This video on growth and the exponential function might be of interest here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

You should watch all eight parts.

Anyone worried about bank failures might want to have a look at this link every Friday evening (closures are always announced after hours on Friday so the FDIC can try to get everything sorted out over the weekend).

http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html

Governments, corporations, and any other power structure you care to name are also corrupt. Power attracts the corruptible.

That was a pretty classy move by Bjørn Dæhlie in #3.

AFAIK, Mugabe handed the confiscated farms over to his cronies rather than just any old "inexperienced black farmers". This is just run of the mill petty corruption, nothing to do with race or colonial rule really.

Yes, comets are, essentially, dirty snowballs but this is an asteroid not a comet. Asteroids are usually made of rock. The composition doesn't matter that much anyway, what matters is the kinetic energy and that depends on the mass and the square of the object's speed. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere and most of it would end up as heat.

nocedhal, I'm not sure what you're saying but: Jupiter has nothing to do with this. Mountains are too small to have any noticeable effect on something like this; Everest is only 9km high and we're dealing with something 500km in diameter. A billiard ball would be a lot rougher than the Earth if you scaled it up to the size of the Earth.

Bacteria and viruses aren't the same thing. A virus is little more than a bit of DNA in a protein shell, they can't reproduce without infecting a host cell to hijack its reproductive machinery; bacteria are single-celled organisms that can reproduce on their own. Also, antibiotics are used to fight bacteria, they do nothing to viruses.

Why not just keep the dumpster closed so raccoons can't get in them in the first place. I live in bear country; we get black bears (and raccoons) in our dumpsters if we don't properly secure our garbage.

Good job helping the little guy out but "an ounce of prevention...".

So you're saying that simple empathy is the basis of morality? That's part of the reason we have to dehumanize enemies before soldiers can kill them and why sociopaths are so disturbing, no?