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J'ai été assez surpris de voir des explications du phénomène des saisons aux enfants dans des fiches à destination des enseignants, contenant un mélange d'explications justes et de formulations malheureuses.

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Subnautica is the name of a very nice computer game I've been playing some time ago. I highly recommend it. It stands out by its originality, its beauty, its design.

The action entirely takes place on an small patch of land (sea?) on an ocean planet, from which you must escape. I had bought it in early access, i.e. got an installation licence for the game while it was still in development. It was fun to watch the successive versions as they improved the game, added content, and corrected bug. They encouraged user feedback by making it easy: a single key press would take a screenshot and allow you to send it with a comment, for instance in case of a bug.

One of the updates was called H₂O and introduced a gorgeous skyscape with two moons and regular eclipses. A funny mistake was that they had put the big moon 3D object farther than the star studded background spherical mesh, resulting in stars passing in front of the moon. This mistake stayed for a very long time and was only fixed very close to the release of the finished game. Since the majority of the game takes place underwater, it does not really matter (and it can be understood that the game designers did not want to spend too much time on a realistic sky (eye candy is more important in a video game than scientific details (that anyway, can never be fully correct in sci-fi, (lest the game be awfully boring)))).

In the following page I allow myself to make fun of the other astronomical absurdities. No mocking of the devs is intended. The game's great. I recommend it.

Mon fils me raconte qu'une année au collège, sa professeure de français, pour choisir qui envoyer au tableau, prenait la liste d'appel et tirait quatre dés à six faces, se servant de la somme comme rang du nom de l'élève à faire passer. En tant que 4è élève sur la liste, il savait qu'il avait peu de chances d'être choisi, et effectivement cela n'est pas arrivé.

My son just told me that one year, in middle school, his French teacher, in order to select who shall go to the blackboard, would take the list and draw four regular dices, using the sum as the rank of the name of whom to send. As the fourth on the list, he knew there were little chance he would have to go, and indeed it did not happen.