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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.
like nasa? or fcc? or riaa?
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
Dismantle globally, renew locally.
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".
My other first post is car post.
In case the BBC gets slashdotted? Um, I think they can probably handle the traffic.
My deviantArt site
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.
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Now thats a first for the internet. Someone asking for more hair on a 14 year old!! ;)
"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...
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.
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.
My deviantArt site
...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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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? .
/. this guy's server and kill some asteroids.G ames/game%20 asteroid%20shower.htm
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,
http://www.brudirect.com/LighterSide/
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
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.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
You know you're in trouble when the most exciting subheading you can come up with is "shiny." Oooh, shiny. Jebus.
My deviantArt site
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!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I wonder if
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.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
(* 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.
Table-ized A.I.
I would have to disagree, the girl did nothing to cause her situation, this guy is a darwin award waiting to happen....
No, I don't know what he's holding but the meteorite that hit that car weighed close to 30 pounds (12.5 kg).
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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...
sig fault
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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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
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
"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.
Table-ized A.I.
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?
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.
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...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
Apparently, this is the only documented case in which a meteorite has hit someone. Now, that must hurt!
It wasn't even the size of her hand! Come on, Slashdot!
:-P
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!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Or Poop on a stick?
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.
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.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
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!
Anyone who posts about bad moderation are themselves off-topic and should be moderated accordingly.
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?
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.
Imagine getting hit by a beowoulf cluster of these...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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?"
... rice, rice, gravy
More men golf.
-- My Weblog.
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."
I doubt, therefore I may be.
There's a good chance that this might be a hoax.
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.
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.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Some people seem to think so. Sadly, such impacts generally turn out to have far more mundane explanations.
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
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.
"If it had been one of our modern trains he would certainly have been killed."
Fairly good odds on surviving, then!
j.
Absit Invidia
... 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.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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.
Xaotik Designs
If she turns into the METEOR GIRL Hollywood will probably sue her for copyright violation.
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!
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.
Xaotik Designs
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
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...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
"Sometimes they have shallow depressions and cavities," he said.
;)
Now, are we talking about the British or the meteorites?
Unlikely things are happening to her, but that doesn't mean she would win the lottery, after all, the lottery is rigged.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
After exetensive laboratory examination, the meteorite rock was determined to actually be a tooth which had fallen out of her father's mouth.
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?
It's been a long time.
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??).
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...)
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
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.
What's this Submit thingy do?
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel.
BZZZT! Nice try. You lose. Thankyou for playing.
**>>BELCH
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.
**>>BELCH
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Heretic! This is from the BBC, not some US news outlet. How dare you question it.
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.
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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 :-).
Ah! You have failed to see the insidious nature of their newest invasion! Rocks don't get sick! :)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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?
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Here is my response to my illiterate anonymous coward critic.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Thank you for your critique of the lottery article, and here is my response Have a nice day! :)
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.
**>>BELCH
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.
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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.
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