Mince Pies and Annihilation!
Just thought I’d check Slashdot after one last brandy and a mince pie (made by me: Ainsly Harriot BBC Top 100 recipe, the one with the grated orange peel in the pastry). I love Slashdot. Not that I understand half of what gets talked about there, but the responses to this Christmas day story are wonderfully heart-warming.
From my RSS feed:
phreakuencies writes "Worried since the recent post about the MN4 2004 asteroid, I added a bookmark to it's "impact risk" section at NASA. The asteroid started as having a 1/233 probability of hitting earth. Later it raised to 1/63. Daily computations made on 25 Dec raised it's chances up to 1/45. Optimists can now say it has a 97.8% probability of missing earth." And Veteran writes " NeoDys offers the 'Orbfit' software package (source code released under the GPL) which can be used to get a pre-release view of the situation with Asteroid 2004MN4."
The feeling I had on reading, on this of all days, a less than comforting update on the MN4 asteriod trajectory melts on seeing this:
