Hamilton was asleep in bed at the time, 11:35 p.m., and she called 911 before understanding what had happened, and then "noticed a large charcoal gray object between her two floral pillows."
“It just seems surreal,” Ms. Hamilton said in an interview on Wednesday. “Then I’ll go in and look in the room and, yep, there’s still a hole in my ceiling. Yep, that happened.”...
Ms. Hamilton did not sleep the rest of that night, she said, and sat in a chair, sipping tea as the meteorite sat on her bed....
"My granddaughters can say that their grandmother just almost got killed in her bed by a meteorite,” she said....
The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed in any given year is about one in 100 billion....
The article fails to say how much Hamilton's meteorite is worth. It ends saying she plans to keep it, but she's got a hole in her roof to fix, and isn't it too valuable to display in your home? The article mentions a Christie's auction of meteorites that raked in $4 million.
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The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed in any given year is about one in 100 billion....
I’d like to see the calculations that went into those odds ($100 says it was made up on the spot), but a more meaningful number is the odds of a meteorite landing close enough to someone that it might have hit them. Rather less than 100 billion to one I’d bet.
Not EXACTLY a windfall.
"The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed in any given year is about one in 100 billion...."
And what are the odds of the meteorite hitting a bed while someone is sleeping in it? I calculate about one in 300 billion.
And what are the odds of the meteorite hitting a bed while someone is sleeping in it and hitting right next to the pillow where their head is? I calculate one in 1 trillion. These are, I calculate, the same odds that it will smash them right on the head.
"The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home..."
I think they mean those are the odds of it happening to anyone (in the given year). It's not that each of us has a one in 100 billion chance of it happening to us in particular.
Prof. A: your successive entries on the probabilities seem to me a natural response to the fact that the bet was not well defined. Odds of X happening are a ratio of “it did happen/it didn’t happen” but what is the not-X here? A meteorite hitting the Earth anywhere except in that defined spot? Hitting anywhere in the same state? County? Street? Etc? What about WHEN it happened: within a year? A lifetime?
It’s a mess but that’s how journalism goes.
Ann Hodges was hit by a meteorite in 1954 whilst she sat on her couch. That makes one couch hit and one bed hit in 68 years, so using the only actual data we have, the odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed OR couch in any given year is about two every 68 years, or about 1 in 68 for just a bed (taking size of bed ~= size of couch).
Q: How many meteorites hit the earth each year?
A: Answers vary from 500 to about 80,000, not including the dust particles which make up most of the mass of space objects which hit the earth but which don't count because they're no fun to talk about.
Help, I'm a Rock! is dedicated to Elvis Presley. Note the interesting formal structure and the stunning four-part harmony toward the end." -- Frank Zappa.
I got a rock…
…a bit early for the holiday but one of the more interesting variants.
Grandma’s got a new nickname: chicken little.
The Cosmos is TRYING to KILL US! It's Throwing Rocks at us! At our heads!!!
The calculations are challenging. First of all, while meteorites can and do land above the Arctic Circle and on the Antarctic continent, they mostly come in from the plane of the ecliptic and thus hit near the equator. So we need to calculate the likelihood that a meteorite will hit land, given an unequal distribution by latitude, and also given that a bit more than 70% of the earth is covered by water (including lakes and rivers) and that there is more land above the Tropic of Cancer and below the Tropic of Capricorn than between them. Then we have to calculate what percent of that area is covered by the roof of a dwelling (including condos and apartment buildings). Only then can we calculate the probability that a meteorite that hits a spot on the earth’s surface also hits the roof of a dwelling.
The only number that we know pretty well is the number of meteorites that hit somewhere on the surface of the earth — it’s pretty consistently 17,000 per annum.
From Wikipedia (I know, I know), a quick lesson in terminology:
1) Odds provide a measure of the likelihood of a particular outcome. They are calculated as the ratio of the number of events that produce that outcome to the number that do not. Odds are commonly used in gambling and statistics.
2) The probability of an event is different, but related, and can be calculated from the odds, and vice versa. The probability of rolling a 5 or 6 is the fraction of the number of events over total events or 2/(2+4), which is 1/3, 0.33 or 33%.
You're welcome.
The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed in any given yearis about one in 100 billion....
Sorry, this means that this sort of thing happens about once a decade
(100 billion/year) / (10year/1decade) = 10 in 100 billion == 1 10 billion
Remember hearing of this before? Me neither! Not EVER
i remember a guy's car being hit, in the '30's (he wasn't in it)
(if you are 1 in a million, there are 3 people just like you in Chicago)
Sell it, and use the money to celebrate your remaining time alive, which was almost forfeited. Turn near-bad-fortune into a good one.
Will she sue the meteor for gender discrimination? tea makes leads to pee which leads to dangerous choices.
Any word if it was a racist rock?, that would significantly lower its value.
Was it a small rock the size of a large man's fist or a large rock the size of a small man's fist?
There are a couple of other possibilities.
"Oh my God there's a rock in my bed"
That's what she said.
Reminds me of the guy who found a snake in his boot.
I would definitely keep it. It would go in the Safety Deposit box. I wonder if my homeowner's insurance would cover the damage.
Ms. Hamilton's world was rocked all night long. I envy.
I want that woman to buy me a lottery ticket.
"There is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed." Churchill
Especially when an entire solar system shoots a meteor at you, and the miss is still so very close.
"There is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed." Churchill
Especially when an entire solar system shoots a meteor at you, and the miss is still so very close.
A meteorite hit an Alabama woman while she was sleeping. This happened in 1954.
https://www.space.com/meteorite-hit-alabama-woman-65-years-ago.html
I should have looked further before my prior comment. The meteorite is displayed at the University of Alabama:
https://cw.ua.edu/31399/uncategorized/stars-fell-on-alabama-the-hodges-meteorite/
Althouse writes, "And what are the odds of the meteorite hitting a bed while someone is sleeping in it? I calculate about one in 300 billion."
Somebody clever once wrote there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. The problem with calculating the odds is the unspecified time constraint, given a wide enough window of time, the odds of anything possible happening is unity, 1 to 1. For example, in 1954 a woman was struck by a meteorite. Not only was she struck, but she was also struck while sleeping in her own bed (some sources say it was a couch) in her own home. Not only did the object strike a woman in her bed, but it also fell in North America -- Sylacuaga, Alabama, to be exact.
The fact that the woman, Ann Hodges, wasn't killed or gravely injured is astonishing because the Sylacauga meteorite was an unusually large one. The parent body, which spawned at least two other sizable pieces that have been recovered and identified was likely about the size of a small car when it hit the upper atmosphere.
"And what are the odds of the meteorite hitting a bed while someone is sleeping in it? I calculate about one in 300 billion.
And what are the odds of the meteorite hitting a bed while someone is sleeping in it and hitting right next to the pillow where their head is? I calculate one in 1 trillion. These are, I calculate, the same odds that it will smash them right on the head."
You calculate? Show your work. ;-)
Agent 86: Missed her by that much
My comment about the unspecified time factor is specious in context since the quoted source specifies "in any given year". Still, the coincidences of circumstance are remarkable in these two cases.
Reminds me of an old Far Side comic. God at His computer.
Well...what are the odds that'll ever happen again in the same place? She's got natural immunities now. The rest of us should be sleeping with a Neosteel helmet on.
"Meteorite Crashes Through Ceiling and Lands on Woman’s Bed/After a fireball streaked through the Canadian sky, Ruth Hamilton, of British Columbia, found a 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist near her pillow."
Am I wrong in sensing some sexual subtext there?
Tim Maguire,
Yeah, probably made up on the spot. I found two estimates, contradictory, about how many meteorites make it to the surface- 17/day and 500/year- I could probaby find different estimates if I wanted to. If you allocate 21 square feet to a person's bed, then beds cover approximately 1/34,000th of the Earth's surface.
And Quaestor above is correct- the probability, whatever it is, is time dependent.
The article below says "...she Googled the odds of being hit by falling space rocks and found she had a one in four trillion chance of her house being singled out."
It also mentions that insurance agreed to cover the damage to her home.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/13/meteorite_lands_on_canadian_womans_bed/
In the 1990's, in northern California, a friend of mine heard an odd thunk while in bed. Next day she saw a golf ball size meteorite in her garden. I saw it in situ shortly after, and there was an impact ring in the dirt of the otherwise neatly groomed garden.
We both thought of this as an interesting curiosity. More than a garden variety occurrence, but nothing astronomically rare.
“ Ann Hodges was hit by a meteorite in 1954 whilst she sat on her couch. That makes one couch hit and one bed hit in 68 years, so using the only actual data we have, the odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed OR couch in any given year is about two every 68 years, or about 1 in 68 for just a bed (taking size of bed ~= size of couch).”
Meteorites fall to earth. Women hit hardest.
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