With about 1 percent of incoming comets ending up on relatively short-period Earth-crossing orbits, it is expected that several thousand dormant comets could be currently posing a potential threat to our planet.
Recent surveys of the Earth’s immediate vicinity should have turned up some 400 such objects, whereas only a handful have so far been found.
The researchers dismiss the current belief that all the “missing” comets have disintegrated into meteor streams. If this had happened, they argue, then we should be seeing a far greater number of meteor showers and a much brighter zodiacal cloud than is observed.
They propose instead that the majority of these comets have become exceedingly black, with such low surface reflectivities that they could not be observed against the blackness of space by optical means.
In the last week of the campaign, they’re coming fast and furious. Iowahawk has the latest roundup:
DRUNK BUSH DRAGGED JAMES BYRD BEHIND AWOL JET
Then-airman George W. Bush was reprimanded by superiors for a drunken 1972 AWOL incident in which he dragged a helpless James Byrd behind his F-101, according to a new Texas Air National Guard document found in an Abeline, Texas Kinkos restroom.
The newly unsealed document, which several experts have now verified as typewritten, resurrected nagging questions about Bush’s disputed controversial “military service,” his drug and alcohol abuse, and his role in the slaying of Byrd.
The document shows that Bush earned a stern reprimand from a commanding officer, 6-Star General Smith, who remarks that “Dude, that is so not cool.”
Smith goes on to recommend that Bush “freeze the dude’s body, so like later on you can be governor and blame it on some rednecks, and then have those guys executed.”
James Lileks is less than impressed with Andrew Sullivan’s poorly-thought-out and naive endorsement of John Kerry.
But in wartime, a president bears the greater responsibility for keeping the country united. And this president has fundamentally failed in this respect.
Oh, surely. But maybe – just maybe – many people did not want the country to be united if it meant being united behind Bush. He is a much more potent and immediate threat, after all. Who
I hope that this story is true, and if it is, it’s one more reason for me to support the reelection of the president. It’s certainly not something that a Kerry administration would consider (except possibly to make things worse).