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:'''<big>Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.</big>'''<p><br>

==Page XX==

'''Sample entry'''<br>
Please format like this.

==Page 794==

'''communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic'''
Robert Peary did not even leave New York City at the start of his polar  expedition until July 6, 1908, 6 days '''after''' the Tunguska Event of 6-30-08, and did not reach Ellesmere Island until the summer of 1909.

'''Semipalatinsk'''<br>
Town on the Irtysh River, a ''long'' way southwest of Vanavara. Soviet nuclear tests were administered from here.

'''''obstanovka'''''<br>
Russian: situation.

==Page 795==

'''''Zdorovo!'''''<br>
Russian: ''hel''lo!

'''Neutral Moresnet'''<br>
Tiny "country" between Belgium and Germany; existed 1816-1919; see, oh ''do'' see, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet Wikipedia entry.]

'''''tchudak'''''<br>
Now transliterated ''chudak.'' Russian: crank.

'''Kiakhta'''<br>
Or ''Kyakhta,'' only two syllables. Town on Russian (Buriat)-Mongolian border south of Lake Baikal, a center of Russian trade with China.

'''Not even Russian army does that!'''<br>
And it cost them dearly in 1914 when intercepted "clear" radio traffic helped the Germans crush them at the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1914_Battle_of_Tannenberg Battle of Tannenberg.]

==Page 796==

'''By dusk . . . running-lights'''<br>
This is deeply disturbing, and I hope it is simply my misunderstanding. Apply the description in this long paragraph to a tiny model, say a flashlight, an orange and a toothpick representing one of the mooring lines with a raisin balloon at the top. The orange rotates toward the east, so that the flashlight appears to set in the west. Which part of the system gets dark first? The text says the raisin does, the arc of the orange's shadow moving downward. But plainly the bottom end of the toothpick is shaded first and the raisin remains illuminated until last. What would move downward from the highest raisin to the orange-peel countryside? The arc of the orange's shadow at flashlight''rise'' would. Either I'm running my film backward or the Chums are . . . or Pynchon is. --[[User:Volver|Volver]] 13:38, 4 January 2007 (PST)

==Page 797==

'''upriver from Vanavara'''<br>
"Ground zero" of the Event was 40 miles north of Vanavara.

'''"simultaneity" . . . Special Relativity'''<br>
Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905) refutes the idea that two observers seeing two events can ever agree on whether the events were simultaneous. Adopters of the theory (and in 1908 they were all ''early'' adopters) would be asking one another if it applied to this phenomenon.

'''the error of the seismograph recordings . . . singularity'''<br>
"Error" doesn't mean mistake or wrongness. It measures the variability within each instrument; every measurement comes with a plus-or-minus figure. If the Event happened instantaneously, each of the charts would record it as a more or less spread-out peak. The energy released in a process is calculated from the area under the curve of intensity versus time; to get the power (rate of energy release), divide the energy by the duration of the process. Even though he states the math wrongly, Vanderjuice suspects the seismographs of the world have responded to a titanic release of energy that took place in essentially no time at all, so that power = energy divided by zero. When physicists see a ''real'' process apparently demanding division by zero, they call it a singularity and go looking for an explanation. --[[User:Volver|Volver]] 13:38, 4 January 2007 (PST)

'''Circassian slave'''<br>
Common figure in European literature about the "Lustful Turk." Circassia is a region in the Caucasus.

==Page 798==

'''''mala vita'''''<br>
Italian: evil life.

==Page 799==

'''Glagolitic alphabet'''<br>
See excellent annotation to [[ATD_243-272#Page_252|page 252]].

==Page 800==

'''Irredentism'''<br>
A policy appealing to the idea that "our" lands are unredeemed, i.e., ruled by some outsider, and must be brought into our domain. See annotation to "Eurasia Irredenta" ([[ATD_748-767#Page_761|page 761).]]

==Page 801==

'''unprovided for in the future tense of any language'''<br>
I.e., we have no simple way to describe future events in a chaotic system. You can't say that Chinese butterfly '''will''' cause a windstorm in Brazil.

'''High susceptibility to primordial variables'''<br>
Chaos theorists talk about "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions."

==Page 802==

'''croakers'''<br>
Doctors.

'''Mariahilf'''<br>
The Sixth District of Vienna, known as a shopping district.

==Page 803==

'''midinettes'''<br>
???

'''Facharbeiter'''<br>
German: technician, specialist.

==Page 804==

'''eleven'''<br>
Vienna is 86 degrees west of the Event, more or less. Converting longitude to time at 15 degrees = 1 hour, we get a time difference of 3 hours 44 minutes. At 7:17 a.m. Event time, it was 3:33 a.m. in Vienna. Now, at 11:00 p.m. the same day, Vienna time, it is 19 hours and 27 minutes after the event. The atmospheric effect has propagated west (possibly against the high-level winds?) from Siberia to Central Europe in quite a short time. All these numbers are rough!

==Page 805==

'''prepare them against the day'''<br>
Here the phrase means "in anticipation of" or "to be ready for."

==Page 806==

'''šlivovica'''<br>
One of the spellings of this word for plum brandy (also slivovica, slivovitz, etc.).

'''one to fifty million . . . mile-to-the-inch sheets'''<br>
Two extremes of mapmaking. A 1:50,000,000 map of the United States would fit comfortably on a page of ''AtD'' with most of Mexico and several Canadian provinces. Austria-Hungary at that scale would be about as big as your two thumbprints side by side.

The British Ordnance Survey produced a famous series of inch-to-the-mile sheets (1:63,360); the detail is about fine enough to show the left-turn lane of a city street. At this scale it would take some 200 unhandily large sheets to cover Austria-Hungary.

==Annotation Index==
{{ATD PbP}}
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