Lightsecond

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Read this passage, lightly redacted from one of this year’s Hugo nominees, and tell me if you think “lightsecond” is being used (correctly) as a unit of distance or (incorrectly) as a unit of time.

A docking-mouth opened, a whirlpool of matter spinning out and away, and the comet plunged into this vast funnel. For the first lightsecond, magnetic fields induced its braking, absorbing a fraction of its massive kinetic energy. Then a web of lasers met it…

See what I mean? One doesn’t normally talk of, say, the first ten metres of braking; rather of the first half-second or so. And if the extruded funnel is really meant to be more than 300,000 km in size, that raises all kinds of problems about just how quickly this can be happening. Let’s be charitable and assume it is a misprint for “millisecond”; “lightsecond” really makes no sense here.

(PS: two posts I made by email yesterday turned up on LJ with time-stamps eight hours into the future. I’m emailing this at about 0840 local time.)

One thought on “Lightsecond”

  1. Just read that interview by the ever-excellent Rennie. I am struck by two things: 1) It echoes remarks I’ve read by other writers, including Hopi Sen, that Salmond isn’t the all-powerful, canny operator that some would have you believe; and 2) the comments below it.

    Now, I know no good ever comes of reading comments beneath online articles, but I’ve been struck before by the behaviour of SNP-supporting commenters on online forums etc.. Even more than most usual online commenters, the refusal to engage with the points raised and the desire to ascribe views to a writer who dares to criticise Salmond or his acolytes that the writer plainly does not have (whither all this deep-fried Mars bar nonsense?) is breathtaking. As a Scot myself, I also find it pretty nauseating. It does not bode well for Salmond’s “friendly neighbour” theory if these people are his footsoldiers.

    A final thought on the apparently successful manoeuvring of Salmond. Before last week, we didn’t know when the referendum would be. After this week, and the intervention of the Westminster Government, we do. I’m not entirely sure that at this point, Salmond wanted to be in this position.

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