So which asteroid do we visit in 2025?

I wrote last week that the important part about the White House's vision for NASA and President Obama's speech was the asteroid mission, not Mars, simply because the asteroid mission is much easier, will happen much sooner, and has a much lower chance of being cancelled. Fortunately, after the furor over the speech has settled down it looks like the discussion is starting to shift towards the asteroid mission. An article here from New Scientist goes over what it will take to select a destination, and why we haven't decided on one yet.

The biggest reason is that we simply haven't found all the possible targets yet, not even close. A study in 2009 referencing numbers from 2006 only found seven possible targets during that time, but updated numbers increased this to 42. When WISE is done its mission we should see about 300,000 more asteroids added to those we know, and there are a lot of other sky surveys going on right now doing the same thing. Pan-STARRS is one of the newest ones.

In the article we see another one of the issues for a mission to an asteroid: gravity. Since asteroids have such low gravity, a spacecraft approaching one will have to use its own fuel to slow down. In addition to that the lumpy shape most asteroids have makes for an uneven gravitational pull, and (though not mentioned in this article) dust could be a problem as well, especially the possibility of it clinging to spacesuits due to static electricity. It's safe to say that the more massive, rounder and smoother an asteroid is the better. Taking a look at the close approaches page, we can see quite a bit of variation with asteroids ranging from just a few dozen metres to up to 3 km or so in diameter. Mass and gravity for these would be approximately:

50 metres - 260000 tonnes, surface gravity 0.0003% that of Earth, escape velocity 0.13 kph

400 metres - 134 million tonnes, surface gravity 0.002% that of Earth, escape velocity 1.1 kph

3 km - 56 billion tonnes, surface gravity 0.02% that of Earth, escape velocity 8 kph

The fact that we don't know exactly where we'll be going in 2025 is probably a good thing, since it's a reminder that this is an entirely new field, and perhaps a welcome change from the discussion over more well-known destinations. NASA could easily generate interest for the mission by setting up a page with some potential destinations, providing the information we have on them so far, and inviting visitors to vote on their favourite.

By the way, an asteroid that passed by us last week turned out to be twice the size we thought it was. Once again Arecibo is the observatory to thank for this. Just in 2008 it also found out that an asteroid approaching us was actually a trinary asteroid. Clearly we need to spend a lot more time refining what we know about asteroids before we can send a manned mission to one.

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New York may be home to about 800 languages

The New York Times has an article here on the linguistic diversity found in the city, including a number of examples of languages that now have more speakers there than in the regions of the world they originally come from. The reason for the article now is to spotlight the Endangered Languages Alliance, a group that has been formed to do what linguists normally do with endangered languages - research and try to preserve them.

A blog post here mentions the article as well as a reminder that Ladino is among these 800 or so, a language that seems to be holding up so far. The Ladino Wikipedia has over 2,000 articles right now, with the longest real article (i.e. no lists) being this one on Albert Einstein. One big advantage to preserving Ladino is that it seems to be quite easy to just take a Spanish page and ladinify it; just about the entire language is immediately comprehensible to a Spanish speaker. One example:

Ansi, aresivio en 1921 el premio Nobel por su eksplikasion del efekto fotoelektriko, anke el anunsio no se hizo hasta un anyo mas tadre.

In fact, someone seeing Ladino for the first time could easily mistake it for an IAL created by just taking Spanish and making it look a bit more like Interlingua, but with k in place of c.

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Iranian government not happy with the idea of Persian Euronews

Quelle surprise! The Iranian government is not a fan of the idea of another news channel in Persian run from outside the country. An article here in Turkish has the details:

Iran said it would not give permission for Euronews to work within the country "if it were to be like other foreign Persian channels".

The idea of Euronews working within Iran, which recently began broadcasting in Turkish, is not being looked at favorably by the Iranian government. The Iranian Minister of Culture and Guidance Sayid Mohammad Huseini said that they would not give permission for the Euronews television channel to set up a bureau within the country for its Persian-language section "if it were to be like all the other foreign Persian channels that broadcast to Iran". Huseini, accusing foreign Persian channels of not being objective, said that "apparently these channels want to provide information and broadcast films, but their real objective is something else. They are set up to affect public opinion and impose their own ideas".

Huseini also mentioned the events that took place last year after the presidential elections in Iran, saying that they saw how these channels worked as 'command and brain rooms' (can't think of a good term for this but means a kind of political war room or propaganda centre) and carried out provocation, and that "of course we would not give them permission to set up a bureau if they were to carry out these kinds of broadcast politics."

Iran has not given permission to Radio Farda, BBC and VOA's Persian language channels to operate within Iran on the grounds of interference with internal affairs. Most centres for these Persian television and radio channels, about fifty in total, operate within the United States and Europe.

The day Euronews in Persian is set up will also be a great day for students of the language, as their videos more often than not agree with the text below, making it easy to both read and hear the news at the same time. The last post here on Euronews in Persian was in January, here, where the channel was said to be planning to start broadcasting in Persian near the end of 2010. The Turkish-language version was also a bit vague about the exact start date right up until just ten days before it began (though it did specify before then that it would be in January), so it's not likely we'll know an exact date ahead of time for Persian either.

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Timely study released on evidence for an object of 1-4 Jupiter masses in the Oort Cloud

This study (quick overview here) is timely because it's about evidence for a body of 1 ~ 4 Jupiter masses (!) in the Oort Cloud, one that would be detectable by WISE, which as of now has finished scanning 60.1% of the sky.



Had the report been released a few months later WISE might have already announced finding something like this.

The discovery of an object of this type out in the Oort Cloud would mark a significant change in the way we view and explore space, as right now space looks a bit like this to us:

Solar System - explorable targets out to about 90 AU (though Sedna goes out as far as 975 AU). Then a lot of nothing. Going outwards at 1000 AU at a time, we get:

2000 AU, still nothing...
3000 AU, still nothing...
4000 AU, still nothing...
5000 AU, still nothing...
6000 AU, still nothing...
7000 AU, still nothing...
8000 AU, still nothing...
9000 AU, still nothing...
10000 AU, still nothing...
11000 AU, still nothing...
12000 AU, still nothing...
13000 AU, still nothing...
14000 AU, still nothing...
15000 AU, still nothing...
16000 AU, still nothing...
17000 AU, still nothing...
18000 AU, still nothing...
19000 AU, still nothing...
20000 AU, still nothing... (but that Oort Cloud object might be located somewhere around here)
21000 AU, still nothing...
22000 AU, still nothing...
23000 AU, still nothing...
24000 AU, still nothing...
25000 AU, still nothing...
26000 AU, still nothing...
27000 AU, still nothing...
28000 AU, still nothing...
29000 AU, still nothing...
30000 AU, still nothing...
31000 AU, still nothing...
32000 AU, still nothing...
33000 AU, still nothing...
34000 AU, still nothing...
35000 AU, still nothing...
36000 AU, still nothing...
37000 AU, still nothing...
38000 AU, still nothing...
39000 AU, still nothing...
40000 AU, still nothing...
41000 AU, still nothing...
42000 AU, still nothing...
43000 AU, still nothing...
44000 AU, still nothing...
45000 AU, still nothing...
46000 AU, still nothing...
47000 AU, still nothing...
48000 AU, still nothing...
49000 AU, still nothing...
50000 AU, still nothing...
51000 AU, still nothing...
52000 AU, still nothing...
53000 AU, still nothing...
54000 AU, still nothing...
55000 AU, still nothing...
56000 AU, still nothing...
57000 AU, still nothing...
58000 AU, still nothing...
59000 AU, still nothing...
60000 AU, still nothing...
61000 AU, still nothing...
62000 AU, still nothing...
63000 AU, still nothing...
64000 AU, still nothing...
65000 AU, still nothing...
66000 AU, still nothing...
67000 AU, still nothing...
68000 AU, still nothing...
69000 AU, still nothing...
70000 AU, still nothing...
71000 AU, still nothing...
72000 AU, still nothing...
73000 AU, still nothing...
74000 AU, still nothing...
75000 AU, still nothing...
76000 AU, still nothing...
77000 AU, still nothing...
78000 AU, still nothing...
79000 AU, still nothing...
80000 AU, still nothing...
81000 AU, still nothing...
82000 AU, still nothing...
83000 AU, still nothing...
84000 AU, still nothing...
85000 AU, still nothing...
86000 AU, still nothing...
87000 AU, still nothing...
88000 AU, still nothing...
89000 AU, still nothing...
90000 AU, still nothing...
91000 AU, still nothing...
92000 AU, still nothing...
93000 AU, still nothing...
94000 AU, still nothing...
95000 AU, still nothing...
96000 AU, still nothing...
97000 AU, still nothing...
98000 AU, still nothing...
99000 AU, still nothing...
100000 AU, still nothing...
101000 AU, still nothing...
102000 AU, still nothing...
103000 AU, still nothing...
104000 AU, still nothing...
105000 AU, still nothing...
106000 AU, still nothing...
107000 AU, still nothing...
108000 AU, still nothing...
109000 AU, still nothing...
110000 AU, still nothing...
111000 AU, still nothing...
112000 AU, still nothing...
113000 AU, still nothing...
114000 AU, still nothing...
115000 AU, still nothing...
116000 AU, still nothing...
117000 AU, still nothing...
118000 AU, still nothing...
119000 AU, still nothing...
120000 AU, still nothing...
121000 AU, still nothing...
122000 AU, still nothing...
123000 AU, still nothing...
124000 AU, still nothing...
125000 AU, still nothing...
126000 AU, still nothing...
127000 AU, still nothing...
128000 AU, still nothing...
129000 AU, still nothing...
130000 AU, still nothing...
131000 AU, still nothing...
132000 AU, still nothing...
133000 AU, still nothing...
134000 AU, still nothing...
135000 AU, still nothing...
136000 AU, still nothing...
137000 AU, still nothing...
138000 AU, still nothing...
139000 AU, still nothing...
140000 AU, still nothing...
141000 AU, still nothing...
142000 AU, still nothing...
143000 AU, still nothing...
144000 AU, still nothing...
145000 AU, still nothing...
146000 AU, still nothing...
147000 AU, still nothing...
148000 AU, still nothing...
149000 AU, still nothing...
150000 AU, still nothing...
151000 AU, still nothing...
152000 AU, still nothing...
153000 AU, still nothing...
154000 AU, still nothing...
155000 AU, still nothing...
156000 AU, still nothing...
157000 AU, still nothing...
158000 AU, still nothing...
159000 AU, still nothing...
160000 AU, still nothing...
161000 AU, still nothing...
162000 AU, still nothing...
163000 AU, still nothing...
164000 AU, still nothing...
165000 AU, still nothing...
166000 AU, still nothing...
167000 AU, still nothing...
168000 AU, still nothing...
169000 AU, still nothing...
170000 AU, still nothing...
171000 AU, still nothing...
172000 AU, still nothing...
173000 AU, still nothing...
174000 AU, still nothing...
175000 AU, still nothing...
176000 AU, still nothing...
177000 AU, still nothing...
178000 AU, still nothing...
179000 AU, still nothing...
180000 AU, still nothing...
181000 AU, still nothing...
182000 AU, still nothing...
183000 AU, still nothing...
184000 AU, still nothing...
185000 AU, still nothing...
186000 AU, still nothing...
187000 AU, still nothing...
188000 AU, still nothing...
189000 AU, still nothing...
190000 AU, still nothing...
191000 AU, still nothing...
192000 AU, still nothing...
193000 AU, still nothing...
194000 AU, still nothing...
195000 AU, still nothing...
196000 AU, still nothing...
197000 AU, still nothing...
198000 AU, still nothing...
199000 AU, still nothing...
200000 AU, still nothing...
201000 AU, still nothing...
202000 AU, still nothing...
203000 AU, still nothing...
204000 AU, still nothing...
205000 AU, still nothing...
206000 AU, still nothing...
207000 AU, still nothing...
208000 AU, still nothing...
209000 AU, still nothing...
210000 AU, still nothing...
211000 AU, still nothing...
212000 AU, still nothing...
213000 AU, still nothing...
214000 AU, still nothing...
215000 AU, still nothing...
216000 AU, still nothing...
217000 AU, still nothing...
218000 AU, still nothing...
219000 AU, still nothing...
220000 AU, still nothing...
221000 AU, still nothing...
222000 AU, still nothing...
223000 AU, still nothing...
224000 AU, still nothing...
225000 AU, still nothing...
226000 AU, still nothing...
227000 AU, still nothing...
228000 AU, still nothing...
229000 AU, still nothing...
230000 AU, still nothing...
231000 AU, still nothing...
232000 AU, still nothing...
233000 AU, still nothing...
234000 AU, still nothing...
235000 AU, still nothing...
236000 AU, still nothing...
237000 AU, still nothing...
238000 AU, still nothing...
239000 AU, still nothing...
240000 AU, still nothing...
241000 AU, still nothing...
242000 AU, still nothing...
243000 AU, still nothing...
244000 AU, still nothing...
245000 AU, still nothing...
246000 AU, still nothing...
247000 AU, still nothing...
248000 AU, still nothing...
249000 AU, still nothing...
250000 AU, still nothing...
251000 AU, still nothing...
252000 AU, still nothing...
253000 AU, still nothing...
254000 AU, still nothing...
255000 AU, still nothing...
256000 AU, still nothing...
257000 AU, still nothing...
258000 AU, still nothing...
259000 AU, still nothing...
260000 AU, still nothing...
261000 AU, still nothing...
262000 AU, still nothing...
263000 AU, still nothing...
264000 AU, still nothing...
265000 AU, still nothing...
266000 AU, still nothing...
267000 AU, still nothing...
268000 AU, still nothing...
269000 AU, still nothing...
270000 AU, still nothing...
271000 AU, still nothing...
271930 AU, finally at Proxima Centauri!


As you can see, even 20000 AU is still right next to us compared to the distance even to the nearest star. However, it's still at a distance whereby we would need to use a different type of propulsion to reach there as even the fastest object we've ever sent into space (Voyager 1) is only 113 AU from the Sun after 33 years. So sending a probe to an object like this within a reasonable timeline (let's say 20 years) would mean that we'd be using a type of propulsion much, much more advanced than anything we're using now.

Read more...

Asteroid 24 Themis and its ice in the news again

Asteroid 24 Themis is back in the news again (first time was last October) due to having water ice on its surface, as in addition to the discovery made last October another team has confirmed the same findings, and this time organic compounds have been found as well. The post I wrote in October also goes over suitability of the asteroid as a destination for a manned mission, and it does quite well due to orbiting along the same orbital plane as the rest of the planets in the Solar System; most asteroids are off by at least a few and sometimes many degrees, making reaching them a much more three-dimensional task than reaching a planet, requiring much more fuel than if their orbit had been more similar to ours.

At the same time, 24 Themis is still quite large with a diameter of 198 km, a surface gravity 1.6% that of the Earth, and an escape velocity of 633 kph (176 metres per second), so it's more like a small planet than an asteroid. The surface area is also 123,000 km², almost the same as Greece and somewhat larger than Bulgaria.

Read more...

"This is Alabama. We speak English here."

Tim James is running for governor in Alabama, and has produced the following ad:

Tim James' campaign video -- Language @ Yahoo! Video

Text: "I'm Tim James. Why do our politicians make us give drivers license exams in twelve languages? This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it. We're only giving that test in English if I'm governor. Maybe it's the businessman in me, but we'll save money. And it makes sense. Does it to you?"

Does it to me? Let's check. Here are all the countries that make more per capita than the US.

Rank	Country	US$
1	Luxembourg	104,512
2	Norway	79,085
3	Qatar	68,872
4	Switzerland	67,560
5	Denmark	56,115
6	Ireland	51,356
7	Netherlands	48,223
8	United Arab Emirates	46,857
9	United States	46,381

Luxembourg - all citizens fluent in at least three languages (French, German, Luxembourgish, usually English as well), all three languages are used in different aspects of daily life in the country.

Norway - Norwegian is the official language, has two written forms (Bokmål and Nynorsk) that each region chooses from according to its personal preference, most citizens fluent in English.

Qatar - Arabic is the official language, but has a huge expat population, many of which don't bother to learn Arabic.

Switzerland - 3.5 official languages (German, French, Italian official, Romansh also official but not to quite the same extent).

Denmark - More or less the same as Norway, except with more German speakers per capita (58% of the population speaks it).

Ireland - Two official languages, Irish and English. A lot of time and effort is being put into reviving and strengthening Irish.

Netherlands - Also similar to Norway and Denmark, with the majority very good at English and German in addition to Dutch.

United Arab Emirates - similar to Qatar.


Looks like every single country there either has a large number of official languages, or has a society in which most expats can live and work without needing to first learn the local language. Add to that the fact that a large cost in administering such tests is getting the translation done in the first place, and no, the "maybe it's the businessman in me" argument doesn't fly here.

On a more personal level, articles like this show how multilingualism increases pay and employment opportunities even for those that already speak English as a mother tongue, as monolingual English speakers often miss out on opportunities that go to those who speak another language as a mother tongue in addition to fluent English. The British Council says much the same thing:

Monoglot English graduates face a bleak economic future as qualified multilingual youngsters from other countries are proving to have a competitive advantage over their British counterparts in global companies and organisations. Alongside that, many countries are introducing English into the primary curriculum but – to say the least – British schoolchildren and students do not appear to be gaining greater encouragement to achieve fluency in other languages.

Now, if he really wanted to make an appeal for having English-only tests, the safety/practicality argument would have been better (signs are in English, police officers and other drivers will talk to you in English, etc.), and people with English as a foreign tongue could be given extra training on the side (role playing how to talk with a police officer or angry driver for example) to deal with this. But that doesn't have quite the visceral appeal as "This is Alabama. We speak English here. If you want to live here, learn it."

Read more...

Liquid telescopes are 95% to 99% cheaper than conventional ones

On the subject of gigantic telescopes again, Wikipedia has a list here of the largest telescopes currently in operation. The largest one so far is the Large Binocular Telescope with a pair of 8.4-metre mirrors giving a surface area equivalent to a single 11.8-metre mirror, and the smallest on the list have a diameter of 3 metres. The average cost for an impressive observatory of this type usually ends up being in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, and as mentioned in the post earlier the Extremely Large Telescope to begin operation in 2018 is about $1 billion, so this is the upper end. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope that the ESO chose not to construct due to cost and technical difficulties would have been twice that, $2 billion.

Near the top of the list though, we find one interesting telescope of 6 metres in diameter called the Large Zenith Telescope. A telescope of this size is usually about $100 million to construct, but this one only cost $1 million. Why? Because it's a liquid telescope, using a flat area filled with mercury that spins at a certain rate making it into a parabola, which then becomes just like any other telescope except for one disadvantage: because it's a liquid it can only observe whatever happens to be directly above it. Liquid telescopes have been proposed for construction on the Moon as well, but in the meantime they can be constructed here as well for 1 - 5% of the cost of a normal telescope requiring a cast and polished mirror.

The Large Zenith Telescope seems to have been built more as a demonstration of the concept, because it's located in an area quite far from ideal: very close to Vancouver. It was constructed on a mountain in a relatively dark area, but the mountain is still only about 395 metres in height and the climate is still quite cloudy. See a picture of the observatory here and here.


View Larger Map

For just $1 million to demonstrate the concept there's nothing wrong with the location, but any other telescopes of this type will need to be constructed in a better location than that.

So...if $2 billion can't be scrounged up for the construction of the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope in Chile, why not construct a liquid telescope of the same size?

If liquid telescopes are that much cheaper than conventional ones then one this size could be constructed for just $20 to $100 million, and there would also be two reasons not to be so concerned about the disadvantages a liquid telescope would have:

1) Even perfectly stationary, it would have a collecting area some 70 times larger than our largest telescope today, and five times that of the largest Extremely Large Telescope set to begin in 2018,
2) Research has been underway for a while on developing a liquid mirror that can withstand being tilted a bit - some say ten, others say up to thirty degrees. But even ten degrees would be sufficient for a telescope of such impressive size.

So if a massive liquid telescope were to be built, it would simply be constructed with the assumption that it would remain facing the zenith the entire time, but also done in such a way that the telescope can be improved without having to rebuild it if the technology is developed that allows it to tilt.


New Scientist has an article here written in 2007 by one of the people that constructed the Large Zenith Telescope, where he describes the process and the pitfalls involved in making it, plus (on page 4) other liquid telescopes under development. There are two of them, both in Chile, and he does mention that the site in Vancouver was chosen out of necessity as it was close to his house, so liquid telescopes still have yet to be given the opportunity to impress.

So how are these two projects doing now almost three years later? The first one (the International Liquid Mirror Telescope, 4 metres in diameter) had a successful spin cast in September (videos here). The other one (Advanced Liquid-mirror Probe for Astrophysics, Cosmology and Asteroids) - not so sure, as its page hasn't been updated since 2004.

Final thought: perhaps the problem is that the idea hasn't been promoted as actively as it could. If so, maybe liquid mirror telescopes of a much less ambitious size (1 metre or so) could be developed and mass produced in a single design to be sold to smaller but still professional observatories, enabling them to make observations with these telescopes at a much lower price than they otherwise could using a mirror of the same size.

Read more...

Seoul to start experimenting with subway cars with seats in the middle instead of next to the window

Take a look at these images:





This resembles some of the ideas I've had while standing in a crowded subway here, so it will be interesting to see it in practice. According to this page, eight cars of this type will be made by the end of the year, so very limited so far - a single train is composed of twelve cars, I believe. Passengers standing will also have a bar by the window to make standing more comfortable, and looking at the image it seems to be located just above the window.

Edit: here's an image of a monorail in Kuala Lumpur using this design. It's much smaller though than the subway cars in Seoul.

And while we're on the subject of passenger comfort, last time I was flying on a plane over the Pacific I couldn't help but wonder (I'm 194 cm or 6'4" so I always think about these things on the plane) why airlines try so hard to conserve space as much as possible but still have the safety guidelines in a big open pocket in the front where your knees are, very often with a stretched elastic causing it to remain sloppily half open. Why not a pocket that folds completely into the back of the seat in front instead?

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Lt. Commander Data on 20 years with the Hubble Space Telescope, plus Chile wins the European Extremely Large Telescope

Here's a nice surprise, Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) doing the narration for a short film on 20 years with the Hubble Space Telescope.



In other telescope news, the ESO (European Southern Observatory) has finally decided on the site for their next telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope - it will be constructed in Chile, in a location that is shaping up to be a kind of Silicon Valley of astronomy. Right now the largest telescope we have is the Large Binocular Telescope which became operational in 2008, and is constructed of two mirrors of 8.4 m in diameter each giving a total collecting area of 111 m². The EELT, due to start in 2018, will have a single mirror of 42 metres in length, with a total collecting area of 1,300 m². The most exciting part about the new telescope would be the ability to measure the atmosphere of extrasolar planets.

2018 will also be an impressive year with the commencement of two other extremely large telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope.

Telescopes of this size usually end up costing about $1 billion or so. For twice the cost you could get something like this (cancelled due to cost and technical difficulty in favour of the EELT) Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, with a phenomenal diameter of 60 - 100 metres and collecting area of up to 7,854 m².

Those tiny blips there are trucks.

Of course, the EELT is no slouch either.

Extrasolar planet hunting does, of course, take place using much smaller telescopes like HARPS (also located in Chile) which has a diameter of 3.6 metres and has discovered 75 extrasolar planets all by itself.

Read more...

More simple programming in Python: creating random sentences in Ido

Learning basic programming in Python is coming along well, and just about everything I come across looks like it would be helpful for auxlangs. Today I wrote a very simple program to create random sentences in Ido. Set it to 20 for example and it gives us this:

Tu charmez.
Vi irgaloke konektus.
Me ne aceptas.
Ni absolute ne aceptus.
El adicionos.
Vi ne agnoskos.
Ni rapide ne adicionus.
El bone ne absorbis.
Vi ne ablaktis.
Vi ne kovrez.
Me ne asertos.
Ni chasez.
Ni pretendez.
Me ne absorbez.
El bone adicionas.
El ne demandus.
Ni ne charmos.
Ni ne konektos.
Ni agnoskus.
El preske kovrus.

To make this more complex it would be possible to take a look at some of the main types of sentences we see in Ido, such as:

Ka tu volas irar? <-- Q.P.V1.V2? (question.pronoun.verb1.verb2?)
Ido esas la maxim facila linguo en la mondo. <-- N.esar.S.A.N.L.(DA)N. (noun.esar.superlative+adjective+noun+location+la(or not la)noun

These could then be replaced randomly, so Ka tu volas irar could become Ka vu volas facar, and the second sentence could become Tu esas la minim bona persono en la skolo.

I came up with this simple program on the fly though while studying, so I haven't given much thought to the overall structure of a more complex program. It wouldn't have to be extremely complex though, because the sentences created are devoid of context, and would only be useful for new students who would be given a list of sample sentences to translate into another language as practice. A new student for example would receive a random ten, and then translate them. Then we would get:

Vi ne kombinis. --> You didn't combine.
Tu male abjurez. --> Abjure badly, you!
Il multe ne abandonis. --> He didn't abandon much.
Il ne charmas. --> He doesn't charm.
Il chasis. --> He chased.
Tu male charmas. --> You charm badly.
El irgaloke absorbos. --> She will absorb somewhere.
Ni pretendas. --> We pretend.
Vi irgaloke ne agnoskus. --> You wouldn't acknowledge somewhere.
Vi rapide ne fraudez. --> (You) don't cheat quickly!

So yes they're nonsense, but they also have right and wrong answers and thus serve a purpose in learning the language.

One other note: Ido is the easiest language to do this with. Esperanto has to take into account -n accusative and adjectival agreement, Interlingua and Occidental have some irregularities to take into account (Occidental fewer, but they're still there), and Lingua Franca Nova derivation isn't quite so precise. With Ido though you could take any verb and turn it into something else, like fotograf-ar --> fotograf-ajo, and lektar --> lekt-ajo. No surprise I suppose considering how much of a hand Couturat had in creating it.

Actually, Novial might work almost as well too, except for perhaps the -ione ending.

Read more...

Apollo = Leif Erikson

Expanding on the subject of the previous post about news that matters in the long term, the Apollo program is worth mentioning, as it has now been almost 40 years (December 1972) since a manned mission to the Moon. This huge gap of time without a manned presence there means that Apollo will no longer be seen as the beginning of our exploration of the Moon, but rather a Leif Erikson-style, temporary exploration (in his case to North America) followed by a return home and no successive exploration for a long time. This will mean that the importance of Apollo will pale in comparison to that of our first permanent settlement on the Moon, in the same way that Christopher Columbus is much more widely remembered in spite of not being the first European to set foot in North America.

One other reason for this is the fact that now the majority of the population in the developed world (and even more in the developing world) has never experienced a time when we have had people on the Moon, so even though some may say that the Moon is old hat if the person saying so is in his early 40s or less it's jadedness borne of hearsay, not direct experience. Let's take a look at the population pyramid for the US in 2010. Here it is:



Now let's divide it into three sections. The red part on the bottom shows the number of people that have had no experience with a manned presence on the Moon whatsoever. No reading about upcoming missions, no news about what people are doing on the Moon today, nothing. The next thin section in red are those that have a faint recollection of Apollo. They kind of remember it being on the TV, their mom or dad telling them about it and have a pleasant but hazy recollection of the missions. The blue section shows those that have a clear memory of Apollo (at least 10-15 years old or so when it happened), and they're no longer the majority.


Ah, but it's only 2010 and we're not going back to the Moon tomorrow. Let's be optimistic and assume that we still manage to get back to the Moon by 2020 thanks to private industry, cooperation with China/Russia/etc., or a sudden resurgence of interest and order from the White House and Congress to get there as quickly as possible. Ignoring any changes to the average life span by then, it will look like this.


So by the time we get back, being on the Moon will be a completely new experience to the vast majority, even more so in the (currently) developing world. This is something to keep in mind when thinking about the Moon vs. other destinations. Is the Moon really old hat? Well, is Europe old hat because of that one trip you made in the 1960s for a week, the only chance you had to travel abroad? Are you an experienced journalist because you had a few articles published back in the early 1970s even though you've done nothing since? Are you still in shape because of that marathon you successfully ran in 1972?

So here's a bold prediction: due to demographic reasons shown above the jadedness many of those currently under 40 feel about returning to the Moon is little more than fluff, and will be washed away in a flood of genuine excitement the day we actually manage to return there.

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The Long News seems to be kind of like Page F30

Here's an interesting recent talk from Ted.com by the editor of The Long News, an organization that resembles Page F30 in quite a few ways. It's less than 4 minutes long so has already been translated into 10 other languages.



The Long News is about news that will (may) continue to matter in the future, much in the same way that Page F30 is named for the page on which the internet was first mentioned in the Washington Post in 1988, waaay back near the classifieds section and thus nearly completely out of view. An astute reader back then may have suspected that something big would eventually happen with this.

So back to the video: Kirk Citron's prediction is that the discovery of water on the Moon would turn out to be one of 2009's biggest stories is definitely one I agree with; in fact, I wrote a few dozen posts on that myself. Assuming it happens this year (it might not due to the Kepler team deciding to keep data private until February 2011) 2010's biggest story will be the first discovery of another Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a (red dwarf) star. Due to a lack of precision though the first and subsequent discoveries will carry a lot of caveats, such as not being sure whether the planet would actually have Earth-like temperatures, precise composition of the atmosphere, and so on. So though it will effectively mean the end of our isolation in the universe, there may be a few more years before the extra earth-shattering news of something almost entirely certain (e.g. a planet with an atmosphere that could only be created by a large amount of life) plus the eventual direct imaging of one. Direct imaging of this type is certainly exciting enough:


But something along the lines of this:


is a different matter entirely.

So in a sense the discovery of extrasolar Earths will resemble the advent of the internet in how it will advance in stages. First it will be:

"Hey, did you all hear about the (internet/planet)? It's the big news!"

After that it then becomes:

"So I decided to try out that internet thing / buy a book or watch a long documentary on that/those extrasolar planet(s) that look like our own."

After that it will begin to become common knowledge - "Yeah, I use the internet pretty much every day now" "No, I think Pandora is much more likely to have life than Vulcan..." - "No way, Vulcan is much more likely because..."

And finally it becomes a necessity, or such a part of our life that it becomes completely normal, plus difficult or funny to remember life before (remember waiting days for letters to arrive?). For extrasolar planets this will probably require enough news daily on planets like our own that it becomes necessary to devote entire sections of newspapers/web sites to them. Not so far-fetched when you think about how entire sections are already devoted to horoscopes. By then we should already be a spacefaring civilization and much of the discussion would center around how to explore or best observe them.

Note that getting to that stage wouldn't make it boring, however. The internet has yet to become boring, movies certainly aren't, and neither are books. A new part of our lives can become completely familiar yet just as exciting as the day we first found out about it.

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Avatar sets 2010 record for DVD sales in four days. Plus learning Na'vi in France

Nice, Avatar is doing extremely well just four days after a release of a very basic version (no special features) of the movie to DVD, selling 6.7 million copies during that time. I'm a big believer in positive peripheral effects from movies like this regarding overall interest in space exploration, and the more people out there watching movies about moons orbiting gas giants in nearby solar systems the better.

The movie itself was seen by about 300 million people though, so thus far this is no comparison.

In other news, apparently the second movie will feature more ocean scenes, so a slight change in plans from Cameron's original plan to have it take place in other parts of the solar system. That's probably a good idea as near the end of the movie we were introduced to some more Na'vi tribes from both the ocean and the plains, and they could use some more fleshing out. Including whether they have dialects, and to what extent.

And that brings us to this news report in French on people in France who are learning Na'vi, or at least to the extent that it can be learned without a full grammar and dictionary. The lack of those two is why I won't be learning it yet, as it's just not that pleasant an idea to learn something that could turn out to be quite different from the way the actual language is.

Avatar being such a success worldwide is interesting in an auxiliary language sense, because once a grammar and dictionary is published it will be able to function as one. Right now it technically kind of acts as one in that it is used between people that have different mother tongues, but in a more strict sense (focusing on the auxiliary = helpful, or aiding) part it isn't there yet, because to be a true auxiliary language a language has to be one that actually aids in communication between two or more people. In other words, it has to function for communication better than a natural language could in order for it to fulfill that need.

In the middle of these two definitions though we also have languages that are capable of being auxiliary languages, but haven't been used in that way yet. Sambahsa might be one, since all those that know it are better able to communicate using English or French, but if the need arose (a new user knowing only Hungarian for example) it could certainly have no problems taking on the role it was made for.

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On classifying Esperanto as a natural language

Here is an interesting paper (a pdf) from 2007 on whether Esperanto should be treated as a natural language or not, and I agree with the findings presented therein. The basic argument is that Esperanto should now be considered to be a natural language, mainly because:

1) It has native speakers (about 1000) and has had them for quite some time as well, and
2) These native speakers haven't introduced any fundamental changes to the language.

Point #2 is especially important because if native speakers had brought about any huge changes (not just sloppy -n accusative use and slightly different stress) in the language then it would still be uncertain whether the native speakers or the L2 speakers of the language would have the upper hand in the end, and the dust would first have to clear up before the language could be properly classified.

Stressing the presence of native speakers is probably something that should be done more often, in fact. There's something about a language spoken natively by about a thousand that is just that much more appealing than a language spoken by 100,000 or more people here and there, because the latter group may have varying levels of fluency, and may spend more or less time using the language depending on their mood (IALs are often a hobby and when "real life" interferes it is often set aside for more material concerns). A native speaker though generally uses the language daily with their friends and family, and is much more solid.

Classifying Esperanto as a Pinocchio-like "used to be artificial but now quite real" language would also be good for other IALs, as they could easily show Esperanto as an example of a language that went from the drawing board to real life, much in the same way that Hebrew went from a liturgical language with no native speakers to a revived and very much used tongue today. Other IALs could then market themselves as languages that yes, are technically constructed, but with enough effort will be able to become "real" languages as well.

So how would it be classified? It's not Indo-European, nor simply constructed, nor a dead language that has since been revived. Perhaps vivified would be a good term.

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Norwegian Wikipedia's article of the week is on the Aral Sea (Aralsjøen)

The page of the week on the Norwegian Wikipedia at the moment is the Aral Sea (Aralsjøen), one of the most shocking examples of how overexploiting an area can cause it to change for the worse. What was once a single inland sea is now a collection of tiny lakes.



Given their mutual intelligibility, the Norwegian and Danish (and Nynorsk) Wikipedias also show articles of the week in other Scandinavian languages on a rotating basis, which means an article on the Norwegian Wikipedia will get shown intermittently on the other two Wikipedias as well. Not sure why Swedish doesn't participate. The Scandinavian article of the day can be seen here, and Aralsjøen is a part of the articles for this month.

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Reminder: Europe's Rosetta probe will fly past asteroid 21 Lutetia in July

Remember the flyby of asteroid 2867 Šteins by the Rosetta probe in 2008? That produced some nice imagery of the asteroid, which turned out to have a diamond-like shape.

It's now almost two years later and Rosetta will fly by another asteroid very soon. This encounter will be a bit farther away and at a higher velocity, but the asteroid it will be flying by (21 Lutetia) is much, much larger. The lower the number for an asteroid generally the larger (or more visible) it is, and 21 Lutetia has been a target of interest for quite some time. Here's how the two encounters compare.

Flyby distance: 800 km for 2867 Šteins, 3160 km for 21 Lutetia
Relative velocity: 8.6 km/s for 2867 Šteins, 15 km/s for 21 Lutetia

The average diameter for 2867 Šteins is about 6 km, but 21 Lutetia is about 95 km, so here's what they would look like next to each other.


For more information on the asteroid and the flyby, see here.

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How to make a difference in space exploration as an individual

Here's another good Reddit thread full of information that readers here would certainly find useful. It was started by a 26-year-old architect who has some skill in calculus and physics and a huge interest in space, and has decided he wants to spend the next 40 years of his life helping humanity become a spacefaring race and was looking for information on how best to do this as an individual. 220 comments later it has become quite the repository of information on startups and organizations (and some other things) related to space that are very welcoming of individuals that want to make a difference.

Here are some of them (more info can be found on the thread):

• Open Space Movement (OSM)
• Mach30 Foundation for Space Development
• Open Luna Foundation
• Collaborative Space Travel and Research Team (CSTART)
  
• DevelopSpace
• Copenhagen SubOrbitals
• A book called Gaiome
• Then of course there is the big list of private spaceflight companies on Wikipedia
• International Space Development Conference

Then of course there are organizations like the Moon Society (I know little about this one so can't vouch for or against it) that may be worth joining.

My advice on the thread was in addition to this: run for political office as an independent and bring up the issue of space development and exploration. There is no need to win the seat, as simply being nominated and on the ballot is enough to spend the election season talking to people and being interviewed, so there really is no reason not to and it would make for a very stress-free campaign as well.

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How do Scandinavian languages assign gender to words borrowed from English?

Ever wondered how Scandinavian (and other) languages with grammatical gender assign this to words borrowed from English, which long ago lost grammatical gender except for the odd exception (ship = she)? After all, without assigning a word to one gender it simply can't be used properly. A paper on Scribd I just came across goes over this subject. It's interesting for the language learner in how it shows that learning the gender of a word in a Scandinavian language is different from that in other languages, because in Scandinavian languages the common gender is so prevalent that the student's task isn't so much to learn the gender of a noun so much as to simply keep an eye out for neuter (et) words (and with Norwegian, for words that will also be seen in the feminine form depending on the style of the speaker). A Norwegian dictionary I have doesn't list the gender of nouns in the Norwegian-English portion, and instead just has a list in the back of neuter nouns because this only takes up about ten pages to do so.

Gender Assignment in Danish Swedish and Norwegian a Comparison of the Status of Assignment Criteria

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Sofia - kind of like an infrared space telescope, but not quite in space

BBC news has an article with a video here about an infrared telescope 2.7 metres in diameter named Sofia (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) that will go into use starting next year, for an expected period of 20 years. It's kind of like a space telescope except it doesn't go all the way into space, just 13.7 km above the ground in a regular jet airplane. That altitude is enough to get above 99.9% of the interfering water molecules in the atmosphere, so the telescope has just about all the benefits of being in space except that it doesn't actually have to go there.

The video shows the inside of the airplane and definitely needs to be watched to appreciate the project. The telescope has a device that neutralizes the vibrations from the plane, so no problem there either.

Total cost for this will be about $100,000 to $150,000 per flight, and it should fly every second night. This is quite a cheap price, since even a space telescope with a short mission like WISE works out to $300 million, so Sofia would have to carry out a full 2400 days of observations just to equal that. At that rate, the total cost for flying every second night for 20 years will work out to about $450 million. The Hubble Space Telescope for comparison has cost about $4 to $6 billion, plus a bit over half a billion euros on the European side too. So Sofia really is a steal compared to actually sending a telescope to space.

One other huge advantage is its ability to be anywhere in the world. Observatories in the northern hemisphere can't see stars like Alpha Centauri that are only visible in the south, and vice versa for those in the south. A flying telescope though has no problem being wherever it needs to be.

This isn't a new concept, by the way - the Kuiper Airborne Observatory was pretty much the same concept, except it flew in the 1970s and was smaller.

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Draft William Shatner for Canadian Governor General campaign heats up on Facebook, draws media attention

Canada's current Governor General is nearing the end of her 5-year term and it will soon be time to find the next one, and one of the names being put forth is William Shatner. A Facebook page called Help nominate William Shatner for Governor General of Canada, created in March, has made the news after attracting over 15,000 supporters. Yesterday when I checked it for the first time it was already nearing 18,000, and now it has surpassed 22,000.

The extra media attention is one of the reasons for the sudden rapid growth, and some of the articles on the group are here, here, here, here, and here.

Star Trek-wise I'm definitely a Picard fan, but Patrick Stewart isn't Canadian and without the original Star Trek there wouldn't have been a second Star Trek anyway, so I'm definitely a supporter of the idea to make him GG. Note that the first link mentions reasons besides his role in Star Trek for being GG, and in fact it wasn't William Shatner who is responsible for being remembered more as Captain Kirk than anything else - that was our doing. Well, and Roddenberry's, for creating such a fascinating show.


Leonard Nimoy was in Vulcan today (Vulcan, Alberta), and agrees with the idea. You can see the interview in the third link on the right.

Here's where Vulcan is located in Alberta. I remember visiting there way back in the mid-80s as a child.


View Larger Map

Personally I think this is something Stephen Colbert should be interested in given his affinity for interfering with local politics (remember the Hungarian bridge?) and space.

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Gliese 436b (GJ 436b) is a Neptune-sized, super hot, methane-free planet 33 light years away

An exoplanet called Gliese 436b (GJ 436b) discovered in 2004 is receiving some more attention over the past few days due to new direct measurements showing the composition of the planet's atmosphere, showing it to have a lot of carbon monoxide instead of the expected methane, which is what one would usually expect with a gas giant. Follow-up measurements of exoplanets are just as exciting as the discovery of an exoplanet in the first place, since follow-up measurements are what we are going to be so eager for once an Earth-like planet is discovered and we want to learn more about it.

Due to these measurements this planet is actually said to be a bit "Earth-like", but that only means Earth-like in atmospheric composition, not in that anything living on Earth could live on its surface as it's hotter than Venus at almost 600C. For a better article on the planet's atmosphere though, see here.

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X-37B mini shuttle successfully launched

A successful launch!



Now the question is what the X-37B is going to do, besides "demonstrate various experiments and allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components, and associated technology to be transported into space and back". We also know that the mission is going to last for at least 270 days. The payload it carries though a mystery. Apparently the X-37B is built to be able to return to space just 10 to 15 days after returning to Earth, though of course no tests have been able to confirm whether this is the actual number of days it would take.

Lots of conjecture on what the mission is about can be seen on the space.com forums, and Spaceflightnow has a detailed writeup here.

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January 2010: first nursery in the Cornish language begins operation

It took me three months to notice this, but better late than never. It's good news for the Cornish language, which has been on a bit of a roll since 2008 when the Standard Written Form was finally agreed upon, as before then it was at a double advantage through being not only so small but also with many conflicting written standards.

What will be interesting to see if Cornish is successfully revived as a native tongue for a large number of people is whether it will turn out to be easier to learn than other Celtic languages, as spending a long period of time without native speakers tends to prune out a lot of the idiosyncrasies languages have, ones that native speakers would feel attached to but simply fluent L2 speakers not quite as much.

Some other good news for the language from six months back - in November the Cornwall Council voted for signs in the region to be bilingual. It was an easy vote because they will not be taken down at once in order to do so; instead, the bilingual signs will simply be put up when signs wear down and need to be replaced anyway, so it's a gradual process that will not cost any extra money to implement. Setting up bilingual street signs is one of the easiest ways to aid in the revival of a language, as the cost is minimal to nonexistent, the amount of material that needs to be translated is also minimal, and once translated they can be reproduced forever.

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Kepler scientific data on 400+ exoplanet candidates may be withheld until February 2011

Well, if there's anything that could put a crimp on my prediction for the discovery of an Earth-like planet this year (around a red dwarf star, that is) it's this. Kepler's data was originally scheduled to go public in June this year, but a request has been made to censor data on 400+ exoplanet candidates until February 2011. The reasons behind this are:

1) credit for discoveries (releasing the data ahead of time would mean someone else could jump in and get the credit for a discovery), and
2) avoiding false positives - telling the media about extrasolar planet discoveries that turn out to be statistical noise or something else.

There is another kind of false positive here though, seen with the announcement of the discovery of Gliese 581c, a planet that was originally billed as being extremely Earth-like. About a day after the announcement though questions started to emerge about whether the planet's location and potential thick atmosphere wouldn't make it more along the lines of a super-Venus than Earth, and it turned out that Gliese 581d, farther out, is more likely to have an Earth-like temperature. So the presence of a large number of eyes can also be beneficial...and probably outweighs any potential disadvantages. After all, no harm was done in the end from Gliese 581c being billed as an Earth-like planet in the beginning.

And besides, it's a bit of a tease to quickly announce the discovery of five exoplanets right off the bat, tout the capabilities of the new telescope and then decide to wait a full year before making the data public.

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Afrikaans is a superb entrance to the Germanic world for an English speaker

That statement comes from here, probably the best site for learning Afrikaans there is. Its geographic isolation from Dutch and German and the fact that it isn't the sole language of any independent country (i.e. go to South Africa and everyone speaks English) puts it out of contention for most when considering a language to study, but its extreme ease of learning (no verb conjugation, no grammatical gender are the two big ones) is a definite advantage in the same way that a language like Papiamentu is easy to pick up but transfers very nicely to Spanish and Portuguese afterwards.

By the way, many say that Afrikaans makes up for this by having more irregularities in its adjectives, but this really isn't comparable. The reason why is this:

1) grammatical gender is something that always, always needs to be kept in mind when using a language that has it. Adjectival morphology, on the other hand, can easily be avoided when needed by altering word order ever so slightly (ex: die goeie man - the good man is the irregular form of goed, good, but you can avoid something like that by saying die man wat goed is, the man who is good)

2) irregular adjectives in Afrikaans resemble strong verbs in that yes, they are irregular, but they are very often irregular in a way that makes sense to English speakers. Ex: Reg (right) becomes regte before a noun, and this now looks more like the word right, so no problem remembering that. Hoog (high) also becomes hoë, and nuut (new) becomes nuwe.

So let's take a look at Afrikaans as a gateway to Germanic languages, specifically German. The reason for that is that Afrikaans is obviously a gateway to Dutch (the two are often mutually intelligible) but German is a bit more removed. First we will look at how Afrikaans compares to Dutch in getting an English speaker used to German, also comparing an English speaker that has learned Dutch vs. an English speaker that has learned Afrikaans. Parts that match are displayed in green.

	German	Dutch	Afrikaans	English	En + Af	En + Nl
Grammatical gender	yes, three	yes, two	no	no	no	not really
Adjectives change before nouns	yes	yes	yes	no	yes	yes
Verb conjugation	yes	yes	no	yes	yes	yes
Vocabulary similarities	yes	yes	yes	somewhat	yes	yes
'Germanic' word order	yes	yes	yes	somewhat	yes	yes
Two types of past tense	yes	yes	no	yes	yes	yes
Cases	yes	no	no	no	no	no

As you can see, Afrikaans has some large differences between it and other Germanic languages, such as no verb conjugation (by which is meant verbs don't change depending on the person doing the action), only one past tense (no distinction between I went vs. I had gone) and some other areas as well. However, note that most of these areas are places where the English speaker is already familiar with these concepts and thus doesn't need the extra help Afrikaans would provide if it did have these characteristics. An English speaker, that is, already knows the difference between simple past and past perfect, and is used to conjugating verbs by person (I am, you are). And while true that Dutch does have grammatical gender (which German has too) and Afrikaans doesn't, gender in Dutch doesn't match up with German (Dutch has two, German has three) so there really isn't any help here besides perhaps getting used to being aware of grammatical gender in general. But the effort required vs. the lack of transferability means it probably isn't worth it from a propaedeutic point of view alone.

Okay, so if English is your first language and you have learned Afrikaans, that means when transferring to German the only big hurdle is grammatical gender and cases. But let's also take a closer look at the vocabulary to see how frequent one comes across German cognates in Afrikaans compared to English. The site mentioned in the beginning has a reading called die Seuntjie (the boy), and one part goes like this.

Met groot weerstand verlaat ek tydelik die projek. Ek is knorrig oor die onderbreking, "Dis ontbyt!" Maar gou vergeet ek daarvan en ek toon ietwat belangstelling in die graanvlokkies, die lemoensap, en 'n bietjie roosterbrood. Na afloop van ontbyt haas ek my, "Plig roep!"

Now let's check for obvious cognates, obvious meaning that German mit and Afrikaans met are cognates, but English is not cognate even though technically the mid in midwife comes from the same source, because your average student is not going to make that connection.

Obvious cognates with German are in green, those that aren't are in red, and slightly iffy (a bit of help to the student) cognates are in lighter green.

German	Afrikaans	English
mit	met	with
groß	groot	great
Widerstand	werstand	resistance
verlassen	verlaat	give up
ich	ek	I
zeitlich	tydelik	temporarily
die/der/das	die	the
Projekt	projek	project
brummig (but knorrig means knotted)	knorrig	grumpy
über	oor	over
Unterbrechung	onderbreking	interruption
Frühstück	ontbyt	breakfast
aber	maar	but
schnell	gou	quickly
vergessen	vergeet	forget
davon	daarvan	about it
und	en	and
zeigen	toon	show
etwas	ietwat	some
Belange	belangstelling	interest
Maisflocken	graanvlokkies	cornflakes
Orangensaft	lemoensap	orange juice
bisschen	bietjie	bit
Röstbrot	roosterbrood	toast
nach	na	to
Ablauf	afloop	end
beeilen (but Hast also exists)	haas	haste / hurry
mich	my	me
Pflicht	plig	duty
rufen	roep	call

So counting less obvious cognates as 0.5, out of 31 German words we have 23.5 Afrikaans cognates, but just 9.5 with English. Afrikaans is clearly a superb entrance to the Germanic world for an English speaker, certainly not the only one, but it is one. English used to be a part of this dialect continuum, but not anymore.

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The English version of Eyjafjallajökull is Eyotfellicle

An interesting post here on the linguistics subreddit shows the less than obvious but still present connection between the Icelandic Ejyafjallajökull and English. What looks completely foreign at first glance is actually cognate with the following:

Eyja - Eyot or ait, a type of small island.
Fjalla - English fell, a type of mountain.
Jökull - cognate with the -icle in English icicle.

So perhaps those stressing out about how to pronounce the mountain should just resort to the anglified eyot-fell-icle, no different than Caesar to Kaiser or William to Wilhelm or any other way in which other languages take cognates and modify them to suit their own tastes.

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Reviving Sanskrit in the state of Uttarakhand

Here's a fairly rare treat: a long (4-page) article on the revival / strengthening of Sankskrit in the northern state of Uttarakhand, and another one here on a Sanskrit newspaper called Vaak. Uttarakhand is where Sanskrit was recently made an official language too, and it seems that revival efforts are progressing nicely. The articles themselves are long enough so no real need for more commentary here, except that:

1) One wonders if Latin would have had such an easy time being made the official language of more than just the Vatican if it had been able to retain a body of native speakers as Sanskrit has, and

2) Look, some Sambahsa cognates from the article: "Sanskrit-dwitiyarajbhashayuktam deshashya prathamrajyam Uttarakhandam". Olivier can tell us if there are others besides these two in the article.

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