Aventures dans l’espace et le temps

June 30^th is one of two days a year on which the ‘International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service’ may choose to tweak time and today, the day before, I had a little adventure.

Due to various factors such as tidal effects from the Moon’s gravitational pull on the Earth, changing convection currents within the Earth, seismic events, glaciers retreating, or the Earth's natural 'wobble', we may need to add leap seconds to our own radioactively judged timekeeping methods in order to keep Coordinated Universal Time back just a little bit and attempt to resolve any discrepancies.

The long and short of it, we've all got an extra second to play with tomorrow and I shared this with my colleagues.

Also discussed, the scientific validity of Superman (1978)

In response I received two messages of thanks, one request to be paid overtime, a comment on reversing the angular velocity, two wry comments on it taking more than the gained leap second to read my original email and one entirely in French.

My French is really only just conversational but first line made me chuckle; the second reach for a blank piece of paper and, curiosity piqued, start to make my way steadily through

I start to break it down, blue for what I knew or could semi-confidently guess at, red for words I didn’t know, underlined when I couldn’t make sense of what it meant.  Twenty minutes later and I’m sat with a page I still don’t get.

I have to break to go to a meeting, there I see the smiling member of staff, she smiles cryptically “Chris…I sent you an email”.  Ah-ha, a challenge is it?

I’m back at my desk half an hour later, a colleague looks over and guesses that it could be in reference to the reformation…it’s certainly not scripture, even in translation and definitely reads fairly classically, they're likely quotations?

Project Gutenberg in Australia hosts several translated versions of French texts.  I use Google to search pages on the site for ‘Translated’, ‘French’, and three of what seem to be key words that I hope would be distinct: ‘Fraternal’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Tenderness’.  Turns out there are quite a few hits for that, including a translation of Mein Kampf…I hope that isn’t it.

A few extra terms and I get to Les Misérables, that seems more like it, although none of the text matches.  I re-read what I've scrawled out and spot ‘anxious hours’, that sounds promising; a smattering of quotation marks and out comes a piece of text that looks now looks a little familiar.

I hurriedly scribble  ‘Emile Zola’ and dash downstairs.  We laugh about my afternoon quest, the new words I can add to my vocabulary, that it’s sometimes nice for teachers to share things outside of their subject, and that ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ roughly translates as ‘The Ladies Paradise’ – a result that splits Google results into two camps; the novel and the rather risqué club in Paris…

Happy leap second day!

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