[X] My Assistant

[jaredGalen]

Looks like the streak spotted back in March is most likely a bit of a comet called Wiseman–Skiff. According to this article

Fantastic little addition to Spirits 'research portfolio.'

[dvandorn]

This discussion points out why I have a certain distrust of mathematical models that predict real-world behaviors -- they often don't account for the occurrences that lie on the shallow edges of the bell curve.

It's all well and good to talk about the number of joules generated when a body enters an atmosphere, and describe on paper what happens to such a body when that many joules of energy are transferred to it. But such a simple calculation doesn't take into account such facts as abalone describes -- golfball-sized objects that survive entry into Earth's atmosphere and whose deeper structures aren't even significantly heated.

Models are good ways to understand how the real world works -- as long as you constrain your expectations as to exactly what you'll let those models predict. The real world is "fuzzy," it includes chaotic phenomenah that cannot be predicted by models. And models are always more simplistic than the behaviors they attempt to predict -- any model complex enough to predict all of the observed phenomenah in the universe will be no less complex than the universe itself.

-the other Doug