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News Briefs 24-07-2009

Souma yergon, sou nou yergon, we are shaking the tree…

Mucho gracias to GT and my cousin Matt!

Quote of the Day:

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the mind at large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual…”

Aldous Huxley

  1. A sunspot!
    Apparently a sunspot turned up today (Friday 24th) which, from its polarity, has been identified as belonging to the last sunspot cycle (Cycle 23). This information was found at the Disaster Watch website.

    Regards, Kathrinn

  2. A Warning Call To Earth?
    If you want to find out what we know right now about our chances of taking a hit from a near Earth object, you can do the following exercise.

    1 Get a spreadsheet running with a blank page up.
    2 Go the http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ , the Sentry Current Impact Risks table of the Near Earth Object office at JPL.
    3 Copy the numbers from the 4th column (cumulative impact probability) from both tabkes (recently and not recently observed.
    4 Put the data from both tables into a single column.
    5. Add.
    6. You now have the cumulative impact probability for the known NEOs with measurable impact risks. You do the math, but I’ll give a hint. The single greatest risk right now is 0.13%. The cumulative risk is going to be greater.

    This is how much we should consider this a warning call to Earth. And we should keep in mind these data represent only those we know about. They estimate there are 10 times as many.

    No, I am not the brain specialist…..
    YES. Yes I AM the brain specialist.

    1. 0.13 %
      The number 0.13% is for how many years?

      If you use a long enough time to calculate the risk, it’s something like 100%.

      Also the 0.13% is misleading, since it does not take into account the damage done if one of those should hit he earth.

      Estimate the monetary damage that could be done, and use some number like 0.13% over (let’s say) 50 years. This gives you an amount of money worth spending on lowering the risk.

      An insurance expert would be the person to ask about this. Just don’t tell the insurance person that you are looking at asteroids. Say it’s an industrial accident or something like that.

      Also take into consideration this about the comet that hit Jupiter this month: nobody saw it coming.
      —-
      No amount of cursing at the round earth will make it flat.

  3. eye in the sky
    “The fuzzy blue dot to the left, which appears to fit snuggly between the arms, is a companion galaxy.

    ‘The companion galaxy that looks as if it’s playing peek-a-boo through the larger galaxy could have plunged through, poking a hole,’ said Helou. ‘But we don’t know this for sure. It could also just happen to be aligned with a gap in the arms.'”

    Note the escape clause. If the red shift of the fuzzy blue dot is not consistent with the large galaxy, it definitely wont be called a companion galaxy, even though it looks like it has poked a hole right through it.

    Kind of like the holding the sun illusion, with one difference. There is much more information available for the holding the sun illusion in order to judge it an illusion, than there is for the companion galaxy illusion.

    1. Lucifer cometh
      To have our biggest planet in the system suddenly explode to become a new star would be incredibly cool 🙂

      —–
      It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
      It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

      Red Pill Junkie

      1. how cool ?
        Some stars are cooler than others. The global warming people would be all over this if they could find a human to blame for events at Jupiter.

        —-
        No amount of cursing at the round earth will make it flat.

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