Meteorite Hunters Find the West Texas Fireball 64
An anonymous reader writes "A fireball streaked over Austin, Texas on February 15 producing sonic booms and startling people for hundreds of miles. The video of the event was shown on national television and viewed by thousands of people on the Net. The first news reports speculated that the fireball might have been debris from a February 13th collision between two satellites over Siberia but space experts said that the object was probably a meteor. Now this has been confirmed: experienced meteorite hunters located a strewnfield about 120 miles north of the filming site of the Austin cameraman and have recovered over 100 freshly fallen meteorites."
West, Texas, not West Texas (Score:5, Informative)
Re:West, Texas, not West Texas (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pure speculation... (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, in such circumstances the Butterfly Effect has vastly more influence on small, irregular objects than it is on, say, a large, smooth, symmetrical, engineered re-entry vehicle.
Re:Qualification (Score:2, Informative)
The Butterfly Effect refers to chaos theory, which states that, at a macroscopic level, large changes can be brought about in a system by factors that are relatively very small. This is often illustrated by relating the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the Earth to the follow on effects leading to a hurricane on the other side of the planet.
I don't think it was the parent that referred to the effect wrongly, but the initial post where it was used to explain that smaller objects would be affected more than large objects. While this is true, it is not, in my view, really an appropriate use of the principle.
Re:Pure speculation... (Score:1, Informative)
I get mod points all the time, to the point that they get really annoying. I don't know the formula but I think it is related to current karma (currently Excellent), recent posting activity and any resulting moderations, plus metamoderation activity.
Since the switch to the firehouse-like metamoderation I haven't done it lately. And yet I am still getting moderator points every week or so. Sometimes it is only 5 if I have been inactive or acting rather trollish, but most of the time it is 15. I have 9 unused points right now.
Re:Feed the Trolls (Score:4, Informative)