Meteorite Hits Girl

redcliffe writes "The BBC has a story about a 14 year old North Yorkshire girl who was hit, on the foot, by a meteorite. Where's Bruce Willis when you need him?" The young Miss Carlton notes: "This does not happen that often in Northallerton"; no doubt the City of York is where most meteorites land.

Comments

With those odds

[N3WBI3]

Someone buy that girl a lotto ticket, better yet have her buy me one..

Re:With those odds

[sekensirazu]

Yes. Except, you'd probably get a paper cut from the ticket and a subsequent deadly rare bacterial infection and die. That's not _good_ luck, getting hit by a meteorite. Oh... he got struck by lightning? Better have _him_ handle my finances. :P

Re:With those odds

[N3WBI3]

IS that where I went wrong last year..... sigh

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's great luck. How many people do you know who got hit by a meteorite and actually lived???

Re:With those odds

[Goldberg's Pants]

God, Aerosmith will probably write a song for it now...

Re:With those odds

[the way, what're you]

No, this guy should be the one buying us lotto tickets!

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the meteor fell from Uranus

Re:With those odds

[N3WBI3]

I would have to disagree, the girl did nothing to cause her situation, this guy is a darwin award waiting to happen....

Re:With those odds

[cscx]

Hey man, consider her lucky... she could have been killed. I mean, what do you think would have happened if she, say, was hiding out in Flanders' bomb shelter?

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

that was a comet, not a meteorite

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

This is excellent quality humor, indeed! May you live for a thousand years.

Re:With those odds

[DeathToBill]

How many people do you know who got hit by a meteorite and actually lived???

About as many people as I know who have been hit by a meteorite, viz, none.

Re:With those odds

[g00dn3ss]

I hate it when news stories give stupid statistics like that.

How do they know the odds of being hit by a meteor. The odds of winning a lottery are probably pretty predictable because a lottery is defined as having only a small number of randomly chosen winners.

We have no such assurance with meteors on the other hand. Who's to say that the Earth won't pass through some huge asteroid field. Then the chances of being struck by a meteor could suddenly skyrocket.

"In this context, isn't it obvious that Chicken Little represents the sane vision?"

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

even so, it's still about the size of a chihuahua's head ...

Re:With those odds

[ComaVN]

First Great Eastern say they decided to publish the picture "out of sheer frustration" in an attempt to stop teenagers climbing onto the tracks.

Yeah that's smart, show a picture of a guy doing something incredibly dangerous and stupid, and getting away with it. Now they made it into a sport. (Let's call it platformhumping)

Better show them this too.

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's to say that the Earth won't pass through some huge asteroid field.

Astronomers.

Re:With those odds

[2sheds]

"If it had been one of our modern trains he would certainly have been killed."

Fairly good odds on surviving, then!

j.

Re:With those odds

[Xaoswolf]

Well, sure she was hit by a meteorite, but I would expect that thing to leave a crator where she stood, or at the very least mangle her foot a little. I didn't even see anything about light bruising in the article.

Re:With those odds

[uncoveror]

Unlikely things are happening to her, but that doesn't mean she would win the lottery, after all, the lottery is rigged.

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

Bang up job so far.

Re:With those odds

[SedentaryZ]

A meteorite that small probably hit terminal velocity much higher up, so it didn't have much impact.

Re:With those odds

[geekoid]

that is like saying your chances of winning will skyrocket if you would only pick the correct numbers.

How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?
what is the surface area of the planet?
what is the population density?

now you can come up with some basic numbers of the odds of getting hit by a meteor over a given time.
and yes, the lottery is easier for determining odds because it is such a limited device.

Re:With those odds

[saskboy]

With those odds... She'll never be able to win a lottery in her life from now on. The odds of being hit by a space object, AND winning a major jackpot must be "astronomical". Anyone care to calcuate the odds? ;-)

Re:With those odds

[g00dn3ss]

I'm just pointing out that past performance in meteors is no guarantee of future results. So:

How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?

is exactly what I'm disputing. Given recent stories like this one, we clearly can't make many predictions about the chances of a huge influx of small meteors.

Re:With those odds

[schmink182]

The odds *would* be astronomical, except that she already got hit by the meteorite. Now that it's been done, there is a 100% chance of it continuing to have been done, so now all that's left are the odds of her winning the lottery.

Re:With those odds

[Daetrin]

I'm just pointing out that past performance in meteors is no guarantee of future results. So:

How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?

is exactly what I'm disputing. Given recent stories like this one [slashdot.org], we clearly can't make many predictions about the chances of a huge influx of small meteors

This is why it's called probability, not history. Who knows, maybe in the next lottery everyone who buys at least one ticket will get a winning number, and then they'd all get killed by a freak meteor storm. However the odds of either one of those things happening, together or seperatly, is pretty darn low.

Actually, we _can_ make a lot of predictions about huge influxes of small meteors, we have at least two such events a year that i know of, and they're well documented. All the stealth asteroids that have been speeding by weren't noticed before because we didn't see them and they didn't hit. Meteor showers tend to have this kind of obvious effect however that happens everytime they pass by, becuase some (relatively) small number of them always hit.

And of course we've got astronomy observations going back for centuries to give us a pretty good idea of what the odds are of a new (and particularly large, if a significant number of people are going to get hit by the remains) meteor shower showing up out of the blue, and they're not very big.

Re:With those odds

[Anonymous Coward]

Question:

when the hell are you going to get tired of shilling your link all over slashdot. Stop wasting your energy and try to make a halfway believable parady site first.

The onion if funny partially becasue it does look like a real news site. Your site looks like wehat I flushed down my toilet the morning!

Re:With those odds

[Snookmz]

Very funny :)

But what is closer to the truth is that Aerosmith will sing a song written by a pop song writer..

Re:With those odds

[Snookmz]

comments the girl made to the press were

"I feel like i just jumped out of an aeroplane and landed in the hot tub at the playboy mansion"

Re:With those odds

[Carnivorous Carrot]

I think you mean slowed down until it reached what would have been terminal velocity had it been dropped from a standstill. For a thing that small, it probably was around 100mph, maybe less.

I, too, was surprised to learn smallish meteorites will slow enough to stop "burning up" but prior to actually burning up. There is a middle ground between burning up in the atmosphere and smashing into the ground with a crater. The error is in the assumption that it keeps burning up until it either disintegrates or hits the ground in a ball of fire and high speed impact.

Re:With those odds

[uncoveror]

Here is my response to my illiterate anonymous coward critic.

Re:With those odds

[saskboy]

Good Observation. So she is left with the same odds as the rest of us.

Re:With those odds

[g00dn3ss]

This is why it's called probability, not history.

I'm not disputing the power of probability.

What I am disputing is that no one has much of a shot at computing such a probability for future meteors showers. The arguments you gave for computing the probability were based on history. If you really want to know this probability you need to build a good model for our current universe - down to the asteroid level. Given the current state of n-body research that doesn't seem too likely. For one thing, most n-body researchers are working almost exclusively with stars - not planets and definitely not asteroids. For another, these models are usually limited to millions of stars, not even a trillionth of the 10^21 estimated in the universe.

For a rough approximation, you could make a model of the neighborhood around earth. Of course, then you would still need accurate knowledge of most of the asteroid sized (and larger) objects within a specified radius of earth - depending on the period you want to compute the probability for. This neighborhood is pretty complicated though since the earth is moving in several frames at once. I can probably stop my argument there because we don't have a very complete picture of that data. But even assuming we did, that still just gives us some initial conditions for a massive n-body simulation. I have no idea how many particles we're talking about but it has got to be beyond the millions range. Still, its only a simulation so even if you could run this thing in reasonable time - you still have a bunch of initial conditions to tweak. So run that a few hundred times and what have you got? An estimate from a simplified simulation.

Given that we can't predict the weather, I can't say that I've got a lot of confidence in our ability to predict this probability.

Re:With those odds

[N3WBI3]

Actually he is right and wrong. The conditional probability of an event is defined as

P(L|A) = P(LA)/P(A)

the probability of winning the lottery (L) given you have been hit by an asteroid (A) is equal to the intersection of the set of Lottery winners and asteroid strikers divided by the set of asteroid victoms.

Now if winning the lottery is a subset of being hit by an asteroid than her odds of winning now are the same as they ever were (if you win the lottery you will have been hit by an asteroid this is not the case). If being hit by an asteriod was a subset of winning the lottery than whe would automatically win the lottery(again not the case). If the events are mutually exclusive than she can not win the lottery (this is obviously not the case because she is alive).

therefore the answer has to be between the three examples above and in the space of all people there are events in which someone may be hit by an asteriod and events in which someone may win the lottery, and yes even people who are in both sets. Now figuring out if P(L|A) is greater than P(A) would be mathmatically easy if one has access to the entire set of humanity, but as we have australlians messing up their census ;) we will never know for sure.

Re:With those odds

[Daetrin]

There are so many levels of error in that.

First the weather, sure they can't predict the weather perfectly, which is why you'll notice that they often provide a probability. They're not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong, and they know the have a certain margin of error. Although you may not remember it the times when it was indeed 75-80 degrees and partly cloudy far outnumber the times when there was a freak snowstorm instead.

Secondly, a lot of probabilities are not calculated by exhaustive modeling of the situation, they're calculated by examining past examples. If they're going to make a long term prediction about the weather, say the number of days it will rain in the next year or the average temperature over that time, they don't pull out a weather model and run it ahead 12 months. They pull out the records for the past few decades, check those, and figure out an average. Sure, the sun can could go nova due to some astronomical phenomena that we don't understand yet and their prediction will be off by a few million degrees, but the _probability_ is that next year will be mostly the same as the previous years once all known factors are taken into account (El Nino and such)

Predicting the chances of getting hit by a meteor is the same thing. They've got fairly detailed records going back decades, and more general records going back centuries. Using those we can make fairly accurate predictions about what the number of meteors expected next year.

True, an unexpected group of meteors could show up out of nowhere and kill hundreds of people, but there have been no records of anything like that happening in the last thousand years to the best of my knowledge, so the odds of it happening next year without anything else to indicate it's likelyhood is less than one in one thousand.

If we had the kind of exact model you're talking about it would be a certainty, not a probability. The probability is used because it's what we expect based on past events, and most of the time it's right. When insurance companies calculate the odds of carious acidents and disasters do you think they have some giant country or world wide really detailed version of the Sims running? (If so, why don't they warn the people who are going to have their house burn down ahead of time!) They don't do any kind of physics modeling at all, they just look at historical records, and calculate the odds, and they're usually pretty close, it's how they stay in buisness.

Re:With those odds

[g00dn3ss]

Not to belabor this discussion but you are wrong about how weather and meteorology works. Historical records are pretty much useless for day to day weather prediction and provide ambiguous data at best about the future. Look at the American meterological society web page (under "What tools do meteorologists use?") and you'll see that models play a big part in short-term weather forecasting. As to long term climate prediction, they play an even bigger part. Why do you think there is controversy over global warming? It all comes down to models. Look at the NASA page for example.

Your assertion that if we had a model we would have a certainty rather than a probability is inaccurate too. That is why future global warming is a probability rather than a certainty - even though we have some fairly detailed models. Why is that? Because once you have enough particles interacting, the system becomes too complex to have a perfect simulation. So you make a bunch of simplifying assumptions and try to calculate the error of those assumptions.

So what you're advocating with your one in a thousand probability is basically a reliance on ignorance. In other words, since we don't know any better, let's just use history as our guide. You can certainly do that but if you want to have any credibility you have to calculate some margin of error. And even in the best case, this margin of error is going to be much greater than 100% if we only use recorded history.

Also, insurance companies do use models. They aren't very open about what they are though. But anyway these kinds of predictions are a little different. They are all based on assumptions like people are pretty reasonable on average so the world economy won't entirely implode and throw us into total chaos. These insurance probabilities don't take that into account but it doesn't matter cause, in that case, we're all broke. In contrast, you can't make this "reasonableness" assumption for asteroids or particles in the atmosphere.

I'm sure NASA has calculated the probability of dangers from certain meteors. I'm just saying that if they told me their assumptions and margins of error, I probably wouldn't put much stock in them.

Re:With those odds

[Daetrin]

Not to belabor this discussion but you are wrong about how weather and meteorology works. Historical records are pretty much useless for day to day weather prediction and provide ambiguous data at best about the future.

You are clearly misreading what i said, because that's mostly what i claimed, although you're wrong about the long term predictions. If we had models that could predict the effects of atmospheric composition to the same detail that you are claiming that we would need to model meteor activity within the solar system then there wouldn't be any controversy about global warming, we could just let the model run and we'd know the answer. You're claiming that such an accurate model is impossible, and i'm agreeing, and claiming that that's not what is used to calculate meteorite frequencies.

One of the primary reasons there is controversay over global warming is because of the human input into the equation. According to the statistics bassed off of historical records we're heading into an ice age if anything, however we have no long term historical records of a society pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which would allow us to accuratly predict the effects. We do however have long term historical records of meteor impacts, and no one has any rason to suspect that the human race is currently doing anything to change the rate of impacts, so those records remain statistically valid.

And yes, models do play a big role in short term forcasting, you're basically supporting my point. Models are for short term forcasts, historic records are used for long term forcasts. No one runs a model to predict that it will get colder in the winter, we know that from milenia of historical records. We can even tell on average how cold it will probably get. We may be wrong for this winter or the next, but averaged over the next ten years we'll be pretty close. We can't predict if a meteor will hit somewhere tomorrow, but we can predict with fair accuracy how many meteors will hit in the coming year, and with even more accuracy how many will hit in the next decade, etc.

If insurance companies use models, it is only in very limited circumstances. For the most part they use known rates of accident occurance statistically calculated from historic records. They know that about x% of houses will burn down because about x% did last year. That number changes slightly from year to year as technology and conditions changes, but they continuously update their statistics to stay current. They don't really make assumptions about anything, they just go by statistics. They don't expect everyone to go nuts and start lighting houses on fire because statistically only a small number of people do that every year. Sure, there's a small probability that everyone in the world will go nuts next year and every building on the planet will go up in flames, probably about the same probability that a giant meteor storm like you were talking about will hit us.

NASA _has_ calculated the probability of certain asteroids hitting us, hence the big fuss a month or two ago when they found one that was slightly more likely than a "random" asteroid to hit us. How do they know how likely a "random" asteroid is to hit us? Statistics.

Damn thats gotta hurt.

[arakon]

I thought it was bad stubbing your toe on all that furniture you don't see in the dark...
that is the pinky toe's true purpose... to let you know about all that furniture and door edges.

Joe Dirt

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone seen Joe Dirt? You know, the part where the meteor turns out to be frozen shit.... Why can't I get that out of my head?

Re:Joe Dirt

[Lynchenstein]

But it says in the story it could have come from Mars...or in this case, perhaps Uranus?

can she sue someone?

[huphtur]

like nasa? or fcc? or riaa?

Re:can she sue someone?

[jgardn]

God? How would you server the papers? And what lawyer would take on God? Well... I take that last one back.

Re:can she sue someone?

[N3WBI3]

I dont think the problem would be finding a layer to take on God (as they all think they are God), I think the problem is where is God going to get a layer in heaven?

Re:can she sue someone?

[Tablizer]

Sue that butterly which flapped it's wings a million years ago.

Re:can she sue someone?

[coryboehne]

Ok, you asked for it, here's the link

Re:can she sue someone?

[Qrlx]

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/02/Apr/marriage. html
Marriage in Heaven
eyesbright@aol.comedienne (Randy Russell)
AOL http://www.aol.com
(chuckle, heard it)

On their way to get married, a young couple are involved in a fatal car accident. The couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven.

While waiting, they begin to wonder: Could they possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter shows up, they asked him. St. Peter says, "I don't know. This is the first time anyone has asked. Let me go find out," and he leaves.

The couple sat and waited for an answer. . . . for a couple of months. While they waited, they discussed that IF they were allowed to get married in Heaven, SHOULD they get married, what with the eternal aspect of it all.

"What if it doesn't work?" they wondered, "Are we stuck together FOREVER?"

After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. "Yes," he informs the couple, "you CAN get married in Heaven."

"Great!" said the couple, "But we were just wondering, what if things don't work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?"

St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slams his clipboard to the ground.

"What's wrong?" asked the frightened couple.

"OH, COME ON!!" St. Peter shouts, "It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have ANY idea how long it'll take me to find a lawyer?"

Re:can she sue someone?

[flippet]

Are you one of those who simply can't write "serve" without automatically adding the "r" on the end? Join the club...

(I did it, just then...)

Phil, just me

Re:can she sue someone?

[darqchild]

Simple, in the case of an act of god, you sue the pope (he can afford it)

Re:can she sue someone?

[GregWebb]

Did anyone else think of the B5 episode where some guy is sueing an alien because his grandfather was abducted by the alien's grandfather?

Is anyone at home and so can look up the reference?

Re:can she sue someone?

[thealphageek]

OMFG that is funny!! Good one!

Re:can she sue someone?

[Jucius Maximus]

"I dont think the problem would be finding a layer to take on God (as they all think they are God), I think the problem is where is God going to get a layer in heaven?"

I dunno, but it would probably take almost as long as it would to find a lawyer in heaven ;-) I mean really, I bet the firewall at the pearly gates blocks all .ho domains.

Re:can she sue someone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick, let's tear down the observatory so this can never happen again.

Re:can she sue someone?

[mmol_6453]

The meteor, before reaching Earth, was outside the butterfly's sphere of influence.

Re:can she sue someone?

[netsharc]

Well it did reach earth, but who knows, if that butterfly had flapped its wings differently back then, the meteor could have gone into a thunderstorm instead of a clear day, and the storm would have blown it onto a course that lead to the meteor landing somewhere else.. or because the butterfly did something different, this girl would be standing somewhere else as the meteor fell to the spot.

Re:can she sue someone?

[Shaper of Myths]

It's in an episode from 1st season called 'Grail'.

http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/015.html

Re:can she sue someone?

[op00to]

Can someone tell me why this is modded +5? It may be funny, but it's a waste of space! If I wanted to read the joke, I'd have clicked on the parent's link. Moderators, you suck.

Re:can she sue someone?

[rweir]

Even more impressive than finding a 'layer' to 'server' papers would be finding a correctly speled post in this thread;)

Re:can she sue someone?

[NeuralAbyss]

See the Aussie movie "The Man who Sued God" (IMDB link)

Re:can she sue someone?

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Read a sci fi short story once about someone suing the devil. There were problems in court with him taking the oath, not the least of which was that the oath was meaningless since the court had no way to incarcerate him should he commit perjury.

Re:can she sue someone?

[Carnivorous Carrot]

Actually the meteorite was not outside the butterfly's sphere of influence.

First of all, the altered global weather patterns would affect photons "just passing thru" the outer atmosphere, not to mention similar particles passing thru same and the earth's altered magnetosphere. The minute deflection because of various ions, photons (both direct and "radiometer" effect, vis Edmun Scientific, that drinking bird is coolio!) would indeed be enough over billions of miles to deflect it from where her foot would otherwise be, which wouldn't even exist in the first place because, about a million minus one or two years ago, the weather patterns would have been different, leading to different copulation times, and within a generation a completely different set of people would exist (not to mention that, even had they been the same, they'd be doing different things.)

Second, I don't think if anyone knows how macroscopic things may effect the "hidden randum number generator" of quantum mechanics. That could be a second influence that, via butterfly effect, also migrates itself up to macroscopic levels. This effect could propagate at the speed of light, or even "spooky at a distance", the universe over, for that matter.

Transcript of article....

[Cryptnotic]

she was walking all alone
down the street in the alley
her name was sally
she never saw it
when she was hit by space junk
in new york miami beach
heavy metal fell in cuba
angola saudi arabia
on xmas eve said norad
a soviet sputnik hit africa
india venezuela (in texas kansas)
it's falling fast peru too
it keeps coming
and now i'm mad about space junk
i'm all burned out about space junk
oooh walk & talk about space junk
it smashed my baby's head
and now my sally's dead

No. Not really. Those are the lyrics to the Devo song, "Space Junk".

Re:Transcript of article....

[Qrlx]

You know what would be cool? If I could go out and get Space Junk by Devo on Napster right now.

God, I miss the 90s.

Re:Transcript of article....

[n3m6]

i bet u can still get the same thing from WinMX, morpheus, kazaa or limewire.

god, i love the future.

Re:Transcript of article....

[danox]

napster was always stupid. AudioGalaxy was awesome. SoulSeek is the best replacement. it kicks napsters arse.

Re:Transcript of article....

[oever]

I think the girl discovered heaven.
Too bad God missed. I'd think she has a good aim.

Wanna know what this is about? Read 'The Discovery of Heaven' by Harry Mulisch.

Re:Transcript of article....

[SpaceJunkie]

What the one where your machine gets DOS attacked for allowing P2P file sharing and all your files are replaced with MPAA RIAA DMCA MPAA RIAA DMCA?

Im not sure that s future I relaly want to be a part of....

Re:Transcript of article....

[akarnid]

hehe, that's cos the programmer behind Soulseek, was in the original napster programming team :)

Re:Transcript of article....

[Anonymous Coward]

> You know what would be cool? If I could go out and
> get Space Junk by Devo on Napster right now.

If you can find out where I can find real, mother-adult daughter consentual incest pr0n, I'd be greatful, or is that grateful, I am too lazy to m-w.commify.

Somebody please...

[seanadams.com]

Photoshop some hair onto that forehead. I'm blind!

Re:Somebody please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now thats a first for the internet. Someone asking for more hair on a 14 year old!! ;)

Re:Somebody please...

[Anonymous Coward]

She has almost as much forehead as Natalie Portman

Re:Somebody please...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

Re:Somebody please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better?

Re:Somebody please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Natalie is CUTE. Surely you are referring to Angelina Jolie-Laide, by far an uglier troll than those that write on Slashdot.

Or Mena Suvari...

Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd appreciate this story much more if I had toes. Or feet for that matter. You see I was born with a defect that rendered me footless within 6 hours of my birth. They had to amputate them because of this rare condition.

I would love to know what it is like to be hit in the foot by a big space rock. I bet she doesn't truely appreciate her luck. I mean, it is not everyone that has a foot. :(

Thank you for listening.

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

> Lucky girl...I was I was her

I was I was her, too.

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

drop dead, fucking gimp.

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

I was I was her, too.

I wish you were me, then I'd be rubbing you're balls.

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

That's NOT you?

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish you were me, then I'd be rubbing you're balls.

I would be rubbing you are balls? Perhaps you meant your meaning "belonging to you", instead of you're meaning "you are".

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

All You're Base, grammer police.

(slapping you with a trout)

Re:Lucky girl...I was I was her

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not following this. Everyone man knows that if they suddenly found themselves a female, they'd spend some quality time in front of the mirror, then go hang out at the lesbian bar.

But what's all this about if "you (a male) were me (another male) then I'd (the second male) would be rubbing your (the first male's) balls (as instantiated as (a copy of) the second's."

Like the second male (the original copy) would love to have a duplicate of himself so he could rub "his" balls?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Some days...

[Xacid]

"...no doubt the City of York is where most Meteorites land." Where exactly did that comment come from? "After all it is not every day you get hit by a meteorite." You'd think everyone would know this...Damn America... Maybe it's just my lack of sleep that got me in this mood. Or perhaps I even got hit by a meteorite too. Watch it become the "next cool thing". I can only imagine...and I hope it stays there.

Re:Some days...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he was making fun of "The young Miss Carlton" who said, "This does not happen that often in Northallerton". I think he was pointing out that it's not like there's any place where this does happen very often.

Re:Some days...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was supposed to be a piece of dry British wit, you re-tard.

Re:Some days...

[Qrlx]

It can't be dry and wit at the same time, retard.

Re:Some days...

[Anonymous Coward]

They think that what they see in movies, is for real and true. And im sure damn hope its true, maybe we get rid of US, becouse I doubt they military has enough moral. Anyway, unfortunatly I know its not true, when the heck are americans going to get that into their sculls.

Re:Some days...

[Keith_Beef]

Have you never used Wit and Dry carborundum paper?

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[Myco]

In case the BBC gets slashdotted? Um, I think they can probably handle the traffic.

Wow

[pc486]

This is preaty amazing because, if my memory serves me right, this is the first recorded meteor that has landed on a human before, beyond space dust that is ;-). There was a case where a meteor broke through a roof, bounced around, and hit someone but it wasn't a direct smash right on the foot. What a lucky girl.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Rain of Iron and Ice by John Lewis. In the chapter titled "Effects on Human Population" there's a comprehensive list of damage, injuries, and deaths in historical records (about half the listings have attributable sources), all but one of which occurred the Common Era ("Anno Domini"). The first fatality listed which isn't just attributed to "stones falling like rain", or some such, is in 1511 (an monk in Italy, along with some birds and a sheep). Another Italian monk bought it in 1664.
A French farmer and some of his cattle were killed in his cottage when it collapsed due to a strike. In 1827 and 1870 in India, two men were hit (one on the arm, the other was stunned).
The 1908 blast in Tunguska, Siberia, picked people and their tents up and threw them through the air. In 1929, a member of a wedding party in Yugoslavia was killed. A boy in Uganda was hit by one of 48 stones that fell together in 1992.
And Mrs. Annie Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was the one struck in her house in 1954 while resting.

There are a _lot_ on the list from China (longer records), nearly as many close calls (only a few meters away--like the guy who watched his mailbox get nailed), and dozens of building strikes (houses were hit in Wethersfield, Conn., in 1971 and 1982).
If these things are irregularly shaped, tumbling action would cause quite a bit of drag and slow them down even more. Also, if they come in shallow, there'll be a lot more time to slow than if they come in steeply. That would also account for some of the reports of hot objects--a long, shallow approach has more "flight" time after ablation (combusting gases from the surface) stops.

[rant] They could have written _something_

[krahd]

I mean, sometimes following a link in a slashdot post is not worthy, but this is ridiculous...

krahd

Re:[rant] They could have written _something_

[Myco]

Hear, hear. It seems like they just took a bunch of quotes from the girl and her dad, and a handful of incredibly obvious scientific observations, and shuffled them around randomly.

You know you're in trouble when the most exciting subheading you can come up with is "shiny." Oooh, shiny. Jebus.

Re:[rant] They could have written _something_

[who what why]

Man bites dog!

Several years ago the UK government made it more or less impossible for young people to receive unemployment benefits. This had the wonderful effect of reducing the unemployment figures, since if they aren't on the dole, surely all those kids must have found grrreat jobs! At the same time, they cut university grants and introduced tuition fees for higher education, and forced everyone else onto various nefarious schemes in which the government pays the young person a training grant, and that person works for a real (money making) company for nothing or next to nothing.

These schemes have been euphemismed out of all recognition, but most people's favourite term is still 'YTS', or Youth Training Scheme. An example of the quality of 'training' that these people get is that my first thought on reading this story was 'did they get a YTS to write that or what?'

Just a long winded way of saying that there's a crapload of 'journalism' that isn't worth printing, let alone reading, let alone LINKING TO on the front page of /.

Re:[rant] They could have written _something_

[Anonymous Coward]

YTS kids are a great resource to this country. Who else will make the tea?

Tiny meteorite

[leviramsey]

This was hyped like it was some big meteorite... something that would have broken her foot, at least. It wasn't even the size of her hand! Come on, Slashdot!

Re:Tiny meteorite

[Jugalator]

It wasn't even the size of her hand! Come on, Slashdot!

Yeah, come on Slashdot! We want to see BLOOD like in the news channels! Try again when you have some news about a meteorite crushing a girl. That would be something... mwahahaha! :-P

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[austad]

The text of the article... in case of /. Effect !

Yeah, because as we all know, the BBC regularly becomes unavailble due to the slashdot effect.

physics?

[Anonymous Coward]

what a load of bullshit. if it hit her foot after falling from miles up, do you really think the first thing she would do is show it to her father? not likely. she'd be screaming in agony. fucking liars

Re:physics?

[phorm]

I believe that there's some sort of rule of maximum velocity due to acceleration depending on max. If it's like lava rock, it's probably got a fairly low mass, in which case there is a possiblity that it might not be able to reach an overly high speed.

But still. You see something flash from by the rooftop, something hits your foot... it's still gotta be moving at a decent rate. I imagine it would still smart quite a bit, guess it would depend on what shoes she was wearing?

Re:physics?

[arkane1234]

-- quote --
I believe that there's some sort of rule of maximum velocity due to acceleration depending on max. If it's like lava rock, it's probably got a fairly low mass, in which case there is a possiblity that it might not be able to reach an overly high speed.
-- end quote --

But there aren't many rocks that make it through the atmosphere that are consisting of a pourous lavarock type material. Usually, they are made of metals, such as iron. That size of rock made out of iron would have reached a volocity to do a little more than make her say, "oh wow... something hit my leg".

Even a human being reaches 200+ MPH when freefalling from 11K feet. An object with less wind resistance would only go faster, considering if it was indeed a meteor it would have been going much faster before it hit the atmosphere. Even going at 50-100 MPH I know I'd be yelling wondering what the hell just hit me as I hold my leg in pain :)

Re:physics?

[phorm]

The point was however, that the human (of greater mass) will reach a point where he/she would no longer be accelerating, and maintain a constant velocity (ignoring the fact that a human would be less than charcoal dust if falling through the atmosphere).

The rock, having a lower mass, would have a lower potential velocity. This means that although it might accelerate faster (gravity - drag is less), it would have a lower MAX speed.

An analogy is like having two very similar cars with different gear ratios. One allows for a greater speed at a lesser acceleration (human), another allows for lesser speed at greater acceleration (rock). Graph it, at the beginning the smaller object will have a higher max speed, but further into the graph the larger wins out.

Also, the little rock could have broken off of a bigger rock, so the acceleration would at that point. Still enough to hurt, maybe not enough to dent somebody's foot or blow it to pieces.

Re:physics?

[sunking2]

Heretic! This is from the BBC, not some US news outlet. How dare you question it.

Re:physics?

[Carnivorous Carrot]

It's mass to wind resistance ration that makes terminal velocity. That rock is pretty light, and is poc marked, so will have even greater drag than a smooth rock.

I'll bet it wasn't even going 100 mph, maybe 50 or so. If you threw it forward out the window of a car speeding on the highway, it would probably decellerate a lot faster than 9.8 m/s/s.

And she didn't move???

[unsinged int]

"I saw it fall from above roof height," Siobhan told BBC News Online.

And it hit her foot. Man, I see an unidentified object coming at me from above roof height and I'm getting out of the way. I'll figure out what it is later.

But then I guess no one would write about that...

Re:And she didn't move???

[MucousOgre]

I think it was probably moving a wee bit fast... I don't know how easy it is to avoid something thats probably moving several hundred if not thousand meters per second =P

Re:And she didn't move???

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how easy it is to avoid something thats probably moving several hundred if not thousand meters per second =P

Right, besides the fact that the air would have slowed it down: thousands m/s seems a bit too much.

I wonder if a meteorite this size hit your foot, you'd walk out without a hole of about its diameter where it went through, or at least severe damage.

After all, those things don't only travel mighty fast, they also got their name of "shooting stars" from the fact that they emit light, and on photos of meteorites that I saw, they didn't look like lightbulbs to me.

I've heard tales of meteorites going through roof, ceiling and floor and end up in the basement, but that may be just an urban legend. Or "another" urban legend?

Re:And she didn't move???

[neoform]

was she located near letterman while he was filming? prehaps it was just some sports ball that fell from the sky..

Re:And she didn't move???

[MucousOgre]

I saw on a show once a metorite that had gone right through this persons trunk of their car, so they do pack quite a punch

Re:And she didn't move???

[SpaceJunkie]

Surely given the size of it, and moving that fast--she wouldnt be smilling holding it, as medical teams would be reconstructing the smouldering remains of her legs.... Thats a fairly considerable amount of force. Saying that- the way shes smilling holding it disregards how dangerously radioactive it probably is, and you never know what else it harbors. Yes I sound negative- but either she is extremely lucky and resilient- or thats not a meteorite in her hand.

ANyway- iron does not get "Slightly warm" falling through the atmosphere on re-entry... It gets extremely hot...I am a little disappointed- I tend to credit BBC with a bit mroe savviness than this. I await the results after the lump is analysed.(Shock-horror-I actually *read* the article).

Re: and she didn't move???

[stux]

Or perhaps its a lump of hardened shit from when someone flushed the toilet on a 747... ...

Yes, I've seen Joe Dirt

Re: and she didn't move???

[SpaceJunkie]

Does anyone remember the statistic for people impaled by blue ice showers?

Re:And she didn't move???

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Why would you think it would be radioactive? The vast majority of meteorites aren't.

And it's not surprising that her leg wasn't reduced to "smoldering remains." No doubt the meteorite did get quite hot on the upper atmosphere, but by the time it got nearer ground level (and went through England's usual cloud cover ;) it had shed quite a bit of both thermal and kinetic energy. And finally -- I've found meteorites that looked very much like the one in the picture, and one of the surprising things about them is how light they are. They're not solid chunks of rock; their outer surfaces are a kind of frozen rock foam, presumably because of what happens to them on their way through the atmosphere. So I have no problem believing that one of these could hit someone on the foot without doing serious damage.

Re: and she didn't move???

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientist #1> Wha - what's that in her hand?

Scientist #2> It's a meteorite!

Scientist #1> No! It's a turd!

Both> Ewww!!

Let's have a count...

[Anonvmous Coward]

So far in the last year we've had:

- Mozilla 1.0 released

- A story on Slashdot about how a guy switched from Linux back to Windows, XP no less

- I got a girlfriend. (I'm man enough to admit that's not easy when you play with computers for a living)

- Nintendo launch two game systems plus a highly anticipated title ON TIME

- A girl getting hit by a meteorite

Yeesh. What a year.

Re:Let's have a count...

[jx100]

Sounds like Duke Nukem Forever's gonna be released after all..

Re:Let's have a count...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'll finally move out of my mom's house and get a job!

Re:Let's have a count...

[Anonymous Coward]

dont hold your breath.

Re:Let's have a count...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Debian 3.0? mustn't forget

Re:Let's have a count...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a good argument at the core, but there's one thing that doesn't make sense: you switched back to XP. There may not be any good UIs for Linux, but XP has the same problem. Why bother switching, when you're just going to downgrade in several categories and "sidegrade" in UI.

Re:Let's have a count...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, about all of those things had about the same probability of happening.

Re:Let's have a count...

[rweir]

Hurd this year!

Re:Let's have a count...

[ShoeHead]

So... what's the point? You just wanted to brag that you got a girlfriend?

Re:Let's have a count...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"So... what's the point? You just wanted to brag that you got a girlfriend?"

What's the point of that question? Touch a nerve did I?

Let's put things into perspecive here: I pointed out several things of surprise that happened over the last year. On one particular point, I implied that my acquisition (heh) of a gf was incredibly unlikely. You focused on the one about my girlfriend and mutated a poke at my own general repulsiveness into an attempt to sound like a player.

So did I use this thread to brag about my girlfriend, or are you using it because you're mad at me for having one? It seems to me that you are the one with an issue, not I.

How to get your photo in the news

[Myco]

1. Get a rock
2. Say it's a meteorite that hit you on the foot.
3. BBC believes you, publishes goofy photo of you holding your "meteorite"
4. ???
5. Profit

Alternately, all your beowulf cluster of meteorite are belong to us.

Yeah, that should about cover it.

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if you had just mentioned 9/11 somehow, I could have won SlashBingo on one foul swoop. Perhaps "Iraq testing meteorites as weapons of mass desctruction".

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[arkane1234]

"In recent news, Iraq has allowed UN troops to investigate it's compounds for weapons of mass destruction. U.N. investigators reported finding a large cache of iron-like rocks in one compound. President Bush's response was emminently to start attacking Baghdad immediately to thwart any attempts of Iraqi based Intercontinental Ballistic scattershots of Iron-based missiles. White House spokesman were unavailable to comment at this time."

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the '???' were located in 'phase 2'!!

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, the 'Profit' has to be suffixed with three exclamation marks.

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo!!!

Thanks :)

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

why do you always call people sir? i just don't get it
please explain it to me sir

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably a lot easier than going through the trouble to fake a chicken head in your mcnuggets

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[mlong]

Don't forget to bake it in the oven first.

1. Get a rock

2. Say it's a meteorite that hit you on the foot.

3. BBC believes you, publishes goofy photo of you holding your "meteorite"

4. ???

5. Profit

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[Anonymous Coward]

Failing to sound either intellectual or well-bred?

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[pogen]

Don't forget to bake it in the oven first.

That would be a dead giveaway. Meteorites aren't usually hot when they reach the ground. Sometimes, they're so cold that they're covered in frost.

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[mlong]

That would be a dead giveaway. Meteorites aren't usually hot when they reach the ground. Sometimes, they're so cold that they're covered in frost.

Yeah but what do news people know about that? You just say "Look it hit me in my foot, and its still warm. Want to feel it?"

Re:How to get your photo in the news

[timlee]

A thing people who read/write the Economist do.

Other Nigh-infinitely Rare Occurances...

[Bonker]

...Hillary Rosen or Jack Valenti mention that the mp3 format or P2P file-sharing networks may not be as evil as the dripping semen of Beelzebub. ...Stallman accidentally says 'Linux' in a moment of pique rather than 'Gnu/Linux'. ...The software or media industry creates an truly uncrackable format for copy-protecting the data on CD's ...Taco posts a story to the front page of Slashdot without a single spelling error on his part. ...Natalie Portman does not run screaming from anything that looks remotely like a nerd. ...A new Slashdot reader goes six months without perma-filtering JonKatz.

Re:Other Nigh-infinitely Rare Occurances...

[Anonymous Coward]

...A shred of evidence for goo-to-you evolution is found.

How Much Would One of These be Worth?

[SalTerre]

If it indeed turns out to be a genuine meteor, then how much is it worth?

I've looked all over google and google groups, hell, even ebay, but can't find a good answer.

Re:How Much Would One of These be Worth?

[Primotheproton]

At the link below, I believe you can find out how much a wide variety of meteorites are worth!

http://www.nyrockman.com/catalog.htm

Mike

Rocks from the sky

[Wierd Willy]

I read about this a couple of days ago. I noticed the fact that the people at Durham University got ahold of it. She coulda gotten maybe $5,000 US for that rock.
Seems there is a rule amongst Astronomers that if you get hit by a meteorite, it belongs to you.
Just my two cents...

Re:Rocks from the sky

[Mr. Flibble]

Seems there is a rule amongst Astronomers that if you get hit by a meteorite, it belongs to you.

Or you belong to it. At least it might be kind enough to dig you a large grave for you while it owns you.

Insert "all your base" joke here.

Re:Rocks from the sky

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean if you get hit by a meteorite, the IRS will come after you for income tax on $5,000 ?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe a factory shout out some gunk and a piece hit her foot?"

Do you speak from experience? That statement sounds suspiciously like:

Maybe my faggot lover's cock shot out some cum and a piece hit her foot?

Quit subtly pushing your gay agenda, cockgobbler!!

no holes?

[zero2k]

What speed was this meteorite travelling at? I am confused why there's no mention of holes in her foot or a little crater created on the grown... If I can through a pebble and cause dints and injure someone, this meteorite looks soft in comparison (what a pussy).

Re:no holes?

[Charles Dodgeson]

If it's small (as it is), then the surface area to volumn ratio will be large enough so that it has a slow terminal velocity. No crater, no holes in feet. Drop a rock like that from a high building, and you are unlikely to harm anyone unless you get them in the eye.

Re:no holes?

[coryboehne]

In all fairness, have you ever thrown a rock from any real height? I just did an experiment, I went up to the roof of my building and dropped a rock (about 1.5" dia, solid composition) off the top (12 story, actually 14 to the street), and it hit so damn hard that it blew apart. Now, tell me this would'nt hurt... The only way this may have not hurt is if the thing had enough holes in it to lighten it enough to not hurt you... which is doubtful considering that the iron content is usually way up there.

Re:no holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the pictures, it does look rather porous.

Re:no holes?

[arkane1234]

No, it looks a little cratered.

Theres a difference :)

Re:no holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Confused - I couldn't even see her pussy in that picture, but if you insist it was good then I'll believe you.

Re:no holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please learn to spell.

Re:no holes?

[Charles Dodgeson]

In all fairness, have you ever thrown a rock from any real height?

Well, I once got hit in the head by a piece of plastster about 10cm in diameter. That might help explain some of my postings.

From what little we see of the rock, it looks flat and pitted. I don't think it would hurt if hit your shoe. Interestingly, she reported it as feeling warm, so at one point it must have been moving fast.

Re:no holes?

[JoeD]

Instead of concrete, try dropping it on an old shoe, then see if it blows apart.

Terminal velocity on something as small as that rock in the picture will be quite low. If she was wearing sturdy shoes, I see it being quite possible that it would just bounce off...

Her looks attracted it

[Perdo]

Ok, she's only 14.. She might eventually grow into that chin.

Re:Her looks attracted it

[jhunsake]

Make fun of a 14-year old girl... you so cool!

Re:Her looks attracted it

[sinserve]

They make fun of 34 year old boys all the time. Where was the PC movement when
the "your parents basement" jokes where getting posted on /. ?

Re:Her looks attracted it

[vrai]

That's because blokes over the again of 18 aren't 'boys', they're men - who should be able to withstand the odd insult. Especially if its warranted by their living with their parents past said age of majority.

Re:Her looks attracted it

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example of spineless cunt moderation here on Slashcrap - you aren't allowed to attempt humor, FUCK, what are you thinking!

A few haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe Moderators
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit moderator!
Try to suck less, please

The Humorless Moderator
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator!
Why do you hate me?

The Proletariat
Slashdotting Commie
Moderator fears new idea!
Censor him quickly

Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, SLASHDOT's editing/moderating [read: censoring] "community"(*) ALL AGREE on ONE THING:

CENSORSHIP WORKS!

So, you busy little plebian proletariats, get busy, you have some censoring to do!

Good job you little neo-commies. Don't want to hear the other side, shoot the fucker in the head as an ENEMY OF THE STATE [In this case anyone who seeks to improve the sad state of /.].

I have a Gun and the Constitution [Not the urinated-on pissed-on hacked fucked up one WashingTOON thinks exists, I mean the real one, with Jefferson and Madison at my side], please, give me an excuse to use them both.

(*)Note, the word community used often on Slashdot, this is referring to a proto communist commune.

Not the first time . . .

[loraksus]

I dunno, I somehow doubt this would be legit, I'd expect the asteroid to come out of the sky going a lot faster - hell, terminal velocity for a human body is like 400kph (could be mph / completely wrong), this thing would probably have a lot less drag and I'm sure that you wouldnt be able to see it fall. Any physics people want to correct me?
I wonder if this is like me holding quarters about a lighter for 30 seconds and throwing them in a crowd. . . not that I've ever done that. . .

I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.
If you're bored, /. this guy's server and kill some asteroids.
http://www.brudirect.com/LighterSide/G ames/game%20 asteroid%20shower.htm

Re:Not the first time . . .

[who what why]

The terminal velocity of a human body (skydiving) is more like 90mph. I expect a smooth rock might be a bit more. Depending on size, I'd expect it to hurt lots, but then she was probably wearing shoes.

Ever been hit by a cricket ball? I saw one bounce of my teacher's head once and he barely even blinked, and that must have been travelling at 50mph... I guess people are tougher than we look!

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Reziac]

I would have also thought that a meteorite would plough into whatever it hit and bury itself, but maybe not. When I was about 8 years old, I found a meteorite laying on the grass in front of our house. It was the iron type and quite heavy for its size (a bit less than an inch across). Unfortunately, it got lost in a move a few years later. :(

In other weird stuff in the sky, a few years ago I happened to see an incoming meteor (magnesium by the brilliance) that in the few seconds it was visible, was large enough to show a disk to the naked eye, and it lit up the landscape about the same as would a major lightning strike. Good thing it burned up on the way down :)

BTW, there've been a few cases of people who fell off a building, and at least one who fell out of an airplane, and survived a long fall with minimal injuries. It's a bird.. it's a plane... *splat*

Re:Not the first time . . .

[LMCBoy]

I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.

I always thought that too, but while googling for a picture of the Peekskill Meteorite car, I stumbled on this page, which shows at least three separate incidents where a person was killed by a meteorite. None have happened recently, though.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[DigiNic]

Check out the pictures on this page:
http://www.nyrockman.com/peekskill.htm
See ms God aims for the rear right of the car each time. What gives?

Re:Not the first time . . .

[coryboehne]

I like this quote from that page
September 5, 1907 Hsin-p ai Wei, Weng-li, China A whole family was reportedly crushed by a meteorite. Now, if that isn't bad luck. Besides how friggin big was the damn thing? A whole family?

Re:Not the first time . . .

[ChiPHeaD23]

uh... what do you mean each time? You DID notice that's the same car in all the pictures, right? Right???

Re:Not the first time . . .

[NeMon'ess]

From an issue of Maxim:

Someone wrote in asking if a penny dropped from the empire state building could kill someone on the ground. A physicist contacted by Maxim suggested fastening g a length of string to the penny and holding it out the window of a moving car. When the penny is at 45 degrees, check the spedometer and that is a very rough estimate of the object's terminal velocity. Maxim's penny only had a rough terminal velocity of 16mph. The metorite could be similar. We still don't know its speed entering the atmosphere and how long it took to fall through.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[sql*kitten]

I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.

I guess that depends if you buy into the theory that a meteorite caused the last ice age and wiped out most life on the planet...

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of a person falls out of an airplane?
-bob

Re:Not the first time . . .

[protonman]

> one who fell out of an airplane, and survived a
> long fall with minimal injuries.

That's what parachutes are for.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[protonman]

*in recorded history*

Contrary to popular belief, dinosaurs couldn't write. Or in any case, left no notes we have recognized as such.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[pythorlh]

But that wouldn't qualify as "recorded" history, would it?

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic physics will tell you that the minimum velocity for that rock is the escape velocity of the earth (assuming the rock has come from a very large distance). This is about 25,000 miles per hour, or 7 miles per second. I seriously doubt that the atmosphere would have slowed the rock down enough for it not to hurt when it hit her, considering that the atmosphere would have been traversed in only a few seconds.. It would also be extrememly hot.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[RadioTV]

There was a pro baseball player a few weeks ago that got hit by a ~90 MPH fastball - and it broke his wrist.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Reziac]

[laughing] Well, this was without a parachute. The one I heard about falling out of a plane, the altitude at the time was about 3000 feet, and the guy broke both his legs but that's all the damage he took. Pretty lucky!

When I was a baby, I climbed out of the playpen and clonked myself on the head. My mom, being the paranoid new mother type, rushed me to the doctor. He said, "Don't worry about it. Last week my kid jumped out a 2nd floor window!"

(Yes, I *was* dropped on my head when I was very small, why do you ask? :)

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic physics will tell you

Basic, indeed. Now please explain how an object entering the Earth's atmosphere must be traveling at escape velocity.

Then consider these questions:

Was the rock the same size when it entered the atmosphere as when it reached the Earth's surface? Was the rock traveling the same speed when it entered the atmosphere as when it reached the Earth's surface? Why or why not?

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Daetrin]

These people.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[fuzdout]

ver been hit by a cricket ball? I saw one bounce of my teacher's head once and he barely even blinked, and that must have been travelling at 50mph...

Um..Dunno about a cricket ball but when I was about 14, I was hit square in the forehead with a baseball and it *HURT*! You do a little more than blink. :)

Re:Not the first time . . .

[fuzdout]

Despite being hit in the head with a baseball I still claim to be normal :)

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Now please explain how an object entering the Earth's atmosphere must be traveling at escape velocity.

Anything traveling slower than escape velocity tends to get bound into a stable orbit when it gets near the Earth, instead of hitting it.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Reziac]

Depends on how it hits and whether it breaks something, squishes nerves out of commission, or whatever. Once when I was chopping wood, a forearm-sized chunk flew up and smacked me across the forehead so hard that I literally saw stars (see, I'm on topic :) and almost blacked out -- but it didn't hurt at all! Guess my head is harder than it looks. Must be all those "getting hit on the head" lessons. ;)

Re:Not the first time . . .

[alexjohns]

So, you're telling us you buy Maxim for the Physics articles? Yeah, right. Still not buying it...

Re:Not the first time . . .

[fuzdout]

Head went into shock ;) I think you may be right because I had an incident where I fell off a ravine about 12ft up and landed on my back and it didn't hurt (Does that make me a "spineless worm" ? :).. Had a dog that jumped off a secound-story balcony without being injured (I dunno if she hurt or not)..Runs in the family I guess :)

Re:Not the first time . . .

[Reziac]

That's nothing.. in college I had a dumb roommate. Dumb roommate flung training dummy over a 100 foot cliff. Othric (one of my 1970s retriever pack) went over the cliff after it, tumble-and-thump all the way down, but apparently not hurt since he got the dummy and climbed back up (the long way round, of course).

Did I mention I had a dumb roommate? Rinse and repeat. Dog didn't hurt himself this time either. Dumb roommate would have done it a 3rd time, except I grabbed dog and dummy and held onto both. :)

Re:Not the first time . . .

[fuzdout]

Well that's quite a lot -poor dog. You said you stopped your roommate from throwing it a third time by grabbing onto both dog and dummy..Which dummy? The bumper or the roommate? ;)

Sundae, same dog to jump off the balcony, also ran in front of a fast moving truck to grab her tennis ball out of the road and got ran over and LIVED with no broken bones or internal injuries.

Re:Not the first time . . .

[NeMon'ess]

that's funny, but no. It was in Maxim's AvantGo PDA page just a week ago. No pictures unfortunately.

Hehe, remember Joe Dirt?

[nice]

Where he was carrying around that composite piece of crap that fell out of a passenger jet thinking it was a meteorite?

'nuff said.

:)

Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[Mr. Flibble]

From the article: .Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel.

The problem with this is that meteors are not hot. See this link and this one. From the first link:

Objects from space that enter Earth's atmosphere are -- like space itself -- very cold and they remain so even as they blaze a hot-looking trail toward the ground. "The outer layers are warmed by atmospheric friction, and little bits flake away as they descend," explains Yeomans. This is called ablation and it's a wonderful way to remove heat. (Some commercial heat shields use ablation to keep spacecraft cool when they re-enter Earth's atmosphere.) "Rocky asteroids are poor conductors of heat," Yeomans continued. "Their central regions remain cool even as the hot outer layers are ablated away."

And from the second:

Are asteroids hot or cold as they descend through Earth's atmosphere? (Level II, They are cold as they enter and remain so even as they blaze a hot-looking trail toward the ground. The outer layers are warmed by friction and little bits flake away as they descend.)

So I suppose it is part of abilated material if it is real, that would explain why it was hot. That would probably still make it a meteor. It might also explain why she still owns her foot.

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[stephanruby]

The problem with this is that meteors are not hot. See this link and this one.

This is Scientific method at its Best !

Step 1. Formulate an abilation theory
Step 2. Contradict this theory with evidence
Step 3. Conclude that the evidence MUST be wrong
Step 4. Go back to Step 1.

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidence?

1. Rock hits girl's foot.
2. ???
3. Meteorite!!

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[SpaceJunkie]

This explains a few things- as I thought it was unlikely she would still have a foot. NOw what about the massive amounts of dangerous radiation she is exposed to holding it like a common rock?

Oh - interesting sig- given it points back to localhost... (Quite obviously).. Hows your real firewall- it may survive most things- but what about the slashdot effect....

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[kindbud]

How many times must you cut and paste the word before you realize that "ablation" is not spelled with the letter "i"?

A-B-L-A-T-I-O-N
A-B-L-A-T-E-D :)

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[Niaxato Blackstar]

If this rock that struck the girl in the foot is indeed a piece of material cast off from a parent body by ablation, then it begs the question: Where is the parent body?

Is it possible that this is the original body, and the surface was warm from atmosphereic friction, but not necessarily hot enough to cause its outer layers to ablate?

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[jcast]

Umm, ablation has an `i' in it...

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm ... it's almost certainly not any more radioactive then a "common rock".

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[Physics Dude]

Ever hear the phrase "Don't believe everything you read"?

The sources you quote are a lot of rehashed BS. Note how the wording is nearly identical in each. Obviously copied by someone who doesn't have a clue about physics... (probably just a Ph.D. ;)

"... very cold and they remain so even as they blaze a hot-looking trail ..."

hot-looking??? Just what do they think is causing all that bright white light to be given off anyway? It's called BLACK BODY RADIATION! It means that the surface of the object emitting the light is thousands of degrees. The specific temperature can be determined directly from the light's most intensely emitted frequency.

Most meteorites litterally burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry, leaving at mosts tiny specs that fall as dust. These are solid rock and iron and their surfaces don't just flake off like a piece of pie crust.

Now, the core temperature of the object and it's temperature on impact is another matter, but those quotes are WAY off base.

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[Physics Dude]

Just a followup... I realize that chemical energy is also producing some of the light, but I think the temperature required in order to get iron and stone to react chemically with the air speaks for itself. Care to look up the boiling point of iron?

Re:Possible, but unlikely. Abilation is key.

[ryanvm]

The ablation theory sounds cool, but how did they determine that is what actually happens? Certainly nobody's sitting out in a field somewhere with a chisel and a thermometer waiting for meteorites to crash down around them.

MOD THIS FUCKER DOWN,

[Anonymous Coward]

ehh, that's not a meteorite

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a wee bit of poo, that is. The lass is holding a WEE BIT OF POO!!

HA HA!!!

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

my faggot lover has great control over his man beast, he'd never miss my asshole and hit a young girls foot.

How dare you assume!

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[Myco]

Pfft, I had you by a full two minutes, Mr. Redundant.

Re:hmm

[LMCBoy]

It's possible this isn't a meteorite. It would have hurt (but probably not much more than having the same rock thrown at you); since the article didn't mention it, I assume she was undamaged by the impact. Perhaps it hit her after a bounce.

Anyway, the thing that caught me was that she said it was hot to the touch. Small meteorites tend to be cold by the time they hit the ground. They are mostly iron, so they conduct heat well, and cool off fast in the upper atmosphere.

And she said it looked "rusty". Meteorites are black; they can't oxidize in space.
It will be interesting to see if there's a follow-up on this.

BTW, here is a picture of a car in NY that was hit by a 12.5-kg meteorite in 1995. Ouch!

Oh great...

[kyletinsley]

Oh great... first some pranksters are out there making crop circles in rural farmers' corn fields, making everyone speculate about the existance of aliens... and now some smart asses are heating up rocks and throwing them thru the air at people! Will this madness never stop?!

Before the vengeful hand of god smites me via your hand on the Troll-mod button, think about it for a second. A rock falls from EARTH ORBIT and hits her in the foot... and she 'NOTICES' it. Now IANARS (I ain't no fangled rocket scientist), but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND. Not to mention kicking up rocks and dust all over the place and leaving a molten core behind that turns sand into glass at the impact point. But that didn't happen here did it? No, it just sort of "fell on her" and it was "quite hot"...

Maybe it fell from an airplane from a couple thousand feet. Or maybe some jackass threw it at her like I mentioned earlier. But it came from MARS? Uhhhh huhhh..... Yeah, so did this "Mr. Fusion" machine that fell out of the sky too. You dump beer and old banana peels into it, and it gives you enough power to travel back in time...

Re:Oh great...

[kyletinsley]

"Oh great... first some pranksters are out there making crop circles in rural farmers' corn fields, making everyone speculate about the existance of aliens... and now some smart asses are heating up rocks and throwing them thru the air at people!"

Don't you mean nerds without girlfriends?

Yeah, I'd think this was part of a new NASA program to get the public interested in space again, except that the plane tickets for sending 'staff' over to the limey island would have probably drained most of their budget...

Let's see:

• 1 zippo lighter: $15 (we could get something cheaper, but hey we're trying to Start Something here)
• 1 rock (free, Yes!)
• 1 former high school football quarterback, whose hopes of NFL glory have long faded and is willing to accept a pitiful allowance for using his once golden arm: $200

=================
equals: Instant free publicity on BBC or CNN about a "lucky winner" who got hit by a space rock. People will be clamouring about, trying to find a way to increase their odds of winning the galactic lottery! Hell, they could even sell books about it to all the schmucks that buy those books about how to get rich quick... (Chapter 1: Write a Book About Getting Rich Quick and Sell It to Millions of Dumbasses). Sounds like a Better/Faster/Sheeper plan than what they've tried so far!

Re:Oh great...

[maxentius]

"Oh great... first some pranksters are out there making crop circles in rural farmers' corn fields, making everyone speculate about the existance of aliens... "

Or worse, making movies like "Signs."

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>Um, I think they can probably handle the traffic.

Exactly... And IF they cannot... then we are covered, thanks to my forethought (not to be confused with the young lass' forehead.)

Caught a falling star

[Anonymous Coward]

Did she put it in her pocket?

Obligatory Simpsons reference?

[handsomepete]

(not terribly relevant, but what the hey - thanks to snpp.com)

Lisa: I can't believe that extra-thick layer of pollution that I've actually picketed against burned up the comet.
Bart: But what's really amazing, is that this is _exactly_ what Dad said would happen.
Lisa: Yeah, Dad was right.
Homer: I know, kids. I'm scared too!

havent we had enough yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

geez

Very light on the details....

[seanadams.com]

I wonder if

Re:Very light on the details....

[seanadams.com]

Is something wrong with slashdot lately? My posts keep getting truncated.

Re:Very light on the details....

[Anonymous Coward]

no there are no proble

Re:Very light on the details....

[Jacco de Leeuw]

I wonder if

Whoa! What are the changes of a second meteorite hitting a Slashdot reader while he is commenting a meteorite story?!!?

Re:Very light on the details....

[Anonymous Coward]

Slim to non... nggghhh

Re:Very light on the details....

[rickwood]

Perhaps he was dictat -- Arrrrrgh!

Re:Very light on the details....

[Maniakes]

You type "Arrrrgh!" when you get hit by a meteorite? I guess you must have been dictating your post.

Re:Very light on the details....

[mh_tang]

Whoa! What are the changes of a second meteorite hitting a Slashdot reader while he is commenting a meteorite story?!!?

Practically zero. Slashdot readers don't go outside, silly!

suppose to be a serious matter of discussion?

[ddd2k]

this is oddly more amusing than "man being hit by football" or the exploding manhole accidents... and also reminds me of diablo2...

Re:suppose to be a serious matter of discussion?

[kubla2000]

the exploding manhole accidents...

Sounds like a theme for sadomasochistic gay pr0n to explore

Re:suppose to be a serious matter of discussion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mods - can we get the above OFF-TOPIC parent modden down please? Thanks.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's all in the details

[E-Rock-23]

It's Cowton, not Carlton ^-^ Nitpicky, I know, but still...

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what they say... Mediocre minds think alike.

I Blame Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

Their .NET Strategy and Palladium plans are to blame. I'm not sure how M$ fits into this, but they are at fault.

That girl should turn over that rock over to DOJ for further examination.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

profit...

[taernim]

Hmmm. After the fiasco with NASA going after the people who stole the moon rocks, maybe the girl can offset the pain of the meteorite strike by selling it on eBay?

Not news

[John Garvin]

Yawn. If the girl had hit the meteorite, that would have been news.

Have you hugged your air today?

[Tablizer]

(* I'd expect the asteroid to come out of the sky going a lot faster - hell, terminal velocity for a human body is like 400kph *)

It is probably hard to say without more analysis of that particular rock. The atmosphere slows rocks down. How much the atmosphere slowed it depends on a lot of factors like its orginal speed, angle of entry, composition, shape, etc.

It is possible that it was falling at a regular "dropping" velocity once slowed to the minimum for the atmospheric drag. IOW, lost almost all of its "space" velocity.

Gotta love our atmosphere.

Re:hmm

[LMCBoy]

No, I don't know what he's holding but the meteorite that hit that car weighed close to 30 pounds (12.5 kg).

Rusty?

[El Puerco Loco]

The girl says the rock was rusty on one side like it might contain iron. A meteorite fresh from space would not be rusty. And even a small rock like that would be going fast enough to sting more than a little if it hit your foot. I'm not buying this at all.

Huh?

[kreyg]

The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University.

What was the purpose of this paragraph? It just comes out of nowhere, and the subject abruptly dropped. Is there some reason to believe it might be from Mars, rather than, say, anywhere else? Does it matter? Was the reporter concerned that the Martians were hurling rocks at little girls' feet?

It just struck me as though this reporter didn't have the faintest clue what they were reporting on, but remembered some buzz about meteors from Mars a few years back...

Re:Huh?

[Jugalator]

Yeah, I was slightly amused by that too. By reading the picture texts, you didn't get too much confidence in the article: "I saw it fall from above roof height" and "The stone may have come from Mars"... *sigh* :-)

Re:Huh?

[Zarf]

The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University

I speculate, aswell, that the stone could be the fore-front of the Martian Invasion of Earth! To arms, to arms! The Martians are coming! The Martians are coming!

By the way of England of course. Was it three if by air and four if by space?

Re:Huh?

[Zemran]

The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University.

This proves that there is intelligent life on Mars !!! It would take some kind of launch system to get the rock to leave Mars' gravitational pull and think of the accuracy required to target a little girl's foot !!! Precision rock throwing...

Re:Huh?

[Idarubicin]

The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University.

The stone could be a charcoal briquette that fell off the roof next door--the college students in the adjacent building were having one last barbecue before going back to school.

One of the students was being severely beaten by his friends for posting a message to Slashdot containing the phrase "3. Profit!!!". When his head hit the grill, the briquette was ejected over the edge of the roof.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

being a (recovering/former) reporter, i can tell you with some authority that most reporters have no idea what they're talking/writing about.

Re:Huh?

[Stonehand]

Nah, not Mars. _Starship Troopers_ was right, it's just that they overestimated the size of the bugs a little...

Re:Huh?

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> It just struck me as though this reporter didn't have the faintest clue what they were reporting on...

Duh. The press sucks. The press doubleplussucks at reporting on science.

Re:Huh?

[FozzTexx]

Ackack ack ack ackack! Ack ack ackackack ack ack ackackackack ack ack! Ack ack ackack!

Or something like that.

Re:Huh?

[vicious_sloth]

no... precision rock throwing would be to thorw multiple rocks and have them all hit the same target, this case would be accurate rock throwing, if the foot is indeed the intended target of the rock

Re:Huh?

[jrennie]

Don't you know that Martians regularly launch various size rocks toward earth? I think it's 25 points for hitting a girl's foot. Some alien hit the jackpot with this one:

http://www.positron-press.co.uk/c3-5.htm (post by jukal)

Jason

Re:Huh?

[geekoid]

Of course be way of england! That is well Documented.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait - let them take out England first before we do anything.

Sincerely,

the Minister of France
Jacques Somebodie

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember years ago, chatting to my tutor
the phone rang, he quickly muttered 'oh, I have no idea, about 120 mph?' and put it back down. a 10 sec chat.

later, I was watching the news, and saw 'a Professor of Theoretical physics calculated he'd have hit the ground at 120 mph'.

Katz...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I don't filter Katz... and I haven't seen anything from him in awhile.

Oh crap! We're jinxed now! There'll be something posted by him in less then 24 hours now!

Curse you!

Gender bias?

[Tablizer]

It was a girl. Hmmmm.

I have read that males are something like 3 times more likely to get hit by lightning than females.

One theory is that men are more likely to have outdoor jobs (ranger, cop, ditch digger, etc.)

Another theory is that men are too bull-headed to come in from storms.

Re:Gender bias?

[gvonk]

[/me cringes as the Female League of Ditch Diggers hits their collective reply button]

Re:Gender bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

men are not 3 times as likely to get hit by lightning than women. i think you mean to say that 3 times are many men have been struck by lightning than women. don't post any more statistics until you understand the difference, ok?

Re:Gender bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... both members of it. Which kinda proves the point, doesn't it.

Re:Gender bias?

[Tablizer]

(* men are not 3 times as likely to get hit by lightning than women. i think you mean to say that 3 times are many men have been struck by lightning than women. don't post any more statistics until you understand the difference, ok? *)

I admit that I don't see the difference right now. I may not be interpreting you right. Unless you are suggesting that the rate is changing and that history is not a good predicter of current rates?

Re:Gender bias?

[Debillitatus]

People who flame about mathematics are amusing.

People who flame about mathematics, when they're wrong, are even more so.

Literally, the statement that "men are 3 times more likely to be hit by meteorites" means that you expect, in the future, that out of all meteorite-human collisions, 3 out of 4 will be men. The fact that heretofore, 3 out of 4 have been men is a reasonable suggestion that this will continue to be true, especially if you have no reason to expect that this will change. The original poster was correct.

Re:Gender bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

who gets hit (the likely hood of) has nothing to do with the meteors. It has everything to do with the amount of time each group is at risk.

If 4 men are outside in the open for ever 1 woman then the odds are higher a man will be hit.

Re:Gender bias?

[Reziac]

Or it could be that males are 3 times as likely to have heads with a solid iron core ;)

Re:Gender bias?

[Paul Komarek]

Whomever wrote about the statistical difference was being either 1) pedantic or 2) a jerk. That's an inclusive-or, by the way.

Using historical data you can make estimates of probability. Because we don't have a *perfect* model for the events being described, we'll never know the desired p.d.f. and never have any "statistical truth" about the matter. If you wanted to make the complainer happy, you'd have to choose a statistical model, then devise and justify a fitting procedure for that model. Then you could argue that, under your model, some event had a certain probability. At this point, the complainer would tell you that your model was stupid, and that you were stupid, etc.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Gender bias?

[Debillitatus]

Which means, exactly, that men would be more likely to be hit. This is what the original poster said.

She's 14!

[Mattygfunk1]

The young Miss Carlton notes: "This does not happen that often in Northallerton", no doubt the City of York is where most Meteorites land.

Pulling this quote from the article and attempting (very poorly I might add) to make fun of the girl's comments is pretty poor form.

----

Sexy walls

Re:She's 14!

[An Onerous Coward]

Wrong. Redcliffe was making a very valid point. Which city always bears the brunt of every disaster film's wrath? New York. When the director of Armaggeddon had to choose something to slam a meteor into to open his movie, what got blown up? Northallerton? No, New York.

The simple fact, which has been demonstrated in such varied settings as movies and. . . well, made-for-TV movies, is that when a disaster is deciding where to strike, it will usually choose New York. It might decide to hit Los Angeles instead if it's feeling rather saucy. But all disasters know, deep down, that New York is the only hangout spot for big-time apocalypses.

In short, the girl's comment was being used only to clarify its insightfulness, and you can stuff yourself. Thank you.

Re:She's 14!

[redcliffe]

Actually, I didn't make that point at all. All I said was that it was in North Yorkshire, and where's Bruce Willis? Chrisd added the rest :-).

how is that possible

[tanveer1979]

Going by the standards of metiorites this one is *big* considering most are dust spec sized. But the fact is if such a metiorite comes to earh and hits it will burn a long long hole.
Now even if some argues that it was slowed down by air, still it could have a terminal verlocity of 120Lm/hr atleast and it would be damn hot. It would burn a hole right through her foot!
PRobably it is something else.

Re:how is that possible

[ChaoticLimbs]

Them's SPACE peanuts.

Re:how is that possible

[geekoid]

Due to the ablatince nature of a meteor moving through the earths atmosphere, there not real very hot at all.
most people hit be metiorites live, usually with no long standing injury.

Re:how is that possible

[Reziac]

As I mention in another post, when I was a kid I found an iron meteorite (not quite an inch across) in our front yard, just lying on the grass. It hadn't been there very long, as it was still hot to the touch, but not hot enough to even wilt the grass under it or blister your finger.

I'd guess if you run the physics, you'll find that the depth of the hole, if any, has more to do with mass than temperature, and the result of a large mass would be a shockwave crater (such as the one in Arizona), not a "long long hole."

Stupid People...

[CyberBill]

The article says the object was "quite hot"... Well if they knew anything, they should know that the majority of all meteorites that fall to earth are COLD to the touch when they hit earth, do to the fact that they are 'burning' so fast when they enter the atmosphere that the heat doesnt transfer to the core of the meteor. And the part about rust being on the rock doesnt really make sense (to me atleast)... When an object comes in from outter space, the outside is heated and melted away, and by the time the NEW outside is showing, it has usually melted and cooled within a few seconds of falling, giving it a melted glassy almost golf-ball look, how could rust form in a few seconds?? And the whole thing about it being from Mars and crap, these people are RETARDED!! The rock could be from ANYWHERE. Only a small fraction are from Mars, and there is no way they can tell just by looking at it. They need to do some carbon dating or something like that. The 14yo girl is probably the butt of a joke by some 14yo boys, and is too stupid to realize. Now I could be wrong, that could be a piece of 2billion year old mars rock that fell, I'm not a professional meteorite examiner or anything, but c'mon... -CyberBill

Re:Stupid People...

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Well if they knew anything, they should know that the majority of all meteorites that fall to earth are COLD to the touch when they hit earth, do to the fact that they are 'burning' so fast when they enter the atmosphere that the heat doesnt transfer to the core of the meteor.

Um, doesn't the fact that "the majority of all meteorites" are cold imply that some, at least, are not cold? (I suppose technically not necessarily -- 100% is also a majority -- but it's an extremely unusual way to say it.) And unless the good people of the Hayden Planetarium were lying to me all those years ago, I've seen meteorites that were pitted and melted.

It can be a 1 in 10^9 occurance and still occur...

Re:Stupid People...

[Anonymous Coward]

And unless the good people of the Hayden Planetarium were lying to me all those years ago, I've seen meteorites that were pitted and melted.

Don't go "Truman Show" on us, dude.

Re:Stupid People...

[CyberBill]

The 'one in a million' meteorites that are warm, are made of combinations of metals, and are *BIG*. They stay warm (atleast on the outside) because they are extremely heat-conductive and dont flake-away when heated, and those generally 'splode when they hit. The reason they have to be big(and dense!) is because it takes more force to slow down a more massive object than a smaller massive object. Its like throwing a wiffle(sp?) or ping-pong ball as hard as you can, and a baseball as hard as you can. -CyberBill

Re:Stupid People...

[DNS-and-BIND]

It doesn't matter - it was just a fluff news story designed to make people feel good, with a suitably spunky heroine. It's in the national media and forms part of our culture now. Wouldn't be surprised to see art films next year about misunderstood young women getting hit by meteorites.

Re:Stupid People...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rust can actually form quite quickly. Take some thin steal wool, submerge it in vinegar, shake it lightly free of excess vinegar, and watch it for a while. I did this experiment in a chemistry lab and was suprised to see it form visible rust in less than 10 minutes. Increasing the oxygen pressure and temperature would definately speed up the oxidation reaction.

I agree that mentioning it might be a Mars rock is quite premature.

Radiocarbon dating is used for determining how long a once living creature has been dead. Specifically the sun interacts with our atmosphere to create a radioactive isotope of carbon. We breath and eat the radioactive isotope while alive, but no longer ingest it when dead. Since the isotope has a known half-life, one can measure the amount of the the isotope remaining in the remains of a once living creature to estimate its time of death. "Something like that" would definately be a more useful means of identifing this rock.

Re:Stupid People...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yoour the stupid one if you think that carbon dating will determine the age of a 2 billion year old meteorite.

done. just for YOU

[Anonymous Coward]

here it is.

I hope you appreciate my hard work.

This was my nightmare. . .

[MyHair]

I had a dream a couple of nights ago about a meteorite crashing through the roof of my room and smashing my server right through the RAID array.

Now I'm going to have more nightmares . . .

Well, at least the meteorite in my dream didn't hit the tape backups 6" away from my server. I would've only lost a few hours of data.

Re:This was my nightmare. . .

[arkane1234]

I had a dream a couple of nights ago about a meteorite crashing through the roof of my room and smashing my server right through the RAID array.

Now I'm going to have more nightmares . . .


I'm surprised Intel hasn't invented some technology to thwart that! Something like a secondary bus to bypass the first damaged one in case a meteor goes through it!

I doubt you have much of a case to worry guy.

Re:This was my nightmare. . .

[tiedyejeremy]

funny, I had a dream that a girl fell through the roof of my room...

Terminal velocity

[ciurana]

d00D,

Terminal velocity for an average human body is only about 110 mi/h, or about 175 km/h, give or take a few ds/dt. Maybe top off at 200 mi/h if you really try.

A meteorite might go a bit faster, provided it is somewhat round. It will also be rather hot due to friction.

I thought I'd share this with you.

Cheers!

E

Re:Terminal velocity

[XNormal]

A meteorite might go a bit faster

Not necessarily. Gravitational pull is proportional to mass, drag is proportional to area. Mass grows at 3rd power, area at 2nd power. Therefore smaller objects fall more slowly in an atmosphere.

Re:Terminal velocity

[[ella]]

Gravitational pull proportional to mass ? This one is good ;-)
Newton is turning in his grave !

Re:Terminal velocity

[reidbold]

Not necessarily. Gravitational pull is proportional to mass, drag is proportional to area. Mass grows at 3rd power, area at 2nd power. Therefore smaller objects fall more slowly in an atmosphere.
Wha? Gravitational force (in this case between earth and a meteorite) is (Fg) = G(me)(mm) / r^2 if i recall.
me=mass earth
mm=mass meteorite
r=displacement

So potential energy grows linearly to mass, not to the 3rd order as you suggest. Acceleration of the meteorite can be written, a = (Fg)/(mm).
Or.. a = G(me)/r^2
As r->0, this is a constant, 9.81 m/s^2. Thank you Newton. This math may very well be all wrong, but the following point is still the same.
So really, the mass of the falling rock does not need to be considered, only the drag, which I'm not familiar in calculating, but that doesn't really matter, as I'd wager something small drags less than something big. In short, you're wrong.

Re:Terminal velocity

[Anonymous Coward]

this analysis is completely wrong, the parent was correct. 3rd order is in reference to the size, not the mass. thus smaller objects have a smaller terminal velocity. apply some common sense before you bust out the incorrect math too.

in case you didnt know, large objects have a greater gravitational pull towards the earth than smaller ones. thats why they weigh more.

Re:Terminal velocity

[XNormal]

I was using everyday terms. By "gravitationa pull" meant the force you call "weight", not acceleration.

This force really is proportional to the mass:

f = mass*g = volume*density*g = K*size^3*density*g where g is the Earth gravitational acceleration at sea level and K depends on the shape of the object (it's 1 for cubes).

Nobody needs to turn in any grave.

Re:Terminal velocity

[bgins]

Whoa, there's some serious freshman math/physics confusion here! Looking at the whole thread, there are several gotchas:
1. don't confuse distance to earth's surface and distance to earth's center
2. don't confuse distance r between two objects and radius r of an object
3. think carefully when talking about limits of something over something approaching zero (they are usually not finite!)
4. don't disregard a quantity (like mass) in an equation (like that for terminal velocity) until you know all the component forces (i.e., drag)
5. don't make statements when you don't know what you're talking about!
6. (from someone else's comment): don't confuse gravitational force and acceleration

a = G(me)/r^2 correct
As r->0, this is a constant, 9.81 m/s^2 ouch!

First, gravitational force is proportional directly to both masses and inversely to the square of the distance r between the two center of masses. This formula would approach an infnite force as r->0. However IIRC, when an object starts to fall inside a hole in the earth, then the effective mass of the earth used in the formula decreases to the instantaneous mass bounded by the sphere of earth from the object's present height. (This is derived by calculating a net gravitational force of zero for an object inside a uniform-density spherical shell of width dr.)

Second, when we say that gravitational acceleration is constant, we mean that it is independent of the mass of the small object -- at a fixed distance from the earth's center (like near the surface) -- here we are ignoring neglegible smaller-order gravitaional variations due to, say, the earth being different from a perfect sphere, etc. The gravitational force acting any object however is of course proportional to the object's mass.

The value g=9.8m/s^2 comes from assuming some version of the earth's mean radius as the distance. So what you probably meant is as the distance from the earth's surface goes to 0 (r->r_0), the acceleration approaches a constant limit.

So really, the mass of the falling rock does not need to be considered, only the drag, which I'm not familiar in calculating, but that doesn't really matter, as I'd wager something small drags less than something big. In short, you're wrong.

Here, we've got to be really careful talking about things we don't know about. We can calculate the gravitational acceleration without knowing the mass, but as it turns out, once we calculate the drag, we have a force, and so to convert the drag force to an acceleration on the object, we have to divide by the mass, thus reintroducing this quantity into the calculation. Terminal velocity results when the two acceleration terms are equal and opposite:

drag acceleration F_drag/m = gravity g

Finally...
The parent poster is of course right, because the drag force F_drag is proportional to the object's velocity, with a proportionality constant depending on the surface area of the object (as well as another factor relating to how smooth or rough this surface is -- maybe sorta like a fractal dimension), and surface area is proportional to r^2 -- taking r now as the (average in some sense) radius of the object. Now, assuming that the object is roughly (macroscopically materially) homogeneous, we can assume it has a uniform density. Under this assumption, its mass is directly proportional to r^3 (for some suitable definition of 'average' radius). Under these circumstances, the drag acceleration is going to be proportional to drag force over mass, or r^2/r^3=1/r. Thus the original poster would seem to be completely right, that smaller obects will have a lower terminal velocity v:

g = a_drag = F_drag / m ~ v*r^2/r^3 ~ v/r
v ~ r*g

This might be verified by looking at a discussion of the Millikan experiment IIRC [although one quick reference suggests that here one wants a viscous force F_drag = c*v*r, (not r^2!) where the constant c=6*pi*eta is given by Stoke's Law, eta is the air's (?) viscosity, and flow conditions are "laminar" -- these seem like rather idealized conditions]. Note however, that even if the drag force is sometimes proportional to r and not r^2, that still the terminal velocity will be proportional to a positive power r (r^2 instead of r^1), and will still decrease (in this case even quicker) as does r.

Does anyone know whether drag forces are ever proportional to fractional powers of r (between 1 and 2), perhaps somehow related to a drag coefficient of fractal dimension (perhaps between 2 and 3)?? Just a wild thought...

Re:Terminal velocity

[Hal-9001]

s/Gravitational pull/Force/g and he's got it right. F = ma and all that...

JON KATZ IS DYING FROM AIDS. HE GOT IT FROM TACO.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man bites dog!

[Tablizer]

"In a related story, a man broke into a local astronomy museum and smashed the glass on the meteorite exhibits and started pounding the contents. Police said he was claiming retaliation for 'that poor little girl's foot'."

Promise you won't ask me to verify this story.

The dynosours are still pissed also, I bet.

...beaned by a metorite?

[EngMedic]

to the best of my knowledge (which most times isn't saying much at all)... the only instance of someone actually dying from a metorite was a courtier in French monarch Louis the 16th's court. apparently, he was playing croquet at the time... while this may be apocryphal (old-school UL started by supporters of the french revolution? ) it's still quite amusing

DOES THAT EMOTICON INDICATE YOU'RE A CHINAMAN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:JON KATZ IS DYING FROM AIDS. HE GOT IT FROM TAC

[Anonymous Coward]

I am curious how this person got all caps title and no content past the lameness filters? Some kind of Unicode translation trick?

Impossible

[Xavier000]

How is this possible? I remember reading about a meteorite that hit a dam in Australia a few years ago. It evaporated the lake, and when scientists sifted through the mud, the meteorite was only the size of a marble.

Remembering my high school physics, all things of the same mass will fall through the earth at the same speed, assuming they are aeorodynamically equivalent, beccause they have the same terminal velocity.

This girl's foot would be pulverised if it was hit by some space junk of that size that had just fallen through earth's atmosphere.
It seems obvious that this is not a meteorite at all. If it was, she would probably only have one leg. The only slim possibility I can imagine, is if the meteorite was so full of bubbles that it came to earth with the characteristics of foam. Unlikely given the photo they have shown.

Re:Impossible

[CyberBill]

A meteorite the size of a marble (lets put that at 10grams), moving at... lets say... 40,000km/hr (normal asteroids and stuff move at about 40,000km/hr).. So the total energy for that object (given by the equation: K = 1/2mv^2) would be:

8000000 joules.

WOW! Tons of energy huh!! Well, too bad that .01kg meteorite falls through like 100 miles of atmosphere, slowing it down to somewhere under 300km/hr. Giving it the energy of about 450joules... Which is just about enough to really sting when it hits you. Hey lets even say it would knock you unconcious, or possibly even kill you if it hit you right. But it wont evaporate an entire lake. Even if the meteorite had 8,000,000joules of energy, thats hardly enough to evaporate even a moderately good size lake. A single Megaton of energy (a moderately large nuclear bomb) is 4,000,000,000,000,000 joules!!!!!!! -CyberBill
Some info gotten at:
http://www.ss.astro.umd.edu/deepimpact/disczone/ch allenge.html

Re:Impossible

[Arandir]

This is not the first time a meteorite hit a person, and the person survived.

It depends on the mass of the meteorite. Too small and it burns up. Too big and it creates a tourist trap in Arizona. But at the right mass, it will hit like a rock dropped from an airplane. That's because the atmosphere will slow it down. It WILL hurt when it hits. But it's entirely possible that it can hit a girl's foot without removing it.

But what about your high school physic's teacher? He too busy reading physics texts and not enough time looking at the real world. In college we performed the classic physics experiment that no one ever performs: we dropped a watermelon and a grape from the top of a building. The standard physics text says that they will both hit at the same time. But the watermelon hit first! I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why...

Re:Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably air resistanc, or a gust of wind even, or something even simpler, like they weren't dropped at the same time.

Two objects, dropped from the same height, will be subject to the same acceleration due to gravity. Other forces may act on the objects differently, and add to, or detract from, that acceleration, but that's not the point of the experiment.

Re:Impossible

[arkane1234]

When was the last time a peice of iron that size weighing 10 grams?

Most of the damage done by meteorites that hit this planet is done by the actual impact and movement of air/dirt and rock at the impact site, etc. Take a look at the Barringer crater (In Winslow, Arizona, USA.. a little down the street from Flagstaff) for a practical example. Though it wasn't created with a marble-sized meteor, it is a great example of the typical epicenter activity. You can even create your own meteorite impact there via computer simulation :) It's quite entertaining, though inevitably that's all it is, a play thing.

Re:Impossible

[smash]

I'd say its due to air resistance.

Recall that the smaller an object is, the larger its surface area is in relation to its volume.

I would assume that grapes and watermelons have similar density and similar aerodynamic shape - factor in a larger surface area:volume on the grape... that means more drag for its mass, and hence, lower velocity.

I don't remember any scientific rule for this, but it seems logical to me....

Do the same experiment in a vacuum and I'm guessing the expected result (both hit at the same time) would occur.

smash.

Re:Impossible

[An Onerous Coward]

Another theory is that the watermelon has more water in it. According to Aristotle, water has a tendency towards downward motion, and earth moreso. Fire and air, on the other hand, have a tendency towards upward motion. Which, if I remember my philosophy right, is why the sun doesn't fall down on top of us and dish out literal "sunburns."

You wouldn't happen to remember if the grape was of either a fiery or an airy nature, would you? It could be very important to breathing new life into the classical framework of motion. It would be nice to give the ancients their due, and knock that upstart Newton down a few pegs.

Re:Impossible

[geekoid]

Due to the ablatince nature of a meteor moving through the earths atmosphere, there not real very hot at all.
most people hit be metiorites live, usually with no long standing injury.

there are many site that explain why this is possible, and how it happens.
I bet your teacher also believes water runs 'backwords' in the southern hemisphere to.

Re:Impossible

[Anonymous Cow herd]

A single Megaton of energy (a moderately large nuclear bomb)

I seem to remember that moderately large nuclear bombs are upwards of 10 megatons. The first nuclear bombs were around a megaton.

Re:Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

More like 20 Kilotons, it was a while before bombs in the megaton range were developed.

l337

[Anonymous Coward]

l337

There are no caps above, yet the lameness filter says there are too many. Since when are numbers caps? Fix it CowboyNeal!

15mins

[nevek]

The world has a story about a 14 year old North Yorkshire girl who was hit, by a camera, with 15 minutes of fame. Where's Andy Warhol when you need him?" The young Miss Carlton notes: "Do I really get to be on tv?", no doubt the City of York is where most ****** land.

God

[pompomtom]

Sue his representatives

Re:God

[Keith_Beef]

Sue his representatives

For vicarious liability.

She found it!

[Anonymous Coward]

She found that missing comma that caused my program to crash and get chewed out by the boss for days. I was wondering what happened to that comma.

Ballad of the Metorite

[GreyWolf3000]

*sung to an 80's monster ballad type melody*

[guy singing, resembling a slashdot poster]

Girl I know there's times, when we walk along.
That pain is at our feet--a pain so strong.
Maybe the greatest crime, if it all comes caving in.
Is forgetting 'bout the heat, when a metorite comes along.

[Girl singing]

Yeah believe me it hurts, but is it news worthy?
News for nerds and geeks, does this stuff really matter?
It hit me in the foot, but don't buy me a trophy.
I'm here 'cause for the last few weeks, they couldn't find anything better....

[Both together]

You know it hurts so bad, when no one really cares.
The story is quite sad, but to make everything fair,
Let news for masses do their job, and us get stories for nerds,
Us hackers who look kinda odd, and first-posts that end up third.

Re:JON KATZ IS DYING FROM AIDS. HE GOT IT FROM TAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Just wrap a tag around any of the text tags, like , , etc. in the comment box. The problem is that you can only use one tag per story. Once you use up, say, an italics tag, the lameness filter kicks in, and you have to use another text tag.

This girl WAS hit by a meteorite

[jukal]

Apparently, this is the only documented case in which a meteorite has hit someone. Now, that must hurt!

Re:This girl WAS hit by a meteorite

[Tablizer]

(* Apparently, this [positron-press.co.uk] is the only documented case in which a meteorite has hit someone. Now, that must hurt! *)

I don't mean to be cruel, for I could use the same advice, but if that lady in the hospital photo lost a some weight, it looks like the stone would have *missed* her rather large tummy.

The physics are simple: Bigger people are bigger targets.

Perhaps we should start sleeping standing up to present a smaller target profile area. Our foil hats will stay on better that way also.

Re:This girl WAS hit by a meteorite

[arkane1234]

Great, lets all live with paranoid pschizophrenia :)

If you worry about these types of things all your life, what type of life do you really have? You have more of a chance to fall unconscious when walking by the side of the road and getting your head run over by a passing pack of school children.

Re:This girl WAS hit by a meteorite

[tconnors]

I don't mean to be cruel, for I could use the same advice, but if that lady in the hospital photo lost a some weight, it looks like the stone would have *missed* her rather large tummy.

The physics are simple: Bigger people are bigger targets.

In high energy physics, a particle with a lot of mass tends to have more of something with call cross-section, analagous to a size you give a physical ball. So you are saying this woman is a high energy particle? Can I throw neutrons at her? Will they bounce back and hit me in the face, just like in Thompson scattering?

Re:This girl WAS hit by a meteorite

[Anonymous Coward]

*Ahem* See Rain of Iron and Ice by John Lewis. Regarding generalizations concerning fire-setting falls and possible fatalities, he states,

I have concluded that [these statements] might better agree with the eyewitness reports if they were changed as follows: [...] 'Only one person in recorded history who was struck by a meteorite was interviewed by a twentieth-century American reporter'; and 'Meteorites have never been observed to start a fire in the presence of a meteoriticist and a fire marshall.'"

Historical memory is short, especially in these days of media saturation. Much of the pooh-poohing of eyewitnesses from days of yore stems from the fact that the observers are usually rural peasant-types, often illiterate and superstitious, and are given no credit for being able to use their eyes properly.
As Lewis says, what someone observes is priceless (espec. after they're dead), but what their interpretation is is usually worthless.

Re:This girl WAS hit by a meteorite

[Anonymous Coward]

If you worry about these types of things all your life, what type of life do you really have?

Hey, we're geeks! A "life" is not something we actively persue anyhow.

l337

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot one

[DAldredge]

- /. went 24 hours with out reposting a story

Anthropemorphic bias

[Tablizer]

From the meteorite's perspective, it got hit by a fast-moving girl.

Imagine being a rock drifting thru space. (Don't tell my boss, but I do it all day).

Out of nowhere a big blue ball appears and keeps getting bigger and bigger until a human foot smacks you right in the keaster.

The daily newspaper for meteorites, The Rock Chronicles[1], right now probably has a story running titled, "Human Foot Hits Citizen".

[1] I don't know if they have "Rolling Stone" there.

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[Anonymous Coward]

From the meteorite's perspective...

Well you know what they say, "From the toilet's perspective, we are all just a bunch of assholes".

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[jrennie]

I don't buy it. It's one thing to be moving at a constant velocity, hit something, and say that the other thing hit it. That's fine. But, here, we're talking about some *serious* acceleration that is not indistinguishable between reference frames. It is *clear* that the asteroid accellerated toward the big, blue sphere-like object and hit an object standing on it's surface. However, the big, blue object is the one to blame for causing the asteroid to accelerate, so you could say that the big, blue object (and hence the object standing on its surface) deserved what it got!

Jason

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[Tablizer]

It is *clear* that the asteroid accellerated toward the big, blue sphere-like object and hit an object standing on it's surface.

The space rock would not "feel" the pull of the Earth. We only feel gravity because the surface is keeping us from reaching our "natural" excelleration. Or as Einstein would possibly say, the surface prevents us from "going with the flow" of the space-time-gravity distortion framework.

Further, technically both bodies (the Earth and the rock) *mutually* attract each other. It is just that the Earth has the bigger pull.

Further 2, it may not have been Earth's gravity that landed it there. It could have simply been headed for Earth regardless of gravity. Gravity is *not a prerequisite* for such collisions. It may increase the chances of it though.

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[jrennie]

The asteroid may not "feel" the pull of the earth, but an outside observer could scientifically determine that it was the object doing the accelerating, not the earth.

Uh. Yeah. The asteroid creates a whole 0.00000000001 m/s^2 pull. Very significant :-P

Jason

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[germinatoras]

The asteroid creates a whole 0.00000000001 m/s^2 pull. Very significant :-P

With my luck, that'll be just enough to knock the earth off-orbit and send us all hurlting into the sun. :)

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[freek_daddy]

That's some really excellent total nonsense you've got going there. I especially liked "natural" excelleration and space-time-gravity distortion framework.

I'm gonna guess - you watch a lot of Star Trek and take it easy on the physics books, right?

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[Anonymous Coward]

sulaaamm!

(this was not meant as a terrorist war-cry)

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[Tablizer]

(* That's some really excellent total nonsense you've got going there. I especially liked "natural" excelleration and space-time-gravity distortion framework. *)

It is not "nonsense". I just don't know how else to describe it without going into fat detail.

By "natural excelleration", I mean drifting with the pull of gravity. IOW, weightlessness. We feel the pull because the surface is pushing against that pull. But without being stopped by a surface, we would have no way to sense Earth's gravity.

My Einstein reference was to the fact that excelleration and gravity are indistinquishable from the observer if they can't look around. Einstein postulates that they are really one in the same.

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[Sloppy]

So that was the mysterious lurch that I felt the other day...

Re:Anthropemorphic bias

[Anonymous Coward]

"Humans are pretty rare, so the chances to get hit by one are astronomical!

So when you see him, get this guy to buy your next Rotto ticket.

heh heh

And now over to Basalt for the weather!"

Critical Failure

[doorbot.com]

She must have had a critical failure on her dodge roll.

Obviously the meteorite didn't disintegrate, so it couldn't have been going that fast... so did it just bounce off something like Bart's comet?

MOD YRSELF DOWN FUXX0R THAT SHIT IS +5 FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

York?

[main()]

> no doubt the City of York is where most Meteorites land.

What's the City of York got to do with anything?

Or are you under the false impression that North Yorkshire and York are the same?

Si

Re:York?

[Anonymous Coward]

Northallerton is only about a 20 minute drive away from York. If you are in Northallerton and want to avoid seeing the same people again and again at the local pubs you may drive or take a train to York. It is the nearest city.

no, you are not a rocket scientist.

[autopr0n]

but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND.

What about medium sized rocks, smartass?

Re:no, you are not a rocket scientist.

[kyletinsley]

but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND.

What about medium sized rocks, smartass?

Let's see if we can theorize what happens in the middle, given the two outer extremes. A) Small rock = completely destroyed in a ball of fire. B) Large rock = Makes big ball of fire, part of it survives & creates big explosion when it smacks into the ground, destroying other rocks along with itself...

Now you're suggesting that C) Medium-sized rock = no fireball, no explosion, no crater... just taps a girl on the foot and she picks it up and notices it's kinda hot... Yes, that makes absolute perfect sense, Mr. Spock.

Re:no, you are not a rocket scientist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some skepticism is in order judging from the story. 'Small rock falls on girls foot from above, therefore assumed to be a meteorite, possibly from mars.'

That would be interesting. But would still like to hear from someone with some expertice in meteorites.

Re:no, you are not a rocket scientist.

[Daetrin]

Or how bout, makes medium big ball of fire (when it was higher up in the atmosphere) and then lands on a girls foot? You're getting kinda caught up in that whole either/or thing. There's no magic size where below it a meteor completly disintigrates and above it it causes a giant crater :)

Re:no, you are not a rocket scientist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how bout, makes medium big ball of fire (when it was higher up in the atmosphere) and then lands on a girls foot? You're getting kinda caught up in that whole either/or thing. There's no magic size where below it a meteor completly disintigrates and above it it causes a giant crater :)

But aren't you then assuming that there is a "magic size" at which the meteor will neither burn up completely nor cause massive impact damage? I think his point was that there seems to be a scale of effects that falling rocks can go through, ranging from "complete disintegration", to "partial disintegration and holding onto enough kinetic energy to go through a house roof or a car or an entire layer of rock". But the 'rebuttal' to his argument is that there might be a "magic size" in which it doesn't turn into a fireball and destroys her foot and blows her family's car a hundred feet away, it just bounces off her shoe. Since there's no mention of even minor damage to the girl (not even a bruise!), I too find it rather suspect that the rock actually fell from space.

Re:no, you are not a rocket scientist.

[Daetrin]

But aren't you then assuming that there is a "magic size" at which the meteor will neither burn up completely nor cause massive impact damage?

Nope, not making that assumption at all. I'm assuming that there is a wide range of meteor sizes and speeds, both before and after entering the atmosphere. Terminal velocity for a rock that size is probably somewhere on the order of 10 - 50 mph, enough to hurt if it hit you, but probably not enough to do any serious damage (given it's small size)

Terminal velocity for a meteor large enough to make a crater is much higher. And because of it's larger mass it may also have not had time to bleed off enough energy to slow down to terminal velocity by the time it hits. Larger object with higher speed equals more damage. Smaller rock has lower speed, not much damage. Even smaller rock burns up completly and the dust gently floats to the ground and no one even notices.

Looking at the meteorites in scientific collections there seem to be quite a large number of them that are in that size range, large enough to survive entry, but not large enough to cause any real damamge.

I live in York

[Graspee_Leemoor]

I live in York, (North Yorkshire, England, UK), and the only reason I don't get harmlessly battered by objects of extraterrestrial origin all the time is because I am usually to be found hunched over my computer, coding, instead of outside in that rain of meteorites.

People who go outside tell me that using an umberella is sufficient to protect oneself from the onslaught.

graspee

Re:I live in York

[Anonymous Coward]

I too live in York - maybe it's a reference to a story that hit the local paper last year when a meteorite was thought to have come down near a woman walking her dog.

There as a deep hole in the pavement (=sidewalk) with smoke coming out of it. They got York university physics bods to come out and take a look, the police fenced the area off, TV crews came out (quite unusual for UK) etc. etc.

Turned out to be an electrical cable fault, which Yorkshire Electric dutifully repaired....

Rich.

Re:I live in York

[hatstandman]

I'm another York resident; I saw this covered on local news, apparently she said "If it's a meteorite, I'll sell it for as much as I can, and if it's not, I'll just stick it with my other interesting things on my shelf" - maybe she has a collection of other nearly-meteorites ? Or maybe it's just someone throwing strange brown rocks at her...

Better Odds?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you say the odds would be if you saw the meteorite coming and tried to get in the way? hmm..

"roof height"

[evilviper]

"I saw it fall from above roof height,"

Hmmmmmmmmm. *evil grin*

If you will excuse me, I need to get a bucket of volcanic rocks, and climb up on my neighbor's roof.

Re:"roof height"

[redcliffe]

Meteorites are easy to distinguish from terrestial rocks, and this one is consistant with being one. Maybe someone who already had it chucked it at her? Anyway, it was an easy way for me to get an article posted front page :-).

R0CK AND R0110V3R, BAYB3333!!

[Anonymous Coward]

K1SS F0R3V3R!!!!

Re:hmm

[Lucas Membrane]

Maybe a piece of an airplane engine. Shiny on 1 side, they say. Maybe that was Planet X and we were saved as it hit the earth and burned up.

Space Rock??

[teamhasnoi]

Or Poop on a stick?

Credibility

[digitaltraveller]

I'm getting far too cynical in my old age, but I just don't believe it. First, as the article pointed out, the odds are huge. I'd like to think this was a scientist teaching his daughter how easily the foolish media is manipulated. Eg. Like Joey Skaggs does. The meteorite in the picture appears to be about the size of her 14 year old thumb. She states: "I saw it fall from above roof height". We don't know her height, and the distance to the roof, so we can't calculate the arc tangent. Let's say she was staring into the sky with her head tilted at a 60 degrees angle upwards. (an odd angle for a head to be at). Also, her head was also staring in the CORRECT direction (360 degrees) and SPOTTED the meteorite, and still it hit her?
Hmmm. Kids do like to exaggerate when something happens to them. Possible, but astronomically unprobable.

In latest news.. /. is changing its name..

[marcushnk]

To the Inquirer

or maybe the rag..

either way.. its pretty lame stuff.

ROFL

[Anonymous Coward]

hehehe Fascinating...

Why no permanent foot damage?

[Jon Abbott]

Wouldn't this thing have easily pierced through her foot and kept going into the ground with some momentum to spare? I guess she could have been wearing steel-toed boots, but I seriously doubt it. I'm slightly skeptical of this, as it probably should have destroyed her foot.

Re:Why no permanent foot damage?

[Stuart Gibson]

Or, much more likely, it hit the ground and bounced against her foot, rather than a direct on-target hit.

Or, more likely still, it landed somewhere near her and she decided that being hit by a meteorite sounded a better story.

Or, most likely of all, even if this was a meterorite, it has been down here for some time and they suddenly decided, "Hey, you know what would be funny to tell the newspapers?"

Your choice...

Goblin

Re:Why no permanent foot damage?

[ahrenritter]

Is there any scientific backup to the common conception that these tiny meteorites are traveling at a higher than terminal velocity? I could drop a peanut sized pebble from ten miles up, and if it hit my foot, it wouldn't do anything more than bounce off...

Re:Why no permanent foot damage?

[ahrenritter]

So upon doing a little more research, the real question is how frequently meteorites of this size would have enough time for their inertia to bleed away to TV.

Re:Why no permanent foot damage?

[GigsVT]

Terminal velocity is not a constant, it depends on drag.

Re:Why no permanent foot damage?

[ahrenritter]

I wasn't meaning to indicate I thought TV was a constant like c or something. I was questioning whether the object was traveling faster than its TV would normally be at that moment in time.

News?

[mblumber]

Dog bites man: Not news.
Man bites dog: News.
Meteorite hits girl: Not news.
Girl falls from sky, hits meteorite: Now there's a story!

It came from Mars? I think otherwise.

[Anonymous Coward]

The girl commented that the stone was hot when she picked it up, and thought it might be from Mars. Well, no, I have another idea. See, two blocks away, some lame kid lit his friend's gas attack, and some flaming debris rocketed over to hit her on the foot.

Yes, it came from Uranus.

(*Had* to say that! :) )

Meteorite or not? (Re:hmm)

[tamnir]

A couple of years ago, a meteorite hit a house in Japan (article in Japanese). Went straight through the roof.

Now ok, the rock that hit that girl's foot is smaller, but it's still hard to believe it just bounced off her shoe...

Re:hmm

[guttentag]

BTW, here [nyrockman.com] is a picture of a car in NY that was hit by a 12.5-kg meteorite in 1995. Ouch!

Woah, and look what it did to the car's owner! He looks really messed up. Worse than the car.

Wow!

[Captain Large Face]

When I first read the subject line, I thought "woah, someone actually got wasted by an intergalatic rock". Then I find out some 14 year-old got hit by a rock the size of a peanut and we're all supposed to find that interesting?

Where's the interesting news?

Dateline: The Bizzaro World

[Alien Being]

August 24, 2002

A small girl fell up from Bizzaro today striking and obliterating a large meteor. Debris from the impact is expected to reach Earth sometime next week.

I'm not surprised one bit!

[SystematicPsycho]

This is going to sound like a bullshit story, but I was walking down my street one night on my way home when not too far from my house I saw a meteorite streak not to far in front of me (30-40 metres in the air) and land on a roof. Since I was the only one around I ran home before they would think I was pegging rocks at there roof.

Why would she...

[Anonymous Coward]

...even look up? I mean - why did she see the meteorite fall down when the first the she noticed was, that something fell on her foot.

I gotta admit that I don't scan the skies with my bare eyes just to check for any stuff falling on my sacred foot.

Somebody has to say it:

[evilviper]

Imagine getting hit by a beowoulf cluster of these...

Well, Bruce is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's Bruce Willis when you need him?

fuckin' pornstars :)

It's going 180 m/s when it hits the ground/girl.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireball/faqf.html#12

M O D P A R E N T U P

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my god if I were a mod that shit would be +5
you made me laugh out loud

What a let down

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping to see a picture of half a girl, with a nice crater in the ground, and gore everywhere. Instead, there is a picture of some stupid little 12 year old holding a piece of pumice, and trying to claim it is a meteorite. If it had been a proper meteorite, we'd have some great pictures. As it is, we've got some loser girl with a fake rock.

Re:hmm

[minghe]

As already replied, that is not the rock that hit the car. It was alot bigger.

The damage on the car seems to be about right for a 10 kg rock traveling at terminal velocity. And thats what happened. Any stone that isnt too big will eventually slow down in the athmosphere. And that isnt all that damn fast.

So no, the small pebble that hit the girl would not had trashed her foot totally. If it fell from space or from an airplane or a tall building (or shot from a smokestack) it would still have about the same speed when it hit her. Were she barefoot it might break a bone or two, but just as likely not.

And if she wore good boots it would indeed had just bounced off.

one sentence paragraphs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that noticed that *every* sentence was the beginning of a new paragraph? Some were even absurd:

"It is worth a lot to Siobhan.

"We will have it mounted in a glass presentation case so she can keep it for the rest of her life.

"After all it is not every day you get hit by a meteorite.

"The odds of winning the Lottery are better."

Is this a british thing? I've never seen such bad structure in an article from a *real* news reporting agency.

i'm just sorry for the rock

[vittal]

"Sometimes they have shallow depressions and cavities," he said.

"oh god, i'm millions of miles from home, have tooth decay, and am now being discussed on slashdot... i'm so depressed."

"`Meteroite' hits girl"

[Anonymous Coward]

The article headline was "`Meteroite' hits girl".

Perhaps it was knocked out of orbit by a `LASER'...

-- Terry

Nope

[wirefarm]

More men golf.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

That comes under the "too bull-headed to come in from storms" part.

What a goal!

[rEWDBOi]

God crosses the ball over to the other side..
This could have been the dropkick of the millenium.. Too bad Yorkshire doesn't have a decent football team (soccer, for you Americans). It doesn't, does it??

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[elijahb80]

interesting stuff, but I'm dissapointed: What kind of journalist lists 5 quotes in a row. It just doesn't read right.

The odds...

[Gabrill]

The odds for being hit by a meteorite much be very small indeed, but what are the odds for being able to smile about it afterwards?

Re:hmm

[psychofox]

Actually, it probably hurt a lot less than having the same rock thrown at you... It would hurt equivalently to having the same stone, dropped on you - There is a difference.

The stone would have reached its terminal velocity, as you have stated, much earlier in the upper atmosphere. I expected I could through such a stone much faster than its terminal velocity.

What's more important . . .

[shampster]

. . . is that if this poor girl got hit by the meteorite -- she should now 'own it' (IMHO). Meteorites are a very valuable commodity, and this wouldn't be the first time one has been snached up quickly by those who don't deserve. . .

She is possessed

[Anonymous Coward]

the meteorite carry evils

beware, end of the world is near as predicted in the bible

repent your sin to jesus christ your savior

I wonder...

[plaa]

In a newspaper here in Finland it said it fell at her feet, not that it actually hit her. I'd say it's quite probable it didn't hit her, but the reporter streched the story a bit to give it a better twing. When you read the article, it very quickly gets over the point of it actually hitting her.

Also (as mentioned in another comment) the point of it being from Mars is totally bogus. Probably the "expert" they interviewed mentioned that some meteorites can come from Mars, and the reporter immediately picked it up, saying "The stone may have come from Mars."

Re:I wonder...

[DanEsparza]

I completely agree.

Referring to the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy ...

Legend has it that if a penny fell from the top of the Empire State Building, by the time it hit the pavement it would be travelling at a speed fast enough to kill somebody, or at least put a big dent in his or her head. This would make sense from a scientific point of view, but what remains to be answered is whether or not the penny could still be spent at the local cornershop afterward. And, one might ask, what if it were bigger change, say a silver dollar, or fifty-pence? Then the person on the pavement, so the answer goes, would be able to buy a paper.

Re:I wonder...

[SpaceJunkie]

Which is a much more factually based, informative source than this artical has been. In fact I am a regular contributer to the H2G2. Long live H2g2. Long live the DNA legacy! That guy actually inspired me to read Dawkins- how about that....

layer

[Anonymous Coward]

"layer". I love it!

fake?

[SeanAhern]

There's a good chance that this might be a hoax.

Mrs. Hodges: "But mine was much bigger"

[Montezuma58]

About the only documented meteorite/human collision from 10 FUN THINGS TO DO IN AND AROUND SYLACAUGA

"In 1954, Mrs. Ann Hodges, who was napping on her couch, was awakened very suddenly when a meteorite penetrated her roof and struck her on the thigh. The Hodges or Sylacauga meteorite, which weighs 8.5 pounds and is 7 by 5 inches in diameter, can be viewed in replica form at the museum. The original is in the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Sylacauga is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records since this is the only case of a meteorite hitting a living person."

Althoug she was not hit directly. The meteorite bounced of some other junk in her house before striking her.

meteorite hunter

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember hearing stories about a meteorite hunter in Western Australia. The small bits of space rock end up scattered over the desert, and the way he distinguished the genuine thing from sheep dung was to bite them.

I don't believe it...

[dpbsmith]

Let's see if I've got this right:

No corroborating evidence at all except the word of the adolescent girl herself. Nobody else saw it. Nobody but she can testify that it was warm.

They say they "plan" to have the stone analyzed by scientists, but it hasn't happened yet.

Even the scientist couldn't prove that someone hadn't warmed up a meteorite and pitched it over the rooftops.

I have no doubt Charles Fort would put this in his newspaper clippings file, but the only thing that's remarkable about this to me is that the BBC would publish it.

I bet a nickel that there's never even any followup story reporting on any scientist's report on the meteorite. I can just see the family in their car on their way to the university and the embarrassed kid 'fesses up.

Re:I don't believe it...

[T-Punkt]

> Nobody but she can testify that it was warm.

Actually this is the #1 reason I don't think she was hit by this meteorite - it's a common missconception that meteorites are hot when they hit the earth. There's an FAZ article about common myths about meteorites.

The #2 reason: Even a small piece of iron/rock like this, falling from more than 100m height surely would break a girl's foot if it hits it.

My guess: She bought the meteorite via internet and maybe it fell on her foot when she opened the package...

Re:I don't believe it...

[elveu]

you're too distrusting. i mean it not really worth making this story up for just a bit of attention. it's not like they'll get endorsments or anythingm for jit. i do believe that iit is quite possible it's not a metiorite, lots of other things can fall from roof height but i doubt they made it up.

Re:I don't believe it...

[geekoid]

Some points:

It would be warm because the outside would be warm, however it would be cold inside. It disappates heat through an ablative process, but there will be a point where it will be hot, but not how enough to shed any outer material.

people have been hit be bigger meteorites and lived. In some caes with no more then a large bruise.

You could be right, and it is a fraud, but it could happen the way she described it.

I'll be cynical about corps, and Gov't, but I choose to believe some 14 year old girl. At least until my little girl is 14...

Sorry it was my late father's calculi

[Tuqui]

Sorry
I throw it from mother's house.
It's only my late father's Calculi.

Sorry Again. If it hit the girl.

York, City of Meteorites

[__davep]

no doubt the City of York is where most Meteorites land

Some people seem to think so. Sadly, such impacts generally turn out to have far more mundane explanations.

MOD THE GIMP DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

for being a gimp of course

Re:hmm

[Shimbo]

They are mostly iron, so they conduct heat well, and cool off fast in the upper atmosphere...

And she said it looked "rusty". Meteorites are black; they can't oxidize in space.

Presumably that it where the speculation that it may be Martian in origin originates. One might expect Mars crust to be both stony and oxidised. Martian meteorites are pretty rare though, so it makes the story more unlikely. It's barely possible though.

"Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven." -- Thomas Jefferson

Re:hmm

[Scooter]

hehe and she also said her name was Cowton - not Carlton - so who knows :P

Indeed

[Scooter]

I agree - it's the worst type of superficial repetitive "journalism" - just repeating the headline over and over with increasing numbers of filler words - the BBC should know better.

You kno what happens - they phone some guy in a University and repeatedly ask "could it have come from Mars?" "Well yeah - I guess" says the guy (thinking "it could have come from anywhere - I haven't seen it, have no idea of it;s composition, but I can't say no") Next thing, he's being quoted in some half arsed article as saying "it could have come from Mars"

You gotta laff at TV news programmes (it may be on a web site but the BBC is a TV outfit)- they never tell you anything but the obvious.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... When people shoot bullets up in the air (to celebrate, or whatever) then when the bullets return to earth they are actually going pretty fast, and can really injure people.

A lead bullet of course is more dense than a nickel or iron meteorite, but surely the difference is not that great.

Now, I'm just talking out of my ass here, but I suspect that either this is not a meteorite, or it bounced off of something before hitting the girl.

Bullshit

[t_allardyce]

I got hit by some bird-shit once. I wonder if she was actually hit by a peice of bull-shit - its quite common you know

ROFL

In other news...

[merlyn]

• "First time player wins the lottery"
• "The Cubs take the pennant"
• "The RIAA decides to back off on all future requests for digital rights management"
• "Microsoft calls it quits, gives up willingly to the DOJ"
• "Moderators create a new category for this post: brilliant"

I can remember...

[RobinH]

... back when I was in high school, there was a local story about a meteorite landing in the back yard of this guy in London, Ontario. They even interviewed a geologist from the local University of Western Ontario who said he was 75% certain it was a meteorite. Later he retracted his comment:

Blob no meteorite
A strange blob that an expert believed plummeted
from the heavens suddenly became less alien yesterday
after it was found to be a lump of asphalt covered
with paint. "I'm kind of embarrassed," said David
Dilon, a member of the University of Western
Ontario's geology department, who said he had been 75
percent certain the object was a meteorite.

Meteorite hits the Pope (w/pic!)

[Frogg]

This article reminded me of this, also photographed from this angle too.

To be honest, I'm surprised no one has already posted links to pics of this already! ..it simply needs to be shared!

Of course, it's not real! ..it's a wax-work. It was shown at an exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled 'Apocalypse' - but it has also been shown at other exhibitions, elsewhere in the world. Here's what The Guardian said about it:-

Maurizio Catellan's Pope has celluloid forebears, too, in this case the face-down prelate in Un chien Andalou, burdened with a piano containing a donkey's corpse. But the prostration of John Paul II is hardly so savage or surreal. The fake meteorite that has supposedly plunged through the ceiling - a hole has been engineered in the skylight - rests upon a waxwork with its vestments still in perfect order. The Pope has his eyes closed and frowns as if in prayer. He is down, but not out; indeed, he looks a sight more robust than the pontiff himself. Catellan has a genuine gift for tragi-comedy, but his latest piece makes no headway in either direction. It feels like a punchline without the joke. You can't get close to the Pope - he's yards away behind the barrier ropes. Crowds strain to see what's going on through the scrummage of shoulders. It's a tactical measure, consistent with the governing principle of this show, which is that you should always be aware that you're having the Apocalypse Experience.

You can read another article on this here (2nd article from bottom of page) although it looks to be a variation on the same theme.

Enjoy! (Sorry about the lack of bigger/better pictures)

Forgot this one...

[L-Wave]

The Great Slashdot Blackout =)

Bigger report tomorrow

[shippo]

There will be a larger report on Friday in Northallerton's weekly local newspaper, although it is likely to share the front cover with the story on the explosion at a pork-pie factory.

I'll post a link if the story appears on their site.

Hmmmm...

[pr0t3uS]

If she turns into the METEOR GIRL Hollywood will probably sue her for copyright violation.

Correction to the artist's name

[Frogg]

Actually, there are probably some better pictures out there if only I'd spelt the artist's name correctly (I took my spelling from the Guardian's article, fwiw).

Anyway, here's a Google search that might help.

<irrelavant-point>I live near North Allerton, N.Yorks</irrelavant-point>

Martian invasion? So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sit and watch while our earth bacteries kill them.

The stone may have come from Mars

[squaretorus]

Well... why are we always told these things 'may have come from mars'. It may also have come from Earth, or any other chunk of rock floating about out there.

Hey - it might have come from mars - it might be a fossilised martian poop!

Re:Ignorant Moron

[Squidgee]

Ok, what the hell?!

Does this seriously offend anyone else? Can IPs be banned on /.? If so..this one should be.

This seriously pisses me off. Fucking moronic skinhead bastards.

Re:hmm

[Xaoswolf]

"Sometimes they have shallow depressions and cavities," he said.

Was that about the rocks or the victims?
That car sure looks like it had a nice new cavity, I sure want to see her foot.

Fireball

[wiredog]

I've seen a couple of those. From what I've read a meteorite large enough to appear that size is actually about the size of a soccer ball.

Re:Fireball

[Reziac]

Likely so. I imagine most of the visible "disk" was actually burning gassified magnesium, not solid matter. It was bright enough to cause a brief bit of flash blindness, even thru closed eyelids!!

I've since seen a couple more myself, but nothing quite so spectacular. Probably the only reason this one didn't make the news is that it came along at 4am west coast time, and was out over the ocean so probably not widely visible. I only saw it because I got home real late (er, early) and was wandering down to the road to pick up the morning paper.

Oi mate!!!

[MaxVolume]

That looks like the turds we were throwing off the trolly after the football match. Give em back ere, eh love?

Re:hmm

[jdavidb]

Yeah, I'm thinking an object of that size hitting you after falling through the entire atmosphere ought to have been going fast enough to go right through her foot. Every time I've visited the deep canyons of the western United States, I've seen warnings all over the place not to throw even small rocks over the edge, as they will be going fast enough by the time they reach the bottom to seriously injure someone. Think about the size of a bullet and then contemplate that this rock should have been moving even faster than that.

-9.80665 m/s^2: it's not just a good idea, it's the law! :)

10 to 1 we never see a follow-up, and never know.

MOD PARENT UP! (en tea)

[Anonymous Coward]

Conflict with the BBC story

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I was listening to NPR this morning, and they interviewed the girl by phone, and on the phone she said that once they get it authenticated they plan to sell it at a London auction because it's "very valuable".

The story on the BBC says they intend to put it in a glass case and keep it forever.

Wonder how it will really turn out...

Seriously confused here...

[cswiii]

"Sometimes they have shallow depressions and cavities," he said.

Now, are we talking about the British or the meteorites? ;)

Re:Seriously confused here...

[davinciII]

No, they said sometimes. It obvious it's the meteorite ;-)

Meteor Girl

[eric6]

am i the only one who hoped that she would rise from the smoldering crater with super-powers, don a colorful costume, and fight crime?

Odds of.. what's your name? huh?

[Vortran]

Well, things would be a damn sight better for the lass if she had won the lottery instead. Heck, if something with a 1:10^9 probability happened to me, I'd sure hope it was more fortuitious than getting hit by a rock!

Also, how does one pronounce "Sibhan"? Not exactly the British-looking name I might expect from a Yorkshire resident.

Vortran out

Re:The text of the article... in case of /. Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of journalist lists 5 quotes in a row.
Think of it as one quote with five sentences in it, if that makes it easier.

seems like a hoax

[suprnova]

Even the "expert opinions" they have in the article sound downright silly:

"It could be billions of years old and come from the earliest formation of the solar system," he told the Daily Mail newspaper.

That sounds like something an 8 yr. old says when he finds something that looks like a piece of bone when he's trying to "dig to China" with a spoon.

It was probably expelled from a factory smokestack or something...hence the iron, and heat...ridiculous what some people will do for recognition...

So, is she lucky?

[cvd6262]

I remember when I lived in California, I read a newspaper article about a girl who was sitting in a church listening to her mom practice the organ.

A bullet was fired during a gang fight two blocks away. It traveled down the streen, through the large oak door of the chapel, and hit the girl in the shoulder, popping it out of joint, but not penetrating the skin.

The newspaper called her lucky.

I dunno, but if a gunshot I didn't even travels two blocks and then hits me, or (to stay on topic) a space rock hits me in the foot, I would not consider myself lucky.

Re:So, is she lucky?

[Garridan]

I'd lose some toes for that! I'm fascinated by meteorites (all rocks, really... but meteorites are more interesting by a few orders of magnitude)... I've never heard of anybody being struck by a meteorite in recorded history! If one just fell out of the sky and landed on my foot, I'd be too happy to notice the pain!

Meteorites fetch quite the premium... over $2000/g for some!

it was "hot"?

[Frederic54]

If it has been a icy rock block, I thought it would be cold when you touch it, no?

Re:it was "hot"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a complete moron?

Ever hear of a little thing called the atmosphere? The friction from a fast-moving object entering the atmosphere creates heat. Why do you think 'shooting stars' glow? Because they're superheated and/or burning up from their trip through the atmosphere! /me shakes head in disgust.

Re:THAT *WOULD* HAPPEN TO A BRIT. DUMBASSES.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have heard the interview on NPR this morning.

Follow-Up Story

[dbretton]

After exetensive laboratory examination, the meteorite rock was determined to actually be a tooth which had fallen out of her father's mouth.

Re:hmm

[Sj0]

It's possible this isn't a meteorite. It would have hurt (but probably not much more than having the same rock thrown at you)

Yeah...A rock thrown at you at terminal velocity!

Ouch. I saw the headline, and thought "Poor girl. If she lived, it probably went clean through her foot."

No. You're right about one thing; it's likely not an actual meteorite. Maybe someone threw a rock at her from the safety of behind a house, and missed somewhat?

depends on size

[mikeee]

Drag is proportinal to surface area (size^2) and to velocity squared, and mass is proportinal to volume (size^3). Terminal velocity is the speed where weight equals drag.

So to a first approximation, terminal velocity is proportinal to sqrt(length). Small objects fall slowly. Quadruple size to double terminal velocity.

Now, when you start losing size based on some function of speed it gets tricky, but if a meteor melts down to a small rock a few thousand feet up it won't be going fast enough to do much before it hits the ground. The interesting question is how it could get so small when it should have slowed down before then (just momentum??).

hot in a different way?

[dacarr]

Never mind whatever heat there was involved with that (perhaps it was an exploded brick?), but if that was a meteorite indeed, would there be concerns for radiation?

Poor kid...

[KC7GR]

She probably made the mistake of trying one of the tricks from this list I wrote up a couple of years back.

TOP TEN WAYS TO ATTRACT AN ASTEROID

10). A horseshoe magnet about the size of the moon, hooked up to an equally large Tesla coil.

9). Find an asteroid slightly smaller than the one you want to attract. Equip it with bikini briefs, a good tan, and a wonder-bra that would turn Playtex green with envy. Place it in geostationary orbit above your desired target zone, and wait.

8). Lay down a trail of mineral-rich ice crystals from low orbit to the target spot. Hey, asteroids have to eat like anything else...

7). Locate an asteroid in a bad mood. Call it things like "half-rate pebble" and "quartz queer." Duck behind the far side of the planet, and wait.

6). Announce a casting call for the next Bruce Willis space movie.

5). Have at least three Nobel prize-winning scientists announce simultaneously that there's no way any asteroid will ever hit the planet directly. Murphy will do the rest.

4). We have whistles that only dogs can hear. How hard could asteroid whistles be to do?

3). Brew a fresh pot of Columbian Lava. Works every time, but don't tell Juan Valdez (or his burro).

2). Install a 'rock'ing chair at the desired location. Asteroids need a place to rest after dashing all over the solar system.

And the number one asteroid attractant...

1). Boost forty-two thousand metric tons of dinosaur remains into orbit. Attach a large sign that says "HA! Missed the first time!"

(There go my karma points...)

Re:Poor kid...

[sinister minister si]

Question: Reguardless of the size of the stone, had it fallen from space, it would have built up enough speed to reach terminal velocity before hitting earth. Do you really think a 14 year old's foot is capable of withstanding say, 2 pounds of iron, falling at 160+ mph? Wouldn't her foot be obliterated? /me smells a rat.

Re:Poor kid...

[KC7GR]

Why do you think I had trouble taking the report seriously? ;-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

BULLSH*T!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if I get flamebaited into hell....

Your link is incorrect. The information is bogus:"


Yes, I personally am involved in it. Lottery ping-pong balls have a small valve, like a basketball or soccer ball, only it's very tiny, and nearly invisible. We use a hypodermic needle to inject heavier-than-air gasses such as radon into the balls we don't want to come up. At first, we tried helium in the ones we did want to rise, but they jumped up so quickly that it was obvious. Lotteries are raking in much more than if the games were honest, and people don't know they have literally no chance!"

Umm... I'm no scientist, but RADON is a poisionous gas that is dangerous to humans. Had they really been using "heavier than air" gases they should've considered something that doesn't kill the person "injecting" the balls.

Re:BULLSH*T!!

[shlybluz]

Ummmmm...I think someone needs to catch the clue train. The story is a spoof..a parody...total fiction.

Re:BULLSH*T!!

[macdaddy357]

Thank you for defending the lottery from troublemakers. The truth is that people do win every day! Send me $200, and I will tell you what you have won!

Re:BULLSH*T!!

[uncoveror]

Thank you for your critique of the lottery article, and here is my response Have a nice day! :)

shogun...

[forehead]

Karma, neh?

-PS For those who haven't read the book.... First off, that is not /. karma I'm refering to. Second, go pick up a copy. You'll be glad you did.

Re:hmm

[Reductionist]

Most likely air resistance due to the density and shape of the rock resulted in a relatively low terminal velocity, which would explain why it didn't go through her shoe into her foot. The girl also claimed that she "saw it fall from above roof height", which is very telling as it means the velocity was slow enough that the object could be easily seen.

Ever heard the urban legend about how a penny falling off the top of the Empire State building could kill someone if it landed on their head?

Believe it or not a penny has a terminal velocity somewhere between that of a ping pong ball and a basketball, and while it would certainlly sting if it hit you on the head, its highly unlikely it would kill you.

The Penny Problem
http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~macklem/paper. html

Profit

[Anonymous Coward]

This abuse of the "??? Profit!!!" joke has gone on long enough. Your post is not funny, and misses the essence of "??? Profit!!!". You can't just just put any stupidity in front of "??? Profit!!!" and expect it to suddenly turn into a funny joke.

I don't know what is more disappointing: that bad jokes like this get written, or that they somehow attract "funny" moderations. I always thought humor transcended time and trendiness, and that it was one thing that would never go out of style. I was wrong.

Re:Profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of naked and petrified Natalie Portmans pouring hot grits on all your penis bird are belong to us for $50. Priceless!

Beginners Guide to Slashdot Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Ensure your head is lodged FIRMLY in your ass
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Another meteorite story

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/29/10305080 98806.html

Speculation ?

[Edrick]

I see alot of skepticism as to whether the rock was a real meteorite or not and a lot of justifications that are just plain silly.

The idea that a meteorite has to make a big smoking hole in the ground is stuck in our minds through tv and movies. A small meteorite has a small terminal velocity (compared to a hulking big rock) and won't plow into the earth at amazing velocities, killing all in it's path

Did the thing hit her foot or not? who knows...it could easily ricocheted off another object first...it was going off for tests, and if it is real we'll know soon enough.

Meteorites are not that rare, especially in the tail wake of a major meteor shower, it's just most go unnoticed as the probability of whacking a person, or even a noticeable man-made structure is rather low.

As for how the meteorite looks, there are many types of rocks that can come from space; not all are iron based, and entry into the atmosphere can alter their look significantly.

There is no reason NOT to believe this is real, unless the rock gets analyzed and is found to be fake, which I honestly don't think is very likely.

I am somewhat surprised that more museums and such have not bid on the rock, as space materials tend to fetch a hefty priec tag.

Who'd deserve it?

[mmol_6453]

this wouldn't be the first time one has been snached up quickly by those who don't deserve. . .

Who'd deserve it? It's not like anyone did anything to earn it. Maybe a rain-dance gone bad, but I doubt it. ;)

Re:Who'd deserve it?

[Daetrin]

Maybe a rain-dance gone bad, but I doubt it. ;)

It must be this guy, and i can see why he's retiring if his rain dances have gotten that far out of whack :)

Re:Who'd deserve it?

[yuri benjamin]

About time that git retired. I live in Christchurch and after hearing the same rant everytime I walk thru the square over several years the novelty wears off.

Neighbor kid with a slingshot?

[Tommy_S]

My guess is an 11 year old boy a couple houses away launching rocks into the air with a "wrist rocket" slingshot. Its quite fun actually, the heights you can obtain with those things are fantastic. Particularly if you use the red tapered bands that are designed for extra distance, they really work.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Meteorites are black simply because of the fusion crust that forms while the object passes through the atmosphere. This looks like just a rock. As for what these "scientists" say about the rock, how the hell do they know, without doing some tests? Shit, BBC probably interviewed them, didn't get anything worthwhile, and took this one tiny, offhand comment and made it the whole quote. I like the factory theory, it almost looks like the pumice that's put in propane grills.

Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the first time in a long time I've seen an appropriate negative moderation...

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of 14 year old girls from England, whatever happened to that girl with the gigantic tongue?

Whoops!

[Skip666Kent]

Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel.

BZZZT! Nice try. You lose. Thankyou for playing.

Re:Whoops!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called ablation, which is "...the loss of mass from the surface of the meteoroid by vaporization or as molten droplets." The chunk that hits the ground is always cool, no matter how firey it looks in the sky.

He's right

[Anonymous Coward]

Meteorites are COLD when they hit the ground. Poor white attention-seeking trash would believe them to be hot, however, "'Cause that's how they are in all them monster 'n alien movies! Everybody knows meteorites is hot ya dufus! Hyuk hyuk! Boy are eeyewww dumb!"

(or the trashy Brit equivalent)

'Huh?' is F*cking-A Right

[Skip666Kent]

This family's claim is such obvious bullsh*t.

Repeat after me:

Meteorites are cold when they hit the ground.
Meteorites are cold when they hit the ground.
Meteorites are cold when they hit the ground.
Meteorites are cold when they hit the ground.
Meteorites are cold when they hit the ground.

And the bits about a scientist saying it could be from Mars clearly indicates that the speaker in question is hardly a scientist. I'm being unfair here. More likely, to his credit, it's probably a case of a BBC reporter saying "Do you think it came from Mars?", to which the scientist probably said "Well, it's not very likely, and there's no indication whatsoever that that's the case, but...", to which our reporter adds, "But is IS possible, isn't it? It COULD be from Mars, right?" and so on. Nauseating.

Golf & Lightning

[goldspider]

"More men golf."

There's an easy way to avoid getting struck (stricken?) by lightning when on a golf course. Just keep a 2-iron in your bag. When a thunderstorm interrupts your game, take out the 2-iron and hold it up high, because it is rumored that not even God himself can hit a 2-iron.

And the effect of the string?

[zlexiss]

A penny isn't that heavy compared to the string it was hanging from. Since a piece of string likely has a very low terminal velocity, the wind blowing the string back probably caused Maxim's test to err well on the low side. It's also possible that the penny was hung from the string in a position where it could not settle into it's most aerodynamic profile.

For comparison, raindrops fall about 30 mph.

How to get your post +5 funny on Slashdot

[Daetrin]

1. Make up some stupid list.
2. Add one more item that just says "???"
3. Add one more item that just says "Profit"
4. ???
5. Modded up

The stone could have come from Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University.

"It could be billions of years old and come from the earliest formation of the solar system," he told the Daily Mail newspaper. "I really don't know anything about space" .......

It more likely could have come from URANUS

no its not

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

You're an idiot too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop mixing newtonian and quantum mechanics and shut the fuck up. What the fuck is "excelleration" anyways?

Re:You're an idiot too.

[Tablizer]

Quantum mechanics? I thot QM has yet to merge with the relativity stuff. I suppose you are right in that I did not have to bring relatively into the mix. Me bad.

What the fuck is "excelleration"

It is when a company tries to do everything with MS-Excel. Happy now?

Shit happens...

[Chemical Serenity]

Guy I know was walking on 41st street in brooklyn a little while ago... apparently some big ass building beam fell off the building and pancaked a worker not more than 20 feet from him.

Life has stuff like that. If you think too deeply about these things all the time, you'll end up depressed, paranoid, and indoors all the time.

Kinda like most slashdot posters. Hmmmm...

Re:Martian invasion? So what?

[Daetrin]

Ah! You have failed to see the insidious nature of their newest invasion! Rocks don't get sick! :)

Re:hmm

[Ozymandias_KoK]

There's no need to make fun of Bobcat Goldthwaite. Show some manners.

Re:hmm

[Mad Marlin]

Woah, and look what it did to the car's owner! He looks really messed up. Worse than the car.

Actually, that guy isn't the car's owner, but rather "meteorite expert" Ray Meyer. Since he is listed as "meteorite expert Ray Meyer" instead of "Ray Meyer, Ph.D., astro-geologist" I suspect that he is just some moron who likes space rocks.

It's total bs Read why.

[BoomerSooner]

Okay I'm listening to NPR on the way to work this morning and I hear an interview with the girl. She says "I was just standing there and got hit on the foot with this meteor, so I bent down and picked it up."

Okay let me be the 1000th person to screem BULLSHIT. First off a fucking meteor would be a tad hot to the touch and second off she would have heard it like an incoming bomb so it's unlikely that she would be just standing still, it's more likely she would be looking around for the source of the sound (like when a jet flies buy and you look for it).

Unbelieveable what makes news now days.

Re:It's total bs Read why.

[mackstann]

Okay let me be the 1000th person to screem BULLSHIT. First off a fucking meteor would be a tad hot to the touch

why do you say that? you think charcoal-like rock the size of, say, a marble, would hold its heat very well after falling through several miles of 50-80 degree F air? the thing will come into the atmosphere at perhaps thousands of miles per hour, hit the atmosphere, heat up, slow down, reach terminal velocity and then begin to cool down and keep on truckin along till it hits earth (or a girls foot)

and second off she would have heard it like an incoming bomb

since when are all meteorites the size of a car?

Re:It's total bs Read why.

[Anonymous Coward]

> She says "I was just standing there and got hit on
> the foot with this meteor, so I bent down and
> picked it up."

And all the foot fetish guys are thinking, "Gee, 14. She's physiologically mature. Why couldn't they give us a foot shot of where it hit?"

Meanwhile, in other news....

[Nerull]

(here goes what little Karma i have...)

The spaceship 'Heart of Gold' was sighted somewhere near The Moon earlier today.

(You need to have read Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, and remember the Infinate Improbability Drive to get it, and if you do, its not funny anyway, so your not missing anything by not getting it.)

Hot Grits anyone

[hippo]

If I'd noticed a hot grit falling from the sky I would have got my trousers undone in readiness.

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in County Durham last weekend (the next county north from Yorkshire). The headline in the Northern Echo was "Dog bites girl", I kid you not.

I call ...

[g0bshiTe]

BULLxxxx !!!

The Story Is A Lie and Here's Why

[Skip666Kent]

The girl claimed the rock was hot when she picked it up. This is what a Spielberg-fed child would think a fresh-fallen meteorite would feel like, but she's wrong, end of story. As soon as a meteorite hits the ground it's cold, regardless of how fiery it's display may have been on the way down.

Look up 'ablation' in your favourite astronomical text.

Numb-nuts.