Fireball over US, Wednesday, April 17th 2019 around 02:57
fireballs.imo.net
fireballs.imo.net
It was very large and very bright. For several seconds after it had disappeared, I expected a large "boom" to occur. Quite an unsettling moment.
edit: Looks like some dash cams caught it:
It was amazing. I wasn't unsettled—more surprised. Assumed it was a meteorite burning up close by.
Everyone, including grade school children old enough to be aware of it, used to worry about that sort of thing. That latent fear lay across everything and everyone in the US, until around the time the Berlin Wall fell. It was an incredible feeling of the lifting of a mental burden.
https://cochranesfsophomores.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/fos...
They still have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at eachother, on hairtrigger alert.
There is zero rational reason for that fear disappearing.
Yes, there is. Political bravado coupled with distrust of politics in general and mainstream information being what it is today it's very hard for citizens to notice geo-political turmoils.
Personnaly I'd blame the fascination for useless plastic gadgets masquerading as star-trek level tech but I can't be certain.
I invited my little friends up to the roof to await the end.
The cold war was such fun /s.
Rational Wiki has a good summaryhttps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Duck_and_Cover
My freshman physics professor had a story about working for a cold war defense research lab, and not being told what the graph he was working on was about until he absolutely had to know. Eventually, it was revealed that the graph was for % fatalities from flying glass by height of airburst, megatonnage of weapon, and distance from ground zero.
It was at that moment, he decided to find a job elsewhere.
Like everyone else, I let my defenses drop after '91 or thereabouts. They are back up these days, I can assure you. Unexpected lowflying aircraft, loud bangs, F16 fighters screaming pairwise out over the Baltic, believe me, I pay attention.
You can't expect rational behavior from governments. In a time of crisis, there will always be some idiot in power, who doesn't want to face reality, or cares about their pet issue more then overall well-being, or feels that they have no alternative options.
Churchill rather typically stated it most succinctly: When presented in late 1941 with the report of Hitlers declaration of War on the U.S he said (paraphrasing a bit from memory on the literature) "So then we do win this war after all.."
As for Japan, SOME of the top people in the government and military knew they were committing slow suicide with their attack (Yamamoto for example, thought it was complete idiocy to fight the U.S) but there were enough fanatical believers to push through their idea that if they could just get the upper hand on the U.S in a preemptive naval/air war in 1942, they might secure peace for their Asian conquests.
Note that the incident is started by North Korea downing a civilian jet, even if by mistake, South Korea reacting, NK going berserk with nukes, US responding with conventional weapons... Hmmm, a bit kind towards the West. The US certainly come out as the level headed guys, which doesn't sound very coherent with recent rhetoric and events.
Saddam Hussein thought that telling the United States to go pound sand was the correct move. He thought that all the talk by the warhawks in the Bush administration was just bluster.
As it turns out, that talk was not bluster, telling the US to sod off was not the correct move, he got to dance the hemp fandango, and 16 years later, Iraq is still in the middle of a civil war.
These kinds of geopolitical failures happen when one country's leadership mispredicts how another country will react to its actions. This can happen in any year, be it 1939, 1941, 2002, or 2019.
They either start by one side believing the other side fired a nuke. (See: Every close call having to do with a communication failure/false detection.)
Or by one side believing that firing a tactical nuke is the only way to accomplish their goal. The battle doctrines of both the United States, and Russia, permit the use of tactical nuclear weapons in conventional military engagements. I wouldn't be surprised if, in a shooting war, some idiot were to actually use a tactical nuclear weapon, believing that it would not escalate into an exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.
This assertion has no historical basis. Plenty of people stand to profit from such a war. Just look at World War II. Countries, companies, and individuals profited greatly. Even in the worst case of total nuclear annihilation, someone who was prepared for such an event could profit, depending on your definition of profit. In any case, what matters is whether the people involved believe they can profit; however they define profit.
It doesn't have to be anybody's decision. Cascading mistakes and system failures happen.
Even if they’re at home and you have a bunker, you don’t want the neighbors inviting themselves over. You want them locked safely inside before anyone else knows.
> The only time locking yourself in is really important is if it's a long term disaster, either something nuclear (where this is most valid)...
A nuclear ICBM striking DC is the scenario. Even though the strike is short term, that's a long term event with a lot of unknown variables.
In any case, I suspect it's a probable stance people will take regardless of the merits.
Basically, in the abstract, and in pop culture according to video games and movies... your approach is the way to "win", but the human psyche is a fragile thing.
(I'd clarify, this isn't meant as any sort of criticism, I just think that considering these sorts of scenarios in a abstract sterile setting is very different from how you'd experience them as they happened - and that's interesting to me.)
Amy preemptive strike will have no warning . Otherwise it would defeat the purpose.
On a similar note - the number of people asking about ICBMs every time SpaceX has a twilight launch... facepalm
Yes they're quite bright but more consistent in their brightness, but any ICBM is going to detonate quite a lot higher.
Also: why is it still bright? Don't understand why it would still be firing at that point. Is it burning?
No, "nova" just means "new." Nova Scotia translates to New Scotland.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/14/supr...
Double entendre, subtext send similar are a large part of marketing. It's often used in the vein of "sex sells," but can have other uses.
I got the information from a piece about translation fails in international branding campaigns. It wouldn't surprise me if the article has inaccuracies. It's hard enough for someone to be fluent enough in two languages and knowledgeable enough about two cultures to effectively fact check such a piece and the piece covered multiple incidences involving various languages and cultures, not just Spanish-English.
IIRC, here are a few other examples from the article:
Coca cola apparently originally was written in Chinese such that it meant "bite the frog." Sales improved after they modified it such that it meant "happiness in the mouth."
The Spanish word for "embarrassed" doesn't get used to mean embarrassed. It gets used to mean pregnant. Some campaign for some trivial thing like toothpaste or breathe mints had a slogan about use their product "and never be embarrassed again" which weirdly got translated to "and never get pregnant again."
Some toothpaste that bragged about it's whitening ability bombed when they tried to market it in a culture where people dyed their teeth some dark color.
Yes, the Nova story is very common in that context, but everyone who's actually done the research has found that the Nova actually sold decently well. The story probably originates with some English speaker who knew some Spanish seeing the car's name, read it as "no va", and assumed that "of course that would sell poorly" and using that as an example of marketing failure, which everyone copied without fact-checking.
Note that Spanish does have a word "nova", which means exactly the same thing it does in English (a stellar birth), and could be used as a marketing name in Spanish-speaking countries with much the same connotations as you could find in English. After all, Pemex has a brand of fuel that's called "Nova," which should instantly debunk the story.
For those who are in the know, speak Spanish, etc.
I did qualify my remark to indicate as clearly as I could that I lack such credentials and there's room for error here when I led with "From what I've read."
There are good ways to add such knowledge to the discussion. Raking someone over the coals for trying to join in with people playing with language for light-hearted fun is probably not one of them.
I've always been confused by that, as I couldn't get Coca-Cola to be anywhere phonetically close to 蛙 ("wa"), which would be the character for frog. Had to look it up — https://service.goodcharacters.com/blog/blog.php?id=225 has it as being 蝌蝌啃蠟, which is mostly nonsense, but if I had to translate it, it would be closer to "tadpole nibbles wax". Or possibly, "ke ke brand nibbling wax", assuming "nibbling wax" is a thing. It certainly doesn't sound like a drink.
Definitely a little unsettling. It was bright enough some folks that hadn't seen the whole trajectory thought it might have been fireworks.
Atlantic ocean off of Deleware.
https://www.space.com/18009-meteorite-collectors-public-land...
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Fireball
It's not clear to me if this is because the frequency is actually increasing... maybe it has to do with an increase in the number of cameras, or growing awareness of the AMS website?
Almost all of videos come from dashboard cameras, and rarely from surveillance cameras because those are pointed downwards.
Guess which technology become popular with drivers in the last decade, and recently became good enough to capture good video at night?
Personal grumpiness aside though, I'm relieved that it didn't end up making landfall considering how close it was to some pretty major cities. I wonder if there's any hope for recovery of the meteorite itself since it appears to have fallen in the bay/ocean. Is it possible that it's close enough to land that they could find even a few parts of it?
Either way, I'm hoping more footage of the entry event starts coming in. Preferrably with audible reactions.