fission

I'm spending the day trying to get some work done on the book-in-progress, so I'm avoiding both work- and blog-related stuff. I don't want to leave the site completely quiet, though, so here's a question to ponder, relating to SteelyKid's continuing fascination with Goodnight Moon: How does a cow jump over the moon? The father of one of SteelyKid's classmates, who is not originally from the US, asked why there's a cow jumping over the moon in that (or, as SteelyKid puts it: "Cow jumping MOON!!"), and I don't have a good answer. I'm aware of the nursery rhyme and the Tolkien joke, but why…
Let's say we're having a nice day here on Earth; the Sun is shining, the clouds are sparse, and everything is just looking like a peach: And then Lucas goes and tells me, Oh my God, Ethan! It's Armageddon! An asteroid is coming straight for us! You've got to stop it! Really? Me? Well, how would I do it? Let's say we've got some reasonably good asteroid tracking going on, and we've got about 2 months before the asteroid is actually going to hit us. We'd like to do something with the situation on the left, to avoid the situation on the right: Well, what we really have to do is change the…