Harvey Nininger's 1948 attempt to nationalize Meteor Crater
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract— Harvey Nininger successfully petitioned the American Astronomical Society to pass a motion in support of nationalizing Meteor Crater, Arizona, at its June 1948 meeting. He alleged that the Barringer family, who held title to the crater, was depriving American citizens of its scenic beauty and scientific value. He then reportedly went on to make the unauthorized‐and false‐claim that the family would be receptive to a fair purchase offer for the crater. The Barringers, who had not been given advance warning of the petition and were not present at the meeting, felt ambushed. They quickly and forcefully rebutted Nininger's allegations, made it clear they had no intention of relinquishing their title to the crater, and terminated his exploration rights. What led Nininger to such a curious and self‐defeating act? Based on our reading of his voluminous personal correspondence, we conclude that it was rooted primarily in his complex relationship with Frederick Leonard and Lincoln LaPaz, and his desire to establish a national institute for meteoritical research‐with them, originally, but after a serious falling out, on his own. Prevented from moving his American Meteorite Museum to the crater rim, Nininger wondered what would happen if the crater was nationalized and made into a public park, with an accompanying tourist center and museum. With characteristic élan, he could picture himself at its head, with a secure salary and adequate space to exhibit his meteorite collection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".