Exploding super-prang asteroid to pepper Earth, trigger deadly ice age – no, wait, it happened 466 million years ago A huge collision in the Solar System’s asteroid belt may have triggered an ice age on Earth that froze our planet... some 466 million years ago. Eggheads believe a 93-mile wide space rock floating between Mars and Jupiter was smashed to pieces as it crashed into something else, perhaps another cosmic boulder. The prang …
La Compagnie des glaces by Georges-Jean Arnaud. Unfortunetaly, only the first book (out of 30 or so) was translated and my french is just "good" enough to make a frenchman "volunteer" to speak english.
Nice read, though. Fond memories about the Amiga game as well.
a 93-mile wide space rock
Please, when you convert measurements between systems don't state a precision which didn't previously exist. I bet the paper said something like 'estimated to be 150km wide' and some journo somewhere (probably not even Katyanna) stuck this into Google and blindly copied 93 rather than the more sensible 90.
I'm also a member of the Campaign for Imprecise Time. If I ask you the time, don't tell me that it's 7:53. The quarter hours will do nicely.
Obviously a bit different if you're trying to catch a train, or boil an egg. But under normal circumstances it'll be fine.
On the other hand, "Tuesday", probably doesn't quite cut it. But points for trying.
Couldn't agree more. I'm happy to wait for the computers to catch up too.
Rich 11,
From my downvote score above, it looks like you're the only one who couldn't agree more. Other El Registrans clearly like their time exactly thankyouverymuch!
My brother actually bought a "cool" watch in the 1980s that was highly fashionable by being black and shiny - with glowing hands. But the only time marked on it was 12 o'clock (in watch-speak should they be called indexes?), so you could see which way up it was. For any other time, you were literally in the dark.
He got rid of it because he complained that he couldn't tell what time it was. To which my response was, why buy a watch with no numbers in the first place? Now I campaign for imprecise time, I'm all in favour of it...
Apparently those gradations on a watch face are indeed called indexes or indices, depending on your preferred spelling.
I've had watches and clocks with no indices, or just the one at 12. Never really had a problem telling the time well enough for my purposes from the angles of the hands.
Apropos of nothing, I've just had the idea to announce the time in radians. That would be marvelously annoying. "Hey, it's nearly three-pi-over-two to pi. What say we head out in another half-pi or so?"
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