The perils of crashing are obvious, but being trapped behind a crash when the road is blocked with bodies and bikes is equally perturbing.
The bombshell can partly be explained by memories from last year, when credit-rating agencies were caught snoozing by the East Asian turmoil.Also perturbing, though long expected, was the recent announcement that the governor of the Reserve Bank, Chris Stals, would be replaced next year by a politician, Tito Mboweni, currently the labour minister.
Their plummeting fortunes (see chart) helped to spark the stockmarket sell-off that prompted the Federal Reserve to act this week ahead of its scheduled meeting.So perturbing was their plight that the prospect of a rescue caused a far bigger stockmarket rally than the Fed's biggest rate cut in a quarter of a century the day before.
It is also perturbing liberals.As of August 22nd, just two weeks after the riots peaked, 1,406 people had appeared in court, according to the Ministry of Justice.
If similar boosts were made in the euro area and America, says the think-tank, British GDP would decline by 1%.But if the prime minister would have liked to do more, the Treasury's answer, spelt out in perturbing new projections, was that government was pushing at the limits of affordability.
The figures were puzzling as well as perturbing.
It appeared possible that the gravitational attraction of an undiscovered planet was perturbing the orbit of Uranus.
Manfred Eigen was the first person to clearly perceive that mixing could be avoided by perturbing an equilibrium and watching it relax.
In addition to causing tremendous immediate devastation and ensuing earthquakes, firestorms, and giant sea waves (tsunamis), collisions of such magnitude are believed to be capable of perturbing Earth's environment globally by throwing large quantities of fine debris high into the atmosphere.
The English physicist Isaac Newton used lunar observations in developing his theory of gravitation in the late 17th century, and he was able to show some effects of solar gravity in perturbing the Moon's motion.
Which explains why Lonely Planet's decision to overlook London for its cheerier northern cousin feels particularly perturbing.
