Tuesday, March 05, 2013

An interesting mystery

Mysterious light blamed for circle of fire - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Here's the report in full:
Tasmanian police and firefighters are unable to explain the source of a beam of light which reportedly fell from the sky and formed a circle of fire in a Hobart suburb.

Early Saturday morning police and fire crews received calls from concerned residents in Carnegie Street at Claremont, who reported seeing a bright light igniting a fire in a nearby paddock.

Tasmania Fire Service officer Scott Vinen says the blaze was quickly put out, leaving an obvious burnt patch.

He says the bizarre incident has everyone baffled.

"Once we put the fire out, we kind of walked through the fire and tried to find something," he said.
"We thought a flare or something may have landed there, but we couldn't find any cause."

The Fire Service says it will not investigate further.
 I can't see it mentioned in the Hobart Mercury.  What a pity:  I would like to directly hear interviews with witnesses.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Steve

Tillman here.

They won't let me post at the Cat anymore so you could you please let everyone know how much I've enjoyed Iq49's guest posts.

And to think I used to call 49 a pompous blowhard who would blather on about ideas and concepts he didn't understand!

I'd really appreciate it if you could make sure 49 gets my message and knows how much satisfaction I've got from all this.

Thanks in advance

Tillman

Steve said...

I've added it to the end of the Mk50 thread, although I would guess that it is at risk of being "tidied up" out of there.

I thought Fisky was making many cracks last night which were very Tillman-esque. I enjoyed it too.

I cannot believe the power of tribalism at Catallaxy - "So, his guest posts contained whole slabs of lightly disguised reworkings of paragraphs written by other people on the net - including Stratfor which makes money from its analysis - and he accepted praise from Catallaxy readers who thought he was a really good analyst and writer. I mean - so what you Leftist moron??"

Deadman said...

“I cannot believe the power of tribalism at Catallaxy”. Really? I should have thought that tribalism, within any group, is all too believable.

Steve said...

That's odd: dd, who came out strongly in favour of removing Mk50's posts last night, made a short critical comment of Sinclair this evening (after surveying what had gone on today) but it has now been removed at his request, apparently.

So now we have a situation with 3 posts of Mk50, only one of which contains a note warning readers of the "similarity" with its clear source material. The two earlier posts have no such warning, and much of the material in the comments thread of the latest post which shows how they plagiarise, have been removed.

How ethical is that?

Anonymous said...

Removing the posts would be less ethical than leaving them up. The 'memory hole' is pretty much a blogospheric cardinal sin; you are expected to leave the tracks of transgressions.

Also, don't blame Sinclair. The fact is that Sinclair got sucked in.

Steve said...

So this unofficial blog "code of ethics", which is about not covering up your past errors, can be used to allow extensively plagiarised material to remain on your site with no acknowldegement ever that the site owner has discovered the plagiarism?

That would be a complete misuse of the blogging ethics idea: the interests of acknowledging someone else's work surely has to trump the idea that you don't cover up errors in what you post.

So, no, while ever MK50's previous posts remain with no indication on the blog as to extensive parts of plagarism, it is Sinclair's fault.

Anonymous said...

hmm, I hadn't been following what was going on.

I am frankly not surprised, I always thought Mk50 was a bit of a Walter Mitty character

Jason