I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Russian Meteor Explosion Might Mean Earth Gets Hit More Often Than We Think.

The latest analysis of the bollide that burst over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February suggests that the risk from such airbursts — which occur when friction in our atmosphere heats up a meteor — may be greater than previously thought.

Meteorite collisions are often compared in size to nuclear explosions, but because they are speeding toward Earth they have momentum that makes them far more destructive. And to make matters worse, they may occur more often than currently estimated.

On the morning of Feb. 15, a fireball lit up the skies above the town of Chelyabinsk. A 12,000-ton bollide estimated to be roughly 20 meters in diameter came screaming into the atmosphere at more than 42,000 mph. Locals could feel the heat from the blast while dozens of dashboard cameras made recordings of the event, which were disseminated widely on social media.

The best estimates of how much energy was released by the Chelyabinsk explosion come from infrasound measurements taken by an array of sensors all over the world. These instruments detect low-frequency sound waves traveling through the atmosphere. The longer the waves’ period is, the larger the explosion. Infrasound measurements are calibrated from atmospheric nuclear testing done in the 1950s, which is why asteroid explosions are often described in megaton units. The bomb that exploded at Hiroshima had a yield of 16 kilotons while the most powerful nuclear weapon active in U.S. service, the B83 bomb, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons. The Chelyabinsk blast is estimated to have been between 200 and 800 kilotons, on par with a huge atomic weapon.

But meteors explode in a very different way than a typical nuclear bomb, says physicist Mark Boslough of the Sandia National Laboratories, who studies asteroid impacts and is presenting a talk today about the Chelyabinsk event at the American Astronomical Society’s 2013 Division for Planetary Science meeting in Denver.

“When an asteroid explodes, its momentum is conserved and that explosion continues down toward the Earth,” Boslough said.

For that reason, the people who live in Chelyabinsk explosion are very lucky to be alive, he added. If the bollide had come into the atmosphere at a less steep angle, its blast would have been aimed right at the ground, likely doing much more damage.

That an airburst continues traveling in the same direction as a meteorite was only appreciated starting in the 1990s, particularly after the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter.

I’d rather spend more tax dollars on studying stuff like this, and less on free birth control.

REMEMBER, THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH OF YOUR MONEY: VA Asked to Explain Blowing Half a Million Bucks on Art.

SENSE AND SUPERSTITION:

No, knocking on wood won’t change what happens. The cancer is no more likely to stay in remission one way or the other. But knocking on wood does affect our beliefs, and that’s almost as important.

Research finds that people, superstitious or not, tend to believe that negative outcomes are more likely after they “jinx” themselves. Boast that you’ve been driving for 20 years without an accident, and your concern about your drive home that evening rises. The superstitious may tell you that your concern is well founded because the universe is bound to punish your hubris. Psychological research has a less magical explanation: boasting about being accident-free makes the thought of getting into an accident jump to mind and, once there, that thought makes you worry.

That makes sense intuitively. What’s less intuitive is how a simple physical act, like knocking on wood, can alleviate that concern.

Also, the knock wakes up the good spirits in the wood, who break the jinx.

FARHAD MANJOO: Humans 1, Robots 0: Cashiers Trump Self-Checkout Machines at the Grocery Store. Personally, I don’t like the self-checkout. It’s somewhat hinky, and I actually enjoy chatting with the cashier.

AT AMAZON, coupons galore on Vitamins & Dietary Supplements. I still swear by my CoQ10.

Also, over 200 Kindle Books for 99 Cents.

IS THE UNIVERSE WEIRDER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE? Does Some Deeper Level of Physics Underlie Quantum Mechanics? An Interview with Nobelist Gerard ’t Hooft. You can’t fool me. It’s quarks all the way down.

HEY, WHEN ALL THE MEN ARE ON STRIKE, WHAT’S A GAL GOING TO DO? Woman Marries Herself.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Warships are the new interrogation ‘black sites.’ “Instead of sending suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay or secret CIA ‘black’ sites for interrogation, the Obama administration is questioning terrorists for as long as it takes aboard US naval vessels.”

CHANGE: Depth-Sensing Cameras Head To Mobile Technology.

STICKING IT TO THE MAN: More Shutdown-related civil disobedience, this time in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

NEW ADVANCES in coffeemaking technology.

JOHN FUND: How The IRS Coverup Works.

A FEW SNIGGERS AIMED AT DAN PFEIFFER, but if a Republican had done it, it would have made the evening news.

YA THINK? USA Today editorializes: Exchange launch turns into inexcusable mess.

President Obama’s chief technology adviser, Todd Park, blames the unexpectedly large numbers of people who flocked to Healthcare.gov and state websites. “Take away the volume and it works,” he told USA TODAY’s Tim Mullaney.

That’s like saying that except for the torrential rain, it’s a really nice day. Was Park not listening to the administration’s daily weather report predicting Obamacare’s popularity?

Park said the administration expected 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. It got 250,000. Compare that with the similarly rocky debut seven years ago of exchanges to obtain Medicare drug coverage. The Bush administration projected 20,000 simultaneous users and built capacity for 150,000.

That’s the difference between competence and incompetence.

Ouch.

OBAMA COUSIN DR. MILT WOLF mounts a Tea Party primary challenge in Kansas. “The Shawnee-based physician stressed that he is motivated by his opposition to the Affordable Care Act and the Congress that allowed it to become law.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 152.

BOOTED FROM THE JEFFERSON MEMORIAL: Five For Fighting Singer John Ondrasik: I got my 5-mile jog in and learned something about government spite and political theater along the way.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Republicans Didn’t Sabotage Health Exchanges, Obama Did.

For the first week that the federal health-care exchanges were running … well, crawling … the Obama administration claimed that no one could get through because of overwhelming pent-up demand. Essentially it spent a week arguing that no one could have predicted that, in a country of 300 million people, 2.4 percent of those people might stop by sometime in the first seven days to check out the administration’s signature legislative achievement.

We can now dismiss that theory, because the administration has: “Six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government acknowledged for the first time Sunday it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for coverage.”

Presumably, it would not have given that interview if its efforts to fix the systems had been successful this weekend. The Hill reports that the system will go offline again late tonight for more repairs.

So prepare yourself for the next theory: This is the fault of Republicans. Had Republicans created state exchanges as they were supposed to, agreed to the Medicaid expansion and provided more funding, the reasoning goes, everything would be going swimmingly. . . .

But I do not think that the Republicans can be blamed for this particular disaster. They did not force the administration to wait until late 2011 to begin awarding important contracts for implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Presumably, they were also not skulking around the Department of Health and Human Services, writing the memos that delayed, until February of this year, the deadline for states to declare whether they’d be running their own exchanges.

I predicted in December 2012 that the exchanges would not be up and running on time with minimal knowledge of how the contracts and budgeting were being run, because the administration was being pretty closed-mouthed about those things. Was I prophetic? Hardly. I just didn’t see how the administration could make things work in the allotted time frame.

You don’t need to sabotage the incompetent.

MORE SUPPORT for turning national parks over to the states. “But why stop with the national parks?”

WHY PROGRESSIVES always get tech wrong.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Eric Holder’s 2014 Racial Politics: The Attorney General tries to reverse a Supreme Court ruling by the back door. “It’s telling that Mr. Holder prefers to file lawsuits rather than take up the Supreme Court’s invitation to modernize the Voting Rights Act for current racial conditions. The Congressional Black Caucus has said it is working on a new formula for preclearance, but such legislative labor doesn’t get the headlines that lawsuits against GOP-run states do. All the evidence suggests that Mr. Holder’s real motive here is political. Portraying voter ID laws as racist helped to drive Democratic voter turnout among minorities in 2012, and the White House wants a repeat in 2014. Never mind if the suits eventually fail in court. The goal is to elect more Democrats in the meantime, even if it means needlessly increasing racial polarization.”

It’s not needless. They really need racial polarization.

AT AMAZON, Take 20% off Sweaters & Cashmere. For men, women & children. Winter is coming.

Also, Warehouse Deals on Kitchen & Cookware.

Also, today only: Up to 70% Off Select Kwikset SmartCode Keypad Deadbolts.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Washington Isn’t Working. Plus, a comparison of the political class with the parts of America that do work. “One America can launch rockets. The other America can’t even launch a website.”

TRAIN WRECK: Guess how many of Kathleen Sebelius’ 3 Obamacare ‘success stories’ have actually enrolled.