Fluffy comets — not!

I have occasionally wondered about movie depictions of comets as big, fluffy balls (albeit sometimes with surges & waves adding a bit of character) since the only other nominally fluffy things out there are stars or gas clouds, either of which are relatively huge in comparison. Fluffy things “not out there” can be quite different.

Now the Thunderbolts crew have run across some information which seems to show that comets are most un-fluffy with corners & other sharp bits.

This accords well with my thought that in order to survive anything substantial by way of a number of orbits, these bright little suckers would have to have a correspondingly substantial physical makeup.

It also accords better with the observation that in only a few decades, astronomical things have been watched changing, which of course renders the straight gradualist approach to astronomy fairly pointless (which will of course be, er, naturally unsettling to some people).

Oddly enough, this kind of observation also applies to Open Source software vis a vis its effect on the “gradualist” software business.

Items like OpenOffice, Linux, The GIMP etc have pretty much blindsided traditional commercial software providers — & the effects/consequences of that blindsiding are far from complete. Fundamental characteristics such as there simply not being a competitor to buy or pressure out of business will, I think, have the deepest & most lasting effects.