Slashdot Mirror
22lb Ice Blocks From the Sky
cavedwler writes "An article http://www.msnbc.com/news/814100.asp?0dm=-23ET over on MSNBC has an interesting writeup about large ice blocks forming in the upper atmosphere on CLEAR days. Pretty interesting read." The article talks about how this could be a harbinger of massive climactic change. Either way, I'd prefer to not have one of these things smack into my house.
I scream!
You scream!
We all scream for ice-- SPLAT!
If you post it, they will read.
"But geologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle told the same publication ..."
Somehow I think that the guy from Colorado should back off, seeing as someone from Washington would be much more familiar with rain.
got standards? --- http://www.w3.org/
I was swirling it above Spain trying to look down Xui Xuis top.
Sincerely,
--Galacticus
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
The ice in Spain falls mainly on your windshield.
Anybody contacted Taco Bell yet?
Hey hey, put that chunk of ice away *ducks*
A quick look on mathsci.net shows other papers that they have published:
"Lake Superior: Gosh it sure is a lot of water," Journal of Hydrologic modeling.
GRRRRR!!!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Jesus [...] has spent the last two and a half years investigating so-called megacryometeors
Cut the guy some slack, you think it's easy being the son of God?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
What's with the dramatic pauses? I was expecting a violin crash after he uttered "Iberian rain".
Back to the topic, what are we to glean from such a shallow article from an entertainment company? Can we get an article from a scientific journal next time? Is this really a new phenomenon, or is it that accounts of ice falling from the sky are discounted? After all, you can't expect the evidence to last very long on a balmy summer day...
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
Don't they get sick of using the same template? To wit:
"An article over at [some news site] has an article about [some subject]. Pretty interesting read. They talk about [cut n paste something from article]. Either way, [say something stupidly obvious]."
Sorry. It's monday.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I'm not a religious man, but you ever get nailed by a 30kg block of ice falling from a clear sky, you can be pretty sure God was trying to tell you something.
MIR is no longer in orbit, it was brought down in March of 2001. Remember? Fiery blaze over the South Pacific? Free tacos for every American?
The article talks about hail, but they fail to
mention that hail ONLY comes from thunderstorms.
Just like tornadoes ONLY come from thunderstorms.
And almost all lighting comes from, you guessed it,
thunderstorms. They also fail to talk about the
freezing level. That's how a thunderstorm becomes
a thunderstorm. A cumulus cloud that's growing
upwards because of vorticity (air rising fast)
grows past the freezing level. The top of the
cloud and the bottom of the cloud get different
charges and blammo, you have a big floating battery in the
sky. The hail forms because there are rapidly
moving columns of air moving up and down
in the cloud and water trapped in that column
gets frozen, recoated with water, frozen again,
etc.
The ice clouds he's talking about are
cirrus clouds of some kind. That's basically
any cloud made up of super tiny ice crystals
because they are above the freezing level.
a VERY VERY rare type of cloud is called
cirrocumulus. This is ice crystal clouds in
the shape of the puffy white clouds called
cumulus that sometimes turn into thunderstorms.
The reason these clouds are so rare is because
they are unbelievably heavy. It takes an
incredible amount of 'vorticity' to keep
them up there, and they don't last long.
If you ever see very high puffy cottonball
looking clouds, there's a great chance you'll
have a thunderstorm soon (24-48 hours) because
vorticity (air rising fast) is one of the major
things needed. There is NO WAY upper atmosphere
vorticity is going to hold water in the air
long enough for it to weigh 10 friggin pounds.
There is no way that ice clouds would clump
together and form ice. There is simply no force
there to do that work. You might get a ball of
something more like snow, but definitely not
ice. I'd be more willing to bet some smartass
with a catapult is having fun at the ice factory.
If they said this was related to thunderstorm
activity, I might buy it. But on a clear day?
No way.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
It has started:
as heavy as a talent [between fifty and sixty pounds],
of immense size, fell from the sky on the people;
and men blasphemed God for the plague of the hail,
so very great was [the torture] of that plague.
(Revelation 16:21)
Trust me; Fundamentalist sermons will be referring to this story for a long time to come.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it'll melt. Glad I could be of assistance.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Just get everyone to run dual proccie Itanium2's. The things will melt before they get within a 1000ft of any suitably equipped home.
Allegedly, her insurance company balked and said that her policy - which included everything from fire and flooding to sinkholes - did not cover Acts of God. Clearly, a meteor hurtling through the atmosphere to striker her house was an Act of God. However, the company ultimately paid, bowing to public pressure.
Ran keywords against google, but couldn't find a reference - so it's probably bullshit.
Yeah, I heard this one before. And the big bad wolf is going to come eat us all, right? You go hide in your cave. OK, see you later. Have fun. What the hell is--
::BONK!::
If you were to Read The Fucking Article right now, you--like the rest of us--would realize what a dumbass you sound like. Too bad whomever modded you up also didn't RTFA.
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
There was a run of just that sort of thing in the 1970s.
The chemical toilets on airplanes are emptied by connecting a big hose to a fitting on the bottom of the airplane, opening its valve, and pumping the contents out. The valve has a rubber seal, and the toilets occasionally collect small metal objects -- jewelry, coins, keyrings, OJ's knife and so forth -- which can damage the seal on the way out.
So once in a while the seal springs a leak, and since the airplane is pressurized in flight by as much as 8 pounds per square inch, a lot of the water can leak out. At jet cruising altitudes it immediately freezes, and a ball of ice collects on the outside of the airplane. Then when it lets down into warmer air, the ice gets dislodged and, well, bombs away.
After three or four of these incidents over a couple of years, the industry worked out some design changes and inspection requirements that seem to have pretty well stopped it. But if one hits your property, you should immediately note the time and location, put the biggest chunk in a baggie, and stick it in your freezer for proof. You can count on a rather nice settlement from the airline, especially if keeping it quiet is part of the deal.
rj
Yup, hasn't read the article and neither have the people who modded it up.
Kudos.
for me is not whether or not ice can form. Of course it can form. The question in my mind is what kind of wind can sustain such a large glob?
Traditional hailstones form in the updrafts of thunderstorms--the more forceful the updraft, the larger the hailstones. This begs the question of what kind of wind is keeping these things aloft and allowing them to form. The answer could be easily found in a wind tunnel. What you need to know is the terminal velocity of these ice "blocks". I assume they are not actually blocks. That would just be too wierd.
Perhaps, there is some kind of ice structure that forms and has a very low terminal velocity... ice parachutes with thick centers? Then, as it falls through the atmosphere whatever it is that reduces the terminal velocity melts, leaving the "payload".
Also, is there any correlation between these things and anything else (like contrails?). If there is, then maybe we could use doppler RADAR to look for clear-air updrafts, and a telescope to view these things as they form. Of course, maybe these things are highly localized--little tornados in the upper atmosphere... maybe they are smaller than the resolution of the RADAR.
At any rate, I just hope these things stay away from my head.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I believe it was nuclear warefare. If you read the verses, you find people's skin rotting( sign of radiation sickness) and big fires. Hydrogen bombs typically blow air so high into the atmosphere that the nuclear winds compress and condense into ice and fall back to earth. This was documented numerous times during testing at the Atoll reefs.
http://saveie6.com/
Could you make it a little more obvious that you didn't read the article?
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
It Melts.
I have seen one of these things. Last Spring I was outside doing yard work when I head a loud thunk. I walk over to where the noise came from and there was a LARGE ball of ice about the size of a basketball. The odd thing was, it was a clear day. I'm glad to finally know it wasn't just God trying to smite me or something. :-)
Keep Austin Weird!
I see lots of people asking basic questions such as "What about...?" and "What if...?" and "How come...?" Come on people, get past the popsci article and go straight to the source from the guy himself.
Da Blog
"And huge hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, came down from heaven upon men; and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, because its plague was extremely severe." Revelation 16:21
i will be outside holding up a large bucket of cointreau
:wq
From his website:
Martinez-Frias has also published around 130 articles in scientific and technical publications (mainly specialised in Earth Sciences -- Geology, Economic Geology, Mineralium Deposita, Computer and Geoscience, Neues Jahrbuch fur Mineralogy, Geotimes, GeoMarine Letters, Episodes, Geological Magazine, Applied Geochemistry, Journal of Chromatography, AMBIO, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, Meteoritics and Planetary Science, etc.), in high profile multidisciplinary publications (Nature), high prestige international books (Springer-Verlag, Geological Society) in popular magazines, (Mundo Cientifico, Fronteras de la Ciencia y la Tecnología) and in the Scientific supplements of national newspapers (ie El Pais, El Mundo, ABC).
Martinez-Frias is the author of the book "Sulfuros y Sulfosales de Metales Nobles" and co-editor of several books, among which are; "Recursos Minerales de España" (CSIC 1478p) (Spanish Mineral Resources), "Geologia y Metalogenia en Ambientes Oceanicos. Depósitos Hidrotermales Submarinos (Geology and Metallogeny of Seafloor Hydrothermal Deposits) (IEO, 162p) and "Esto es Imposible" (Aguilar, 320p).
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
You see that msnbc link ? seems innocent huh
when you click it though you are actually sent to msn in order to transfer your cookie from any of msn's domains which includes hotmail (any of the *.msn.com domains) in order to track you personally (if you use hotmail notice hm is actually a subdomain of msn)
so while you click on the story link of
www.msnbc.com/news/814100.asp&0dm=-23ET [msnbc.com]
you are actually sent to here
http://msid.msn.com/mps_id_sharing/redirect.asp?w
why ? so they can steal your hotmail/msn cookie and transfer it to the msnbc domain and track you across any of microsofts domains (hence the msid = microsoft id or guid), this gets round all browser cookie privacy limitations that browser manufacturers (including mozilla/msie/ns) implementation so websites cannot read cookies from other domains and is a blatent privacy breach,
whats happening is msid server is reading your cookie and passing it to the create_p1.asp page via a GET which then creates a new cookie with your old cookie values then finally redirects you to the story complete with transfered cookies contents, clever but not clever enough for those that spot it
of course all this cookie sharing happens in the blink of an eye so the average user doesnt see it (dont believe me look at the 302 redirect headers sent when you click the msnbc link) and has no idea they have actually visited msn.com in order to steal their msn cookie
more information about this exploit can be found here
http://www.pc-help.org/privacy/ms_guid.htm
http://online.securityfocus.com/news/83
i really wish that the
of course if you block msid.msn you cannot access the msnbc site , basically if you wont let msn track you they wont let you in the site
yeah im anon cos who iam doesnt matter
MicroVax.
Pfft. The media talks about how EVERYTHING could be a harbinger of massive climactic change, and furthermore how it's OBVIOUSLY the fault of technology and Western democracy.
I've quit listening to their made-up crap. It's blips of statistical noise overlying a long-term cycle of temperature variations that pre-existed any human life.
Climate change has become grant-grubbing junk science harnessed to the service of failed leftist political ideologies.
Pay no attention to the watermelon wackos. Buy that SUV if you want one and drive on without guilt!
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
This happened last month in the New York area. Crashed through some woman's house. I read it in the NY Post, featuring pictures of the ice chunk. Check it out.
Since the airlines use some kind of blue dye in their toilets the ice was blue, which I'd imagine prevents me from pissing in a coffee can, freezing it and asking the airlines for money.
I seem to recall the article (sorry, the above link is only a free preview) mentioning that airlines "weren't supposed to do this until they got out over open water" (paraphrasing). As if it was standard operating procedure to eject the holding tanks out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean; who knows, maybe on a 747 doing the Kennedy to Johannesburg route you *have* to eject the crap at some point to avoid overflowing tanks.
How do we know it wasn't just a giant flaming ice block?
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Ice blocks keep falling on my head ...
And that prob'ly means concussion soon will make me dead
Stories about weird stuff falling from the sky have been with us for millennia. Charles Fort (1874-1932) devoted his life to collecting newspaper clippings of rains of fungi, formless masses of protoplasm, hatchets, masks, the ceremonial regalia of savages, and stones--with and without inscriptions. One of his accounts, The Book of the Damned is online here. (By "the damned," he means data that science refuses to accept).Written in an almost poetic, tart, prose style, it is very readable. He talks of rains of "Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it." Most of his information was obtained from newspaper accounts.
I'm inclined to take a very skeptical view of any stories about weird stuff falling from the sky. Maybe it's true about the blocks of ice, and maybe Fort's falls of frogs and fishes were true, and maybe other accounts of worms, snails mussels, snakes, turtles, and even a whole calf are true.
But I'd want to see heavier evidence than an MSNBC story.
Anyway, Fort would have loved this one.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It seems that every news article about weather events these days mentions a possible connection to climate change! Has it occurred to anyone that since there is a lot of money for climate change research, scientists, in response to the inevitable reporter question, will of course say it *might* have something to do with climate change.
It is time for a new fear. Climate change is getting trite!
The only good weather is bad weather.
Despite for some reason being marked 0, I do believe this user echos what many of us think. Unless most /.'ers have harder heads than roofs (maybe only the moderators). Reminds me of a line from Harry Potter:
We could be killed, or worse, expelled!
She has *got* to get her priorities straight
After all, you would want someone to be dropping Icy BMs on Europe, would you?
Yes, it was used in one of Spider's Calahan stories [Or maybe a Lady Sally one]. It's people like him that cause good pun shortages, and we have to get by on stupid Xanth level stuff. Those kinds of dangerous memes should never be published.
"Dangerous Memes", hmm, I'll suggest that to Keith Henson as a title if he ever writes a book about his experiences with the Co$ merry-go-round. Harlan Ellison wouldn't sue over that, would he? (Okay, he would, but after Co$, who cares!)
You in the back, say it slowly and think of the letters while you're saying it. Sheesh!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
6 mi * 1600 m/mi = 9600 m
Kinetic Energy = Potential Energy, so 0.5*m*v^2 = m*g*h, and the m's cancel, and then we solve for v:
v=sqrt(2*g*h)
h=9600m, g=approx. 9.5 m/s^2 at that height.
Therefore, the ice will hit the ground at about 430 m/s, almost the speed of sound!
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
By "It's started" do you mean the "end times" as you intrepret in the bible, or some new wave of fundamentalist teaching?
Would it interest you as much if the passage you found was from old greek myth, or Native American pagan stories?
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
The above opinion has been created without basis or research into the referenced articles.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Having lived in both LA and Florida, the drivers in LA in the rain are a lot worse. I knew this place had a different view of rain when during the first year after arriving here (from southern Louisiana in '88) after a small rain, there was a front page headline on the LA Times (the biggest LA paper) the next day that read "Rain in the Southland".
Okay....
"Martinez-Frias said only around a fifth of the ice meteors are ever found."
Ermm... how do they count what they haven't seen?
"Martinez-Frias suggests that because global warming involves one level of the atmosphere getting colder while another gets hotter, some ice clouds now remain longer."
Logic dictates that if global warming causes one level to get colder while another gets warmer, that global cooling would cause one level to get warmer while another gets colder. Am I repeating myself? And besides, this is a suggestion, not a formulated hypothesis based on evidence. At least not yet.
Scientific fact is that water vapor and carbon dioxide are the most abundant greenhouse gas. As our combustible-fuel appliances become more efficient, there are less hydrocarbon emissions and more H20 and C02 emitted; the net effect on greenhouse gases is the same. Besides, it has been argued that a single volcanic eruption has a far greater effect (neg or pos, you decide) on the atmosphere than the entire history of mankind burning stuff.
One more thing: there's no such thing az a ZEV (Zero-Emission-Vehicle). Electric is displaced emissions -- unless your power is hydro (and "we all know how bad that is for the fishies"). The manufacture of solar cells and batteries/fuel cells require the use -- and disposal -- of tons of toxic chemicals. Nuke also involves toxic waste (nevermind it's the cleanest and safest form of electricity, it's gotten a bad rap by the actions of irresponsible people).
To say that man (woman too!!) is causing global warming is a crock. If we all went back to eating wooly mammoth cooked over teradactyl dung, I don't think we'd notice any difference in the rate of global climate change.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
1. List all known natural phenomena
2. Exaggerate them all big time
3. Incorporate the exaggerations into stories
4. Gather the stories into one book
5. Look like a Prophet! to zealots during bad weather.
There ain't no question marks in this gag
Table-ized A.I.
What's next, penguins raining down on Redmond?
Table-ized A.I.
Is chicken little going to become a
Since we are dusting off the 1970's shoes styles, we might as well pull out the good old fashioned scare mongering too.
For those who have not seen a good example of history repeating itself, sit back and watch the 70's replay themselves. But I must warn you, the stories have to get much more spectacular before the trend comes to a close.
The whole scene can be put into perspective if you view it from a great distance. This should be fodder for some great flame wars on motives.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
But if one hits your property, you should immediately note the time and location, put the biggest chunk in a baggie, and stick it in your freezer for proof.
My wife would absolutely kill me if I put frozen passenger turd in our freezer, regardless of container. Big no no. Whoever wrote that must be single.
Table-ized A.I.
The weather is always like that; they predict 50-60, and you only get 22. And the people who have to shovel it still swear about it.
Yes. Chunks would be a better description.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
"I'm not worried that a block of ice might fall on your head," said Martinez-Frias, "but that one might fall on mine."
ok, he didn't say the last part, but I'm sure that's what he was thinking.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Also, rather large chunks of ice sometimes fall from commercial aircraft wings during winter flights in bad weather.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The ice is really falling off of a new US military stealth aircraft that uses UFO technology! Unknown Freezing Objects.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Thanks Spider.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
The single most amazing thing about the bible is that, despite the extrodinary stories written thousands of years ago, not a single one has been proven to be impossible. Now that is the amazing feat
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ok, I've read that the terminal velocity of a man falling is somewhere around 120mph. Since I never see the weight of these falling people mentioned, lets say he weighs around... 180 lbs sound good? Maybe 200 for kicks and grins. So lets divide 120 by 200 ... That's approximately .6 mph per pound. It's looking like (if my busted math is correct) that it'd take a sustained updraft of at least 13.2 mph to keep the thing aloft (keeping in mind it doesn't start out at 22 lbs), probably more given the density of a 22 lb block of ice. I'll cheat and say 20-25mph to keep it aloft. if I were just looking at the numbers I'd say it could work, but then you have to figure in crap like stability of the airmass, how long a 20 mph updraft can be sustained while the thing froze, ambient temperature, etc, etc... It seems pretty damn unlikely conditions would stay stable long enough for it to form. But then, I'm far from a meteorologist... I could see the ice parachute thing, but the conditions required to form such a delicate structure... Yeesh...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Really? Wow, what a bummer. I thought all those things were miracles.
Seriously, are you implying that it's possible to:
- make a living man out of clay?
- flood the earth to a depth of over 29,000 feet?
- turn a staff into a snake and back again?
- stop the sun from moving in the sky?
- raise a man from the dead after three days?
The significance of the Biblical story is not that it's never been proven impossible, but that it's never been proven incorrect. Archaeological discoveries have time after time reinforced the historical accuracy of both the old and new testaments. If all the miracles were mere inventions, why would the rest of this massive text have been kept so accurate? There's no reason at all, so I'm inclined to believe that the miracles occurred as well.One that truly amazes me is the miracle at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26), where Jesus healed a blind man. Suddenly the man could see, but he perceived people to be like "trees, walking around." Jesus touched him again, and he could see clearly. Not until John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the concept mentioned in literature, that vision might require experience to be properly interpreted. A writer in the first century would have naturally assumed that someone whose eyes were healed would immediately see, regardless of how long they'd been blind. This story, however, presents a man who was healed twice, for reasons that would not become clear until the mid-twentieth century. Anyone reading this passage without an awareness of the neurological basis of sight would simply believe that, for some unknown reason, Jesus at first healed this man only halfway (something not done anywhere else in the Scriptures). Only a modern reader can see what the ancient writer could have only understood by inspiration: Two miracles had occurred, and the second was even more astonishing than the first.
Was it possible? Of course not. Did it happen? I am convinced that it did.
Now, as for the hailstones... in the book of Revelation, the original Greek indicates that they weighed one talent. According to a handy dictionary, "A talent of silver contained 3,000 shekels (Exodus 38:25,26) and was equal to 94 3/7 lbs. avoirdupois. The Greek talent, however, as in the LXX., was only 82 1/4 lbs. It was in the form of a circular mass, as the Hebrew name kikkar denotes. A talent of gold was double the weight of a talent of silver. (2nd Samuel 12:30)"
So if you've been reading the apocalyptic Left Behind book series and you're afraid of being pelted with hundred-pound hailstones, relax. They may only be 82-pounders.
Well Buster, I'm not so worried about YOUR head either!
"It's very easy to tell real and false ice blocks apart."
False ice? I have heard of people forging money, IDs, painting and even dog poop (for their percieved entertainment value, not their nutritional value) but this has got to take the fake cake. Fake ice? Does he mean one of those clear plastic ice cubes with a fly inside you dropped into the lemonade glasses of your friends when you were a kid?
"Glad you came professor, we need to know if it's real ice or just an imposter."
"This *holds it up to the light* is a block of fake ice."
"Ohh, but Professor, how can you tell?
"It has a fake fly in it!"
Money for nothing, pix for free
> You wanted to say: Most people out there are not using ancient medievel units based on body parts, plant semen and the like anymore
;-P
True, but it's always better to put these things delicately. We wouldn't want the Americans to believe there is something (or someone living) outside their vast continent?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
UFOs.
I think that it is a simpler explanation and thus MORE likely that this is just a bunch of kids who are testing a trebuchet.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Don't they get sick of using the same template?
Wha da ya mean? it beats thinking about it!
Your odds of winning the lottery are probably about the same as being hit on the ground by one of these babies...
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
Didn't anyone see the part that said that the ice had Iberian isotopes in it? everyone knows that isotopes are part of nucular bombs. it's obvious that this stuff is coming from iberian terrorists and that they already have the ability to make atomic weapons of mass destruction, because there wouldn't be isotopes in their rain if they didn't. this must be some kind of small test of a deadly terrorist ice weapon. i'm no geology expert, so i don't know exactly where iberia is, but it must be in the middle east near indonesia, because they are terrorists. we shouldn't be worried about iraq when we don't have any evidence of there nucular weapons when we already know the iberians have isotopes. we should invade them right now and kill them all unless they accept jesus christ as their lord and savior, or else someone is going to get killed by the dirty ice chunks they are dropping everywhere. we can worry about saddam later, if we find out he has isotopes too.
If you read the article, you would note the following:
Three others were found later, bringing the world total over the last decade to more than 50. But Martinez-Frias said only around a fifth of the ice meteors are ever found.
That would make, by his estimation, 250 such events over the last decade. So, in fact, this event is not "So rare, in fact, that it has never before been documented."
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I would have thought it fell out of a plane but not that God found a new amsuing way to smite people.
Maybe if a giant glowing hand popped out of the clouds and threw it at some unfortionate soul then with a booming voice shouts "That'll learn ye!" I might reach for the rosary beads. Then again, with a god like that, the differences between heaven and hell probably arn't that great.
It would suck, of course, but at no time would I think "God struck her down" or anything like that.
Further, your assumptions are bogus.
IANABB (I am not a Bible Basher), but for argument's sake - If revelations predicts a plague of 100lb ice blocks falling from teh sky all over the place late in the sequence (when thunderstorms and earthquakes are apparently also rampant?), this could just be a sign of it coming. Perhaps these "plagues" are meant to come about by somewhat natural means, and the atmosphere is just getting warmed up for swarming us with 100lb blocks a few years down the road.
11*43+456^2
A few years ago a large block of ice fell not far away from where I'm living. It made some headlines and it was even shown on TV. Several analysis were made to study the origin of this thing. Well the main startling thing was that this big boulder had an unusual high level of titanium, so most speculated that this came from some rocket booster. Meanwhile many noted that this could be barely the fact as our region is not in the direct lift-off trajectory of any base. There was never a final conclusion, so this piece of ice is a small mistery of the skies.
As far as I have seen on TV the boulder looks is a ice with a blue tone, with a volume nearly to 3 cubic meters. However, some earlier news claimed that the original boulder was no less than 500 cubic meters.
Well, though I have no idea whether they would be more or less common over urban areas, it certainly would make sense that their formation might well be affected by the heat island effect. In addition, the particulates from industry may well have an affect as well. Please note: IANACNAMNDIPEOT.
Okay, it's a little off-topic, but I have to take issue with this statement:
Solar can be clean when converted to electricity by means of a solar array used to heat water for a steam turbine (or other similar configuration). Alternatively, geo-thermal energy is, AFAIK clean, although I would grant you that there are potential negative side-effects there that we don't fully understand (similar to the effect of hydroelectric generation on fish). In any case, there is such a thing as clean electricity, it's just not that efficient or readily available in most populated areas.
-"Zow"
(* The single most amazing thing about the bible is that, despite the extrodinary stories written thousands of years ago, not a single one has been proven to be impossible. *)
The amazing thing is: NOTHING has been proven impossible about anything. For example, just because we currently don't know how to physically travel faster than the speed of light does NOT mean that it is impossible. But, that is not the point.
Table-ized A.I.
two straight days of articles bemoaning the fact that "global warming" is causing an ice age in the next 10 years and ice blocks to rain in Spain today.
Since wtf did WARMING cause all sorts of problems with ice? Maybe it would be better called "global warming leading into a sudden ice age?"
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Actually, I would consider it more along the lines that sometimes the universe gets it right, along the lines of the million monkeys at a million keyboards...
BTW, I'm an atheist, so Act of God isn't fitting for me either. Perhaps for you it could be considered karmic consequences. However, as another poster noted "shit happens."
cubic zirconia
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do you have a reference?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
turn your cookie directory to read only.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We know your there, thats why we'e positioned to dominate you, bitch.
We know of another measurement called 'grains'. What to see?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not saying that the current ice blocks could be a sign... what I'm saying is that perhaps the 7 plagues and all actually start 10 years from now, and God wills them to come about in "natural" ways like climactic changes (I like to believe that even God makes things play out by the laws of physics, he just messes with probabilistic outcomes to get the desired result).
So if this 100lb ice storm is to come about naturally as the 7th plague of a series that starts a decade from now, would it not be possible that the climactic changes leading up to this would induce rarer and smaller chunk today?
11*43+456^2
Seriously, are you implying that it's possible to:
* make a living man out of clay?
* flood the earth to a depth of over 29,000 feet?
* turn a staff into a snake and back again?
* stop the sun from moving in the sky?
* raise a man from the dead after three days?
By definition... If it happened, it is possible.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sure... there are plenty of instances where we've learned more about a subject, and stated that reported event could not have happened in the way described.
Meanwhile, biblical stories go the other way. We've had the story of bringing down the walls of Jerico with trumpets, for thousands of years now. It was not until recently that we discovered that sound can indeed be incredibly destructive.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant