Toast442.org

NASA has just revised their stats for asteroid 2004 MN4. Last week they announced a 1 in 300 chance that the thing would hit the Earth in ~2030 or so. They revised this over the weekend, and it now stands at a 1 in 37 chance (2.7%) Not enough to run for the hills, but enough to make you think.

Fortunately the thing is “only” about 300 meters, not a likely world-killer, but some massive destruction wherever it hit. It’s also small enough (and far enough away) that the potential for nuclear bombardment may be an option should it be required.

Yow, man. 1 in 37. Who gets to roll the Earth’s 2d10? And the really funny part is they’re projecting a hit on - get this - April 13, 2029. That’s a Friday. How’s that for bad luck?

Link to CNN article from Dec 24, giving the original 1 in 300 odds.

It’s technically Christmas here, so I guess I can no longer add to my wish list for this year. But if I could, I’d add this high powered green laser. The thing will burn holes in plastic cups from a few feet away! Now if that isn’t gift-worthy, I don’t know what is. There is a video of the thing on the website burning through both sides of a common cup and photos of the thing illuminating a tree from a quarter mile.

All this for $699. Totally worth it. Show those jerks with their keychain pointers what it’s like to really burn out someone’s retina.

Adobe has released Acrobat Reader 7.0. Included in this version is something that was lacking from the Mac for quite some time: An official browser plugin for viewing PDFs. Unlike the ridiculously priced ($69 - are they on crack??) PDF Browser Plugin, this one is official and allows basically all viewer functionality. This includes the newly-added ability to fill in and print/save PDF forms - something that was previously only available with the full version of Acrobat.

Something else you might find interesting - the load time has been dramatically reduced - it’s almost usable now as a day-to-day reader of PDFs. Something that wasn’t possible before. It’s not as fast as Preview, but much, much better.

From a SouthFlorida.com feature that shows children screaming in fear of Santa. Now the photo here doesn’t really show scared children - but if I were them, *I* would be scared. I mean - look at this guy. He’s obviously had eight or nine too many and is anxious to get out and abduct some children or something. Yikes.

Yet another version of Tower Toppler, version 1.1.1 was releases by Andreas Röver. This comes quickly on the heels of the 1.1.0 version. The main changes are:

• Included Pasis 2 Towers
• New Finnish translation
• Updated French Translation

I’ve updated the OS X packages on my Toppler page. Worth a download for the new level set!

Thanks Andreas!

Update, December 24, 2004: The issue with Toppler not running on 10.2.8 systems has been fixed. It was due to a missing function in the 10.2 C libs. The new version is 1.1.1-1

Remember the C-64 joystick all-in-one from a few weeks ago? Well the New York Times has done a story about the designer or said device, Jeri Ellsworth. She is a self-taught high school dropout who managed to cram all the circuitry of the original C-64 onto a single chip for the design. Good interesting stuff here, and shows that even little guys (or girls!) can get a leg up on the big boys of chip design.

Dan Brown, the author of the ridiculously over-hyped and only marginally entertaining novel The DaVinci Code is being sued by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh) whose research and opinions were obviously used by Brown when writing his book. Having read the latter book some years ago, when I picked up former on the recommendation of a friend, I was bored to tears - most of the “revelations” in this book were straight from HBHG.

Now, that doesn’t mean there is the basis for a lawsuit. I mean, how can you sue someone for using historical facts in a novel? Even if the facts are, shall we say, somewhat suspect. However, the authors of HBHG are forging ahead, claiming outright plagiarism. From the article:

He [Baigent] was reluctant to outline why he was taking legal action, but has told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Britain that being “lumped in” with Brown’s novel degraded the historical implications of their research.

“It makes our work far easier to dismiss as a farrago of nonsense.

“What a lot of people have forgotten was that the Holy Blood was a hypothesis,” Baigent told the Weekend Herald this week.

“We had a lot of data that we were deeply suspicious of, and we spent a lot of time checking it.

“We managed to establish that a certain amount was shown to be correct; the rest was plausible.”

Link to original article from the The New Zealand Herald.

Clifford Ball is one of the classic two day festival shows that everyone remembers. A lot of work went into this show, with movies being shown every night, tons of guest performers, fly overs by air force planes - it was non-stop.

Download the .torrent here, and check out the set info (courtesy of The Mockingbird Foundation)

I just read a post in Boing Boing about someone coming across this Jack Chick tract. It’s pretty much a standard fact-lacking rant in the typical Chick style - but at one point it veers off the deep end and starts randomly attacking current atomic theory:

Wrong Sir! Gluons are a made up dream! No one has seen or even measured them … they don’t exist! It’s a desperate theory to explain away the truth!

Naturally, Jesus Christ is the answer to what hold the nucleus of an atom together. Seriously - that’s what was written. I can’t make this stuff up.

Update, December 20, 2004: Check out this page at Johnny Logic. It actually names (and pictures!) the new Christ-based particles: Jebons! You have to see the art toward the bottom of the page. Hilarious.

Check out these gingerbread creations, featured at Popgadget. They’re by someone named Pavlovi from mediatinker. The biggest problem with these is that the laptop should so obviously be running OS X, and not some crappy version of Windows. I mean - who would want to put XP in their mouth? Jeez. Also be sure to check out the Tree o’ Memory, complete with an AMD star.