zero meridian

After a meeting Friday in Moscow with his British counterpart, Ben Wallace, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said, “Unfortunately, the level of our cooperation is close to zero and about to cross the zero meridian and go into negative, which is undesirable,” according to an Agence France-Presse report that cited Russian news agencies.

After Wallace laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, acknowledging Russia’s loses in World War II, Shoigu nodded to the countries’ alliance in that war but added, “Unfortunately, the level of our cooperation is close to zero and is about to cross the zero meridian and reach the negatives.”

Unfortunately, I had no chart of the variations with me, and I could not remember where the zero meridian of variation lay—the boundary-line between easterly and westerly variation.

There’s the date of the recording and the place—the longitude doesn’t mean anything to us because we still don’t know where the Martians fixed their zero meridian.

The instrument was equipped with three movable rings to be set for the celestial equator, for the zero meridian, and for the right ascension of any convenient star.