Playing Roulette.

Conditions: Raining


Not Really Watching The Skies

One of the most important, yet least public, jobs on this planet is the task of monitoring space for giant asteroids, heading for Earth. This is undertaken by Nasa. The problem with this is that Nasa also do other, less important things, and have been facing a bit of a financial squeeze.

Without more funding, NASA will not meet its goal of tracking 90 percent of all deadly asteroids by 2020, according to a report released today by the National Academy of Sciences.

The agency is on track to soon be able to spot 90 percent of the potentially dangerous objects that are at least a kilometer (.6 miles) wide, a goal previously mandated by Congress.

Asteroids of this size are estimated to strike Earth once every 500,000 years on average and could be capable of causing a global catastrophe if they hit Earth. In 2008, NASA's Near Earth Object Program spotted a total of 11,323 objects of all sizes.

But without more money in the budget, NASA won't be able to keep up with a 2005 directive to track 90 percent of objects bigger than 460 feet across. An impact from an asteroid of this size could cause significant damage and be very deadly, particularly if it were to strike near a populated area.

- edition.cnn.com/

Two important bits of information there. One is that Nasa is going to struggle to meet it's obligations regarding the task of saving the Earth from annihilation. The other is that they're only scheduled to actually be doing that after another 11 years. The hell?

What's going on is that the initial goal was to track the large 1 kilometer bits of rock. But then someone thought about Tunguska

For example, the NRC report states that the body that caused the 1908 Tunguska explosion and destroyed 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest was only 30-40 meters in diameter. This realization is what led Congress to change its mind and decide that NASA should track even smaller asteroids. The new goal: track 90 percent of NEOs 140 meters or larger in diameter by 2020.

The NRC report primarily takes issue with the lack of action on this goal from anyone involved: Congress has not volunteered funding for their mandate, and NASA has not allotted any of their budget to it, either. The equipment currently in use to track NEOs can easily see the 1km monsters, but it's not sensitive enough to track the 140m asteroids. As a result, if a Tunguska-sized body were headed for Earth today, its arrival would probably be a complete surprise.

Of course, the Tunguska explosion is the only collision of this sort in recorded history, suggesting that threatening bodies that cross Earth's path are fortunately rare. Considering this, and the fact that the most disastrous varieties of asteroids are fairly well covered, danger is probably not imminent.

- arstechnica.com/

Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly how the Russians near Tunguska felt as well, back in 1908. Frankly, the Earth is littered with impact craters, clearly we have gotten hit hard in the past, and will be hit again in the future. Priorities need to be worked out here, and keeping a close eye on the one disaster that we can 100% predict with total certainty will happen one day, should be a pretty damn high priority.



Film Review: G.I. Joe

Yet another famous toy franchise makes it's foray onto the big screen with the advent of G.I Joe. To be honest, I don't really know all that much about the G.I Joe universe. And to be even more honest, I really wasn't expecting much from this film at all. Happily, I was pleasantly surprised. G.I Joe turns out to be a well made fast-paced action-packed adventure about a group of international special forces trying to recover a dangerous weapon that's fallen into the wrong hands. The wrong hands being, oddly, the hands of the company that built the weapon in the first place, but it's that kind of film. Thankfully light on the pro-American military parade that it could have been, it uses two new recruits to introduce us to the Joes, and, via an old flame turned femme fatale, to the bad guys.

This could have been so easily a total mess. Directed by Stephen Sommers, who knows a thing or two about letting CG-heavy films getting carried away with themselves, what's happened here is almost a miracle: It's a toy franchise action film that spends a large amount of time developing the characters, and the backstories that set them all up, including a broken promise to a lost love, a Scottish arms-dealing ancestral tradition, and even a decades-old blood feud between two samurai. Relationships between the characters are fostered, and actually grow. The plot actually has a bit of sense to it. There's a couple of reasonably good twists. Well played.

Of course, it's not perfect. There is some use of the shaky cam for the action sequences, which is annoying. And while most of the fights are brutal, and there is a substantial body count, there's still a overall sense of PG13-ish bloodlessness that lessens the impact. Still, it's exciting, it's well-acted, it's interesting, it's pretty well made, it's a good time at the cinema. Three and a half henchmen out of five. Go Joe.



- Peace out