Just under 13,000 years ago, the earth entered a profound cooling period in Europe and Asia that lasted about 1000 years. In conjunction with this was the die off of most of the mammoths in North America and Europe and the disappearance of the early Stone Age humans from North America. This was known as the Younger-Dryas period and until very recently there were several competing theories as to why this happened.

… at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. A group of US scientists that include West will report that they have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago, they say. The huge pressures and heat triggered by the fragments crashing to Earth turned the comet’s carbon into diamond dust. ‘The shock waves and the heat would have been tremendous,’ said West. ‘It would have set fire to animals’ fur and to the clothing worn by men and women. The searing heat would have also set fire to the grasslands of the northern hemisphere. Great grazing animals like the mammoth that had survived the original blast would later have died in their thousands from starvation. Only animals, including humans, that had a wide range of food would have survived the aftermath.’

Estimates put the comet as five kilometers in diameter. Link.

I’m a Bad Brain. I was out of town dismantling the last of the Barn and without internet connection for five days, and am therefore delinquent. Steve will no doubt administer a sound drubbing the next time we’re in the same area code. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I spent some time in airports this week–in San Francisco, Atlanta, Cincinnati and Boston, and of course the third thing I look for in airports, right after coffee and the restrooms, are bookstores. Not that my work has ever made it into an airport bookstore, where what they stock is generally high-profile stuff with a pre-sell (if you liked the last five James Patterson thrillers you’ll love the current James Patterson thriller, etc.). I just like bookstores. And sometimes friends’ books are there, too. In Cincinnati, as I walked past the CNBC News Store managed by The Paradies Shops, I saw a display advertising the Read and Return program.

The way the program works is: you buy a book at a Paradies airport shop in Atlanta (for example), and–theoretically, anyway–read it and swap it back at a Paradies shop in Sacramento–perhaps, if you’re a fast reader, on the same business trip (you’ve got six months from purchase, and the book must be returned with its original receipt). At which point you get 50% of the purchase price back. Woo hoo, right? Well, for the purchaser of the books, perhaps.

What isn’t clear is what this means to me, the author (or, perhaps, to James Patterson, the author). And what happens to the book? How do the publishers feel about this? Paradies’ sales may be up 20%, but does that mean they’re re-selling the returned books? If they’re not, are they treating the returned books as returns to the publishers? Or just tossing them? Are they considered to be loss-leaders, to bring in business on the theory that most people will buy more but won’t remember to return the books or will lose the receipts? If they sell the same book more than once, does the author get multiple royalties on the sale? And what does this do to the author’s sales record, if you “sell” the same book three times, but don’t actually sell three copies of the book?

As a reader, the program sounds kinda cool to me. As a writer, obviously, I have a lot of questions. The program isn’t new–it’s been going for three or four years. I’d be very curious to know what its collateral effects have been.