So You’re Saying There’s A Chance

Asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered several weeks ago.

Between 100 to 300 feet across, it has something like a 1.5% chance of striking earth in 2032. Anything larger than 150 feet with a 1% chance of impact gets put on the watch list of the International Asteroid Warning Network.

An asteroid that size could easily cause something as significant as the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908, estimated at 1000X the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb.

And still not remotely close to the Chicxulub impactor at the end of the Cretaceous. When it struck the Yucatan, the 10 – 15 kilometer meteor caused a rim of mountains higher than the Himalayas to form around the impact zone, blasted debris that achieved escape velocity and left the atmosphere, and brought instantaneous extinction as far away as what is now North Dakota and New Jersey.

NASA (funding pending) and Jet Propulsion Labs, among others, will follow YR4’s progress. If they upgrade this current threat, presumably some half-baked plan ensues to mitigate damage. I have personally volunteered Makerbot – the youngest, spryest, least whiny bastard – to lead Space Force on that dangerous mission.

Ring of Fire

“Ring of Fire” eclipse drops tomorrow.
Nashville – the center of the universe – only gets a 50% eclipse from about 10:30am to 1:30pm, with a peak at noon.

The full experience passes right through Roswell, so I’m pretty sure that this is the mother ship coming to get us. I’ll see you onboard.

All Your Face Are Belong To Us

For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the proverbial needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet.

A search takes mere seconds. You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers.

PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search.

I’m sure that this technology will only be used for noble pursuits.

Hard Pass

Confession… I’m a bit of a horror movie nerd, and I actually like some of what Rob Zombie has put out there. This… this looks awful. I can’t believe that people gave him the go ahead to drop $30 million to produce this. Go ahead and watch this trailer, and let me know if you think this guy ever makes another “film.”