primordia that exhibit a pattern of fusion as it is, so an epigenetic error that causes either an excess of fusions or failure of arm buds to form isn't a particularly dramatic event. Now, if they breed this octopus and find a heritable propensity for limb development failur, then I'll be much more interested, since that means we'd be able to look at…

Amalie Takes A Rubber Man Swimming

With thanks to Moomin, here's a fine clip with Max Raabe und das Palast Orchester performing "Amalie geht mit 'nem Gummikavalier ins Bad" from 1927. How low haven't the lyrics of the popular song sunk since that golden age of wit and erudition! Update 22 October:My translation of the song's title doesn't bring across just how naughty it sounds in German. In Bad gehen does mean "to go swimming", and the lyrics make it clear that Amalie and her rubber gentleman are indeed on the beach. But it also means "to take a bath", so to someone who only reads the title of the song, it appears to mean "…

Science Blogging Starting to Look Like Football

Here's an interesting development. Top science bloggers have become a commodity hot enough that a situation like that in European football is emerging. Players are getting snatched from team to team through hostile buyout (Carl Zimmer of The Loom), and the number of really good non-pro players is dwindling (Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer just went pro). I'm not sure if Carl got offered better pay than at Sb. Both bloggers did get steady writing gigs as columnists for Discover Magazine, which translates to some money (though most likely not much). In an attention-based economy, the market is…

More minor roadkill in the wiki-wars

But its topical! We have the bizarre and deeply stupid ruling from the EU re the "right to vanish". But wikipedia has a quasi "right to vanish" too. People use it to sweep their embarrassing past under the carpet. Which brings me to: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Thegoodlocust. Ho ho. Update: (User rename log); 07:40:16 . . Nihonjoe (talk | contribs) renamed user Thegoodlocust (2640 edits) to Vanished user oerjio4kdm3 (courtesy vanishing) (Move log); 07:40:16 . . Nihonjoe (talk | contribs) moved page User talk:Thegoodlocust to User talk:Vanished user oerjio4kdm3 without leaving a redirect…

What are you people doing here? It's Christmas Eve!

You've got to have something better to do. We're having the traditional white Christmas here in Morris: a foot of snow on the ground, temperatures around 10 to 15° below zero C, a nice stiff 10-15 mph breeze, and no one with any sanity stepping outside. Which rules me out right there. I made the drive to St Cloud and back yesterday, in even worse weather, to pick up #1 Son; I get to make the longer drive (but in somewhat milder weather) to Minneapolis to pick up #2 Son today. You might expect nothing but gibbering madness and exhaustion from me for a while. So go do something with family or…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 80

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 79 Table of Contents Chapter 81 Chapter 80 Makeba, November 14, 2055 Aretha, I would like to call your attention to an SRM device of which I have recently been apprised. The rough theory is in the UNGETF database, keyword Sunbugs. An implementation is to be found in the FabNet archives, same keyword. It requires a Fraunhoeffer chemical synthesizer to which I do not have access, but I believe you do. It might be a viable replacement for the sunshield. Trust you are well. cordially, Luc Fontaine Excerpted from _The Bottleneck Years_ by H.E.…

Cruise from hell

No, I don't mean the infamous cruise of diarrhea and vomiting, I mean something far, far worse — a trip that would make a week locked in the head with fluids gushing from your orifices seem enticing. I mean… The National Review's Cruise. Neo-cons. Casual racism. William F. Buckley, Dinesh D'Souza, Norman Podhoretz. Fear of Mexicans. Nuke the liberals. Bernard Lewis and Kate O'Beirne. Muslims must die. Desiccated ancient WASPs urging their kind to breed. Steven King must ship out on one of these cruises sometime. It will spawn a horror novel so terrifying that it will need to be stored in a…

Jefferson and Christianity

There is an interesting exchange on Jefferson and Christianity going on in the neighborhood, which I think was kicked off by Jon Rowe's fisking of a very bad article the other day that included what appears to be a fake quote from Jefferson. Sandefur picked up on the discussion of the Jefferson quote with this post. Then Jason Kuznicki posted about it here and here. And so did Paul Musgrave and Caleb McDaniel. The only one I wasn't familiar with in that was the last one, and how on earth did Caleb manage to escape my notice all this time? He writes about history, religion, and jazz - the…

Astroquizzical: How Does Gravity Escape From A Black Hole? (Synopsis)

There's something puzzling about black holes, if you stop to consider it. On the one hand, they're objects so massive and dense -- compacted into such a small region of space -- that nothing can escape from it, not even light. That's the definition of a black hole, and why "black" is in the name. Image credit: James Provost, sciencenews.org. But gravity also moves at the speed of light, and yet the gravitational influence of a black hole has absolutely no problem extending not only beyond the event horizon, but infinite distances out into the abyss of space. Image credit: Henze, NASA.…

Snip

There are two subjects that I know stir up a few dedicated commenters here: abortion and circumcision. Most articles, when they fall off the front page, fade away from continued discussion fairly rapidly. Abortion and circumcision proponents and opponents have endurance, though, and comments will continue dribbling along for months. So I hesitate to bring this up, but… An infant died, slowly and unpleasantly, of an infection and septic shock after an ordinary circumcision. I know this is a rare occurrence, but it's the pointlessness of the death that jars. This poor kid died for a silly…

Could Black Holes Destroy the Universe? (Synopsis)

Out there in the Universe, black holes are some of the most extreme examples of physics in the Universe. Space is curved tremendously, there's an incredible concentration of energy all in one, singular point, and everything that occurs, in theory, outside of the event horizon can be seen in our Universe. Image Credits: Birmingham Libraries. But what if one of those things that it can do is make the quantum vacuum in this incredibly curved space unstable? What if it can allow the vacuum to tunnel from its metastable state into one that's truly stable? Image Credits: Gary Scott Watson. In…

Numbers Game (Synopsis)

No one science can stand wholly on its own. For inquiry about the Universe to give a correct, complete picture, it requires that we bring in a whole slew of evidence, often from tangentially related fields. Image credit: Professor Kenneth R. Lang, Tufts University. The interplay between three fields in particular -- astronomy, physics, and math (not a science, but the tool used to help understand the relationships arising in the first two) -- have given rise to the most successful picture of the Universe of all-time. But how did this come to be? Image credit: Scott Dodelson. Brian…

Mini-Movie Monday: Genesis Episode 3, The Galaxy (Synopsis)

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” -Ralph W. Sockman After millennia looking up at the Milky Way overhead, it's only recently that we discovered our galaxy had a spiral-like structure, and that the other spirals and ellipticals in the night sky are galaxies much like our own. But how did they come to be? Why do they appear the way they are? And what will come of them in the future? Find out the answers to all these questions and more on the third episode of Genesis, where we focus on the galaxy and where it comes from! (And if you missed either of the…

Rip-off artist catch-and-release

Here's a nice story about a woman striking back at identity theft. She was robbed of $9,000 in 3 days (with even more long term grief) by a sleazoid who got financial information by breaking into her mail — and then she spotted the thief (recognized from a security camera photo) and got her arrested after chasing her on foot. A happy ending! Happy, that is, until you learn the conclusion of the court trial. The thief was given probation. She'd perpetrated her crimes while on probation, so this seems like a particularly futile sentence. It's not an entirely pleasant prospect. Read the article…

Wishing Doesn’t Make It So (Synopsis)

When our science fiction fills our heads with ideas that could make our lives tremendously improved, we like to believe it's only a matter of time before technology catches up with our imaginations. Indeed, tricorders, wireless communicators and rocket ships were just some of the breakthroughs predicted by sci-fi on their way to becoming commonplace technology. Image credit: Peter Nussbaumer. But many of our dreams are a long way from becoming reality, including human-sized teleporters, wormholes and time travel. What happens when science fiction runs into the cold, hard wall that is…

Transcript of Forrest's Testimony

Thanks to Dave S for letting me know that the transcript of the first part of Barbara Forrest's testimony is now available. You can download it from this page, along with earlier transcripts. Want a good indication of how important her testimony is at this trial? On top of the major freakout going on among the ID crowd to discredit her, look at the size of the transcript. It's 3 times as long as all the other transcripts combined, and it doesn't even include the cross-examination of her by the defense attorneys, just the direct examination by the plaintiffs and all of the arguing over whether…

If a tree falls at a press conference and no press shows up, does it still make a sound?

For the last couple weeks I've been dying to get my hands on a transcript of the NCBCPS press conference where they responded to the Texas Freedom Network's criticism of their bible curriculum, mostly because I wanted to see what sort of stupid things Chuck Norris might have said. Last night I got an email from Ed Darrell that may explain why I can't find one. He has it on the authority of Heather Alden, the TFN's tireless media director, that no press showed up at their press conference (which was held at the National Press Club, as many Washington events are). That's absolutely hysterical.…

Returning to the Scene of the Crime

I have returned. Much better debate at this tournament than the last one, but that was expected. EGR is a major national tournament, with teams coming from far and wide, New Hampshire to California, and that includes probably half of the top ten teams in the nation. The tournament is actually still going on, it should be in the final round right now. I had fun, got to see several more old friends who were quite surprised to see me at a debate tournament for the first time in so long. This will probably be the last one I judge, though I am going to try to arrange a get together during another…

Bush Double Speak

I saw him say this on TV and just sat there with my mouth agape: I don't like the tone in Washington, D.C. I feel like that the politics has gotten ugly, and that tends to discourage people around the country. And that's just too bad. This from the guy who had his underlings doing push-polling during the 2000 election to inform people that John McCain had a "biracial" baby. How about that tone, George, was that okay? Oh wait, that was the tone in South Carolina, not in Washington DC. Now tell us again how you don't like the tone, then tell us all about how the terrorists will win if people…

Praise the Lord and Pass the Switchblade

Here's more of that good Christian charity. We're told constantly that school prayer will help keep kids from being immoral; apparently that doesn't hold true in Crawford County, Georgia. Two teachers there recently asked the school board to stop opening their meetings with prayer. Their reward? Vandalism. The teachers asked the school board last month to stop giving invocations, which are routinely Christian and often mention Jesus Christ by name, at monthly board meetings and events such as new teacher orientation. That same night, Laura Meldrum, a special education teacher, and Charles…

LOLEmmy: Unsatisfactory Toys

It's Saturday, and it's Homecoming weekend at Union, so I'll be over on campus watching sporting events for a good chunk of the day. That means it's a perfect time to pay off another blog purchase, this one from Rajesh Vaidya who asked for LOLEmmys, at least five pictures worth. There are two problems with this request: First, the Queen of Niskayuna is much too dignified to speak in LOLCat. More importantly, though, I'm not very good at coming up with these. However, that's why I have clever readers. So, here's a picture: And here's my lame attempt at a caption: I'm sure somebody out there…

Ideas All Over the Place

Ethan Zuckerman has the sort of life that every academic dreams of: He travels all over the world going to conferences where really smart people, some of them famous, talk about interesting things. And he doesn't even have to grade exam papers, or attend boring faculty meetings. His latest jaunt was to the Idea Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, and he has blogged it extensively. Highlights range from Steve Wozniak talking about the birth of Apple to James McLurkin's swarms of robots to Dirk Brockmann using dollar bills for epidemiology (hey to Tara and Revere). Like all of his conference…

Nerd Holidays

Steve Cook suggests a holiday for computer nerds: Far better than World Hello Day would be Hello World Day, celebrating 32 years of every programming manual's stock first example. Global diversity could be honored by recognizing our rainbow of programming languages, from Pascal to Brainfuck, and when we were done we could all sing a song, examine some art, and return to our homes without bothering anyone. Hey, it makes more sense than "Talk Like a Pirate Day"... Of course, as always with a Snarkout post, there are more offbeat links in the post than you would want to shake a stick at, and…

Queen Emmy the Vigilant

This might not look it, but this is actually a happy dog picture. On windy days, she'll sit like this at the edge of the patio, just letting the wind blow interesting smells past her. You can't see it from a still photo, but she's constantly sniffing, and her ears are twitching, and she's generally having a good time. It's really cute. It's hard to get a picture of, though, because the minute we open the door, she'll explode into motion to chase... something. Birds, squirrels, invisible aliens that only dogs can detect, I'm really not sure. This picture was actually shot through the kitchen…

Leaf Peeping

It's fall, which means lots of good things: football on tv, college basketball just around the corner, apple cider donuts (mmm.... donuts...), and the leaves turning colors. One of the real highlights of living in New England is the spectacular foliage. Sadly, it tends to bring out the leaf-peepers, people from down toward New York or Boston, who drive around at about six miles per hour looking at the trees, but the trees are certainly worth a look. Ever wonder why it is that the trees do that? So have a lot of scientists. Carl Zimmer has a round-up of their findings. Short answer: "Beats us…

Quick Geek Notes

I'm vaguely relieved that I didn't make the Top Five in the Nerd-Off. Just to prove that I'm still plenty nerdy, though, here are a few links: First, a new(ish) physics grad student blog, Tales from the Learning Curve, by Jen Fallis. I noticed her blog a while abck when she ran into everyone's favorite troll, but I haven't gotten around to linking her because I'm lazy. Sorry. Of course, every silver lining has a cloud: Dylan Stiles is shutting down his blog. As Derek Lowe notes, it's probably the right thing to do, but I'll miss his irrepressible chem-dork posts. Finally, via RRResearch (via…

Where the Nerds Are

For those few readers who are really fascinated by the workings of SF fandom, Kevin Standlee has posted a map of the Worldcon membership by country, and by state for the US and prefecture for Japan. It's interesting not just for the distribution of the actual members, but for the gaps. Africa appears only in a couple of small insets, thanks to a few members in Nigeria, South Africa, and Israel, while only a tiny slice of Aouth America is shown, thanks to a handful of members in Chile. There are no members from anywhere in the former Soviet Union. I don't know that you can read any Deep…

Alternate Mascots

Some guys on a mailing list that I'm on were talking about a game they were playing during breaks in the NCAA tournamnent last weekend, trying to come up with appropriate alternate mascots for colleges and universities. The idea is to pick mascot names that fit with the school name to make an amusing phrase. My favorites from the list discussion were: The Creighton Barrel (Singular, like the Harvard Crimson or Stanford Cardinal). The Seton Hall Monitors (A Komodo dragon that checks late passes). The Iona Spheres (A team with real balls). I'm sure ScienceBlogs readers can come up with some…

Dark Aliens in the Times

A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens). It's probably possible to draw some sort of parallel between the two-- after all, the notion of dark matter was viewed as bordeline kookery for decades before gaining wide acceptance, and SETI is still widely viewed as a little bit off. I'm a little discombobulated from yesterday's long trip, though, so I'll…

Scorsese Is Doomed

A few days ago, Inside Higher Ed did an Oscar preview, and asked five academics who study film to predict the Best Picture winner. Three of the five picked The Departed to win, and one of the other two preferred it to his predicted winner (Babel). Clearly, Scorsese is doomed to lose yet again. Scalzi's half-serious prediction of Letters from Iwo Jima is looking better and better... Or possibly The Queen, which none of the academics even mentioned. I've seen exactly none of the nominated films, so I really don't have an opinion. If you'd like to offer a prediction, or just call me a cretin for…

Zeilinger on Physics

I got email last week from the Institute of Physics pointing me to a pair of video interviews with Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. Zeilinger has built an impressive career out of doing fundamental tests of quantum mechanics-- he's not only got the accent and the hair to be a brilliant physicist, he's got a long list of amazing experimental papers to back it up. They've gone the Locus route, and not included any of the questions he was responding to, which is always a little weird. Zeilinger provides enough context that everything makes sense, though, and he says some really…

21st Century Video

The video from today's talks at the Science in the 21st Century conference have been posted at the PIRSA collection, so if you want to see my talk, you can watch the video (a 110 MB WMV file), and/or look at the slides (a 2.7 MB PDF). I would also particularly recommend watching the video of John Willinsky's talk on Open Access, which was outstanding. The video quality is excellent-- they have multiple cameras, so despite my best efforts to pace out of the frame, they kept me on camera most of the time. The audio clip of the "Bunnies Made of Cheese" posting is a little hard to hear, but…

Betting vs. Prediction

A quick review of an important concept going into this weekend's Super Bowl: The "point spread" for a football game is set at the level required to get equal numbers of bets on the two teams. The spread is not the consensus opinion of expert observers as to the likely outcome of the game. The two are often similar, but the point spread is fundamentally about the behavior of bettors, not the prediction of outcomes. This ought to be trivially obvious from the fact that you don't see anybody on ESPN taking the Patriots and giving the points. It's surprising how many people who make their living…

Kate and the Dragon

There's a chance that, if I make a serious push this week, I can have a first pass through the book complete before Christmas. So, of course, I'm procrastinating madly. I understand it's traditional to post pictures in these circumstances, so here's one of my favorite shots from the Japan pictures: This is Kate getting some water out of the awesome dragon fountain at one of the Hongwan-ji temples in Kyoto. They're doing major renovations at the moment, hence the white construction fence, which made a very nice plain background for the dragon, and made this come out really well. Right. With…

Tree of SCIENCE!!! #3

Today's ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! might seem like a repeat, but it's not: I know, you're saying "Dude, you already did life sciences..." True, but this glittery polar bear doesn't stand for life sciences, he stands for climate science and environemntal science. This little guy had an icecap, but somebody be stealin' his icecap. That's why he looks so sad. That, or he's just out of Coke. Tough call. I'm not sure where we got this one-- I think it was a gift. It's a little awkward as an ornament, because the hook is not above the center of mass, so it hangs a little crooked, but it'…

Thursday Toddler Blogging 071510

We've been doing weekly Baby Blogging (now Toddler Blogging) for a long time now-- this is week 101-- but it occurs to me that we've been shortchanging someone in all these pictures: Appa. He is, after all, a sky-bison, so it's about time we got a picture of him in flight: SteelyKid says "I could totally do that, if Mommy and Daddy would let me." (We've-- well, all right, I've-- started playing a game where I get Appa across the room from SteelyKid, say "Yip-yip!" and toss him across the room to her. Lately, she's started saying "Yip-yip!" as well, which makes it much cuter.) (Kate is way…

Laser Smackdown: Final Days of Voting for the Most Amazing Laser Application

We're just over 600 votes in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, as of early Friday morning. I notice that it has moved off the front page of the blog, though, so here's another signal-boosting repost, just so we have as many votes as possible, to establish maximum scientific validity when we declare the winner the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research Voting will remain open until next Sunday, May 2, just two days from now, with the ultimate winner announced on Monday…

Kids These Days

New students will be showing up on college campuses all across the country in the next few weeks, which means it's time for the annual "kids these days" reflections on the character of the new freshmen. Apparently, they don't know all kinds of important stuff, but they don't drink as much as they used to: (Figure from The American Freshman - National Norms for 2005, sent to me in an all-faculty email. It's not clear to me whether "in the past year" refers to their first year in college, or their last year in high school, but I don't care enough to pay $25 to read the report...) Make of those…

(OT) Totally awesome!

From APOD: (click on image for full resolution, totally awesome!) Here is an equally stuning video of that prominence erupting: Ironic that according to the IPCC that massive ball of fire has nothing to do with the climate which is entirely controled by CO2, isn't it? (As humour is hard to detect on the internets I had better spell it out: the IPCC makes no such ridiculous claim, that is a denialist strawman. The sun sends around 343W/m^2 our way, but the important factor is change in that number, which since around 1850 is ~0.3W/m^2 while GHG direct forcing is ~2.5W/m^2. Kinda ruins the…

My sister in law just got Abwrackpraemie

Don't worry, it is not as bad as it sounds, but it is somewhat contagious. Abwrackpraemie is German for "car scrappage bonus" which is what you get if you turn in your older lower mpg car for a new higher mpg car, I assume. The word was added to the German Language earlier today as five thousand words in total were loaded into Das Dictionary. Other words include Konjunkturpaket (stimulus package) and "After-Show-Party" (that one is from English). Oh, and we have a new verb in German as well: Twittern. Not sure what it means, though. There is a story on this here at the BBC or you can…

Diversified Linux Resources

Following on this earlier post, here are links to on line resources that would aid in building, configuring, and using a Linux based computer. Hardware: The 800 dollar killer PC. This is a "gaming" PC, but this set of guidelines is more broadly useful than just for games. Just don't forget to substitute Linux for Windows. Linux-Friendly Hardware More on Linux Friendly Hardware Systems and related information: The Windows to Linux Roadmap Ubuntu Xubuntu Guide to Debian Linux Open Source Resources Page Just for fun: Linux from Scratch Shell Scripting: Linux Shortcuts and Commands…

Happy Birthday Maria Reiche

Maria Reiche was an archaeologist and mathematician who worked on the Nazca lines in Peru. Originally, she worked with Paul Kosok, who discovered the remarkable drawings, and starting in the mid 1940s, Reiche mapped in the drawings. She believed that the lines represented a calendar and a sort of observatory. She is probably single handedly responsible for the preservation of these important archaeological features. She died in Lima in 1998. Several crackpots have suggested that the Nazca lines, since they can only be taken in visually from a height achievable only with flying machines…

New Neutrino Detector To Be Built in Minnesota

Which is great, because I understand we have LOTS of neutrinos here .... The University of Minnesota and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory plan to break ground south of International Falls today on a multimillion-dollar project designed to help understand the universe. The NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance Experiment (NOvA) will be the Northland's second detector studying subatomic particles being shot through the earth from near Chicago. Learning more about the mysterious particles, called neutrinos, will help scientists better understand how the universe formed and how it…

Science Rock Stars

Lynn Fellman, the Ira Flatow of the Twin Cities, has a guest post at Quiche Moraine about her recent trip to the Origins Symposium. Rusty-red rocks against an electric blue sky were an exact color match for the mix of brilliant intellect I knew to be in Phoenix on Monday. I had just flown into Sky Harbor Airport from Minneapolis, and any Minnesotan will tell you that we don't waste a day like that indoors. It was a sparkling spring morning alive with color and radiant sunshine. But I happily joined 3,000 other science fans inside a dark auditorium for a full twelve-hour day of physics,…

Congratulations Discover Magazine Dot Com

Discover Magazine Dot Com, which has been expanding its blogospheric presence recently, has just reached the one million plus monthly page view mark, having shown a steady expansion since last year. Since Science Blogs has also been growing (though I'm guessing much more slowly since we are not brand new ... I don't really know) this is great news. It means the science blogosphere is growing, and hopefully because more people are paying attention to science stuff. Of coruse, without a more sophisticated analysis, it is hard to say. Of course, I question the wisdom of Phil Plait and…

Finches Determine Sex of Offspring

As you know if you read my blog, Trivers Willard is an important theoretical construct which has been tested numerous times. TW works in some species, not in others, and overall, that should be predictable (accroding to TW). It turns out that finches control the sex of their offspring, and do so in a way that TW would predict, apparently. There is a paper in Science that I'll probably eventually get to writing up for you, and in the mean time, here's a quick news report from Scientific American. See if you can figure out how Trivers Willard is working here, and why the important…

Duck! 2009 DD45 is flying by

Late word out of the IAU's Minor Planet Center: a small asteroid will pass close to Earth [on] ...March 2nd ... at 13:44 Universal Time. How close? The MPC's Timothy Spahr calculates that it'll be 0.00047 astronomical unit from Earth's center. That's only about 40,000 miles (63,500 km) up -- well inside the Moon's orbit and roughly twice the altitude of most communications satellites! This object is about 30 meters across. If it struck a dinosaur, it would probably kill it. But, unlike this object that struck the earth recently, this asteroid is going to fly by. Apparently, people in…

US News and World Reports Screws The Pooch

With an absurd opinion piece by Henry Morris III. You can't comment on the piece, so I'll just tel lyou that it is in the current web edition of the paper and you can go dig it up if you want. (Blog policy: No logic, no links. Unless I feel like it.) Henry Morris is the guy from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). The publication of this opinion piece by USNWR is roughly like, say, the New York Times Science Section publishing a piece on Large Mammal Conservation by those guys who sold the frozen bigfoot last year. Utterly stupid and irresponsible editorial policy on the part…