I According to a janitor’s assistant at the Maximegalon University, who often loiters outside lecture halls, the Universe is sixteen billion years old. This supposed truth is scoffed at by a clutch of Betelgeusean beat poets who claim to have moleskin pads older than that (rat-a-tat-tat). Seventeen billion, they say, at the very least, according to their copy of the Wham Bam Big Bang scrolls. A human teenage prodigy once called it at fourteen billion based on a complicated computation involving the density of moon rock and the distance between two pubescent females on an event horizon. One of the minor Asgardian gods did mumble that he’d read something somewhere about some sort of a major-ish cosmic event eighteen billion years ago, but no one pays much attention to pronouncements from on high any more, not since the birth of the gods debacle, or Thorgate as it has come to be known. However many billions it actually is, it is billions and the old man on the beach looked as though he’d counted off at least one of those million millions on his fingers. His skin was ivory parchment and, viewed in profile, he closely resembled a quavering uppercase S. The man remembered having a cat once, if memories could be trusted as anything more than neuron configurations across trillions of synapses. Memories could not be touched with one’s fingers, could not be felt like the surf flowing over his gnarled toes could be felt. But then what—
Book cover showing Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Six of Three And another thing Eoin Colfer
I was expecting Eoin Colfer's 6th book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy to annoy me. I just wasn't expecting it to annoy me by paragraph 2.
#innumeracy #scienceidiot
