Just once, can we not see one of these stories where the accused's *lawyer* is the one saying how ridiculous the charges are? Yes, I know that in this case the charges really are nuts, and yes, the whole thing really is beyond-the-pale outrageous, but surely we can find a more credible source for that outrage than the guy whose job it is to express outrage over the accusation.

Jrtom:

Doh! Tried to recall from memory and got the diameter wrong by a factor of 2.

I'm not sure where wikipedia got its number, but it gives it at 100k ly, fwiw. But also, it mentions a 1000 ly thickness, which gives a little wiggle room for the 6000 ly, since a sphere centered on us occupies (albeit slightly) less percentage volume than does a circle of the same diameter in 2D. Still, even with your numbers, .64 percent is pretty low probablity for an event that happens every 100,000 years. I'd disagree with you and say that this means there's a 99+% chance that if we're "lucky" enough to see one of these things in our galaxy, it'll be at some safe range.

And that's a mass extiction event, rather than a boil-the-oceans event, which has odds far lower. Not to mention that for what its worth, if some supergiant were to GRB 10 ly from us, we'd have hundreds of thousands of years to actually see the star coming - a big supergiant at 100 ly would be pretty noticable, all the more so if it were moving rapidly relative to the sun (it would have either a large proper motion or doppler shift). I'm not sure what you can do about something like this, but with a few thousand years warning, I'm sure someone could think of something.

On the other hand, this got me thinking about the whole "lifetime of the earth" thing. 0.9936 ^ 100 (the odds that we'd be hit over the last 10 million years) is about 50%. 0.9936 ^ 1000 (100 million years) = 99.998% chance of being hit, which either makes us pretty damn lucky (since nobody's hypothesizing a GRB extinction in the last 100 my), or it means somewhere the math is wrong.

One thing I've been thinking about is the whole collimation thing. Not only does a GRB have to go off in the right place, but it also has to be pointed in the right direction, since the burst is a jet, not a sphere. I actually tried to look up the distribution of stellar axis of rotations relative to the plane of the galaxy, but couldn't find anything. Otoh, *our* solar system's ecliptic is tilted 60 degrees relative to the plane of the galaxy, which probably means that unless the solar system's special in some way, that the distributions are random. Given that the jets are 2-20 degrees across, this means that there's a max of 20^2/180^2 *2 (the area taken up by 2 jets in the sky, if my math is right) chance (around 2%) that any burst would intercept us, regardless of its distance. When you multiply all that up, you get a ~12% chance of a "hit" every 100 my, which is about right, I guess.

Of course, none of this takes away from the most important issue: seen with naked from 7 bly away = COOL! :)

"A gamma ray burst at 6000 light years would result in mass extinction; a 1000 light year distant burst would be equivalent to a 100,000 megaton nuclear explosion. A burst 100 light years away would blow away the atmosphere, create tidal waves, and start to melt the surface of the earth."

And one 10 light years away would finish the job, and no doubt one 1 light year away would be even vaporize the vapor. Presumably, one around the orbit of Pluto would leave one hell of an afterimage. Yawn. While all these things may be technically true, all observed GRB's are *extragalactic*. Once per galaxy per 100,000 years are pretty good odds by my book, not to mention the volume of space in our galaxy (150,000 ly across, give or take) suggest it's unlikely that one could pop up next to us. Not to mention that a "1/1,000,000 event PER 10 billion years" (the whole lifetime of the earth thing) is probably on the order of magnitude of the probability of all of the hydrogen in the ocean spontaneously undergoing fusion. If a GRB suddenly creeps up on us at a mere 10 ly away, it's time to just acknowledge that God hates us.

Beat me to it :)

"they explained that the last growth in Finnish population had come nine months after a wintertime TV strike"

Needless to say, I assume that's about as credible as the New York City power failure myth.
http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/blackout.asp

After a certain age, I actually mapped most CYOA books, so I could efficiently "mine" them of content as quickly as possible. I also remember the hidden "good" ending in "Inside UFO 54-40," though I can't remember how I found it seeing as I was methodically mapping the stories. I particularly liked the fact that that ending was logically consistant with the plot of the story. I barely remember the plot, but at least once, people refered to Ultima as being findable only when you weren't looking for it. And sure enough, when you find that ending it begins with something like: "you're not sure what you did to end up here but...."

No way the heat from rubbing your hands together kills anything. How much heat do you *feel* when you rub your hands together, even dry (with far more friction)? Most microorganisms are almost certainly able to at least briefly stand temperatures that you'd consider painfully hot. The autoclave in our lab runs with pressurized steam at about 120 degrees (C) for 15 minutes, which is, to be sure exactly the kind of overkill you'd want in a microbiology lab, but still, that's about the order of magnitude you're looking at for killing bugs via heat.

Incidentally, the flu virus may indeed, not be "hanging around your genitals or rear end" but just google "fecal oral transmission" to learn all the fun bugs that *would* be lingering there :)

I dunno. Bacteria have no trouble colonizing a newborn's GI tract after birth (at which time it's sterile) with no effort undertaken on our part. And I'm not sure I'm buying the "before we lived as densly as we do now, we'd have trouble getting bacteria from others" part either. Given ancient concepts of hygiene, how many other people would you have really needed around before you were sharing GI tract flora? Not to mention, it's not like these bacteria have exclusively human hosts. Finally, other mammals can get cholera and other GI tract diseases too and lack an appendix.

From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Legislature

"The legislature meets in regular session on the second Tuesday in January of each odd-numbered year. The Texas Constitution limits the regular session to 140 calendar days."

Let's all have a moment of silence for the poor overworked Texas Legislature, which every other year sometimes doesn't have time for bathroom breaks.