I’ve decided that in my next life I will be someone who is much better at math, all for the purpose of becoming an astronomer.

Now, I know that in the usual understanding of reincarnation one is not given a choice.

But I don’t subscribe to those long-established religions with such rigid beliefs. Rather, I adopt the method of so many modern theologians – L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind, along with Oral Roberts and the Reverend Ike, all now, alas, unshuffled from the mortal coil – and simply make up my own, the chief difference being that I won’t be asking anyone for money.

To live outside the law, says the poet, you must be honest. Two outlaws discovered this week that you’d better live outside caves, too.

Come along on a whirlwind tour of Antarctica, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Reiner (the Shakespearean), and that great anthem of civilized life, the Addams Family theme song.

A 34-year-old puffin? 34,000-year-old clothes?

Titanic moons named after places in a sci-fi novel?

In this week’s Hot Links, we look at these matters and more—including a recent spotting of “pretty perversity.”

An unknown comet or asteroid has evidently plowed into Jupiter’s atmosphere as one great chunk, and, according to photographs from the Hubble Telescope, it has left a remarkable hole behind it.

If a similar object hit Earth, what would happen? And what could we do about it?

Check out this video, then read on …

It was forty years ago today, July 20, that the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the surface of the moon and astronauts—first Neil Armstrong, then Buzz Aldrin—stepped down to plant an American flag in the dust of the Sea of Tranquility.

Any mere earthling of a certain age will remember the proceedings.

But in case you missed it or have forgotten, watch the video.

As you might have heard, an asteroid 40 yards wide, traveling 12 miles per second, passed within 40,000 miles of Earth on Monday. Given its speed and size, the asteroid had the potential, if it had collided with Earth, of obliterating a metropolitan area like New York or London.

It was roughly the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia (see the Tunguska event) in 1908 with the force of 1,000 atomic bombs.

How often do these close encounters and near misses occur? And how can such collisions be avoided?

For answers to such questions, check out Britannica’s extensive coverage of Earth Impact Hazard.

As a book reviewer for several publications, I see piles of new books of all kinds every year.

In the general category of reference books—books for the look-it-up-shelf, to steal a phrase from the great man of letters Gilbert Highet—here are ten published in the past year that I found room for in my own overstuffed shelves, which, since that act involves getting rid of other books to make space, is among the highest honors I can bestow.

Please add your own favorites to the list.

Welcome to the Universe is an upcoming documentary series on YouTube by the blog Andromeda’s Wake detailing our understanding of the universe, with respect to the scientists, experiments, and missions that have shaped it.

Each episode will be entirely free and without copyright and feature an entirely original score.

Here’s the initial video, introducing the series.

Today, June 30, marks the centennial of the Tunguska event, the only instance in recorded history of a very large object striking the Earth. By sheer good luck it struck in a mostly uninhabited region of Siberia, at a spot so remote that it was 19 years before scientists were able to study it firsthand.

The discovery of extinct life on Mars would furnish evidence for what some pessimistic cosmologists call the “Great Filter”–a theorized congeries of conditions obtaining throughout the universe, under which the chances of life anywhere developing civilizations capable of interstellar travel are impossibly small.

This doesn’t mean that life never arises elsewhere; it only means that the chance of it arriving at the stage at which it can voyage among the stars is effectively zero.