Difference between revisions of "ATD 792-820"

Revision as of 16:26, 15 January 2007

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

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Page 794

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

obstanovka
Russian: situation.

Page 795

Zdorovo!
Russian: hello!

Neutral Moresnet
Tiny "country" between Belgium and Germany; existed 1816-1919; see, oh do see, Wikipedia entry.

tchudak
Now transliterated chudak. Russian: crank.

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

Not even Russian army does that!
And it cost them dearly in 1914 when intercepted "clear" radio traffic helped the Germans crush them at the Battle of Tannenberg.

Page 796

By dusk . . . running-lights
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 flashlightrise would. Either I'm running my film backward or the Chums are . . . or Pynchon is. --Volver 13:38, 4 January 2007 (PST)

Page 797

upriver from Vanavara
"Ground zero" of the Event was 40 miles north of Vanavara.

"simultaneity" . . . Special Relativity
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
"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. --Volver 13:38, 4 January 2007 (PST)

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

Page 798

mala vita
Italian: evil life.

Page 799

Glagolitic alphabet
Alphabet devised for writing Old Church Slavonic. Replaced by the modern Cyrillic alphabet but used in Croatia till the end of the 18th century.

Page 800

Irredentism
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" (p. 761).

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