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.

How To Disable Firefox Quick Find

[Note added 2009-07-19: The advice given in this post is now out of date.  In modern versions of Firefox it is possible disable Quick Find using the menus.  On windows, click: Tools > Options > Advanced > General and deselect Search for text when I start typing.  On Linux click: Edit > Preferences > Advanced > General and deselect Search for text when I start typing.]

Recently I have found that when I start typing into a text box in Firefox I often get a Quick Find bar coming up at the bottom of the screen.  This happens if I am typing ahead.  Firefox seems to be interpreting characters typed at a web-page as a search string.  I don't remember having asked for this behaviour and I find it rather annoying.  I would much rather have Firefox silently ignore the type-ahead characters.  At least then I would not have to go to the trouble of removing the unwanted Quick Find bar (or sitting and waiting until it removes itself).  Fortunately a little research revealed the following fix:

Enter about:config in the Firefox URL line and click Go.

Select the line starting accessibilty.typeaheadfind and double click it until the Value field is false.

The Tipler Point

From an article by Philip Ball:

My colleagues and I decided recently that we should introduce the notion of the Tipler Point, being the point beyond which scientists lose the plot and start rambling about the soul/immortality/parallels between physics and Buddhism.

There is an earlier appearance of this term in this report on a 2003 science fiction convention.

Windows Dead Messenger

For several years my daughter Zoe has been a avid user of MSN Messenger.  She uses to keep in touch with her friends after school and at weekends.   A few months ago I upgraded from MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger (WLM for short).  A week or so ago, WLM stopped working in Zoe's account (It would still work in administrator accounts).  The signing-in window would come up but when she typed in her user name the characters would be redrawn very slowly, with gaps of 5 or 10 seconds between them.  Password entry was quicker but then this error message would pop up:

Signing in to Windows Live Messenger failed because the service is temporarily unavailable.  Error code 800401f3.

(As an aside: this message was actually misleading: for Zoe the service was permanently unavailable.  People who write error messages should not make guesses.)

On the web I came across various suggestions for fixing the 800401f3 error: uninstalling and reinstalling WLM, re-registering some DLLs, etc, but none of them worked.  I eventually lost patience and just uninstalled it.

Then, today I remembered that Zoe had been chatting quite happily to her friends on Ubuntu using GAIM, so I thought I would see if I could install GAIM on Windows.  The first thing I found was that GAIM has been recently renamed Pidgin and has a nice friendly purple pigeon as a logo.  The installation process seemed clean and friendly too as I was doing it.  And then Zoe tried it out and she independently said she found it to be simple, friendly to use, and quick.

Now I think about it, I am surprised it has taken me so long to switching from MSN Messenger/WLM to GAIM/Pidgin.  After all, it is many years since I switched from Internet Explorer to Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.   I think this must be down to the very low opinion I have of instant messaging in general: mindless drivel dressed up with garish emoticons and Liberace fonts .

Yawning and Sex

What has yawning to do with sex?  The answer (via The Anterior Commissure) is probably not one that would spring to mind.  However, there is a theory to explain this link:

..., it is pertinent to recall that yawning, alone or associated with stretching, is considered to be an ancestral vestige surviving throughout evolution, that subserves the purpose of arousal. In particular, the role of yawning could be that of increasing attention when sleep is imminent due to fatigue or boredom but cannot be engaged in, as in face of a danger or social circumstances.

Social circumstances?