We may be in for quite treat this week as the Leonid meteor shower may be a storm. The shower peaks every 33 years as the parent comet orbits the sun, and this is the year. Due to quirks in orbital mechanics, it may be the last storm for over 100 years. The peak should be Wednesday evening at 9pm eastern looking to the east, though the best viewing will be in the Middle East. Note all the qualifiers – predicting these things are very, very tricky. Still, I’ll be outside each evening for the rest of the week, hoping to watch a storm.

One of the Hubble Telescope’s three remaining gyroscopes shut down over the weekend, leaving the telescope useless. Three other gyroscopes had previously failed. NASA has a repair mission planned for early December, and astronomers have put the telescope into hibernation until then.

I’d be remiss in my responsibilities (living in Athens and all) if I didn’t link to REM’s soundtrack to the Andy Kaufmann movie. There’s a RealAudio version of their new song. When REM’s official website went on-line a few months ago, it was front page headline news in the papers here.

Do you want to know how the world’s going to look after the coming 5/5/00 apocalypse? Here you go. If you’re really into that, you can order one for your wall.

A few days ago, Peter Merholz wrote Tic toc so what? I’m finding the concept of measured time losing meaning in my life. If I were to design a clock for M & Co., there would be no numbers. At the end of the hands, slowly circumnavigating the clockface, would be the word “Whenever.” I knew I’d seen something similar in the catalogs that’ve been coming in the mail. [Here it is.](http://www.pyramidcollection.com/detail.cfm?prodtitle=Whatever Wall Clock)

Busy, busy day today. Odds are there will be no major updates until this evening. Linkwatcher will let you know when…

What happened to OneSwellFoop? What’s that all about?

Britain will be providing “morning-after” contraceptive pills to teens free of charge, without the usual prescription paperwork, to counter unwanted pregnancies that may occur with excessive “Happy New Millennium!” celebrations. It looks like somebody has done their homework over there. I’ve not heard of anything remotely similar here.

The European Space Agency’s SMART-1 mission to the moon has been given the final go-ahead. Powered by an ion-drive, this orbiter will beam X-Rays at the moon to determine the elemental content of the outer crust. Many scientists have complainied that this duplicates previous work and is a waste of money. The principal investigator may not have helped his case by saying “If the Moon is really made of green cheese, we’ll be the first to tell the world.” In my opinion, any space mission which gets involved with the public as this one apparantly has is a good one. In this case, even if the payload is a duplication of previous work, many new technologies will be tested that will directly apply to future missions to the outer planets, where some of the most exciting research is now being conducted.

Opening night was a smashing success. For a Thursday, the crowd was nice-sized, too… about 60 people, all told. I’ve grown to like my powdered wig, too. Why haven’t they ever come back into style?