Day: April 12, 2002

Yikes, where’s Paul Ehrlich when you need him? Nature reports that population growth is hitting the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

A new survey by TerraSysems Inc. and the Astrophysical Laboratory in Grenoble, France, estimated there were between 1.1 million and 1.9 million asteroids in the belt. That’s about twice as many as was previously thought.

Of course the biggest concern with asteroids is that one of these might decide to get up close and personal with the Earth someday. In movies typically such asteroids get destroyed or deflected with nuclear weapons, or if you’re the Stargate team you simply pop them in and out of hyperspace (worst. episode. ever.)

But it turns out a realistic way to deflect asteroids would be to alter the amount of sunlight they reflect. It turns out that due to something called the Yarkovsky effect, the momentum of unevenly heated objects is altered by re-radiating heat. Change the amount of light reflected and you could change the course of the asteroid.

One possibility, for example, is to cover the surface of the asteroid in dirt to alter its surface heat conductivity.

Man, I can’t wait to see Bruce Willis do that in a film.

Source:

Asteroids pile up. Meera Lewis, Nature, April 12, 2002.

Last week there was a brutal assault on a female police officer near Grand Rapids, Michigan. The suspect had stolen a cup of pop and was hanging around suspiciously at a McDonald’s. So the store manager called the police.

The officer who responded started to question the man when he just started beating on her. He apparently hit her more than a dozen times, stopping only when she was incapacitated and on the ground. He then ran off but was apprehended later.

So today he had his preliminary hearing which involved setting of bail. Now the defense obviously wanted a low bail amount and the prosecutor wanted a very high bail. So the prosecutor argued that he was a flight risk and pointed out that he had fled the scene of the crime.

At which point the suspect’s defense lawyer actually had the temerity to argue that since the incapacitated officer had never formally placed the suspect under arrest, that he was under no legal obligation to stay at the scene of the crime so the fact that he had ran from the McDonald’s was no indication at all whether he was a flight risk.

The judge didn’t buy it and set bail at several hundred thousand dollars.

The European Union is floating a proposal to outlaw racism and xenophobia which it defines as a dislike of individuals based on “race, colour, descent, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin.” The law would also make it a crime to engage in the “public denial or trivialization of the crimes dealt with by the international military tribunal established in 1945.”

Although British Prime Minster Tony Blair had expressed some limited support for a Holocaust denial law in Great Britain, the UK is opposing the new proposal and can effectively block the law since it requires a unanimous vote of the 15 EU members to take effect.

Laws outlawing racism and Holocaust denial are already in effect in some European countries, leading to jail terms for people based entirely for the ideas they express. According to the Daily Telegraph,

In Germany a historian who claimed that AUschwitz prisoners enjoyed cinemas, a swimming pool and brothels was sentenced to 10 months in jail; and an American served three years of a four-year sentence for distributing anti-holocaust material.

Great Britain, meanwhile, saw a civil trial in which Holocaust denier David Irving sued an American history professor who had written a book accusing Irving of being a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite. Irving failed in his lawsuit and the British court’s findings and verdict reinforced the fact that Holocaust deniers are in much the same category as those who believe that aliens built the pyramids (the deniers are actually worse, however, because the alien pyramid folks don’t generally espouse viciously anti-Semitic dogma).

As the Daily Telegraph wrote in an editorial,

Their [other European countries] history is very different from ours. In Britain, the state has no compelling need to imprison the handful of cranks who deny that the Holocaust took place . . . The truth that the Holocaust did happen appears all the more unassailable for the fact that Britons are free to deny it if they wish.

We have plenty of laws to prevent people from inciting others to violence, and it is sensible that we should. But the Government is absolutely right to resist this latest forced assault on British freedom, and must no compromise on it.

Well said.

Source:

Liberty to think ill. The Daily Telegraph, April 9, 2002.

Blair shies away from EU law on Holocaust. Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, April 9, 2002.