Tunguska Event

The Tunguska event was a massive explosion that occurred on June 30, 1908, in the remote Siberian region of Russia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. It was one of the largest recorded impact events in human history, and it led to increased interest in the study of asteroids and comets. The event also served as a warning about the potential dangers posed by objects from space and the need to track and monitor them to avoid catastrophic impacts.

The explosion was so powerful that it flattened an estimated 80 million trees, which were knocked down in a radial pattern within 2,000 square kilometers around the epicenter of the explosion. The trees in the center of the blast zone were stripped of their branches and bark, and their trunks were scorched and charred.

One of the unusual features of the Tunguska event was the presence of broken glass in the area surrounding the explosion. The glass, known as "Tektites," was found in the soil and ice around the blast zone. Tektites are small, rounded, and smooth glassy objects that can be formed when a meteorite or comet impacts the Earth's surface. The Tektites found at the Tunguska event were unique in that they were formed from the soil and sand in the area rather than from the impactor itself.

The exact cause of the Tunguska event is still a matter of scientific debate. One popular theory is that it was caused by the explosion of a large meteoroid or comet fragment in the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion is estimated to have had a force of between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, which is equivalent to the explosive power of a large nuclear bomb.

The Tunguska event also had a long-lasting impact on the environment. The destruction of so many trees caused significant changes to the local ecosystem, and it took decades for the area to begin to recover. The explosion also generated a significant amount of dust and debris, which was blown into the upper atmosphere and circulated around the globe for years. This dust may have contributed to unusual atmospheric phenomena and colorful sunsets seen around the world in the years following the event.

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AI Technical Trustability Update

While working on an update to my RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook project to add a couple calculators about FM sidebands (available soon). The good news is that AI provided excellent VBA code to generate a set of Bessel function plots. The bad news is when I asked for a table showing at which modulation indices sidebands 0 (carrier) through 5 vanish, none of the agents got it right. Some were really bad. The AI agents typically explain their reason and method correctly, then go on to produces bad results. Even after pointing out errors, subsequent results are still wrong. I do a lot of AI work and see this often, even with subscribing to professional versions. I ultimately generated the table myself. There is going to be a lot of inaccurate information out there based on unverified AI queries, so beware.

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