Man in a Shed: Near miss

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

The headlines should all have been about 2009 DD45.

The BBC reports that on Monday a previously untracked asteroid passed within the distance of the moon's orbit that was large enough to cause an explosion of 1000 atomic bombs on impact.

Re-read that sentence a few times and see where your imagination leads you.

Such an event has happened in the recent past in Siberia, 1908, fortunately it was a mostly uninhabited area.

This really should have grabbed more headlines, and must now concentrate minds.

Think - where were you on Monday afternoon and how different your day could easily have been.2009 DD45 intersects Earth's orbit just as Earth is passing. A close shave gromit. (H/T to JPL Small-Body Database Browser here ).

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman