“Let’s go burn down the observatory so this’ll never happen again!”
Have you thanked a modeling and simulation engineer today? Check out the NASA/JPL video showing the most recent trajectory simulation for Apophis 99942 asteroid.
On April 13, 2029, Earth has a 1 in 250,000 chance of having a very bad day.
Instead of freaking out, maybe we should catch it?
Wanted: Another Giant Leap For Mankind
NASA's new goal: make Anderson Cooper cry
I’m pissed off at NASA.
Yes. I felt exceptionally let down after their horribly anticlimactic LCROSS impact earlier this month. One 5AM retweet still reverberates in my mind: “Only NASA could make blowing up the moon boring”.
But I’m not pissed off about that. Novelist and scholar Issac Asimov once appropriately quipped “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’”.
The fact that the impact’s plume was less than expected yields new insight and discussion. Why didn’t this behave the way we expected it to behave? What didn’t we account for? Do we need to modify our models? Or is it Neptune’s fault?
The reason I’m actually pissed off is that I believe NASA is failing (or at least slipping in their attempts) to inspire and ignite the dwindling scientific interest of our youth. And as Fountains of Wayne struggled to repeat their success of “Stacy’s Mom”, NASA too has struggled to surpass its Moon landing.
53 Predictions for 2010
"I see ... spackle and a ceiling fan."
No lie.
A while back, I said to a friend, “You know what they should do? Have Tim Burton redo Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp as Wonka.”
Years later, after my Wonka reboot surfaced and fueled by my own sense of self-importance, I said to the same friend, “You know what else they should do? Have Tim Burton redo Alice in Wonderland with Scarlett Johansson as Alice.”
Okay, so I got half of that last one.
But my amazing clairvoyance was more than proven in my mind. And today I will demonstrate that my power extends beyond future Tim Burton projects.
So before everyone makes their end-of-the-year predictions for 2010, I’m going to make this more difficult on myself and make 2010 predictions two months in advance.
What will we find in 2010? Here we go:
- Michael Jackson’s secret song library leaks onto the Internet. Kanye samples using stupid pitch-correction effect. Jackson post-humorously wins Grammy.
- Twitter viruses galore. Ellen inadvertently infects millions of house-wives; husbands forced to fix the damn computer again.
- Windows 7 fails to impress; Apple gloats in increasingly unfunny ads.
5 Technologies That Will Be Gone In Five Years
In April, 2009 FOXNews.com posted an article entitled Gadget Graveyard: 10 Technologies About to Go Extinct. I will save you the time and stigma of going to FOXNews.com and list the 10 gadgets here: landline phones, floppy disks, wristwatches, VHS tape, beepers, film cameras, typewriters, the Walkman, dial-up, and DVDs.
Really? Typewriters are just now circling the drain? Let me repeat part of that first sentence again: APRIL, 2009. Most of these are already extinct! Now I will agree that landline phones are certainly heading out of the door, but come on FOXNews. This article should have been written 5 years ago.
So here’s my response: 5 modern technologies that will be gone by 2015. Pay attention Shepard Smith.
6 Future Projects in Google’s Arsenal
It was the year 2000, the early days of the Internets, and Google had easily rose above AskJeeves and AltaVista to become the adolescent nerd’s tool of choice for finding time-wasting Flash games and crappy Flash videos. As the adults took notice, Google’s publicly traded stock rose along with its popularity. And the web was happy for a brief moment. We were years away from inane youTube comments and inbox flooding lolcats. And then in 2002, Google got fancy. First came Google Labs, then Froogle. Then it was blogging, social networking, text messaging, mapping, and image searching. Suddenly Google became scary — like a tinted white van full of puppies and candy.
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