This doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in NASA:
A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.
Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.
Many of us have lamented society's drift away from individual responsibility. It's not the drunken driver's fault -- it's the fault of the bartender who served him. It's not the murderer's fault, but that of the company that manufactured the gun. It's not the homeowner to blame who entered a too-risky mortgage agreement; the blame goes to the "predatory lender" who talked him into it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFNeE_W5VZU]
Regular "Bob & Tom Show" listeners (I confess to being one -- somebody has to offset the editorial page editors who wake up to NPR) will know a Tim Wilson song called "The First Baptist Bar & Grill." Sometines, life imitates art ( or at least reflects comedy):
The Pub Lounge near the I-75 exit in Sidney is your typical neighborhood restaurant/bar.
Golleee, Ange, can you believe the second cousin of the governor's assistant is coming here?! Let's get out the town band's costumes and have Aunt Bee fry up some chicken! And we'd better make sure to hide Otis for a while:
Mark Black, principal of Corydon Central Junior High School, was not prepared for the call he got Sunday morning from Superintendent Neyland Clark, who said former President Bill Clinton was coming to his school.
What is "visual sexual aggression," you ask? Well, it's "peering" at children in public, which could get you in trouble in Maine:
Under the bill, if someone is arrested for viewing children in a public place, it would be a Class D felony if the child is between 12 to 14 years old and a Class C felony if the child is under 12, according to Alexander.
It may not be freezing yet, but it's surely getting a little chilly in hell. One of the co-founders of Greenpeace now says, in a Newsweek interview, that perhaps nuclear energy isn't quite the evil it has been depicted:
ZAKARIA: At Greenpeace, you fought against nuclear energy. What changed?
RIP, Sgt. Virgil Lee Phillips:
On Nov. 2, 1950, Sgt. Virgil Lee Phillips' unit was overrun by Chinese troops attacking near Unsan in North Korea.
Phillips' battalion was surrounded, and he was one of more than 350 soldiers unaccounted for after the battle.
The Martin County, Ind., man, who had a reputation for not walking away from a fight, was declared missing in action.
I know, you'll find this shocking, really shocking, but the Hoosier Hotties escort service was not legitimate. It was -- are you ready, are you sitting down -- a prostitution operation. Don't worry about the place going out of business, though:
The courting of the common folk continues. Hillary went the furthest with her shot-and-a-beer trick, but Obama gets points for the greatest outreach. He had lunch in Muncie with five "low dollar" donors (combined contribution: $165), four of whom were flown in from all over the country. The Indiana participant said it was definitely among the "top 10 events" of her life (only in the top 10?), and one participant plans to hold on to the memory:
Another school system seems ready to succumb to the "competition is bad for students" sickness:
ST. JOHN | The Lake Central School Board is following the lead of the School Town of Munster in exploring the elimination of class rank.
Board Vice President Nancy Gray said she's been trying for many years to make "something like this happen."
Here's one of those "shocking murder in a small town" stories, but not all the good information was supplied by the TV station. We learn from its story only that the man shot his wife dead then shot himself in the head when police approached him, that the two had been fighting "in the past several months" and that police had been called to control the situation "on many occasions," all of them ending "in a peaceful manner." The rest is mostly "Mayberry will never be the same" boilerplate:
Come on -- you were like me, thought Dr. Phil couldn't possibly look any sleazier than he already has. Were we ever wrong:
BARTOW, Fla. — As talk-show host Dr. Phil McGraw took heat for bailing out one of the girls charged in a vicious beating of a classmate, it emerged that show executives feel they were embarrassed by a low-level producer.
All those years spent reading science fiction novels about life on other planets, all that nerdy "Star Trek" watching, all those movies -- wasted:
Advanced ground and space-based telescopes are discovering new planets around other stars almost daily, but an environmental scientist from England believes that even if some of those planets turn out to be Earthlike, the odds are very low they'll have intelligent inhabitants.
Since the idea of red-light cameras keeps coming up at the state and local levels, I think we should keep bringing it to the attention of politicians every case we discover of the concept being discredited:
When politicians start playing the "out-of-touch" card, I tend to tune out as a defensive measure. My tolerance for humbug isn't what it used to be:
What a nifty new concept -- ninja buddhists! I can see the TV series now, perhaps starring Jet Li or Jackie Chan, and, of course, Steven Segall and David Carradine have to be technical consultants:
State media, meanwhile, labeled a group linked to the Dalai Lama's India-based government-in-exile a "terrorist organization" — building on claims that recent anti-Chinese protests were part of a violent campaign to overthrow Chinese rule and sabotage the Beijing Olympics in August.
At the risk of again infuriating Catholics (let 'er rip, CED), I must comment on the poll of Catholics released in conjunction with the pope's visit to America. This caught my eye:
Yet, few parishioners overall said they go to confession, and most believed they could be good Roman Catholics without going to Mass.
When thinking about Oprah Winfrey's approach to the metaphsyical, writes Indiana Unviversity professor Kathryn Lofton, it's important to make a distinction between religion and spirituality:
The only way religion or religious belief works for Oprah is if it is carefully coordinated with capitalist pleasure. Thus, the turn to 'spirituality' -- the non-dogmatic dogma that encourages an ambiguous theism alongside an exuberant consumerism," Lofton said.
