Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Another reason to read Daily Kos
. . . is for the science.
Depending upon which way you lean, Daily Kos may be one of the few bastions of liberal thought on the internet, or a hotbed of Commie pinko activism. The reality is, it’s a battlefield wherein Obama cheerleaders, self-proclaimed “pragmatists,” and progressive purists regularly get into screaming fits. The only thing uniting this crowd is that we all despise the Republican agenda.
But, back to the science. Pop over to Daily Kos right this instant and you’ll find a book review of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown, the astronomer whose work on the solar system’s outermost reaches led to Pluto-the-planet’s demise, and the author is participating in the discussion in the comments. How cool is that?
Right below that, author Mark Sumner reports on mega-meteorites striking the Earth in Death From Above, and leads with the provocative question,
Fill in the blank. The Earth suffers an impact from an asteroid or comet generating more energy than the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima every __ year(s).
You’ll have to pop over there to find out the answer. Sumner provides lots of great information about the science of impacts, the Tunguska event, the Teller Scale of Intolerably Large Disasters, and the Torino Impact Hazard Scale.
And there’s Darksyde’s regular feature, This week in science. The most recent column included a link to PZ Myers’s self-proclaimed “wet blanket” to the arsenic-based life form story . . .
It’s an extremophile bacterium that can be coaxed into substiting [sic] arsenic for phosphorus in some of its basic biochemistry. It’s perfectly reasonable and interesting work in its own right, but it’s not radical, it’s not particularly surprising, and it’s especially not extraterrestrial.
. . . and a link to a report regarding SpaceX’s efforts regarding the commercialization of space travel.
See? Not just politics!
But with regard to politics, I found the cute image below in one of the comment threads. One of my bumper stickers reads “Cthulhu 2008: Why Vote For the Lesser Evil?” This would be a good companion sticker.
Now that’s change you can die for!
D.
