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[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Can I post old news?

[Max™]

And yet Arizona can't compete.

Population density and humidity.

100 F with a 101 heat index isn't bad, it's like the air giving you a big warm hug, 95 F with a 105 heat index feels like the air is trying to strangle you for daring to step outside.

45 people per square mile is roomy, 300 people per square mile is uncomfortable.

Then you mix in all the drugs, old people, alligators, AND the air trying to strangle you, Florida surprises literally nobody when it is crazy. Individual events may be surprising, like the guy throwing an alligator in through a drivethrough window, but as a whole? Not in the least.

[DoctorMcTaalik]

Can I post old news?

The one I posted was 5 years old, so.... I certainly hope so.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Can I post old news?

Go for it, this is for strange news, not current news.

[Reelya]

https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/08/19/0012223/flaming-blue-whirl-could-be-used-in-fuel-spill-cleanup

An unfortunate mix of electricity and bourbon has led to a new discovery. After lightning hit a Jim Beam warehouse in 2003, a nearby lake was set ablaze when the distilled spirit spilled into the water and ignited. Spiraling tornadoes of fire leapt from the surface. In a laboratory experiment inspired by the conflagration, a team of researchers produced a new, efficiently burning fire tornado, which they named a blue whirl. To re-create the bourbon-fire conditions, the researchers, led by Elaine Oran of the University of Maryland in College Park, ignited liquid fuel floating on a bath of water. They surrounded the blaze with a cylindrical structure that funneled air into the flame to create a vortex with a height of about 60 centimeters. Eventually, the chaotic fire whirl calmed into a blue, cone-shaped flame just a few centimeters tall, the scientists report online August 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The soot-free blur whirls could be a way of burning off oil spills on water without adding much pollution to the air, the researchers say, if they can find a way to control them in the wild.

Man the flaming Bourbon lake with the fire tornadoes, I remember that, good days.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

It's raining fish!

London Times, April 19, 1836:

Fall of fish that had occurred in the neighborhood of Allahabad, India. It is said that the fish were of the chalwa species, about a span in length and a seer in weight--you know.

They were dead and dry.

Or they had been such a long time out of water that we can't accept that they had been scooped out of a pond, by a whirlwind--even though they were so definitely identified as of a known local species--

Or they were not fish at all.

I incline, myself, to the acceptance that they were not fish, but slender, fish-shaped objects of the same substance as that which fell at Amherst--it is said that, whatever they were, they could not be eaten: that "in the pan, they turned to blood."

For details of this story see the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1834-307. May 16 or 17, 1834, is the date given in the Journal.

Rocks fall from the sky? Humbug!

Spoiler: Was Lavoisier a meteorite denier? (click to show/hide)

About one hundred years ago, if anyone was so credulous as to think that stones had ever fallen from the sky, he was reasoned with:

In the first place there are no stones in the sky:

Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.

Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject. The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.

In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. Of all attempts at positiveness, in its aspect of isolation, I don't know of anything that has been fought harder for than the notion of this earth's unrelatedness. Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce. The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.

The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.

Lavoisier's analysis "absolutely proved" that this stone had not fallen: that it had been struck by lightning.

So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned. The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.

But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement. It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them--

Monthly Review, 1796-426

"The phenomenon which is the subject of the remarks before us will seem to most persons as little worthy of credit as any that could be offered. The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause of their previous ascent, seems to partake so much of the marvelous as almost entirely to exclude the operation of known and natural agents. Yet a body of evidence is here brought to prove that such events have actually taken place, and we ought not to withhold from it a proper degree of attention."

The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius--

Or that stones do fall from the sky, but that they are stones that have been raised to the sky from some other part of the earth's surface by whirlwinds or by volcanic action.

It's more than one hundred and twenty years later. I know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.

Falling stones had to be undamned--though still with a reservation that held out for exclusion of outside forces.

One may have the knowledge of a Lavoisier, and still not be able to analyze, not be able even to see, except conformably with the hypnoses, or the conventional reactions against hypnoses, of one's era.

We believe no more.

We accept.

Little by little the whirlwind and volcano explanations had to be abandoned, but so powerful was this exclusion-hypnosis, sentence of damnation, or this attempt at positiveness, that far into our own times some scientists, notably Prof. Lawrence Smith and Sir Robert Ball, continued to hold out against all external origins, asserting that nothing could fall to this earth, unless it had been cast up or whirled up from some other part of this earth's surface.

It's as commendable as anything ever has been--by which I mean it's intermediate to the commendable and the censurable.

It's virginal.

Meteorites, data of which were once of the damned, have been admitted, but the common impression of them is only a retreat of attempted exclusion: that only two kinds of substance fall from the sky: metallic and stony: that the metallic objects are of iron and nickel--

Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.

We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:

There in the first place;

Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.

As late as November, 1902, in Nature Notes, 13-231, a member of the Selborne Society still argued that meteorites do not fall from the sky; that they are masses of iron upon the ground "in the first place," that attract lightning; that the lightning is seen, and is mistaken for a falling, luminous object--

By progress we mean rape.

Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it.

[Reelya]

One facepalm thing about the meteorites thing is that churches accepted "stones from the sky" as a miracle of God, and had extensive collections of meteorites. After Lavoisier decried the phenomena, these extensive collections were destroyed as an embarrassment, losing centuries worth of valuable scientific specimens.