Day: November 4, 2000

On Friday astronomer said they had identified a suspected asteroid that had a 1 in 500 chance of hitting the Earth in 2030, but today they apparently downgraded the risk saying that the object would actually miss the Earth by about 3 million miles and was no longer considered a serious threat.

After 2030, though, the picture might not be so rosey. For a 2071 flyby the risks of a collision could be as high as 1 in 1,000.

And just so you know how little we know about near earth asteroids — nobody’s even sure the object really is an asteroid. There’s apparently some suspicion that it might just be an Apollo-era booster rocket!

Information on the original announcement can be found in the IAU Technical Review Team Assessment on Asteroid 2000 SG344, and a followup news story on MSNBC, Asteroid threat downgraded sums up the aftermath, including a stinging e-mail message from a scientist wondering why the IAU went public so early on such flimsy evidence.

PC Gamer is just one of several game news outlets reporting rumors that Sega is going to manufacture a PCI card that will allow people to play Dreamcast games on their computers. A lot of people think this rumor almost has to be false since the Dreamcast uses a proprietary optical disc format (although the copy protection on it was hacked awhile ago).

Here’s why I think the rumors are probably true: this would be an incredibly stupid move by a company, Sega, that has a long history of making incredibly stupid moves. Oh yeah, I would want to buy a Dreamcast PCI card so I could play the Dreamcast port of Unreal: Tournament rather than the PC version. Or maybe PC gamers are dying to ditch The Sims to play Seaman? Such a move would be crazy given that the console and PC games really service different markets — which is precisely why I would bet anything the folks at Sega are seriously considering it (btw, I’m not a PC snob and own several console systems; it’s just that the console is very good at what it does and PC games are good at what they do, and the result is usually a waste of time and money when companies try to bridge the two).