Good riddance Mr Gaddafi?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s not clear exactly what may have happened, but there are increasingly reliable sounding reports that Muammar Gaddafi has gone into that sweet goodnight:

AFP news agency quoted another NTC official, Mohamed Leith, as saying that Col Gaddafi had been captured in Sirte and was “seriously wounded” but still breathing. A soldier who says he captured Muammar Gaddafi told the BBC the colonel had shouted: “Don’t shoot!” But NTC official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters news agency that the former leader had been shot in the head and killed as he tried to flee.

Hashtags seemed to be #Gadhafi and of course #Libya and #BreakingNews. Al Arabiya English has tweeted they’re being allowed to photograph the body and will have more soon.

It’s raining comets at Eta Corvi!

Bring the rain! The Spitzer Space Telescope has found evidence that a nearby star system only 60 light-years away may be undergoing a period of bombardment similar to what happened during and before the Hadean Eon in our solar system about five-billion years ago:

The infrared telescope spotted a band of dust around Eta Corvi that strongly matches the chemical makeup of an obliterated giant comet, said Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and lead author of the new study. The Eta Corvi system is approximately 1 billion years old, which would place it in the right time period for such a comet storm, the researchers said.

Bacterial super computers

More evidence the Singularity is nigh! Mere bacteria being given super human processing Rain Man-esque power:

Scientists have taken another step towards biological computing, with the creation of logic gates from gut bacteria and DNA.While something similar’s been done before, the team says its logic gates behave more like the standard electronic version.

All microprocessors do is add. That’s it. Your entire computer works on the back of what is basically an electronic abacus. Which is why questions about sentience and all that are so fascinating when applied to digital computers. So I wouldn’t worry too much about computerized bacterial colonies taking over the world just yet. I would instead keep worrying about the oxygen-burning bacterial collectives already here, specifically, the bipedal metazoan ones with giant bulbs of nerve tissue at the top.

Ancestral magnitudes

Before there were blogs, there was use.net. One of the most fun message boards there was called Talk Origins, a meeting of the minds between the reality-based community and a gaggle of trolls and drive-by creationists. One of the best essays posted there was by a member named Aron-Ra, and a few years later I adapted it to the emerging new medium of the blogosphere. I’ve reposted an a newly edited, more streamlined version below. — DS

My grandfather wasn’t no monkey!”, “You think we came from slime?!”, and “man, if you want to believe your great^100 grandpa was a rock, be my guest…but it’s STUPID!” One thing we can agree on is, yes, thinking that evolutionary biology stipulates that your ancestor from 100 generations ago was a monkey is indeed stupid. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is just to get to “monkeys,” let alone “slime,” we’ll need a lot more zeros in there …  [Read more…]

Wall Street bonuses set to crater

I’m lucky, in this day and age. I have a job, my firm is making money, and I might get a little piece of it. My bonus should be a couple of thousand bucks — if I’m still employed when that time rolls around and if — thanks to missing four days last month while recovering from a life threatening injury in the trauma ward of a local hospital — I don’t miss a single day of work between now and then. So cry me a fucking river:

During the first nine months of the year, Goldman set aside an average of $292,836 of pay per employee, down 21 percent from $370,706 for the same period last year. But much of that pay was set aside in the first two quarters of the year. In the third quarter, the bank set aside just $46,000 per employee, down an eye-popping 57 percent from the same period last year.

Killer comet barely missed earth in 1883?


That’s the buzz apparently. A single astronomer in Mexico reported what sounds like a comet in the process of calving. Assuming his report is accurate, working back from his location on the earth, it turns out the best explanation for why other astronomers didn’t see it would be because the object was less than 5,000 miles away:

Essentially, only certain regions of the Earth lined up with both the sun and the comet fragments — much in the same way that only certain locales are able to view a lunar eclipse. In this case, northern India and southeast Asia are among the only other places where people might have seen what Bonilla witnessed — and they “weren’t exactly astronomy hotspots in 1883.

[Read more…]

NASA’s Senate Launch System in the news

SLS, click image for proposed specs

Cut and burn Republicans usually interested in eliminating grandma’s health insurance and pension in favor of their rich, thieving friends can’t get themselves enough government spending in some cases. And so it is with the decaying corpse of NASA, there’s meat on them thar bones for shortsighted politicians to pilfer yet! One of them goes by the name of the Space Launch System or SLS. There it is over to the right, in conceptual form anyway. [Read more…]