Bob Space

During the Apollo 11 retrospectives I’ve been by turns amused and annoyed by how much liberty is taken with the A/V materials. For example, the omission of several seconds of crew audio between “Contact light. Okay, engine stop.” and “Tranquility Base here.” Or the matching of the sound of Armstrong’s “one small step” quote with video that shows him descending from the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) ladder onto … a LEM footpad. (The momentous quote occurs as Armstrong steps OFF that footpad and onto the lunar surface proper, about a minute later.) Granted, most people wouldn’t care. But I’m a geek about these things, so I do.

On Saturday morning, NASA TV distributed a “resource reel”, thirty minutes of footage commemorating Walter Cronkite and his coverage of NASA. (more…)

I did finally get an answer from the Special English staff at Voice of America: no, they use no special software tools. Drat.

So it’s off on the road to explore OpenOffice.org, for which I can get a dictionary that corresponds loosely to the guidelines for the Simple English version of Wikipedia: Ogden’s Basic English, plus a few hundred more words to embrace the 1,000 most commonly used English words, plus another few hundred to gather in VoA Special English.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team have released photos of the Apollo landing sites. Guess I underestimated the NASA interest in getting those photos out for the Apollo 11 commemorations.

The 11 and 14 photos are rather nice. The 17 site is taken from much higher up (LRO’s orbit adjustments are not yet finished), but you can still clearly see the shadows of the LEM descent stage and the rover vehicle.

And there will be better pictures to come, I’m sure, over the lifespan of the Orbiter. Thanks, NASA!

Oh, yes, by the by, there are now a baker’s dozen folks cluttering up the International Space Station. That’s the most ever in orbit in one place at one time. Nice, if noisy.

… and now so will I.

The missing Apollo moonwalk tapes are indeed still missing, probably (tragically) recycled to record new data.

Today’s press event will showcase the first fruits of the major restoration project to capture and clean up the best available recordings from the Apollo 11 mission. Which is, really, still very darn cool. The project won’t be finished ’til fall, but there’s some good stuff to look at ’til then.

I have a nice blue notebook. In that notebook I have collected information on different forms of “controlled English”. “Controlled English” uses shorter sentences and a much reduced vocabulary. Most controlled English vocabularies are around 1,500 words, and each word is restricted to only one usage and meaning.

So far I have word lists for:
Basic English (the original, by C.K. Ogden)
VoA Special English (developed for radio and EFL learners)
Simplified English/Simplified Technical English (developed in Europe for the global aviation industry)
Specialized English (a variation of VoA Special English)

And I have a “Plain English” writing guide published by the U.S. Government. (You, there in the back, stop laughing.)

I would really, really like to teach one of these to my word processing program. Then I could select the “Simple” dictionary, type all I like … and where I’ve used a word that’s not in my list, it would put up the “misspelled” squiggle. Then I could think of another way to say what I want to say and so make less trouble for the reader.

There are many software packages around to support controlled English. Each costs many thousands of dollars. Yes, thousands. Yes, many. Unfortunately I am not an airline or a defense contractor.

The Basic English Institute has produced dictionary and thesaurus plug-ins for OpenOffice. But the thought of having another office application on my computer makes me cry. I may have no choice.

I am so behind on space news, it’s tragic. Here’s some great stuff I only just now caught.

The television footage of the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was broadcast from the moon to ground stations around the world. It was converted and relayed to Houston, from whence it went out to the news outlets. Archive footage of that event was actually a 16mm movie camera … pointed at a television display … showing the downconverted video … no wonder it looked so grainy and distorted. The original broadcast data, however, was recorded on magnetic tape at the receiver sites. Those tapes were thought lost forever. But…

NASA will hold a press event at the Newseum in Washington D.C. Thursday 16 July at 8:00 AM ET. The promise is to release “the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years.” Did the missing tapes get found? So the rumors swirled at the end of last month. You can bet I’m setting my DVR to record this from NASA TV…

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Friends Get First Dibs

Yup, if you’ve come here from Facebook or just read my blog anyway, you get to pick first amongst the stuff I’m getting rid of. ‘Cause if there’s one thing better than knowing a game went to a loving home, it’s knowing a game went to a friend’s loving home.

Post rules:

If you’re interested in something, make me an offer. ONE offer. E-mail it to nvdaydreamer (at) gmail (dot) com. (You can put multiple offers in a single e-mail.) Highest offer in the week takes it. Domestic Buyer pays actual Priority Mail shipping cost; International pays actual Air Parcel Post shipping cost. Serious offers only , please… “I’ll buy it for a nickel!” isn’t really funny to me.

Books are “like-new” unless otherwise indicated.

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So, the new criteria for keeping games: Either

1. Played so much it’s part of my genes (TFT, Traveller, FASA Trek)
2. Related to other threads of my sci-fi/fantasy collection (Ringworld, GURPS Humanx)
3. Haven’t played but really, REALLY want to someday (Assorted board and card games)
4. Special gifts from friends

I really, really wanted to play Marvel/SAGA, and I went to down collecting accessory information for it … but superhero gamers are a) rare; b) usually like much more crunch.

The anime-themed RPG books can go, even though they were fun reads and I love the digest format of BESM.

Of course, the wonderfulness of all this is that there is NO market for these things. I fully expect to run up auctions that collect no bids.

When I was small, someone noted my fine motor skills were not all that sharp and told my mother to get me a hobby. She enrolled me in a “plastic model of the month” club — the Revell Young Modelers Club. (There apparently was a Master Modelers Club, too, but I never got that far.) I don’t know if it did much for my coordination, but it wasn’t bad for my imagination … particularly since one of the models I got early on was the Apollo 11 “Tranquility Base” diorama. I already had the space bug very badly, so that model (and a later model of the Mercury capsule) were cherished items long after they’d had far too many dings and knocks to be spaceworthy.

The quality of plastic models has largely gone downhill since the 80s, and these days resin models are plentiful, if not always cheap. But they still require assembly, finishing, painting, decaling … stuff I still don’t have a lot of patience or coordination for.

Enter Delta 7 Studios, (more…)

I have been researching simplified versions of the English Language. I started on Saturday after someone pointed out the Simple English version of Wikipedia. I’ve discovered these are nothing new, with Ogden’s Basic English dating from the 1930s. Voice of America’s Special English was developed in the 1950s and is still in use.

The newest and shiniest today was created to standardize and simplify aircraft manuals: AECMA Simplified English. That has evolved over the last 20 or so years into ASD Simplified Technical English, which is a widespread standard in the aviation field. Other fields are adopting the rules in STE as well.

Technical standards are such fun. Unfortunately, they’re also so very expensive. STE would cost me $200! (I’m afraid to write and ask how much the Boeing Simplified English Checker software costs … and it doesn’t run easily under OS X anyway.)

For the moment, I’m “making do” with third-hand summaries and out-of-date recaps of the old AECMA version. Even so, I think this will probably be useful to me as I try to hash out the language in Go For Launch!. It might even be good in helping me explain things to my children in a simpler way.

And now, off to bowling!