When comets collide with small asteroids or spacecraft, they can breakup into smaller comets and sungrazer comets as shown in the picture of the Comet 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte. The fragments are spread over millions of kilometers.

On July 4, 2005. NASA plans to collide a 370 kilogram spacecraft into the Comet 9P/Tempel 1. The ensuing 16,000-megaton explosion will shatter the 140 billion antimatter metric ton comet into trillions of pieces. Based upon to my computer model, the antimatter fragments are going to collide with Mars, Earth and Sun in the subsequent years.

In 2110, metric ton antimatter fragments will start colliding with the Earth and producing 10, 000 megaton explosions. As trillions of fragments continue to migrate toward the Sun during the 22nd millennium, thousands of 10 to 10,000 megaton explosions will devastate Earth’s environment. Humanity will be brought to the brink of extinction.

Over the centuries, trillions of fragments will drift toward the Sun. When the antimatter fragments, called sungrazer, collide with the sun, multi-billion megaton explosions produce enormous sunspots and solar flares stretching millions of kilometers into space.

I have written NASA Office of Space Science and had discussions with NASA’s personnel. They have a general understand; but unfortunately, they don’t comprehend a 16,000-megaton explosion with a comet. I have request NASA cancel the Deep Impact launch scheduled for December 30, 2004.

We at NASA appreciate your interest in this matter. Please keep us informed of any further research you may be attempting into this or other related subjects.

Regards,

Dr Hertz Lottly
NASA Office of Staff Morale

(Hat tip: Cecil on Skeptical Community)

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And for everyone else, yes, that's what all the noise is about.

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I'll leave my borders orange for now, in honor of Viktor Yushchenko and the people of Ukraine.

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I have a big bag of chocolate-coated macadamias here. Anyone interested?

(These are from the same company that makes abalone-flavoured, and indeed wasabi-flavoured, macadamias. I hope like hell that they clean the machinery between batches...)

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And then I thought to myself: Duh!

Mr Lileks lives in Minneapolis. This time of year, the sun rises at 7:50 am and sets at 4:36 pm (#). That's less than 9 hours of daylight. Plenty of dark time for everyone to see your handiwork.

In Sydney today the sun rose at 5:42 am and set at 8:07 pm (#). Not a reverse of Minneapolis, since we are not as latitudinally blessed* as that city, but nearly 14½ hours of daylight. Unless you were out late or up very early, you'd never see the lights.

* Mineappolis is 45° N; Sydney about 34° S. The southernmost city in Australia, Hobart, is only 43° S. Dunedin in New Zealand, at roughly 46° S, is currently blessed with 15¾ hours of daylight.

For my American readers (hi there!) Sydney is about the same distance from the equator as Long Beach, California. And no, it doesn't snow here. Particularly not at Christmas. Except for one occasion, on which subject Google has let me down utterly...

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This makes me sad.

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After the recent electoral victories of the right people in Australia and America I felt as though a great weight had been lifted - or to use a less cliched phrasing, as though a critical and feared exam had turned out to be, relatively speaking, a walk in the park. And here we are in Graduate School, exams no longer looming on the horizon, but still a huge amount of work to be done.

Because, you have to understand, I'm not a Conservative. Neither George Bush nor John Howard truly represent my views on most subjects. I am pleased by their respective victories primarly because both are fundamentally honest, and I was deeply opposed to John Kerry and Mark Latham primarily because both challengers seemed to me to be deeply, personally, dishonest.

Look, I'm not a child; I don't expect politicians to tell the truth all the time. Sometimes they can't - they have to deal with matters of security that cannot be made public. Sometimes they won't, because, well, politics is like that. But the dishonesty of Kerry and Latham runs much deeper; they are not honest even to themselves.

What I'm really most directly opposed to, and what I've been fighting for years, long before I set up this blog, is not the political Left as such but intellectual dishonesty.

I'm not, technically, a scientist, though I would have been, technically, a scientist had I troubled myself to attend my classes and so ultimately graduated.** That doesn't mean that I can't recognise Science - the process, the method, even more than its vast body of discoveries and achievements - as the single greatest invention of Western Civilisation. (Number two being the limited liability corporation, something that far too many people take for granted.)

My aim is to promote Science and Civilisation, and it's a selfish aim. I want the products of Science and Civilisation for myself: Peace and wealth and effective medicine and a comfortable home with air conditioning and a fancy computer and an interesting and productive job. The people who attack Science and Civilisation are trying to deprive me of all that, and I won't allow it.

The Creationists pushing their fraudulent spin on Evolutionary Theory; the Post-Modernists denying the concept of Objective Truth; the Islamists trying to do both at the same time; the historical revisionists; the Psychics; the "Alternative Health Practitioners"; the academics who see their role being not to teach but to brainwash their students into leftist zombiehood; the "free speech" proponents who want to stamp out speech they don't like; Mysticism and Obscurantism; the spammers and scammers and hackers who are doing their level best to destroy the Internet; the nanny-state idiots and the totalitarian hardliners who try to legislate problems out of existence: These and more are what I truly oppose.

So I shouldn't want for subject matter.

* Not that it has any.
** I was studying Computer Science, hence the "technically". Still, it's better than Sociology...

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Guantanamo Serenade (an extract from The Men Who Stare At Goats, by Jon Ronson)

The more I've delved into the US military's psychological warfare, the more examples of New Age-style, First Earth Battalion tactics I've been noticing in the war on terror. I learned of one fact in particular that struck me as entirely incongruous, something at once banal and extraordinary.

And what might that be, we ask?

When I met Jamal, he began to tell me about the more bewildering abuses. Prostitutes were flown in from the US - he doesn't know whether they were there to smear their menstrual blood on the faces of the more devout detainees. Or perhaps they were brought in to have sex with the soldiers, and some psychological operations (PsyOps) boffin - a resident cultural analyst - devised this other job for them as an afterthought, exploiting the resources at the army's disposal.

"One or two of the British guys," Jamal told me, "said to the guards, 'Can we have the women?' But the guards said, 'No, no, no. The prostitutes are for the detainees who don't actually want them.' They explained it to us: 'If you want it, it's not going to work on you.' "

"So what were the prostitutes doing to the detainees?" I asked.

"Just messing about with their genitals," said Jamal. "Stripping off in front of them. Rubbing their breasts in their faces. Not all the guys would speak. They'd come back from the Brown Block [the interrogation block] and be quiet for days and cry to themselves, so you know something went on, but you don't know what.

Yes, I know that the last time a woman stripped in front of me and rubbed her breasts in my face, I was so distraught I... Err, enough that.

What other tricks did the fiendish Yanquis employ?

The interrogators were getting more and more cross with Jamal's apparent steely refusal to crack. Also, Jamal used his time inside the Brown Block to do stretching exercises, keeping himself sane. Jamal's exercise regime made the interrogators more angry, but instead of beating him, or threatening him, they did something very odd.

A military intelligence officer brought a ghetto blaster into his room. He put it on the floor in the corner. He said, "Here's a great girl band doing Fleetwood Mac songs."

He didn't blast the CD at Jamal. This wasn't sleep-deprivation, and it wasn't an attempt to induce the Bucha Effect. Instead, the agent simply put it on at normal volume.

"He put it on," said Jamal, "and he left."

"An all-girl Fleetwood Mac covers band?" I said.

"Yeah," said Jamal.

Aieee! The inhumanity of man's inhumanity to man's fellow man, or however it goes.

This sounded to me like the tip of a very strange iceberg.

"And what happened next?" I asked.

"When the CD was finished, he came back into the room and said, 'You might like this.' And he put on Kris Kristofferson's greatest hits. Normal volume. And he left the room again. And then, when that was finished, he came back and said, 'Here's a Matchbox Twenty CD.' "

"Was he doing it for entertainment purposes?" I asked.

"It's interrogation," said Jamal. "I don't think they were trying to entertain me."

"Matchbox Twenty?" I said.

Matchbox Twenty?

"I thought they were just playing me a CD," said Jamal. "Just playing me a CD. See if I like music or not. Now I've heard this, I'm thinking there must have been something else going on. Now I'm thinking, why did they play that same CD to me as well? They're playing this CD in Iraq and they're playing the same CD in Cuba. It means to me there is a programme. They're not playing music because they think people like or dislike Matchbox Twenty more than other music. Or Kris Kristofferson more than other music. There is a reason. There's something else going on. Obviously I don't know what it is. But there must be some other intent."

Aha! Now I see the evil Yanqui scheme!

No I don't.

"Hm," said Joseph.

"Do you think ...?" I said.

Joseph finished my sentence for me.

"Subliminal messages?" he said.

Subliminal messages!

"Or something like that," I said. "Something underneath the music."

Underneath the music!

How could you blast someone with silent sounds "without it affecting us"? This struck me at the time as an unassailable argument, one that cut through all the paranoid theories circulating on the internet about mind-control machines putting voices into people's heads. Of course it couldn't work.

The thing is, I now realised, if silent sounds had been used against Jamal inside an interrogation room at Guantanamo Bay, there was a clue in Jamal's account, a clue that suggested that military intelligence had craftily solved the vexing problem highlighted by Colonel Alexander.

"He put the CD in," Jamal had said, "and he left the room."

Aha! Fleeing the subliminal messages! Or possibly just a music lover. (Matchbox Twenty?)

Next, I dug out the recently leaked military report entitled Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms And References. There were a total of 21 acoustic weapons listed, in various stages of development, including the Infrasound ("Very low-frequency sound which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles ... biophysical effects: nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur. Superior to ultrasound ...").

You know, this is actually true. Blast someone with sufficiently loud very low-frequency sound and it basically shakes their internal organs to pieces.

They tend to notice when you do this, of course.

And then, the last entry but one - the Psycho-Correction Device, which "involves influencing subjects visually or aurally with embedded subliminal messages".

I turned to the front page. And there it was. The co-author of this document was Colonel John Alexander.

So, not Matchbox Twenty?

I'm confused.

(via Tim Blair)

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