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An Asteroid Could Have Killed Us Tonight [Space]

Rejoice, because you are alive: An asteroid named 2009 TM8 just passed only 216,000 miles from Earth, racing at 18,163mph. That’s closer than the moon. But don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to panic, says the JPL:

If it’s typical density, it would create a 4 kiloton explosion in the Earth’s atmosphere if it were to hit, which of course it won’t. You’d expect an object of this size to fly within the orbit of the moon every few days or so.

That's what Don Yeomans—manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California—said talking about 2009 TM8 and the other 7 million objects in the near-Earth space which, "needless to say we have discovered only a small fraction of them."

Great. At 30 feet, something like 2009 TM8 is not as big as the killer Apophis or as the superkiller that can destroy everything on Earth. But who cares about destroying everything when this thing is large enough to annihilate Brooklyn.

Ah well, as if I needed any excuses to celebrate after this sodding Friday. Zacapa rum, here I come. [MSNBC]






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Home sales up 18%

The Canadian Real Estate Association says 135,182 homes were sold countrywide in the third quarter, up 18 per cent from a year earlier and the most ever for the period.

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Integrated Gmail Updates with Improved Looks and Handy Features [Downloads]

Firefox: Integrated Gmail is a clever way to load any Google app on one landing page. With version 2.0, it also adds a lot of interface fixes and helpful features, in the style of a certain well-known Gmail extension.

The basic functionality of Integrated Gmail remains the same—load in other Google Apps, like Reader, Calendar, Chat, Tasks, or whatever you'd like, and set how big they are when you click to expand them. New to 2.0 are several features included in Better Gmail 2, like message counts in your web favicon, and a few that are just all-around neat: universal drag-and-drop between left and right sidebars, sidebar and title bar hiding, multiple inbox support, theme detection and compatibility, and much more, detailed at the developer’s Mozilla page.

Of course, loading multiple Google apps in a single page can introduce a good bit of lag, and we saw some incessant Gmail load flickering in our installation. With some adjustments, though, you can probably create a single-page inbox for all the stuff Google wants to serve you.

Integrated Gmail is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.






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Filippa Hamilton: I was fired because I was too fat!

Ralph Lauren’s clothing company fired the model whose body looked emaciated in a touched-up ad because she weighed too much, the woman told the Daily News Tuesday.Filippa Hamilton – whose hips appeared slimmer than her head in the recent altered ad – said her contract was terminated in April because she was too heavy.”They fired me because they

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HP Ranked #1 Green Company (What!?) [Hp]

Newsweek’s latest Green Rankings gave Hewlett Packard the top position, establishing the firm as the greenest Fortune 500 company this year—a far cry from Greenpeace’s #14 ranking. So what gives?

The ranking methodology utilized by Greenpeace and Newsweek are radically different; the Newsweek rankings are based on a holistic view of the companies including greenhouse emissions, water consumption and supply chain management. Greenpeace study analyzes more focused benchmarks like the use of toxic chemicals.

Greenpeace's biggest knock on HP is it's continued polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardant (BFR) usage despite a commitment to discontinue their utilization, while Newsweek recognizes their continued use— they give HP credit due to progressively diminished usage.

HP got especially high marks for it’s Green Policy and Performance from Newsweek, issues Greenpeace did not consider. While Newsweek’s ranking system is more comprehensive, there is good reason Greenpeace looks specifically at PVC and BFRs. Dioxin, an organic compound, produced as a byproduct of PVC production has been implicated in a broad range of health problems from acne to sarcoma.

Both rankings have valid rationales to justify their methodologies, HP most likely belongs somewhere in between #1 and #14. [Newsweek and Greenpeace]

Thanks Prof. Singaram for helping me work through organic chemistry.