GPS World
February 24, 2016
By Alan Cameron
It happened in the blink of an eye. Less than a blink. Far less, actually. Slightly more than one one-thousandth of an eye blink, according to calculations. In that amount of time, one of your eyelashes traverses 10 micrometers on its journey toward your lower eyelid.
And yet it was long enough to throw computers and communications systems around the world out of whack, generate thousands of alarms, and pull engineers from their beds at 2 a.m.
One occurrence might have been enough to do all that. I’m not sure. But it kept happening over and over again. Thus the alarms, the out-of-whackness, the sleep deprivation. At least it did not generate massive financial trading sell-offs, blow holes in national security, or shut down Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. For that, we may be thankful.
But it might have.
