Curiosity Finds Iron Meteorite on Mars | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity Finds Iron Meteorite on Mars

mars.jpl.nasa.gov

70 pointsshankysingh32 comments

Looks huge; but there's no scale. So many pictures from Mars lack context like that.

It's difficult to guess the scale, but at least the caption has some information:

> This rock encountered by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is an iron meteorite called "Lebanon," similar in shape and luster to iron meteorites found on Mars by the previous generation of rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle). The smaller piece in the foreground is called "Lebanon B."

Depending on how much of that thing is buried, it sounds like it could be comparable to Ahnighito (3.4m x 2.1m x 1.7m): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahnighito_AMNH,_34_tons_me... or the Willamette Meteorite (3m x 2m x 1.3m): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Meteorite#mediaviewe...

That reminded of this article, http://petapixel.com/2012/09/13/1909-lincoln-penny-used-to-c... "Coin" being used for camera calibration on rovers. Not sure if they can be used to show scale too.

Funny that they chose the penny because it's classically used in geology to combat the issue of scale in photographs, which it seems is an issue in Mars too.

That's exactly why it was chosen.

An article about that was on HN just yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033760

The article says "Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle)", Lebanon being the largest meteorite (the other one is called Lebanon B).

Not a lot of bananas on Mars.

One edge of the metorite seems to bear the inscription 'Beagle 2'

Beagle 2?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2

"Lebanon"?

Lebanon because it looks bombed out? Not really PC.

Most non-PC naming by Americans since calling UBL "Geronimo"

Since a proximate meteorite is called Littleton, http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-images/mars/lebano... , my guess would be that both are named after towns in Colorado.

Or it could be named after one of the dozens of Lebanons in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon_(disambiguation)

Wow, so many cities with same name. Must give rise to loads of issues when geo-locating "Lebanon". I wonder how Google maps figures out which "lebanon" I searched for.

I assume that it assumes based on your GeoIP location which to show first. (Guessing)

It must be really depressing to find something offensive in the most mundane details.

Being offended gives some people a rush. He could just be an addict.

I'm offended you assumed the commenter is male.

I'm offended it was assumed the commenter was human.

Take it up with English, and maybe while you're at it you can invent a gender-neutral pronoun better than "zhe"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Invented...

They?

At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous.

> At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous.

In the cases where it is used in a gender-neutral but expressly singular sense, this is false. In cases where whether the number of the referent is ambiguous and might be either singular or plural, the use of the plural they has been acceptable longer, and has never been objected to even by the prescriptives who have tried (and are still trying, though their influence has waned somewhat from its late 19th Century height) to force generic he in place of singular they as part of their effort to impose Latin-inspired grammar rules on English.

dragonwriter had some interesting things to say. However, they used a lot of hand-wavy claims.

That sounds normal to you?

The only structural problem (and its a minor one, since the resulting ambiguity is readily resolvable from context) I see with that is that there are two different possible referents for "they" in the preceding sentence; in this particular case the fact that there are both singular and plural uses of "they" is relevant to why both referents are possible, but you can run into the same ambiguity with gender and number specific pronouns.

Of course, there's no real good reason to use a pronoun there except for an excessive fondness for choppy sentences.

That's why we should use `thou' again and don't rely on `you'.

We have one, it's "they", and it's been in use for centuries. It's just not something we're quite used to with modern usage, but it's fine (we don't shirk from adding plenty of other words), and its far better than 'zhe' - for a start, people already know how to pronounce 'they'. Your own link reports it in usage since the 15th C.

I'm sure xie wouldn't mind.

Or because lebanon balogna is so delicious.

Being offended about what words are used to name things is exactly how war and other atrocities start. Get over it, and you take a step towards peace for the species.

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