Try not to freak out, but a 10-meter-wide asteroid exploded somewhere high over Indonesia earlier this month with about three times the force of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Here’s a newscast with some amateur footage of the resulting dust trail—which, admittedly, doesn’t look half as hellish as I’ve been led to expect that it should.
Writeup in Wired about the Perimeter System, the USSR’s top-secret zero-sum doomsday machine—alternatively known as the Mertvaya Ruka or Dead Hand.
The gist: a network of hidden nuclear silos, daisy-chained to a subterranean control center. In the event of a nuclear attack, fully automated retaliation is a big red button push away.
Oh yeah. And it’s still active.
“Thousands of Americans—hardworking ordinary Americans like you and me—already have H1N1,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said during a press conference. “Now Obama wants to take that away from us.”
That, according to a seriously shaky Wolfram|Alpha calculation, is how much land that each person would get were the Earth (minus Antarctica and the Sahara Desert) split 6.67 billion equal ways.1
Here’s the equation:
For comparison, 4.659 acres is about the size of 2.6 FIFA-sanctioned international match soccer fields.
If you’re thinking, Gee, that actually kind of sounds like a lot, bear this in mind: the actual Earth is not a flat grid of equally habitable cells—inevitably, many millions of people would get stuck with parcels on mountainsides or in toxic waste dumps, swamps, deserts and Siberia. The above figure is clearly on the generous side.2
That said, I’m on the borderline of horror with this one. It either makes the world seem very small or makes mankind seem very stifling.
Either way, this much is certain: the fact that Wolfram|Alpha can help be indulge in such childish things is undeniably cool.
Seed‘s eloquent description of the Higgs boson theory for the Large Hadron Collider’s string of bad luck:
Essentially, the theory is that the Higgs is so destructive that no possible future universe of ours contains one. Thus, any effort to find the Higgs in the present is doomed to failure.
Now that’s the sort of concision I was looking for the first time.
The mayor of Moscow wants to take a proactive approach to snow removal.
The plan, unveiled last month, calls for shooting liquid nitrogen, silver or cement particles into oncoming storm clouds to dump the snow before it gets to the city.
Hm. Sounds just crazy enough to work destroy the Earth.
Is exactly what it sounds like – what the world will look like as the oceans rise.
The unreasonable paranoid in me is a little disappointed that it maxes out at 14m.
Sleep tight. Via Buffering.
