If you have never seen a fireball lighting up the night sky I bet you will appreciate the video below, which was taken by Ivaldo Cervini over Italian skies a few days ago. It is a Perseid meteor, which lit up at a visual magnitude of approximately -10 (for comparison, the brigthest Venus can get is -4.5, and the full moon is -12.5: -10 is roughly 200 times brighter than Venus, and a tenth of the full moon).

"We would dig a shaft near 'ground zero' about 10 feet in diameter and about 150 feet deep. We would put a tank, 10 feet in diameter and 75 feet long on end at the bottom of the shaft. We would then suspend our detector from the top of the tank, along with its recording apparatus, and back-fill the shaft above the tank.

Enough. I have lost to hyperspace too many paragraphs of my scribblings -here, as well as elsewhere- and I cannot stand it anymore. I need your help.

I write on a SONY VAIO laptop, with an English keyboard. The bottom row of keys has the "ctrl", the "Fn", the "windows" key; the second row has the shift key first; and the third row has the "caps lock" key. This information is relevant for what I am about to explain.

It turns out that sometimes while I write I type some nasty combination of shift, caps lock, or other keys in the thereabouts, together with some normal key I am typing at the same time, and the whole paragraph I am editing instantly disappears, vanishing into hyperspace.