:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 8.25.2003 ::
:: "Close encounter, by celestial standards" ::
Mars edges closer to Earth than at any time in the past 60,000 years
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Sixty thousand years ago, the Neanderthal people and early modern humans must surely have watched a faint but familiar point of light in the southeastern sky grow brighter and brighter until its brilliant topaz-yellow light outshone everything in the nighttime heavens save the moon.
We will never know what those people may have thought or feared, because they left no record among their rare artifacts. But today we do know what they were seeing: It was the distant planet Mars, flying on its elliptical track around the sun and closing its gap on Earth's orbit while it appeared to blaze in brightness as the two planets neared.
That same phenomenon is occurring once again as Mars draws closer to Earth day by day, and on Wednesday at precisely 2:51 a.m. PDT, the fabled Red Planet will pass 34,646,437 miles from Earth -- closer than it has been in the past 60 millennia.
posted by me
:: 10:17:00 AM [+] ::
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