On the night after the Heaven's Gate UFO cultists were discovered dead by mass suicide in a San Diego suburban McMansion, I was standing in a dark patch of the Presidio, watching the Hale-Bopp comet and its forked tail over the Marin Headlands. Someone passed around binoculars, somebody else passed a little pipe around, and after a half hour everyone was cold and bored and we drifted back to the battleship-gray Victorian on Haight Street that I shared with a rotating group of five or six pals.

My bedroom was just a large closet on the upper floor, with enough room for a narrow mattress and a chest [...]

"Mars may have a really bad day next year on October 19th. That’s when there is a very slight chance a newly discovered comet may impact our neighboring planet, says NASA…. Based on observations to date the comet nucleus could be a real monster – as big as 9 miles (15 km) to 31 miles (50 km) wide. With it’s velocity clocked at 35 miles (56 km) per second, the energy force of the collision could be measured in the billions of megatons, resulting in a crater hundreds of miles wide. This could be an impact that rivals the one that [...]

"Scientists often think of celestial bodies as roundish, and this obviously is not—it's peanut-like. Mother Nature has once again pulled the rug out from under scientific ideas." —Dr. Don Yoemans, who manages Nasa's Near-Earth Object program, gets an early start on kowtowing to anti-science forces in the new Republican dominated congress, while discussing the very cool photos the Deep Impact probe has just sent back from it's close pass by Comet Hartley 2 "We scientists are stupid," he might as well say, "the government should definitely not give us any money or let us experiment on stem cells or listen to anything we say about global [...]