I leave a comment to your itemn:
“2. A big bolide was seen over Finland earlier today”

I am the person who have studied this case.
The originally only given news was in
http://www.ksml.fi/uutiset/keski-suomi/meteoriitti-iskeytyi-keski-suomen-yli-maahan/377557

(
After, and because the news expanded, then this was also put into the “Tähdet ja Avaruus” news page:
http://www.avaruus.fi/
)

I did not write that news but did see the text (although not in the very final piublished form).
The correct derived entry velocity is 13.5 km/s
This got altered to 15 km/s in some news media and further to 15 m/s in the international news.

But it is not especially good astronomy to mix errors in news media with astronomy

It is true that this will most probably not be found because of the new snow (an even without it), but I wouldn’t consider this a bad astronomy thing.

This was published originally only into one local newspaper (above), but to our surprise it expanded within minutes into national news here and then later also international, it looks.

The reason that it was (at all) published, was that it was captured (among others) into Nyrölä aurora camera and the derived landing site is only about 4 kilometrs from the obsevatory that is kept by the same person, Arto Oksanen. This arouse his interest and he wanted to give the news into the local news paper.

We, in the Finnish fireball grup are not anxious at all to make big news from our firaball-cases. It was as recently as also February ( 2009 Feb. 16/17) that we got our best (expected) meteorite dropping case here, that was very well captured in cameras, and that was estimated to have dropped an as big as about 5 kg meteorite IF of “normal chondritic” density. This was captured into eight fireball-cameras (or auroral-camera), in seven observing stations. (the case in the news “only” into five cameras in four stations).

We have not given any news from this. One might find something brief from a Finnish asrtonomy discussion group, if one would know where to look.

You can see estimated (dynamically derived masses, ie from velocity and deceleration data) meteorite masses in peer reviewed publications and only a few of these may be more or less confirmed, from found meteorite.
And this case (in the news) was among the easiest (in this respect, ie as to the ablation), in my opinion because of very low entry velocity and relatively well derived velocity behaviour to the end, although quite a lot of smoothing will of course be needed.
(But it can not vanish away (as much as I think to understand) at the very end, with low velocity (about 8 km/s in the end) when the abalation is coming to end.)
If you might like to know some further details, please ask.

Some elaborating of the data reduction could still be made, but it may depend on if any search will be made, how much of time I will denote to this, especially now that I have my hands full of work also from the previous expected bigger meteorite dropping case.

Regards,

Esko Lyytinen
Finnish fireball observing group

“An asteroid up to twice the size of the one that levelled the forest of Tunguska, Siberia, has just whizzed perilously close to the Earth.

The rock, which is known as 2008/9 DD45 and is estimated to be between 20 and 50 metres across, passed just 72,000 kilometres above the Earth on Monday. That’s less than one fifth of the distance from here to the moon.”

http://www.asylum.co.uk/2009/03/03/massive-asteroid-narrowly-misses-the-earth

And on the metric/imperial confusion: yeah, 15km/s seems about right. I live in the UK, and can make rough guesses about what something in metric = in imperial, but only if they’re similarly scaled units. Like mph and kph, but I can’t do m/s to mph.

TS: Totally agree. The UK is in a total mess regarding measurements. Hence my joke above.

The Bugatti Veyron has a top speed of 682,245.288 furlongs/fortnight at which it gets 41,234.1391 rods/hogshead.

To the nearest foot, 1 km = 1 mi – 2000 ft

My foot is exactly 1 ft long. Your milage may vary.

1 US gallons != 1 Imperial gallons also 1 US oz != 1 Imperial oz

And the first stage of the Saturn V generated …. darn Google won’t convert to slugs, slinches, or blobs and it’s too early my brain is melting

From a discussion at http://blog.cruachan.ca/2009/01/05/converting-to-metric/ based on an xkcd

They’re pretty glum about finding the thing as there’s a kilometer or so of uncertainty about the smack-down site (calculated from observations), and there’s a buttload of snow. (note: b. is the unofficial SI measurement of snow depth.) Apparently it (just translating) was initially 500 grams, glowed for about 3 secs from 72 km down to 34 km, was about 300 grams by the end of it, dropped down at 200 km/h, and might be in pieces now.

(I don’t know much about astronomy or anything about the society, but hey, I can do Finnish.)

(Oy; made the mistake of including a link and got stuck in moderation. Thus I repost without a direct link and apologize if I end up committing the heinous sin of thus creating a double comment. Phil, if you read this, disregard the comment in moderation. Sorry sorry sorry.)

They’re pretty glum about finding the thing as there’s a kilometer or so of uncertainty about the smack-down site (calculated from observations), and there’s a buttload of snow. (note: buttload is the unofficial SI measurement of snow depth.) Apparently it (just translating) glowed for about 3 secs, from 72 km down to 34 km, was about 300 grams by the end of it, dropped down at 200 km/h, and might be in pieces now.

(I don’t know much about astronomy or anything about the society, but hey, I can do Finnish.)

For example; Most metric people know that 160 kilometres per hour is 100 miles per hour. Most would have to stop and pull out a calculator to tell you that it’s also 44 metres per second or 145 feet per second.

As long as we don’t have to switch to English cooking, too

Is that even likely and/or possible?

There WAS that chunk of rock that was just discovered recently, and has passed (or will pass?) us by 60,000km’s. Makes me wonder if it was part of a collision..

Ah, speculation. It’s what fuels the imagination, doesn’t it?