Are we too cheap to stop asteroid strikes? You decide:
Scott Pace, head of program analysis and evaluation at NASA, said the agency could not do more to detect NEOs “given the constrained resources and the strategic objectives NASA already has been tasked with.”
If there is a one in 26 million chance that an asteroid strike will kill everyone in the world, that’s an expectation of 230 deaths per year. That’s within a stone’s throw of the average number of deaths from terrorist attacks on US soil in the last ten years. It’s interesting to watch the difference between overreacting to terrorism and underreacting to understood harms such as auto accidents.
Not that I think war in Iraq was a bad idea, just that ‘War on Terror’ is an inapt name. The operation name ‘Iraqi Freedom’ was more apt.
I was never much of a Norman Mailer fan. I read The Naked and the Dead as a teenager (my parents’ copy), and didn’t find it that impressive. Roger Kimball obviously never heard the phrase “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”–he has many not-so-good things to say of the author/cultural icon/literary thug, who died today (he had been ill for some time).
Interestingly, of all the works that Kimball mentions in his long anti-eulogy, he doesn’t talk about “Of A Fire On The Moon,” his book about Apollo XI.
The reviews here of it are interesting–many of the reviewers who disliked Mailer’s other work liked this one, and vice versa–his traditional fans had little use for it. I’ve never read it myself, and based on the reviews (including one by Roger Launius), I don’t know if I’ll bother now. Anyway, rest in peace. He certainly didn’t live that way.
as a teenager (my parents’ copy), and didn’t find it that impressive. 