Saturday March 23, 2013
Book 14: Broken Wind — Part II: Can Full of Sky

Note: As has been noted before, there is an obscure derivation of Eddington's Law (the one about an infinite number of monkeys and the works of Shakespeare) positing that in an infinite universe, with an infinite number of points of view upon an infinite number of vistas, eventually you'll recreate all the great movie posters of the 20th century.

Tagon's comment may suggest a different derivation of Eddington -- perhaps lines of movie dialog are similarly ensured re-creation in an infinite universe -- but it is, in fact, just a reflection of the simpler principle of linguistic memeticism. Some words and phrases are like viruses, infecting host cultures in order to replicate themselves. Words like "infection" and "host" may be worrisome, but even the most heavily meme-infected tongues survive the process, proclaiming proudly that they're not dead yet, and would, in fact, like to go for a walk.

Transcript

NARRATOR: One serially minted set of coins later...

TAGON: Commander Andreyasn has issued each of you a shiny thing.

The newly-recruited Sergeant Murtaugh tells me they are "Challenge Coins."  I'm sure she'll explain them to the rest of you.

But not now.  We're approaching the coordinates our client provided.  It's a large body orbiting a red dwarf star, which is in turn orbiting the burnt-out white dwarf at the center of this system.

Now, I'm no astro-nomenclature-er.

ENNESBY: Pronounced perfectly sir.

TAGON: I thought that a thing orbiting a thing orbiting a star was called a moon, but in this case that's no moon.

It's a space station.