In one week, "an office-building-size asteroid will speed past Earth faster than a bullet and closer than some communications satellites."

"The good news: There’s no chance of an impact. At its closest, asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass about 17,000 miles above Earth."

Wow. I had no idea communications satellites were that far away!

But anyway, an office building, eh? Which office building? Are we talking Pentagon-size? The Pentagon, you know, is the world's largest office building. Obviously, this asteroid isn't Pentagon-sized or the WaPo would have said an asteroid the size of the Pentagon, which would have sounded much more amusing (and scary) than "office-building-size asteroid," which leads me to picture an ordinary place downtown in my own city.

So, I'm picturing it, this office-building-size asteroid. What happens if it hits?

Meteor Crater in Arizona — nearly a mile wide — was... probably gouged by an office-building-size space rock about 50,000 years ago.

How big must we go before we're talking wiping-out-the-dinosaurs apocalypse? Apparently, that would be about 5 miles wide. And, no, the Pentagon is not 5 miles wide. It's 921 feet along each outer side facade.

ADDED: A reader writes:

While the physics that I do for a living doesn't have a whole lot to do with planets or asteroids, I do enjoy the stuff and am fairly well versed in it. Since you were wondering on the blog today what a 150 foot asteroid would do, it's about half the length of the asteroid that did the Tunguska event. Remember that mass goes more or less like length-cubed, so the 150 foot asteroid would be about 1/8th the weight/power.

Tunguska had the power of 1000 Hiroshima bombs. So 1/8th of that still would more or less destroy a city if it landed on it. Most likely, of course, any asteroid would hit the ocean. But that would still cause a massive tsunami like we haven't seen in recorded history.

I don't know if you've heard of the Apophis asteroid, but it's more than 3x the length of the Tunguska asteroid and it's going to come very close to Earth in 2029, and then again in 2036 (though it will not hit either year, it's still been mixed in with a lot of silly 2012-style apocalypse myths). Scientists have already accomplished the task of landing a spacecraft on another asteroid, so there is a lot of talk of attaching a beacon to Apophis in 2029 so we could follow it on its path. Would be really fascinating science.

"This will be my last political campaign, no matter what. I've got nothing else to run for."

President Obama, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, yesterday. The "I've got nothing else to run for" is a response to a sad "oh" that follows the "last campaign" remark.

Via Drudge, which is continuing its black-and-white theme, now with Putin top and center — crouching and exposing his muscular arms — above a smiling Romney and an eye-blacked Drew Brees. The picture of Obama is, as it was yesterday, in the right-hand column. Today, it's a photograph — a nice photograph, with a hint of a smile. Also in Obama's column, Chinese ideograms above a link "China Ascends to No. 2 on FORTUNE 500..." Maybe the ideograms say "We're #2" (or "We try harder"). The stack of links between Obama's image and the Chinese writing reads:

'This Will Be My Last Political Campaign No Matter What'...
GALLUP: APPROVE SLIPS TO 44%...
Women outnumber men on US Olympic team...
Swedish billionaire's son arrested as U.S.-born wife found dead...

I'm getting a decline-of-Western-civilization theme out of Drudge's new black-and-white trend. There's Putin on top, looking hyper-masculine. The Chinese are rising up (economically). And Obama's all used up. Nowhere to go. We talked about that back in April, after I received email from his campaign saying  "In a few days, I'll be hitting the trail for my last campaign." I said:

The man is 50 years old. His career is young. He's packing it in so early? This troubles me. Why no more stamina in the political arena?

I mean, what if he loses in November? He could run again. He could let 3 presidential terms pass and come back and only be as old as Romney is right now!

But even if he wins, what's he going to do? He can't run for President again, but there are other elective offices. Look at John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, and Andrew Johnson. All of them went on to seek other elective office and to win....

Why doesn't Obama have more gumption? It makes him seem too weak even now as he seeks reelection. Last campaign. That's annoying.

By contrast, Putin has gumption. Stamina. Staying power. And, by the way, he's sending warships to Syria.

But what's in Drudge's column 1? The only photograph of a person is Obama's brother — George Obama — the one who lives in a hut. (Rush Limbaugh's been riffing about that for years.) The other Obama is being used in some right-wing propaganda film. Easy pickings.  The man needs some money.

The top photograph in column 1 is Saturn. (Yesterday's Drudge had us worrying about the sun.) There's a "Strange Vortex Discovered on Saturn Moon...." Just above Saturn is "Wasserman Schultz: 'It Would Be Nice If We Had Candidate for President Who Was Committed To America'..." Yes, yes, let's stick with the strange vortex that is the American presidential election. For some reason, the Wasserman Schultz line is the only thing Drudge italicizes. Perhaps that's a prompt to read the quote sarcastically.

Clicking through, I see that Wasserman Schultz has radically changed her hairstyle since her appearance on Fox News Sunday (June 8). Did someone decide she needed to look more conservative/conventional/feminine?

Wasserman Schultz point, in this new clip, in this new hair, is about Mitt Romney stashing money outside of the United States:

Mitt Romney needs to come clean and release multiple years of his tax returns so we can see why he invested in a Bermuda corporation and transferred it to his wife's name the day before he became Governor of Massachusetts.

So we can see why he's invested in Swiss bank accounts and accounts in the Cayman Islands. And you know, we also need to know why does -- what is the allure of investments out of the country. When he headed up Bain Capital, he was a pioneer in outsourcing and shipped jobs overseas.

It would be nice if we had a candidate for president who was committed to America. Mitt Romney is committed to making sure that either he makes the most money as humanly possible, or his investors do. 

Imagine a man who tried to make as much money as possible! The Democratic Party is hoping Americans have been trained to think of that as a bad thing.

It's the decline of Western civilization, when we no longer flex muscles, we give up and let China take over. There's nothing else to run for.

We can always run for... cover.

"There is no need to worry. It’s just another instance of random violence."

Said the head of head of student health psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, back when Errol Morris was an undergrad. Now, he says, "I feel the same way about asteroids."

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At the Kafe Kohoutek...

... it's all so unexpected.

(The photograph is something the camera took on its own, as I was sliding the cover closed. It looks like comets so I called this café post "Kohoutek" after the wonderfully overhyped comet that seemed, at the time — do you remember? — to symbolize the lameness of Gerald Ford. I wrote Kafe Kohoutek instead of Kohoutek Café for this café post — a "café post" is just an open thread — because there used to be a really cool restaurant here in Madison called Kafe Kohoutek. That was back in the '90s. The name was a wry reference back to the fizzled comet, 90s nostalgia for the 70s. And here I am now, in the 10s, reminiscing about the 70s and the 90s, all because my camera had a mind of its own.)

"Can one man unilaterally change the zodiac?"

An astronomer brings science to what isn't science but refers to some scientific facts that are susceptible to being set straight, and suddenly you might find yourself Ophiuchus, the Snake Annoyer.

A storm tens of thousands of miles wide.

On Saturn.

"Twinkling Stars May Reveal Human-Size Wormholes."

May!

"If you were sitting in a spacecraft puttering around Pluto and looking out the window, this is what you'd see..."

Beautiful!

I miss Carl Sagan.

I miss Carl Sagan. I miss Carl Sagan.

***

For one thing, I don't see Tyson writing something like this:

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

(Read the whole thing — and don't assume I'm endorsing it. I'm not.)

***

Oh my God, Becky
Look at his cerebellum, it is so big!...

The science narrator who once voiced awe at astronomical size now sounds rather silly.

In last night's Sunset Tavern, rhhardin wrote:

The science narrator genre, made popular in the late 60s.

"There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Simply saying that number doesn't mean much to us because it doesn't provide any context. Our brains have no way to accurately put that in any meaningful perspective."

The quote is from this:



RH goes on:

100 billion is a twentieth of the 2009 Obama deficit.

It's doesn't seem so big now, astronomers.

Needed, a government narrator genre replacing the universe with the deficit.

The Hubble telescope looks at pork.

An earth-sized hole in Jupiter...

... discovered by an amateur, Anthony Wesley, a 44-year-old Australian, who wrote on line:

I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thought likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot....

It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I’d imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place - I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this possible new event. Could it actually be an impact mark on Jupiter? I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark. If it really was an impact mark then I had to start telling people, and quickly....