As expected, the refined orbital parameters of 2003QQ47 show no chance of impact with Earth.
Y’all can come out of your Asteroid Cellars now.
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I first came across this story in the dead tree Times, and although the virtual Times probably has it too, we have a policy here at Samizdata about linking to that which is that we don’t. So here is the same story from canada.com:
Ah look, they got it from the Times too.
It will be interesting to see what the anti-smoking lobby makes of this. They ought to rejoice. But I think they will be angry. Their starting axiom is that cigarettes are evil. If this discovery makes it that cigarettes actually do less harm than hitherto, that will be bad. They will react like hellfire preachers who have been informed that hell, for many sinners (now identifiable in advance), is not as hot as they had previously supposed, and that sin is accordingly less frightening for these particular sinners to indulge in.
So smokers with normal levels of DNA-repairing enzyme will now be sinning like there’s no tomorrow. Bad. Very bad. It’ll be fun to watch. September 3rd, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I don’t think philosophically there’s a meeting of minds between Ayn Rand and Our Glorious Leader, Tony Blair:
You might think that being your brother’s keeper is fine. But when Tony Blair says that he is his brother’s keeper, what he actually means is that he wants to force everyone else to be this. The statement isn’t about him at all. If he really subscribed to the moral code he advocates, surely he would donate most of his income to the poor. Then again, when you hear middle-class socialists demanding higher taxes, and you ask them how much extra they personally should pay, they often reply back that only “the rich” – people richer than they are – should pay more. September 3rd, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
By the end of today I will have been on BBC radio of various sorts twice. I just did a little spot on a Radio 2 talk show about taxes for or against. Guess which I was. I played the consumer electronics card. This is the one that says that since quality in things like computers and music boxes has in recent years skyrocketed and prices have sunk like so many stones dropping out of the sky, but that in the public sector this great stuff hasn’t happened, private sector hurrah public sector bah. Governments are catastrophically bad at spending money. The rapacity of governments in collecting money and the damage that does had already been covered, by George Trefgarne. As usual in this sort of radio, I could have done better and I could have done worse. You land a few punches, give a few tried and tested memes a bit of a dust-over and maybe give some less familiar ones an outing. In among that you do some unnecessary um-ing and aah-ing and waffling. Then you put the phone down and get on with your life, which in my case now means boasting about having done this on Samizdata. And then, tonight at 8pm, I will be contributing to a Radio 4 programme called “The Commission”. → Continue reading: A BBC radio day September 3rd, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
White Rose notes that London’s police commissioner is calling for introduction of ID cards for all citizens as a means of combating terrorism and organised crime. The said commissioner is apparently opposed to any such “Big Brother” schemes but he needs “to have the ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully and those other people who want to create mayhem and effectively destroy our way of life.” And how exactly is that not Big Brother…? September 3rd, 2003 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
It seems self-indulgent to regale readers of this blog with a personal gripe, but indulge me a moment. Like all too many Londoners, I usually have to take our Tube (subway) system to work. It is unpleasant. It is irregular. It is often extremely noisy and the air pollution is bad. In the summer months, it is incredibly hot (we Brits cannot figure out airconditioning without bleating about how vastly expensive it is). And it seems a cult of incompetence has gripped the organisation that runs it, like ivy creeping around the trunk of a tree. This morning, on the Victoria line, all trains north and south were halted “owing to a signal failure in the Kings Cross area.” At least that is what I thought the announcer mumbled into the microphone, though the voice was so hushed and marked by embarrassed pauses that he or she could have been announcing something entirely different, such as last night’s football scores. We gung-ho capitalists may hope that an injection of raw, competitive private enterprise will blast all this complacency and mule-headed uselessness away. Maybe. But sometimes I wonder whether if the country that built the first great railway network 150 or more years ago is capable of every again running big engineering projects with a modicum of talent. Right, I’ll cheer up now. September 3rd, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to Sir John Stevens, London’s police commissioner, Britain must introduce personal identity cards for all citizens if it is to combat the threat of terrorism and organised crime:
He insisted that new biometric technology, which allows personal details such as fingerprint or retina identification to be included, made mandatory ID cards “a must”.
And how would Sir John Stevens define a ‘normal life’? Such clarification is important since it is only those people who deserve to be left alone and not have their lives ‘traced and followed”…. It’s the desire of the police commissioner to have the ‘ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully’ that keeps me awake at night. It seems the British police, despite their protests, are indeed in favour of the Big Brother or rather the Panopticon approach to crime where none happens because everyone is watched all the time. How about allowing people to defend themselves and their freedom? But that is inconceivable to the police mind since everyone is guilty of something at some time and you certainly should not be doing anything they don’t know about, just in case. Just your ID card, ma’am. September 3rd, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Back in May of this year, the Mars Global Surveyer was commanded to turn its’ camera outwards at the solar system. These marvelous images show us the home system as not-so-far-future Martian colonists will see it. I was particularly captivated by this view of North and South America as it would appear to an amateur astronomer.  September 3rd, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Scaled Composities carried out a second drop test of its’ X-ship, the SpaceShipOne, last week. On this flight pilot Melville extended the flight envelope with aileron and rudder control tests at stall. The objectives of the flight were, according to the test report:
Each test brings us one step closer to commercial space. If Scaled Composites’ red tape clearance efforts are going equally well we may yet see the first private suborbital space flight during the December centenary of the Wright brothers first flight at Kittyhawk. September 3rd, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Here’s the final paragraph of a story about how Amsterdam is getting less permissive in its law enforcement policies:
Not all the news in the article sounds bad to me, but a lot does, and that really does. Presumably this means for the whole of Holland, and not just for Amsterdam. September 3rd, 2003 | Comments are closed
You may have heard the news reports. This newly discovered asteroid could potentially ruin everyone’s day on March 21st, 2014. It is way too soon to take this seriously and the odds of an impact event are a little under a million to one. It will take astronomers some time to refine the orbit. It is likely, but not certain, such refinements will prove it harmless. You can view the current data on this rock at JPL. If by outrageous bad fortune this one has our name on it we’ll spend a good part of the Global Economic Product over the next 11 years to get out there and sort the matter. This is not exactly the way I want us to bootstrap ourselves off the planet, but it is certainly better than the alternative… I’ll post on it again if it gets interesting. September 2nd, 2003 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Guessedworker, I am very far from being an idealist, I am however an ideologue in that I am a consistent advocate of the doctrine of pure anarcho-libertarianism. You are quite right that the dogmas of the liberal left are a menace and they need to be refuted, I spend much time doing that whenever I encounter such people, especially the marxoid greens who abound. However also a threat to liberty are the equally pernicious dogmas of the social conservatives, of which you are an advocate. I do not think that the state should be supporting or oppressing any groups at others expense. You may not want to sort out the laudable traits in people but I certainly do and the only way to do this meaningfully is to allow the market to work. There has been nothing like a free market in personal behaviour and self expression for the last forty years. There has been instead a mixture of on the one hand repression and on the other hand state subsidy of fecklesness. This looks to you like a free market because you haven’t the first idea of what a free market actually is. It may well be that we have an ‘eternal nature’ as you say but your narrow and clumsy understanding of it is a useless guide to policy, it is the dumb interplay between the fools on the left and you fools on the socially conservative right over the last forty years that have brought forth the ‘rivers of pain’. For my own lifestyle I seek no subsidy but I certainly will not tolerate any repression. I want not equality but freedom. Paul Coulam September 2nd, 2003 | 93 comments - (Comments are closed)
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