Media flogs phony ice shelf scare story: The New Australian points out some inaccuracies in reporting of the Larsen B ice shelf collapse. [via 2012]
The time travel paradox: a scientist from the pure research firm Starlab NV examines the paradoxes of time travel, which he says all boil to the a condition that "due to the presense of a time machine a system has a state incompatible with the laws governing the evolution of the system", and looks at their meaning for the feasibility of time machines.
How to turn your computer's cup holder into a catapult LART. [via Flutterby]
Bookends: on a visit to Britain's TBS Returns, where books go when no one will buy them. [via Re:Read]
Going Down with the Ship: comparing the 17th century sinking of the Vasa to software project management.
The Vasa's is a story of a project gone awry, taking the project team down with it. Some of the contributing factors that led to the Vasa sinking centuries ago will seem terribly familiar to software folks today.
[via Kalsey]
The Afghan Info Center has news on earthquakes in the area, including the most recent disaster earlier this month. [via Undernews]
Astro Archive combines numerous astronomy related mailing lists into one searchable archive.
Sentry: a monitoring system from NASA to the web: Tumbling Stone reports on the development of the Sentry NEO monitoring system and its impact risk page.
It took two years of hard work, but finally, on March the 12th, NASA announced that Sentry, its new automatic asteroid impact monitoring system, was beginning to be operated out of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Sentry was built largely by Drs. Steve Chesley and Alan Chamberlin with technical help from Paul Chodas. To be more precise, Sentry is a highly automated system, designed to help scientists better communicate about the discoveries of new, potentially threatening Near Earth asteroids (NEAs) and their follow-up observations. While completely independent from other scienitific teams, it is in constant communication with the NEODyS CLOMON impact monitoring system, operated in Pisa, and researchers from the two systems are cooperating to check and improve their results.
Asteroid has a date with Earth, but not quite yet: A team led by two NASA scientists using the Arecibo Observatory have found that asteroid 1950DA has a 1 in 300 chance of hitting the Earth in 2880.
The results showed the huge spherical rock swinging in and out of the inner solar system with its highly elliptical orbit bringing it ever closer to impact. Armageddon day comes on March 16, 2880, when the asteroid's path leads it directly across the earth's orbit.
