Monday 3 January 2011

How time flies!

You get to my age, the days blur into weeks, the weeks into months... next thing you know, it's a new year and I have to instruct my autopilot to type 2011 instead of 2010 (which instruction should "take" around September/October, going by previous years).

We enjoyed 2 weeks of 'flu over the holidays, nothing serious, just a lot of coughing and spluttering and lost sleep and rubber legs. Oh, and vomiting, plus simultaneous volcanic activity at the other end. Buckets! Buckets!! This makes 3 years in a row we've caught some kind of bug just in time for Christmas but we're not complaining, truth to tell we look forward to the extra time together; it's become a tradition.

[Checks date] Wow, it's the 3rd already. And so the New Year has come and gone, another blur. I have some email to catch up on now that my brain is almost functioning again. Just as well I waited -- I scribbled some short story and novel chapter updates over the holidays, and they are mental.

Best wishes to everyone for 2011.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=176634

"T minus 10 minutes" does NOT mean "10 minutes"

T does NOT mean now. T denotes the time of an event.

If "ignition in T minus 10 minutes" meant "ignition in 10 minutes", WHY WOULD YOU SAY IT? Why would you inject "T minus" in there for no reason.

You never see nasa saying "ignition in T minus 10 minutes". They just say "T minus 10 minutes".

When they say "T minus 10 minutes", it means that right now we are at Time of ignition minus 10 minutes. Hence if ignition is supposed to occur at 12:30, and they say "T minus 1 hour", the time is now 11:30.

T is a point in time => T - x minutes is a point in time => "ignition in T minus x minutes" makes no sense

If ignition is supposed to happen at 12:30, then "ignition in T minus 10 minutes" does indeed mean "ignition in 12:20", which of course makes no sense.