[I'm approaching the Desktop Project endgame here; I'm almost out of pictures to post. I've done this every day for weeks, and my computer desktop is almost clean! Of course, more stuff keeps coming in, so I could do this forever. But that would be cheating. Sweet, sweet cheating.] I've got something different for you today. Over the past few weeks I've posted an illustration, and a couple of dozen pictures, but no graphs! That'll change now, and I think this particular set of plots is nifty.
Whenever a big satellite is about to re-enter Earth's atmosphere -- like UARS, or ROSAT, or Phobos-Grunt -- the media freak out. You start seeing numbers being thrown about of the odds of getting hit by a chunk of flaming debris, and I get lots of panicked email and tweets. Then I have to point out to people that the Earth has a ...
