1. The moon’s orbit is off its calculated course by about six millimeters a year.
2. The standard yardstick for length on an interplanetary scale, the Astronomical Unit, grows by about seven centimeters a year.
3. At least four recent planetary probes experienced unaccountable changes in velocity as they passed Earth.

Now you know some of the things we don’t know.

The courts have agreed that Johnson & Johnson’s lawsuit against the Red Cross over the use of the red cross was one of last year’s top 10 dumbest marketing moves.

J&J, which also uses the symbol, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan against the American Red Cross and four of the charity’s licensees, seeking to prevent them from using the “Greek red cross on a white ground,” claiming that it is a trademark violation and that the humanitarian group was barred from using it for commercial purposes. But U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff disagreed, noting that the American Red Cross had used the emblem for more than a century and was authorized to do so by various Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Congress.

I really want to know who got the job of telling the board of directors, “Oh by the way, we’re suing the Red Cross.” There was no possible good outcome from this. Even had they won in the courts no consumer without a law degree would have understood it.

Logoblink has an excellent and informative display of Presidential election logos from 1960 to the present. I say informative because it is quite clear that graphically as well as politically most candidates in the last 48 years have been interchangeable.

Still, I know who I’m voting for.

Comedy Central has even more details on Battlestar Gallactica vs. the actual candidates here.

And speaking of voting for lame characters, turns out Brit PM Gordon Brown lost his latest election to NONE OF THE ABOVE. As mentioned previously Madame Tussaud’s wax museum had put it up for a vote as to whether or not Brown should be included in the collection. Well, “83.8 percent of voters, drawn from museum visitors and online supporters, gave Brown the thumbs down. Some 5,308 people told Madame Tussauds not to bother, while 1,025 people (16.2 percent) said he should be immortalised in wax.” Yeah, but I bet the Supreme Court will rule him in.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

My head hurts from this quote.

Dear George, you want to show solidarity with these families? How about you visit each and every one of them. Maybe explain why neither you nor your children have served in this or any other war. How about adequate funding and administration for the Veterans Administration? How about not being an idiot? How about not starting wars on fictitious grounds?

Good Lord.

McCain? Hillary? Obama?

I’ll take any of them over this fool.

Not Huckabee, though. I can’t live through another administration that views facts as malleable.

Listening (mostly) to the coverage of the earthquake disaster in China I learned that text messages are the most popular form of communication in China. Now I dislike using my little cellphone keyboard to send text messages in English, I can’t even fathom how it works in Mandarin. (I’m assuming they are all texting in Mandarin — China has at least six different regional/ethnic language groups most of which have about as much in common as Latin and Hungarian but Mandarin is the official default.) Now clearly they’ve got this figured out but it’s such a basic thing that no one has explained it to us outsiders.

As a typewriter collector myself I have long dreamed of adding a Japanese or Chinese typewriter to my collection. The Chinese typewriter pictured below is explained by this Wikipedia entry.

That multi-lingual typewriter was the size of conventional office typewriters of the 1940s. It measured 14” x 18” x 9”. The typefaces fit on a drum. A “magic eye” was mounted in the center of the keyboard. When the typist pressed several keys, according to a system Lin devised for his dictionary of the Chinese language, a Chinese character appeared (in the magic eye?). To select a particular character, the typist then pressed a “master” key, similar to today’s computer function key. The typewriter could create 7000 distinct characters. It could type additional “words” using combinations of characters, attaining a theoretical total of 90,000 words. The inspired aspect of the typewriter was the system Lin devised for a Chinese alphabet. It had thirty geometric shapes or strokes. These became “letters” by which to alphabetize Chinese characters. He broke tradition with the long-standing system of radicals and stroke order writing and categorizing of Chinese characters, inventing a new way of seeing and categorizing.

The StraightDope has an explanation here of how a Chinese computer keyboard works but it doesn’t do much to clear up my confusion about the whole texting thing.

Anybody clear this one up for me? Bueller?

UPDATE: NPR has come to my rescue. Apparently the Chinese use an English keyboard to type in the phonetic equivalent of a character and then that character appears in the text. Sounds clumsy to me but 1.6 billion people seem to think it works, so who am I to argue?

Apparently things are so dull in Iowa that throwing candy can get you busted.

A Drake University security guard was questioning Sean McGuire’s friend regarding a hit-and-run when the guard “noticed the colored candies falling on the ground around the officer. When the officer turned around, an M&M hit his shoulder, according to a police report.” McGuire said he was launching the chocolatey treats as a way of standing up for his friend. McGuire was released on a $1000 bond. And he was lucky. Had he been arrested for assaulting an officer with a peanut M&M there would have been no end to the puns.

My alma mater has aimed a deadly insult at me and my fellow Violets here in the land of all that is right, decent and pompous. Owing to construction on the campus green concrete that is Washington Square Park this Wednesday the commencement ceremony will take place at YANKEE STADIUM.

HAVE YOU PEOPLE NO SENSE OF SHAME?

That does it. I am not giving the school another penny until the commencement ceremony takes place at Fenway. And by “another” I mean “a first”.

(Yes, we are The Violets. I can’t tell you exactly how amusing it was to be a wrestler from a school based in Greenwich Village AND have the team name of The Violets. Once we were at a tri-meet with Stephens Tech and University of Pennsylvania and so had The Ducks and The Quakers laughing at us. We deserved it. For reasons I was never able to determine the student newspaper referred to the women’s teams as Violettes. Because plain ol’ Violet wasn’t femme enough? The school has tried to change the team names to The Bobcats, in honor of — not making this up — the library catalog. )

It’s got something to do with chicks is all I know.

A great Brazillian graphic designer named Mario Amaya has taken a few of favorite brands and run them into each other at top speed. See some of the efforts below and see more here. His blog, Following Is For Cattle, makes me wish I’d paid attention when the Providence public school system was trying to teach me Portuguese.

Not sure if this is brilliant or depressing. Or both.

Chrysler announced Monday an offer that caps the price of gasoline at $2.99 a gallon for three years for people who buy or lease new vehicles from Wednesday through June 2. The offer is based on 12,000 miles of driving per year at the vehicle’s rated fuel economy. Customers will get a card for buying gas that is linked to their own charge account, Chrysler said. The customer will be billed $2.99 a gallon, and Chrysler will pay the rest.

I’m sure the honchos in Auburn Hills did their math on this (and when was the last time a US car company didn’t correctly anticipate fuel costs?) but to me it looks like this could get pretty expensive.

The story goes on to point out that at the current $3.61 a gallon average gas price, someone who buys a new PT Cruiser (est. 21 MPG) would only cost the company $1075 per car. That seems a bit much but not ridiculous for a car with an MSRP of $15,285.

However let us take the radical notion that gas prices have not yet peaked. If the price of gas hits $5 a gallon (and I wish that were unthinkable) the total cost to the company hits $3300*. Even if the price “only” hits $4.50 per, the company is on the hook for $2580 per car. Suddenly that PT Cruiser is costing Chrysler a lot.

All of this, btw, assumes something we all know to be false: That there is a relationship between the advertised MPG and what you actually get. If the car actually gets 18 MPG then Chrysler has to pick up the actual difference. At today’s prices that means a mere $150 increase over three years. However at $4.50 it’s about $500 more — which means Chrysler is in essence selling the PT Cruiser for about $12K. For the consumer it’s a great anti-inflation move, for the shareholders though? Well, for gas company share holders it’s great.

The other thing that will contribute to Chrysler’s costs is the fact that consumers will probably buy more expensive grades of gas. Why not always get super premium if it only costs me $2.99?

Here is my own personal indicator of the impact of the price of gas: I am now driving at or below the speed limit. This news so shocked Mrs. CollateralDamage that she briefly put down the latest guide to Disney.

*(In case you’re wondering here’s the formula I used 12000[miles] / 21 [MPG] = total gallons consumed [which I'll call G]. G * price = total cost / (G * price - 2.99) = annual cost to Chrysler * 3 = total cost to Chrysler. Given my legendary inability to do anything beyond basic math I put this out there so that someone can and will correct me.)