What are the Odds?

What are the odds of having your house hit by a meteorite? Obviously it depends on the size of your house and the elevation and probably a whole bunch of other factors, including the length of time we're talking about. Suppose the odds are 1 in a 1000 over your lifetime. Personally I think this is probably too high, but maybe not.

What, then, are the odds that you would be hit six times? that would be 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 in a quintillion. What are the odds of having one person in the world so afflicted by meteorites? With a total world population of 7 billion this turns out to still be approximately 7 in 1,000,000,000. Having something like this happen at random seems very, very unlikely to put things mildly.

Radivoje Lajic, who lives in Bosnia, has just had a sixth meteorite strike on his house. He claims that these are not random occurrences, but rather the work of aliens who are targeting him. Given the odds above, perhaps he is correct. At least it seems unlikely this is random. The aliens bit does not necessarily follow logically, but it is consistent with non-random meteor bombardment.

Lajic has put his money where his mouth is. He "has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house to protect it from the alien bombardment - which he funded by selling one of the meteorites to a university in the Netherlands."

For the sake of science, I think Lajic should move into a new house and see what happens. If the new house gets hit, then the aliens are after him. If the old one gets hit, then maybe they are showing displeasure with its architecture or something. If neither gets hit...? Seems unlikely, doesn't it?

What I'm Reading

Recently Finished
Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon ***** - SciFi/Fantasy
The Course of Empire by Eric Flint & K. D. Wentworth **** - SciFi/Fantasy
The Poker Bride by Christopher Corbett *** - History
Escape from Hell by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle *** - SciFi/Fantasy
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ***** - SciFi/Fantasy
The Egyptians by Cyril Aldred *** - History
more detailed reviews later if I have the time

Reading Now
Dracula by Bram Stoker - Fantasy/Horror
Ancient Peoples of the Great Basin & Colorado Plateau by Steven R. Simms - History/Anthropology

In the Queue
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly - Horror/Fantasy
Bunch of stuff by H. P. Lovecraft - Horror/Fantasy
Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations by Paul Blustein- Current Events

A Classic of Rock Video

From the German version of the Disney Channel

Compare it to the original version here.

Political Culture is ....

The best description I have heard of partisan politics (broadly defined) today -

"This whole “debate,” if we can charitably call it that, is a mess of straw men, hypocrisy, stupidity, and reflexive defenses of one’s own tribe. It has nothing to do with fairness, journalistic ethics, or the immorality of dragging the reputations of innocents through the mud in an attempt at scoring political points."

From Michael C. Moynihan's article in Reason.


Peggy Noonan had a great op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on the Shirley Sherrod mess that is well worth reading.

The whole episode was ugly and tragic, but if people will listen to Sherrod's message, maybe it wasn't a total loss.

The Marshmallow Test

Sit a child in a room with a marshmallow. Tell the child they can either eat it or wait and get another one. Leave and film them. This is what you get. Very entertaining, in large part because we can all relate to the torment the child is going through.

The New Yorker has an article on these tests discussing how success at delaying gratification as a child is a good predictor of success later in life.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution via Arbesman.net.

What's Wrong with This Screen Capture?

This page links to an article about a Vietnamese mail order bride who was killed by her Korean husband a week after she arrived in the country.


What is wrong with the page? It's the ads, stupid!

A Weekend Trip to Nanjing

I just got back (to Seoul where I am now) after spending a weekend (Thursday evening through Sunday morning) in Nanjing. I taught and the whole family lived there during the 2000-01 academic year. We arrived there at the end of August 2000, so it's been almost 10 years.

I traveled there with Ed Monsour, one of the two people I went to Mongolia with last summer. Tom Doherty, the other traveler was planning on coming, but his visa didn't work out (More on that below).

Some quick thoughts on Nanjing now versus Nanjing when I was there. First, the city is much more modern and feels a lot bigger. There is an 89-story building on the north side of the Gulou traffic circle, for example (information here). The city has a lot more car traffic and a lot less bicycle traffic; and much of the bike traffic is now motor scooters, which were rare when we were there. The city is also brighter. More storefronts with neon or lighted signs. And a lot more small storefronts than I remember from before. Though, this could be because we were staying in a different part of town.