Gundestrup

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel J. Milton" <dmilt1896@...>
wrote:

> I can't contribute to Michael Smith's and Torsten's

discussion

> of whether there's any significance to the similarity of "German"
> and "Kerman", but I was there once (Kerman, that is; I've been to
> Germany too), to look at some features the Geological Survey of

Iran

> thought were impact craters (my specialty). They looked to me from
> the air photos to be volcanic, and so they were.
> Anyway, trying to find them, my host stopped to ask
> directions. Not knowing the language, the reply sounded to me
> like "Blahblahblahblahdofarsaghblahblahcharfarsagh" -- and I
> realized that, like Xenophon before us, we were being given
> distances in parasangs!
> Dan
>

The recently deceased (and much missed) Niels Gundestrup, engineer
with the Danish expeditions to drill ice cores on Greenland (the idea
and initiative and later leadership came from prof. Willy Dansgaard,
and to set the record straight: I'm tired of hearing of "European"
ice core drilling projects; for the first couple of years the project
was exclusively Danish; Anglophonian popular science sources begin to
twitch and jitter when even reminded of that fact), whom I worked for
making software for a predecessor of a GPS system (NAVSTAR), told me
one of the many collaterals of Murphy's law: "Units of measurement
will be given in the most unpractical form possible, eg. furlongs per
fortnight"

Torsten