the blog quebecois

From a link which seems to have expired:

A huge asteroid is hurtling towards the Earth, threatening to wipe out entire cities.

So whatdo you do? You could try saying your last goodbyes to loved ones or you could log on to the internet to find out whether your number really is up.

I plugged in a 200 meter-wide, iron asteroid colliding with the Earth.

You can judge the impact here, a (I presume accurate) simulation from the University of Arizona.

Distance from Impact: 100.00 km = 62.10 miles
Projectile Diameter: 200.00 m = 656.00 ft = 0.12 miles
Projectile Density: 8000 kg/m3 Impact Velocity: 32.20 km/s = 20.00 miles/s

Impact Angle: 90 degrees

Target Density: 3000 kg/m3

Target Type: Competent Rock or saturated soil

And lo, energy totalling

1.74 x 1019 Joules = 4.15 x 10(cubed, while I pretend to look for the HTML superscript code) MegaTons TNT

is unleashed upon the world.

With the bonus of:

Time for maximum radiation: 0.16 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius: 4.4 km = 2.7 miles
The fireball appears 10.0 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 6.70 x 104 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 7 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 10.0

The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 20.0 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 7.0
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 100 km:

VI. Felt by all. Many frightened and run outdoors. Persons walk unsteadily. Windows, dishes, glassware broken. Knickknacks, books, etc., off shelves. Pictures off walls. Furniture moved or overturned. Weak plaster and masonry D cracked. Small bells ring (church, school). Trees, bushes shaken (visibly, or heard to rustle).

VII. Difficult to stand. Noticed by drivers of motor cars. Hanging objects quiver. Furniture broken. Damage to masonry D, including cracks. Weak chimneys broken at roof line. Fall of plaster, loose bricks, stones, tiles, cornices (also unbraced parapets and architectural ornaments). Some cracks in masonry C. Waves on ponds; water turbid with mud. Small slides and caving in along sand or gravel banks. Large bells ring. Concrete irrigation ditches damaged.

Masonry C. Ordinary workmanship and mortar; no extreme weaknesses like failing to tie in at corners, but neither reinforced nor designed against horizontal forces.
Masonry D. Weak materials, such as adobe; poor mortar; low standards of workmanship; weak horizontally.

The ejecta will arrive approximately 144.2 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 1.2 cm = 0.48 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 4.6 cm = 1.82 inches

The air blast will arrive at approximately 333.3 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 24651.3 Pa = 0.2465 bars = 3.5005 psi
Max wind velocity: 48.0 m/s = 107.4 mph
Sound Intensity: 88 dB (Loud as heavy traffic)

And that's a small asteroid. From 100km away. God help us if one of the 15000m-wide variety hits.

such romantic illusions
and they’re all about you
i’d sell them all for a penny
they make pretty souvenirs

-- marianne faithfull

Have I got a deal for you! Just hit the PayPal button . . . no, wait. I don't have a PayPal button. Rats. I guess you'll have to go here and look at them for free.

i am the eye in the sky
looking at you
i can read your mind

alan parsons project

Not while I've got my tinfoil hat on, you can't. In fact, you only have a vague idea where my house is, and I like it that way. If you can't find me, what hope do the police have?

The X marks the spot where I live. I think. That's the maximum resolution of Google's satellite mapping over this little corner of Canada.

This is a new blog that specializes in landmarks from Google Maps. Here's the Golden Gate Bridge:

Via J-Walk Blog

This is a tutorial for making a fire using only an empty Coke can and some chocolate. Really.

You doubt it can be done? Check out this video.

Sure, they probably used matches or a lighter. The important thing is that they could have used a Coke can and some chocolate if they had to.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Robots at Cornell University are making copies of themselves without human intervention. In principle, the machines will thus be able to repair and reproduce themselves in space and other remote environments.

"Our self-replicating robots perform very simple tasks compared with intricacies in biological reproduction," said engineer Hod Lipson, a Cornell assistant professor. "But we think they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology." Self-replication is sometimes seen as the holy grail of robotics.

A video of this is fascinating, if a bit creepy.

The title refers to two types of visual phenomena.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War; The Thin Blue Line) illustrates the latter with a short experimental (at least I assume that it wasn't the finished product) film.

As me explaining technical things is too often like hearing poetry translated from Italian by an ape, I'll let Mr. Morris speak for himself :

I was asked by Quaker Oats to direct an advertising campaign for a "new weight control" oatmeal. What better way to discuss weight than through an examination of self-image - how we see ourselves? Ames's room uses that idea literally and metaphorically. Think of it not as an optical illusion but as an illustration of subjective experience. [. . .]

Clearly, our visual experience of the world is based on the two-dimensional images formed on our retinas. We have no "direct" experience of three dimensions. The retinal image produced by the Ames's room (itself, a trapezoidal solid) is no different from the retinal image produced by a rectangular room, and so, we are fooled. (Even though I know the room is trapezoidal, I can't force myself to see it that way. I have a clear predisposition to see it as rectangular, except when I move to the left or right of the one, specific vantage point, and the illusion vanishes.)

Film clip here. Warning: music.

Via grow-a-brain

I happened upon this by accident the other day. It was written in 2003 but I think it applies equally now:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. The integrity of science rests on the willingness of scientists to expose new ideas and findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. Thus, scientists expect their colleagues to reveal new findings to them initially. An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists.

He wasn't speaking about climate change but these are all salient points when considering it. David Suzuki, call your office.

Photographs allegedly from school science projects. I say "allegedly" because some of them are so dumb (the project at left is titled "Crystal Meth -- Friend or Foe?") that I have difficulty believing that any teacher or advisor would give them the green light. Then again . . .

More here.

Via kottke.org

Snow is good-soft, deep, drifted snow. Snow is lovely. Remember that you are the pilot and your body is the aircraft. By tilting forward and putting your hands at your side, you can modify your pitch and make progress not just vertically but horizontally as well. As you go down 15,000 feet, you can also go sideways two-thirds of that distance-that's two miles! Choose your landing zone. You be the boss.

What to do if the plane you are travelling in suffers what the engineers coyly call "catastrophic integrity failure." Meaning that you've suddenly got bigger problems than the yakker in the next seat.

If you keep your wits about you, though, and employ these elementary principles of physics . . . well, you'll probably end up like a smashed bug anyway.

Yet people have survived falls from a similar or even greater height before. Here's how they did it.

Picture from the newly-refurbished Hubble Space Telescope showing:

. . . a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way galaxy. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth.

More pix here.

The Times of India:

In what sounds like a chilling script of a Hollywood science fiction, scientists have claimed that an invisible star, five times the size of Jupiter, might be lurking near our solar system, occasionally kicking deadly comets towards the Earth.

According to scientists, the brown dwarf star is up to five times the size of Jupiter and could be responsible for mass extinctions that occur on Earth every 26 million years.

They believe that the star nicknamed Nemesis or 'The Death Star" could be hidden beyond the edge of our solar system and only emits infrared light.

It is believed to orbit our solar system at 25,000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun, the scientists said.

A "chilling script of a Hollywood science fiction,"` eh? Clearly a job only Hollywood stars are capable of handling -- paging Sean Penn! Yoo-hoo, George Clooney! Pick up the white phone, Susan Sarandon! Your rocket blasts off tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. We`ll radio with instructions once the screenwriters figure out what you should do.

Bon voyage!
`

FOX News:

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his "foremost" mission as the head of America's space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.

Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA's orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering," Bolden said in the interview.

I didn't read all of the 2900 comments at the site; but I read enough of them (and others at usually Democrat-friendly sites like Digg) that it's clear that Obama's next outreach had better be to Americans. Opinions ran the gamut from mystified to outraged; there was little if any support for this lunacy.

Gizmodo:

This isn't our Sun. This other sun is 470 light-years away from our home. Its name is 1RXS J160929.1-210524, and the orange sphere near it has been confirmed today as an orbiting planet. The first photo of an extra-solar planet.

The photo was originally taken in 2008 by David Lafreniere and collaborators working at the Gemini Observatory. Scientists weren't sure about it being an orbiting planet until now, however. New observations have shown that the planet follows an orbit around the star 300 times larger than Earth's orbit.

The planet has eight times the mass of Jupiter, and has a much higher temperature: 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to the minus 166 degrees of the biggest planet in our solar system. Scientists believe this temperature is a product of the age of this star system, much younger than ours.

Purportedly the first photo of a planet orbiting a distant star (this is disputed in the comments). But does it remind you of something else?

David Warren:

The whole of social science has been similarly broadsided by the arithmetical mania. It is worth noting that the greatest economic thinkers, from Smith through Hayek, wrote almost entirely without tables and charts, dwelling instead on the consequences of morally loaded ideas, whereas the demographic muse led economists like Malthus into monstrous visions of purely imaginary catastrophes, and wicked speculations about what would be needed to avoid them.

Likewise, the environmentalism of our own age is contaminated throughout by this Malthusian propensity to follow the numbers out the window. Never listen to people who think the cure for human problems is to reduce the number of humans. Their minds are diseased.

CBC:

The David Suzuki Foundation took aim Tuesday at a "dirty dozen" chemicals that are found in 80 per cent of the most common cosmetic products and urged better labelling laws to help consumers avoid them.

In a report on a chemical survey, the foundation said it got 6,200 volunteers to check the ingredients listed on 12,550 everyday cosmetic products, including shampoo, toothpaste, lipstick and skin cleanser.

The volunteers specifically looked for 12 chemicals the foundation says are linked to cancer, reproductive disorders, severe allergies and asthma.

And who better would know the dangers of cosmetics than David Suzuki?

Not many people know this, but David Suzuki was just five years ago a comely 23-year-old Japanese woman named Davida. Then she made the terrible mistake of trying out some concoction named "Auntie Radium's Miracle Fountain of Youth Creme," and not only did it dramatically age her (see photo), it also forced a sex change on her/him!

Government scientists have since analyzed the lotion, and have calculated its main component has a radioactive half-life of at least 10,000 years. Indeed, Suzuki is now classed as a "Level 6 Haz-Mat Threat," and there are plans to inter him in a lead-lined concrete crypt at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Even if he has attained, as feared, immortality, there's no chance of him escaping.

Unless there's an underwater volcano with really big thunderstorms or something like that . . .

Fun with statistics with everyone's favorite curmudgeon (actually, I think he's a bit too young and uncranky for proper curmudgeonish status, but words fail me again), Colby Cosh:

Hi! Here’s a table of reported sexual offences for the city of Vancouver for a particular group of months.

If you adjust the figures slightly for Vancouver’s population growth and look at the annual playoff progress of the city’s beloved Canucks, what you’ll find is that you can’t use these numbers to prove much of a link between NHL hockey and sexual violence. But if there is one, it’s probably negative. July is (at a high level of statistical significance) the worst month for sexual offences; it’s also the only one of these months in which hockey is never played. In months during which the Canucks were eliminated from Stanley Cup contention, the rate of sexual offences was, on average, more than 20% lower than in other months. There were more sex offences in months with less hockey even if you correct for pure date effects, and the lockout year (2005) had a higher rate of sex offences than either the year following or the year prior.

No, Colby hasn't lost his mind: he's just having some well-deserved laughs at the execrable (Boss! Boss! The words! The words are back!) termagant Laura Robinson.

BBC:

Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L'Aquila.

A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter.

Prosecutors said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake, while the defence maintained there was no way to predict major quakes.

Incredible. You expect this sort of voodoo from some backwater like Iran or Outer Crapistan, not a G8 country in the heart of Europe. The Canadian government should be exploring the idea of exchanging them for some of our "scientists," e.g., climate-change frauds. You can put those ones in jail with my blessings.

What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized?

—Rupert Bainbridge (and hundreds of others)

This question gets submitted a lot.

It turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the agency which runs the National Hurricane Center—gets it a lot, too. In fact, they’re asked about it so often that they’ve published a response.

I recommend you read the whole thing, but I think the last sentence of the first paragraph says it all:

“Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”

It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles into hurricanes.

Hey kids! Unfortunately Mr. Science couldn't make it today, so we'll have to make do with Randall Munroe, a guy with a degree in physics, better known as the creator of xkcd.