By Allan T. Price

The Internet links us all to a vast array of information-sometimes more than we expect, and to sources we didn’t know even existed. When searching for ‘online dictionary’ I pulled up a variety of ‘ordinary’ dictionaries, and such sites as etymology dictionary (www.etymonline.com). Adding ‘desert’ to my search query pulled up sites as diverse as:

Dream Dictionary (http://www.soulfuture.com/dream_dictionary/dream_dictionary_main.asp)

and The Astrodigital Online Dictionary of Meteoritics (http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/metdict.html)

Like a lot of people I sometimes get diverted from what I’m doing by this kind of interesting link appearing in front of me, of which is entirely irrelevant to what I’m doing. In this case, I looked up a definition of the word ‘desert’ which I subsequently found, but in the end didn’t end up using. My search had nothing to do with meteors called ‘fireballs’ which are much brighter than normal meteors because they are roughly the size of peas, some even the size of a grain of sand. I love discovering this kind of trivia. Thankfully, using the Internet makes researching much faster so I can spare a few minutes to connect with interesting web sites, and still learn what seeing a desert means in a dream, before getting back to connecting with the facts I need to know today. You know the next time I see a very bright meteor, I may remember it is a ‘fireball’, and why it is so bright.

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