It was the Torino scale.

Matching the Poisson Equation with the madness of the crowds, no statistical oddity here.

But as the scale quantifies the risks, from 0 (the Alfred E. Neumann level) over 8 (Tunguska, 1908. 1.000 square kilometres gone in a flash, but Nikolaï's tiara would only start to shiver years later, when the collective consciousness would reappear at the coast of Odessa, and the Clinamen would make one very confused marine call out the enemy with the yiel of 'Comrade!'), to 10, the fruit of the loom of impacts, Chixculub, 65 million years ago, where in Velikovsky's vision the collective consciousness of the large saurians had suffered a deadly blow at the bow of a hat. Torino might as well quantify the fear of collective mankind, since the selling technique defines the flavours of danger. In the past, level 6 used to hit the news, now only the astronomers in their little cubicles are informed.

Ballistics really, that's all there is to it. But the target itself moves, and the bullet can match its size. To critters living on the meteor, we are firing at them. God does not play dice, what about a game of pool?

The astronomers' calculus, from their Crays supercomputers or Turing machines like prayer wheels (but no compassionate Om Mani Padme Hum here) offers useful sigils or yantras, making the objects go away, shrinking in scale or disappearing beyond the horizon of our awareness. Like a transcendental meditation, to influence the Gauss glockenspiel. Words and numbers is all we need to grab and mutate der Welt, an Aristotelian truth transmitted through Hermes the pseudo-Trismegistos to modern day marketing techniques.

If it's not in my book OR if it doesn't compute

1. It doesn't exist
   
2. It doesn't apply
   
   
3. None of the above.
   
   

Aye, the good olde verb, Kav resonating from the Ayin Sof Aur above, which had its part in the downfall of the very large saurians - What? The contemporary symphony of five thousand types of frogs was also heard 65 million years ago when the fat lady sang - What? So the big ones became ex-dinosaurs, and the little ones kept populating the ponds with virtually no change in their genetical signature. Aeons before that, the same types of frogs were singing away when Pangea (in the long cyclical traditional break-up of supercontinents Vaalbara, Ur, Kenorland, Columbia, Rodinia and Pannotia) split in half into Laurasia and Gondwana - What?

All the time earth was reprocessed, they produced the same metaphysical sound, studied extensively by Jean-Pierre Brisset, the one sound trying desperately to make sense out of their green little senses, the very froggy je ne sais "Quoi?", making the formula sound and clear. In search for the question to life, the universe and everything, resonating through the globe, producing magnifying shockwaves of question marks, first splitting the known universe in half, hodge-podge, craving for meaning through duality; later on, the dinosaur holocaust. Every question pregnant of others. Concerto Interrogatio. Some even claim to have witnessed rains of frogs falling from the supersargasso sea, and usually consider it a bad omen.

We might feel grateful to the legions of astronomers, bending variables into safe guesses, our Giant's Courseway of unknowns, as a wall against the pipidae's lament.

Derisanamcope, 11th november - deep into Gravity's Rainbow