Monday, May 2, 2011

Bin Laden, a bus and the Milky Way

Apparently there was something in the news about some guy getting killed in Pakistan. But the big news today is that a car hit the Streamline bus I was riding in from Belgrade.

Net results: Obama poll numbers have just got to go up. John Negroponte, G. W. Bush's UN ambassador, answered a question on NPR which included mention of the fact that some previous administrations had downplayed the importance of getting Bin Laden. Which previous administrations those might have been was not mentioned. Negroponte assured us that Bush never lost interest in getting Bin Laden for a single second. There was damage to a bus wheel and damage to the already damaged car which looked like it had hit some other bus before it hit our bus. I got to spend half an hour sitting in a sunny bus reading a fascinating article in Scientific American while the police did whatever it was they were doing.

What we know: Bin Laden and his people were hiding in a huge house very near a Pakistani military facility and Pakistan says they did not know it. We flew a helicopter strike force into that area meeting no resistance from Pakistan, and we say we did not tell them we were coming. The kid who hit the bus says he ran the red light and hit the bright yellow bus which was clearly illuminated by the sunlight coming from behind him because he was picking up something he had dropped on the floor. Everybody who hears this assumes that what the kid had dropped was his telephone. And, most importantly, matter constantly flows into and out of galaxies to an extent not previously imagined. We already knew that the heavier atoms in our bodies, everything above lithium, were formed by fusion reactions inside stars. Now we know that many of those atoms that make us up were probably formed in stars in galaxies outside our Milky Way. Bits of Osama Bin Laden now resting on the floor of the ocean came a very long way to get there, and will someday return to intergalactic space.