Patent Troll Predicts Killer Asteroids

Nathan P. Myhrvold belies the usual image of the patent troll, although by most definitions he is one. Myhrvold is the founder and CEO of one the best known and most successful non-practicing entities in the world, called Intellectual Ventures. Myhrvold may not “produce anything,” a common charge leveled against trolls, but no one would argue that he’s not a technical wizard and man of many parts. As this feature by New York Times science writer Kenneth Chang notes, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft is among other things the author of a highly regarded six-volume compendium of cooking knowledge and an astute commentator and sometime critic in fields as diverse as paleontology and astrophysics. Most recently he has shaken up the world of asteroid study – and in particular the study and predictions concerning asteroids that bring could wreak havoc by colliding with earth – with his challenge to the accuracy of the data collected by NASA’s asteroid-observing spacecraft. He says that data fails to take into account variations in what astronomers call “albedo,” which refers to the reflectivity of a body’s surface and which affects its apparent size to the observer.