Mahoosive Meme

A week or two ago my daughter started using the word "mahoosive" to mean "very big", "huge" or "massive".  She  seems to have caught this from her school friends.  A quick search on Google reveals the following variant spellings:

• Mahoosive - 19,700 hits
• Mahusive - 5,620 hits
• Mahousive - 1,300 hits

I presume that this first appeared as an embellishment of "massive".  The earliest appearance in Google Groups is in a post from 1999, so it is not an entirely new coinage.  I suppose it could have been around a lot longer.

Autumnal Plague

Today we are experiencing a plague of ladybirds.  I counted 12 on and around our living room window and Zoe says that there are more outside on the lawn.

It reminds me of a similar plague in the early summer of 1976.  One sunny morning I had an appointment in Eston and afterwards I walked back over the Eston Hills to Guisborough.  On the way I  came across several plants that were almost completely covered with ladybirds.  But those were bright red; the ones today are a duller orange-brown.

There is even a melanistic one:

Cached Thoughts

From a post by Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias:

It's a good guess that the actual majority of human cognition consists of cache lookups.

"We Know Only One Argument: Death"

From Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler:

Ivanov smiled.  'Maybe,' he said happily.  Look at the Gracchi and Saint-Just and the Commune of Paris.  Up to now, all revolutions  have been made by moralizing dilettantes.  They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism.  We for the first time are consequent.  ...'

'Yes,' said Rubashov.  'So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year.  So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves.  So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China.  Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or to the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciation to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice-versa.'  ...

In later life Koestler might have had some daft ideas about science but back in the late 1930's he was right on the ball when it came to the Stalin's Soviet Union.  For a book on such a grim subject, Darkness at Noon is a surprisingly easy read.

A Nineteenth Century Daylight Meteor

Yesterday I came across this image in Astronomy, by George F. Chambers,  1914(?).   The caption reads:

Daylight meteor seen at Penshurst, Kent, June 20, 1866.  Length of coloured portion 1 degree; space traversed in 2 seconds, 80 degrees.  (J. Nasmyth)

A quick search led to The daylight meteor of 1866 June 20, Chris Trayner, WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization, vol. 32, no. 4, p. 122, 2004, from which comes the following account by Nasmyth:

While walking in my garden at about a quarter to eleven on the forenoon of June 20th, I was startled to see a bright red comet-shaped object rapidly moving across the clear blue sky about 35 degrees above the horizon.  The length of the meteor was about 1 degree, or twice as long as the Moon appears in diameter.  The motion was majestic, yet rapid, for it traversed a space of 80 degrees in rather less than two seconds.  The direction was from N.W. to S.E.  The advancing end of the meteor was brilliant red, with a white or shining envelope or head; the after part, or tail, was a ragged fan-shape, with a waving motion, accompanied by white vapours, and followed by a faint white vapour-trail.  It disappeared from my sight behind a mass of clouds, and I listened for some time to catch any report or sound of explosion, but I heard none.  The passage of the meteor was nearly parallel to the horizon, but with a slight dip or decline to the S.E.  It is impossible to convey by words the impression left by the appearance of this mysterious object, majestically traversing the clear blue sky during bright sunshine.  Had it made its appearance at night, the whole of England would have seen more or less of its light.

Trayner states that the meteor was seen over Sussex, Kent and from the coasts of northern France, Belgium and even Holland.  "J. Nasmyth" was almost certainly the scottish engineer James Nasmyth, who moved to Kent and took up astronomy after he retired in 1856.