Deme

IQ is an attempt to represent a persons problem solving abilities with a single number. This is bullshit, because intelligence isn’t that simple. There’s different kinds of intelligence. Some people are better at some kinds of intelligence, while others have their strenghts in other areas.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

One of the victims - all aged 16 or 17 - had a hand cut off and another had their skull split open.

All the wounded people were brought to hospital and none were in danger for their life, the source added.

That seems very lucky. Damn.

Private weather station?

It’s pretty much impossible to make reliable forecasts based on the data of a singular weather station. The initial data comes in from a variety of sources including satellites, radars, surface observation stations (weather stations) and upper air soundings around the globe. All of the above are maintained by public sector organizations who collaborate and share the data because the weather is an inescapably global thing. During WW2 the Germans actually set foot in Canada to set up a weather station in an attempt to spread the coverage of their observation network.

Nowadays all that data is used as inputs for numerical weather prediction models, running on supercomputers in the basements of meteorological institutes and agencies. Big global ones like ECMWF and GFS are used pretty much by all meteorologists around the world, who look at those and other smaller, more local models. They compare the different forecasts and critically evaluate the probabilities of different outcomes. They apply their own judgement selecting the most credible raw forecast and then edit that if needed. All in all, it’s a very global effort.

At least where myself and @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee are from, meteorologists at the public broadcasting company (where that title is a requirement for getting the job) collaborate closely with their colleagues at the national meteorological institute. Their job is to comprehend the situation as presented by the institute, decide which bits of it are important, and then boil that down into a smooth and easy to understand presentation.

If a weather reporter isn’t an actual meteorologist, then there is an actual meteorologist behind the scenes who made the presentation for the reporter to present.

I’m pretty sure that the important bit here was the quality of those particles, not their quantity.

The study was designed to detect aerosols covered with “meteor dust” left behind by space rocks that burned up upon entry. Instead, the plane detected high levels of metallic elements contaminating the floating molecules, none of which could be explained by meteors or other natural processes.

The discovery “represents the first time that stratospheric pollution has been unquestionably linked to reentry of space debris,” researchers wrote in the statement.

In total, the study identified 20 different metallic elements that do not naturally occur in Earth’s atmosphere, including silver, iron, lead, magnesium, titanium, beryllium, chromium, nickel and zinc.

The team suspects that the main source of the pollution is rocket boosters that are ejected by rockets shortly after they clear the upper atmosphere, then fall back to Earth.