Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.
Just a quick heads up - Dawn is right on the verge of crossing the 100,000 km border, a tiny distance in astronomical terms that doesn't even equal a third the distance from Earth to the moon. What's great about this distance is that we can visualize it in real terms just by taking the most recent image of Vesta. The only thing not to scale in this image of course is the size of Dawn itself.
And for another perspective on this, here is what it would look like with Earth being used as the scale.
Canada Post had a strike for the past week or two, an event hardly significant in the larger scheme of things, but the effects on consumers has been extremely interesting. There has always been a large group of people that were not particularly averse to paying bills and doing a number of other things online but still kept on doing so through regular mail out of habit, but the strike managed to push a huge number of them over.
In the two weeks since the lockout began, financial services provider ING Direct saw 350,000 customers switch to online billing -- which will save the company millions of dollars this year when factoring in postage, stationary and personnel costs.
The article notes that very seldom do customers who begin using services online ever go back to paper again.
This article has even more numbers: Shaw Communications also had 70,000 people (ten times the usual amount) sign up for online billing last month, Enmax had a dramatic increase with 5,000 customers enrolling online, TD Canada Trust and Rogers Communications had a large but unspecified increase as well.
Scarcity alone is not enough for such a change to take place. There must be 1) scarcity or high prices, 2) a large group of people that were on the tipping point already, and 3) extreme ease in switching fro method A to method B.
High fuel prices (#1), for example, may make people want to switch to smaller cars (#2), but without #3 (a cheap enough alternative that sips fuel) it won't happen. And of course, some people will just choose to go without driving altogether if possible if prices are exceptionally high.
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I heard this story on Deutsche Welle today - a new patent system is about to go into service in the EU that will be much cheaper than before due to only needing to be written in three languages - English, German, and French. Unhappy with the decision are Italy and Spain, who apparently will not let the patents be valid in their countries. That makes a total of 25 EU countries where they will be valid.
Current cost of an EU patent: 32,000 euros. In the US a patent costs the equivalent of 1,850 euros, and the new EU patent will cost 680 euros.
This issue should be gold for promoting IALs like Ido/Esperanto/Interlingua/etc. in Spain and Italy, who feel like they are being squeezed out by the others. The argument that translation costs a lot of money is often seen on sites like Interlingua.com, but it doesn't strike quite as close to home as actually having one's language excluded just because it's not quite as large, or historically influential as certain others.
Just a quick piece of news in Portuguese from three days ago: the official journal of the European Community will write Portuguese using the orthographic accord starting in January 2012.
You can see the journal here, and it is available in every official language, including even the smallest ones such as Maltese and Estonian.
Looks like the German Helgoland will not be united by reclaimed land in between the two islands, a proposition I wrote about in April. The results of the referendum there have just been released, and 54.74% are against the idea. A total of 1,312 people (81.4% of the voting population) voted, and 482 were for it while 583 were against.
The two actually used to be one island, until 1720 when storm water rushed over the middle and split it into two.
Deutsche Welle sent me an email today on a questionnaire of theirs on their language courses. I have only the highest praise for Deutsche Welle and quickly accepted, but the one exception, a course called Radio D, was given exceptionally low marks from me. Radio D is a kind of Frankenstein's monster-like contraption, something seemingly created by a group that decided to combine a set of haphazard ideas into one course that tries to be everything and succeeds at nothing. It reminds me a bit of that opening scene in The Majestic where some unseen Hollywood executives take an otherwise good script and add enough slapdash ideas to the mix that it turns into a monstrosity by the time they are done with it.
I also still have no idea why they ever thought it would be a good idea to introduce regional dialects in a course for utter beginners, plus characters who pepper their speech with English, Spanish, Italian and French. Confusing as hell if you don't know any German, annoying if you do.
But enough with Radio D. Everything else got top marks and I was glad for the chance to give them direct feedback instead of just writing about it here. Deutsche Welle is the only national broadcaster I know of that has more than enough resources to take you from an absolute beginner level to fluent.
Read about the CSA's plans for the next few years here. Canada's space agency is not pathetic through any fault of its own, but simply because of a lack of funding and popular support from a country that seems to be content with it having the most minor of roles in the exploration of space.
Funding has reached an all-time high of $424.6 million, an amount just about enough to fund one small NASA mission. And on top of that, it will then drop by 34% over the following two years - first to $371.1 million, and then $317.5 million.
Let's compare.
US GDP / Canada GDP = 9.3 times
NASA budget ($17.6 billion) / CSA budget = 41.5 times
NASA 2013 budget ($20 billion) / CSA 2013 budget = 63 times
The plan detailed in the link is both detailed and vague, with some objectives laid out for the next few years with the tiny budget but a lot of fluff, like "well-managed and efficient government operations", and "an innovative and knowledge-based oconomy". The CSA's contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope is one of the best uses of its funding, and so let's just hope that the launch goes without a hitch. In the meantime there is a lot of news being made by other countries so luckily nothing really major is riding on the fate of the CSA. It's just too bad that it is not given the tools to really make a difference when the country has had more than enough economic leeway to do so, aside from the past few years - and even then the national debt truly is low compared to most of its peers.
Good news - an asteroid has just been discovered that will pass by the Earth at a razor-thin distance of just 12,000 km on 27 June, a Monday. That distance is a full twenty times closer than that separating us from the moon.
The asteroid itself is not very large, about 7 to 15 metres or so, which is small enough that it would break up in the atmosphere if it had hit us. This is what makes the news just good instead of excellent, as a direct hit with no chance of damage but lots of news for a full three days would be the perfect way to get nearly the entire planet thinking about the sky and what's above it the entire time.
The asteroid itself has an orbit much like our own, and also with very little inclination as you can see when you go here and turn it on its side. Its orbit looks like this:
An encounter at this distance will permanently alter the asteroid's orbit too, something like this:
This image shows it viewed from the side, so it is passing over the south pole.
But for an even more impressive demonstration of this, see this animation, which comes from here.
So keep an eye out for some videos on Monday of the asteroid as it passes by. I don't see it yet on the schedule for Arecibo but I would be surprised if plans haven't already been laid to observe it from there as well.
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Three very exciting pieces of space news to share today.
First is Dawn's newest press release, a live conference held today that showed their closest photographs yet of Vesta. The newest images taken on 20 June show Vesta looking kind of like Mimas:
I won't go into more detail as I write too much about Dawn and Vesta already anyway. Google News will tell you more.
Next up: ARTEMIS has arrived! This mission was a complete freebie, which is what makes it extra sweet. Two satellites of six (if I remember correctly) orbiting the Earth began falling further and further into shadow and were in danger of going out of commission, so engineers did a bit of investigation and found out that with some clever maneuvers they would be able to get both of them into lunar orbit in a few months if they used some clever mechanics making use of Lagrange points. I mentioned this in October when we first heard about it, a post that included this video that shows exactly how it is (was) done.
It seems from the article that they took longer to arrive in orbit than the originally projected April date (though the article doesn't mention that), but have even more fuel than originally thought which is a big plus.
Finally, a project to help discover Kuiper Belt objects. Read about it here, or go to the main site here. This might be the most exciting collaborative project yet, and it is quite simple: look for dots and circle them, and dots that receive the most circling will get followed up on. I think I'll start helping out with this tomorrow or the day after.
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A few days ago we saw news of plans by China to build the world's largest radio telescope, one called FAST that would be quite a bit larger than Arecibo but also more sophisticated as well. Details on that here, but the short answer is that it will be able to observe 19 regions simultaneously instead of seven.
Being concerned as much with the PR of space as space itself, this is a particularly welcome piece of news because radio telescopes of this magnitude are the best way to observe asteroids as they fly by the Earth. It is only thanks to Arecibo that we have found out that a great deal of tiny asteroids we thought to be lone bodies are actually binary or even trinary systems, and a new telescope that can contribute to and improve on this will be phenomenal. Here are just a few examples of what we know of some really tiny asteroids thanks to Arecibo, without which we would have little more than pinpoints of light.
1999 RQ36 - 560m in diameter, and the target of the Osiris-Rex mission in 2016. It looks like this:
2001 SN263 - a triple system with the main asteroid 2 km in diameter, the other two are 1 km and 400 metres. It was imaged during a close encounter by Arecibo:
In other words, a radio observatory of this calibre is like having near-flyby quality images every time an asteroid of respectable size passes by. And starting in 2016 we'll have two of them.
Scheduled asteroid observations by Arecibo can be seen here.
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Yesterday Canada's new $100 and $50 bills were revealed, or at least their preliminary design (we hope). The concept behind them is all right and the material they are to be made out of (polymer) is great, but I can't say I'm a fan of the design itself, and many others are saying the same thing. It looks like this:
Many are unhappy with the Canada font on the top right, but I'm not that much of a font nerd. The best part is the DNA strand, the woman using the microscope is not bad but a bit too obvious, while the bottle of insulin is the worst. A big bottle of insulin that says insulin as well as insuline, something like that just screams inferiority complex or cheap advertising ("look at the thing we made that we want you to know about!").
No big deal though, and overall the bill looks fine. Everybody's a critic when something first comes out.
* The $5 note is dedicated to Canada's space program
* The $10 note will depict Canada's railway lines
* The $20 note will feature sacrifices made in Canadian conflicts
Here's what it felt like when I first read that:
Well well! The most-often used bill (or one of the most often) will pay tribute to Canada's space program! That wins instant approval from me.
I do have one fear though: that the bill may contribute to the sense of complacency Canadians seem to have towards their space program. The problem with it is twofold:
- The CSA is not large enough to make a truly significant contribution to space (i.e. get rid of it and not much changes overall)
- The CSA is large enough that it is capable of making several small yet very visible contributions to space. The Canadarm, a few astronauts, a tiny space telescope. All this together is not very much, but they are prominent examples that anyone can point to in order to demonstrate that yes, Canada is contributing to space development as well.
In reality, Canada only contributes about one-sixth the amount per capita that the US does, and even the US only spends 0.6% of its budget on space. And that in spite of the much healthier economy Canada has had over the past decade or so.
The somewhat recently redesigned 10000 won bill in South Korea was also nice to see when it first came out, and is a good example of a subtle and classy way to promote space. It looks like this on the back:
The background is this star map (天象列次分野之圖 or 천상열차분야지도, a map of listed heavenly phenomena) from the 14th century and on the left is this astronomical clock (渾天時計, 혼천시계, armillary sphere) from the 16th century. In contrast to this we have on the lower right Korea's largest telescope, the 1.8-metre one located on the mountain Sobaeksan, or right here:
The 10000 won bill is a perfect example of how to incorporate astronomy without being too garish or obvious. Canada from the looks of it will go with a more blunt approach. And that's infinitely better than having no tribute to space at all.
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I generally don't look at English course materials for East Asian languages as Korean and Japanese generally have better materials - languages like Chinese, Mongolian, even Turkish and Uzbek are often better learned using those languages if you can. But a few days ago I had a listen to the FSI Chinese language course for the first time, and it's very good for a certain type of student. The student is:
- a person who wants to solely, or mostly, listen and learn
- a person who either is not interested in learning to write or has another source to learn it with
This is because the course:
- only uses Pinyin, and
- is extremely thorough. It goes very slow, but makes sure to explain exactly what one is learning. One early lesson I had a listen to explained the difference between one 了 and two of them in using the past tense - one is used for regular past tense showing a finished action as in 他来了 (he came) but you use two in showing how long it has been since action X has occurred, something that is still ongoing. For example: 你来了几个月了 - how many months have you been here?
The course is from 1979 and is naturally a little bit dated, with people in the PRC calling each other comrade and fairly youthful-sounding people saying that they were born in 1939, but overall it is not awkward at all.
According to a sociolinguistic survey, the Midi-Pyrenees are very attracted to Occitan. The investigation showed that 74% of those surveyed thought the preservation of Occitan to be important. More than half of them said that they had something to do with the language. Almost 50% said that they spoke or knew some of the language, and of those 71% said they knew it from their family. However, only a quarter of them said they transmitted the language to their children. 62% of those interviewed said that they were willing to attend Occitan cultural programs. The survey was conducted between November and December 2010 with 5000 people.
Now that Dawn is approaching Vesta and sending back clearer and clearer images every day, not only Vesta but Ceres will be discussed about more and more, and along with that comes the question of whether they would be good locations for manned exploration.
The short answer is this: Vesta is not because (as far as we know at the moment) there is no water there, while on Ceres there is. Water is crucial for manned exploration because not only does it aid our survival in the first place (and drastically lessen the mass that we need to send into orbit in the first place), but it can also be used to make rocket fuel for the return trip. The moon has water and is certainly the easiest location to colonize first, but after that we have Mars, and Ceres, and...an asteroid called 24 Themis.
Before we get to 24 Themis we need to discuss the comparative difficulty of getting to Mars vs. Ceres. A forum post here goes into some detail on that. Here is how the two stack up:
-A journey to Mars takes about 6 months, Ceres somewhat longer. One big disadvantage to Mars, however, is how infrequent the launch windows are. Mars orbits the sun at just a fast enough speed that it takes Earth a long time to catch up; 780 days, in fact. In comparison with this, launch windows to Ceres take place every 467 days. The farther an object in the Solar System is from the Earth the more frequent the launch windows are, because they take so long to orbit the sun that they have hardly moved at all by the time Earth has rotated once and is now at closest approach again.
This video shows why launch windows to Ceres are more frequent than those to Mars.
Landing: one of the most interesting parts about Mars is its atmosphere and the weather and seasonal patterns it has. On the other hand, its atmosphere is not helpful when landing a manned mission: it's thin enough that it doesn't help much in slowing a craft entering it, while it is thick enough that one can't land without a heat shield. Using retrorockets is also tough as the difficulty involved in landing a craft on a planet with weather is much, much harder than a body without an atmosphere at all. An article here goes into detail on that.
Without getting into too much detail, the short explanation is this: Mars is doable mostly as a one-way mission. Send as many supplies as possible ahead of time, somehow manage to land successfully (an extremely large heat shield would be required to slow down enough in the thin atmosphere), and then go with that. Escape velocity from Mars is a full 5 kilometres per second, a bit less than half that of the Earth. Ceres by comparison is one tenth of that (510 metres per second), and without an atmosphere it is easy to both land on and take off from.
Ceres has one disadvantage: its inclination. While not drastically inclined (about 10 degrees), that is still enough to raise the delta-v (change in velocity) a great deal. Here is what Ceres looks like in comparison with the nearby planets:
If only there was another object kind of like Ceres, not too far away and with water, but with a less inclined orbit!
And there is (it's the title of this post): 24 Themis. Let's look at the case for manned exploration of this asteroid, certainly after the moon which remains the easiest target.
First of all, a general overview: 24 Themis is an asteroid in the asteroid belt, and as you can see from its low number (24 = the 24th asteroid discovered), it is quite large; it has a diameter of 198 km. A diameter of 198 km translates into a surface area of about 120,000 km2, which is about the same as Greece or Bulgaria, or the US state of Mississippi. If you're Canadian, it's about Nova Scotia plus New Brunswick. 24 Themis is not a massive planet by any means, but it's the farthest thing from a tiny lump of rock. Walking around it once would take a full three weeks.
Surface gravity is about 1% that of Earth, and escape velocity is 87 metres per second. Extremely easy to break orbit with a rocket, but unless you can jump at 313 kph then you're not going to fall off.
Most importantly though: 24 Themis has ice on the surface, and lots of it. Its discovery made quite a bit of news in 2009, as ice on the surface of an asteroid that close to the sun was not thought to be possible. Nevertheless, it's there, and that's good for manned exploration.
With the above so far 24 Themis is about as good a location to explore as Ceres. The asteroid's orbit, however, shows why it may be an even better place to explore than Ceres. From the top it looks about the same:
but look at it from the side and we see how little inclination there is to the orbit. In fact, it is virtually nonexistent, and Mars is more inclined than 24 Themis.
That image doesn't really do justice though - check out the orbit for yourself here.
So that's the case for 24 Themis. It's at a similar distance to all the targets we are considering after the moon, with a journey time of months but not years (and once VASIMR is put into common use with a large enough power source (200 MW) this will turn into weeks), it has water, is large enough that it is a small world of its own, is easy to land on and leave. It also has a day of 8 hours and 23 minutes, so living and working there would be easy enough to plan: one is awake for two sunrises and sunsets, and sleeps every third day.
We will not get to 24 Themis soon, but it does deserve to be discussed, and it also merits an unmanned mission - at least a flyby, hopefully a dedicated orbiter or even a lander. The best way to make that happen is to begin talking about it. So remember the name, and let others know about it too when the subject of manned exploration comes up. All 24 Themis needs now is some name recognition.
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Now this is more like it - an update just a few days after the last one. A picture of Vesta has just been released, and it looks like this:
The large crater there is as clear as day, though we knew about that one before. Besides that there's a mountain-like thing in the middle, another one down on the left, and some dark spots that might be depressions or just darker terrain. The post on Planetary.org comments that Vesta is a bit lumpier in appearance than a lot of other bodies we know of this size, and that's due to its quite high density. A large number of moons around this size are made of ice and thus end up being a lot smoother, without many protrusions capable of lasting a great length of time. Vesta, as far as we know, was molten for a few million years and cooled down quite quickly, and then just got battered a fair amount after that over the next few billion years.
Current distance: 218,000 km. This image was taken at a distance of 260,000 km.
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Find this interesting tidbit in an article in French here on possible constitutional reform in Morocco limiting the king's powers:
Selon le préambule du nouveau projet, la langue amazighe, à savoir le berbère, sera désormais considérée comme seconde langue officielle avec l'arabe.
Une grande partie des 32 millions de Marocains s'expriment dans l'un des trois dialectes berbères.
According to the preamble of the new bill, the Amazigh language, also known as Berber, would be considered the second official language along with Arabic. A large part of the 32 million Moroccans use one of the three dialects of the Berber language.
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Here's the video to see for yourself (article here):
The argument for giving testimony in Spanish is as follows:
This is not just about talking about a subject, it's giving testimony and thus speaking in one's mother tongue is preferred. This is actually what politicians generally prefer to do when travelling abroad, using interpreters even if they speak the language of the country they are visiting. They could slip up from time to time, or be seen as not properly representing their country while abroad. The latter of course does not apply to the man here giving testimony
The argument against it is:
This man has been living in the US since 1988, and if he wants to talk about policy and have his voice respected then it's best to do it in the language that the majority speaks.
One other point brought up is that he might want to have his speech heard by both the English- and Spanish-speaking community, and since there's no way an English to Spanish interpreter would be brought in, the only way to have both languages present is to talk in Spanish and have it interpreted. In that way it can be easily picked up by media in both languages.
I agree with Taiwan on this. The article says that simplified Chinese characters are being deleted on Taiwanese government sites, due to traditional characters being now being a cultural treasure in Taiwan that it should not be pressed to give up (even inadvertently). Personally, my favourite to least favourite goes as follows:
- Japanese kanji (simplified after WWII)
- Traditional characters
- PRC simplified characters
Japan has probably done the best job in simplifying but retaining most of the feel of the original. Let's take a look at a few examples.
Body:
體 (traditional) 体 (Japan, PRC)
This is an example of a drastic yet good simplification. The word body is used frequently enough that it makes sense to do so.
Next up is a character that kind of means thought or intention, and is used often in the -ism part of commun-ism, real-ism and other such compound words.
義 (traditional, Japan) 义 (PRC)
The PRC version is yuck, yuck, yuck. The original has the character for self on the bottom (sheep radical on the top), the simplified one looks like......looks like a handwritten version of something, could be anything. This character isn't used frequently enough to warrant such a drastic simplification. Also note the simplified body character just above at least has some meaning: a human on the left, a character meaning base/root on the right. This one is just nothing.
The word sun is just weird.
太陽 (traditional, Japan) 太阳 (PRC)
Uh, okay, if the extra few strokes there were killing you then by all means simplify. I doubt they were though.
Some characters like the character to emit are sadly differently written in all three:
發 (traditional) 発 (Japan) 发 (PRC)
I don't really have a favourite there. The traditional one has the bow on the left and the club on the right so it's kind of fun, but it is a bit noisy for a frequent character. Tough call on this one.
One good thing about PRC simplified characters though are the simplified radicals that don't look much different from their original form but are much quicker to write. The form is of course based on how people write them in practice (cursively or somewhat cursively) so it's nothing new, but even when printed out in this way they haven't changed their form all that much so no problem at all.
Changes from
語
to
语
and:
視
to
视
are perfectly fine.
Anyway, good job by Taiwan in aggressively promoting traditional characters. There is no need to be ashamed of, nor stop using them. I may one day write a longer post giving more examples of where reforms have been good and other times not so good. How many to bring up though is a good question, since one could write a whole blog about the subject.
Here's an article from today in French on the Houma, a tribe in Louisiana that speaks French, or rather a type of 18th-century French. Apparently the French they speak is much clearer than Acadian French ("Le français des Houmas est beaucoup plus clair que celui des Acadiens").
A Google alert has informed me of this thread, where a discussion is taking place on the benefits of exploring Ceres vs. Mars and a number of other locations, and a general agreement that it really is a pity that it has taken so long to send a probe to explore the tiny planet. This is one of the spinoff benefits from Dawn's soon arrival at Vesta, that Vesta itself will not only be interesting but it will also increase interest in the next target, which is more or less invisible in the mental map of the Solar System most people have. The forum being nasaspaceflight.com, opinions there are quite well informed and there was no need to log in to note how launch windows to Ceres are more frequent than those to Mars - someone else mentioned it on the very first page.
I made a video showing exactly that a few years ago:
One destination not mentioned yet though is 24 Themis, which also has ice and almost zero inclination (which is a good thing). Actually maybe I will log on and add a comment.
Another article on discovering binary stars today. Two days ago I mentioned a paper showing how the moon can be used to detect binary stars, and this article from today is about the twin Stereo spacecraft, which observe the sun (almost directly) but have also been able to discover 122 binary stars while doing it.
As promised, Dawn's team has released new images of Vesta, the second release of images so far. The first were taken on 3 May, and the ones released today were taken on the first of June. Since then, it has changed from a bright dot into this:
The video shows the same 30 or so minutes of rotation over and over again. Taken almost two weeks ago, the clarity shown here already rivals that of our best images taken from Earth by the Hubble Space Telescope. For comparison this is what the HST showed us a few months ago:
Looking at both of them you can make out the same two dark areas as it spins around with the ridge in between.
The distance right now is about 270,000 km, so already Dawn is almost twice as close as it was when these images were taken and images taken now certainly surpass those taken by the HST. Dawn is still in navigation mode though and images are taken once a week in order to aid this, meaning that we will not be treated to a daily show. I have no problem with waiting a week or two, but I and many others were more than a bit irritated by the month it took between these and the previous ones. Apparently though Dawn's team is well and ready to release many more images, so we won't have to complain again until 2015 if they decide to be stingy with images of Ceres as well. Until then it's all roses and sunshine.
So what is so exciting about Vesta? First of all, it's extremely massive. Put next to a planet it comes out looking like a runt, but its surface area is equal to Ontario or British Columbia, Texas plus Oregon, or a number of other combinations that I've listed here.
Vesta is also massive enough that it has a differentiated interior, which simply means that it was large/massive enough that it was molten when first formed (about 4.6 billion years ago), and eventually the heavier elements sunk to the core while others rose to the top, giving it a crust and core and all the other features that make it more than just a rock and instead a protoplanet.
Read about it at a blog post here, or the original paper here. The paper details how a team of astronomers used lunar occultations to tell whether certain stars were binary systems or not. The precision is not nearly as great as that from the Very Large Telescope and the method is limited to whatever the moon is passing in front of at the time, but it also does not require the massive setup that the VLT uses.
I found a site here a few days ago with slow news in Russian, a language that I assumed would have had such a site but had never looked for. The site makes the interesting point (that I can't confirm to be true or not) that Russian during the Soviet era was much easier to understand than now, given the large number of L2 speakers it was prepared for, as well as the predictable themes.
This might be a better question for somewhere like Reddit (I'll ask there in a day or two as well), but here goes:
Is there a consensus on types of unification and division and geopolitical strength? For example, the current poll on the right asks whether readers believe Romania and Moldova should be united. With the exception of Transnistria, one would assume that a unification of the two would be a good idea since Romania is relatively small (certainly not tiny, however) and Moldova even more so, while the two together would do a better job promoting the language and culture than separately.
Belgium is the opposite: one could make the argument that Belgium doesn't really help out either the French or Dutch sphere, since even now Belgium doesn't seem to be certain as to what sort of identify the country should have and even whether it will still exist in its current form a decade or so from now. Flanders joining the Netherlands and Wallonia joining France, however, would on the surface seem to be beneficial for both languages. Especially for Dutch, which is quite an underrated language. The Netherlands is a bit like the Korea of western Europe - impressive on its own, tiny in comparison to its neighbours. Just adding Flanders would make the country some 30+ larger.
The Nordic countries often talk about the prospect of a union, though it seems to be more for the sake of an interesting hypothetical than anything else:
I remember Norway or Sweden commenting on a recent G20 conference, belittling the idea that the top 20 economies in the world should gather together to decide policy while countries placing just a little bit below that (23rd-largest, 26th-largest, etc.) don't get invited. Sweden places 23rd on this list, Norway is 25th, Denmark is 31st. Put together they would be 14th, and that's automatic G20 territory even though membership isn't strictly decided by just looking at a list and picking the twenty largest. So there's a clear example of a benefit to a union for those three. Then again, the Nordic countries already have a great deal of cooperation between them and are part of the Schengen Area, even if Norway and Iceland remain outside of the EU.
Canada: whether Canada is a net benefit for the French language is a matter of dispute. Is French better served as an official language of a larger Canada (even if very few outside Quebec speak it), or as the only official language of an independent Quebec? Without Quebec it's very doubtful that French immersion would remain as popular in parts of the country far from the east and people there might gravitate towards Spanish and Chinese instead. But then again, an independent Quebec gets all the perks of an independent nation - visa rules, UN membership, you name it.
Kaliningrad: a Russian exclave, since the fall of the Soviet Union it has been effectively isolated. Whether a country benefits from trying to retain such exclaves is another issue that I would love some more background on. Personally I think larger countries with such exclaves are best served by building them up and promoting their independence, in order to avoid a more painful separation later on. In Kaliningrad's case this would mean eventual EU membership, and thus the first Russian-speaking nation in the union. Russia is far too large to do something like this on its own.
So those are a few of the countries I have in mind when considering whether union or dissolution is better for the geopolitical strength of a particular language or culture. It may be that there is no one consensus on which is more effective. One particularly interesting region to keep an eye on regarding this is South America, where we have one country colonized by the Portuguese holding about half the continent, and the other half almost entirely composed of Spanish-speaking countries that all put together make up about the same population and GDP. There is probably no better region out there to make the comparison.
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F*&king finally. I found out today that thankfully I'm not the only one that is intensely irritated by Dawn's team taking navigational photos every week and not bothering to let anyone see them. There is even a small movement of people who are liking Dawn's framing camera on Facebook and commenting on the page in order to show them that yes, people do care and are waiting with much anticipation for the images to be released. This will be important in the runup to Dawn's second target too - the much larger Ceres, which will be visible from a greater distance.
For more on this, see this article from the Planetary Society and Unmanned Spaceflight's forum thread:
It really is a mistake to avoid releasing new images on the assumption that "there's nothing to see there, you probably won't be excited about it anyway". There is no sense of joint exploration or common purpose if we are told to sit down and wait until they have something they deem worthy to show.
The Space Shuttle is nearing its end, and an article here expresses my views on the subject better than I could without expending a fairly large amount of time to write something of such length. The basic premise is this: a shuttle by nature is a vehicle that makes regular and reliable trips to and from somewhere, and the Shuttle hasn't even succeeded in accomplishing the same frequency the Russian Soyuz has. Problems with design doomed it from the start, and though it's awesome to watch it in action, we need something new.
Europe is the region where Portuguese, similar to French and Spanish, faces the most difficulty. This in spite of its importance "as a large international language" and with a growing economic relevance, said the president of the Instituto Camões.
when new numbers for approximate French speakers worldwide came out, showing growth from 200 million to 220 million over just three years. At the same time, it showed a weakening presence in Europe.
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There must be a paper somewhere on this subject already, but the right keywords to find one escape me at the moment.
Whenever one hears the phrase "what a waste", this is a reference to the human potential we believe should be discovered and developed, not squandered. Military spending is often said to be a waste, intelligent minds growing up in poverty and/or under a tyrannical government is a waste, unrecognized potential is a waste, dying young unnecessarily due to easily preventable diseases is a waste.
The opposite of this are the countries that we deem to be about as ideal as one could imagine at the moment at the beginning of the 21st century: your Luxembourgs, your Norways, Swedens, Denmarks, some would say Japan or Singapore, also Canada, Australia and the rest. None of these are absolutely perfect but they have something in common: people there are free to do and say what they want, the media is largely lacking in bias, those who want to succeed can do so if they put their minds to it, and a chance sickness or accident will not result in bankruptcy. Nobody is being denied entrance to university in Denmark because their family does not support the current government.
So let's set a relatively low bar for the ultimate limit of our human potential in the present. Our ideal situation is not a complete utopia, it's just what we've accomplished in a number of countries carried over to the rest of them. A worldwide Germany, let's say. We'll also want to cut military spending by about 80% since we're talking about a nearly ideal but still realistically achievable level. Military spending will still be around for patrolling waters, sending in troops for emergencies and so on, but we'll assume that most unnecessary spending has been cut to a minimum.
First of all, the world GDP. Current world GDP is $63 trillion. At almost 7 billion people that works out to $9000 per person. Our ideal world average (Germany) is $41000 per capita, so that's $287 trillion total - 4.5 times greater total output. Bump this up to a Denmark or greater level per capita and our total output could be some 8 times greater than now.
Total military expenditures: at the bottom of this page we see a total of $1.63 trillion spent on the military per year across the world. Added to that are a lot of pseudo-military and unreported figures, but we'll go with $1.63 trillion for now. Cutting that by 80% frees up $1.3 trillion for other things, the equivalent of adding one extra Spain. Considering the budgetary situation of a lot of countries right now we would probably just want to put most of this toward their account deficits.
On top of this though, our assumption that a large decrease in military spending is precipitated by increased peace means that we are erasing most warm and cold conflict zones. The border between Azerbaijan, Turkey and Armenia would be open, the US and Cuba would of course finally have a normal relationship, North and South Korea would not have a militarized border, and so on. I have no idea how to calculate the effects of that without some spending some serious time looking up the situation in each of these locations.
Literacy: total world illiteracy is around 18% right now, and achieving a worldwide Germany means a reduction to almost nothing - let's say 1%. That's 1.2 billion more people that can read that couldn't before, one extra China or India.
And...once again, I'm pretty much out of time (it's not the weekend yet). A very rough estimate though would seem to indicate that we as a whole are probably functioning at about 5% of our possible, yet realistic potential. That is, ideally we could be progressing one or two dozen times faster in pretty much every endeavour we are currently engaged in.
However, I am willing to be corrected on this. Are there any papers available on exactly this subject? Total *ideal yet realistic* human potential, that is. What the world would look like if everywhere was about as well-developed and peaceful as Germany, Luxembourg, Canada, Australia, etc. Sources or opinions, please.
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East Armenian National Corpus - perfect for the intermediate-level student. Select a text, begin reading it, and simply click on words you don't know and it'll give the meaning and case/tense/etc. for it.
No posting today due to a sudden event, not sure if I'll go into any detail later on. In the meantime there is a new poll on Romania and Moldova on the right. If you want background on the issue first then start here:
The word unprecedented shows up over 30,000 times on Google News. The word Obama? Almost 29,000 times. Merkel gives 23,000 results, Azerbaijan 4,000+, Iran a mere 13,000. There's nothing wrong with frequent use, but the word unprecedented seems to be a favourite expression to use at the moment.
The meaning of the word unprecedented is very easy: without precedent, meaning that there is no previous example to compare to whatever it is you are emphasizing. The Apollo program to take humanity to the moon for the first time: unprecedented. Atomic bomb: unprecedented. Let's take a look at the top few results from Google News to see if what is being called unprecedented is actually unprecedented.
Starwood Hotels Relocates Global Headquarters to China for Unprecedented Month-Long Managerial Endeavor -- nope. A managerial endeavor is hardly without precedent. Unless as above we are talking about the smallest scope possible. But then we would have to start using the word for just about everything: I waited an unprecedented amount of time for my coffee (5 minutes, a new record), my youngest son has an unprecedented amount of money in his account ($50, before he only had $40 tops).
Missouri river could rise to unprecedented levels -- this one is correct! If the river rises to a level never before recorded, it's unprecedented. The scope (a large river affecting thousands to millions) also matches the selection of such a word.
From space, unprecedented views of coastlines -- article is about a new technology so okay, this one is fine. I would prefer "clearest yet", "most detailed ever" but unprecedented isn't too bad.
So is unprecedented actually being used more now or is this just imagination? Google Trends supports the former assertion. See what happens when it is compared to another term with similar traffic like Armenia:
The news reference volume at the bottom is where we really see it, as the word unprecedented suddenly begins to take off as a buzzword in 2008, maintaining this level.
Interestingly (and a search just now has reminded me of this), there is clear blame to be laid for this. It goes all the way to the top, and began right around the presidential election too. Keep an eye on the word's usage over the next decade (a second term would mean lots of Barack Obama coverage until at least late 2016) to see if its unprecedented usage survives his presidency.
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This is my sad desktop background, unchanged since early May.
That's Dawn's first image of Vesta, taken on 3 May and released a week later. The image was taken at a distance of 1.3 million km. The team announced that image resolution would improve rapidly in a short period of time, and I was all ready to see new images released each week or so:
To help target the probe for survey orbit, controllers have commanded it to observe Vesta once a week since the beginning of the approach phase on May 3. As we saw that day, the pictures allow navigators to gain a better fix on Dawn's trajectory relative to Vesta.
Once a week since the approach phase began means images taken on the 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th, 31st, and again tomorrow. Dawn is now just 380,000 km away (3.5 times closer), and still nothing since that one image taken on May 3rd. Okay, we'll just keep waiting and maybe they'll give us another single image in a week or two. Whee.
Dawn's team needs to learn a thing or two from JAXA. Here how PR is really done:
That comes from an article in German here, which unfortunately doesn't provide a source for that statement. Then again, a tripling over five years wouldn't be surprising, especially with a language like Chinese that has traditionally been very unrepresented. Usually when we're talking about a doubling or tripling of students learning Chinese it will mean something like growth from 3% of schools teaching it to 9% or some other relatively small number.
The number of schools in Germany where students learn Chinese has tripled in just the past five years. The growing significance of the Chinese economy, already now the second-largest in the world, has caused the attractiveness of the language to grow. The massive country could soon replace the US as the strongest economy in the world and with that be a very interesting option for finding jobs after graduation.
The next paragraph mentions that the writing system is very complex, but on the other hand the grammar is very simple compared to most European languages, and so students aren't completely intimidated by it.
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I finally got around to watching this video by Aubrey de Grey on his work to extend life past 1000 or so. The point he makes in the beginning is that he is not claiming that we are on the verge of finding a way to suddenly live to 1000, but rather that once we learn to extend life by 20-30 years or so, that extra amount of time will give research the leeway to extend it by another few decades, and another few, and eventually further refinements will bring it into the hundreds and 1000+ years.
In the beginning he brings up some of the arguments that those opposed to his work give for why we simply shouldn't live to a few hundred and 1000+ years. Now, I do agree with him that we should work on life extension and that there should be no problem with trying to live as long as possible.
That said, I do have an actual argument against it (a devil's advocate-type argument): extending life into the thousands of years would essentially guarantee everyone a violent death. Instead of death taking place at around 80-100 on the bed in one's sleep, we would live such long lives that the way we would usually end up dying would be through violence, drowning, falling off cliffs, starving with our arms stuck under a boulder, what have you. All fictional stories about immortals deals with this issue, and that's why we have Highlander with death only taking place with a lopped off head, or vampires who can live almost forever but end up dying in burning pain when tricked into being led into the sun, and so on.
Here's a story worth reading from NPR about Spanish book sales in the United States, where the language itself makes up 12% of the population but in terms of book sales just 4%. It begins by addressing that one might be tempted to make the assumption that this is simply just an untapped market, but the issue is more complicated than that, mostly having to do with 1) reading habits for English vs. Spanish speakers, and 2) the fact that English in the US is more culturally unified than Spanish, and so a book that might be liked by an Ecuadorian might not necessarily appeal to a Mexican, or vice versa, or some other combination.
Newcombe, 12, a Toronto eighth-grader, faltered on the word "sorites," misspelling it psorites...She lost to Sukanya Roy of Pennsylvania, who won on the word "cymotrichous."
Speakers of other languages, and ancient speakers of English itself, would find such an orthography ridiculous. Ormin was one of the first advocates of an orthography that represented English as spoken:
He states that since he dislikes the way that people are mispronouncing English, he will spell words exactly as they are pronounced, and describes a system whereby vowel length and value are indicated unambiguously.
Orm's chief innovation was to employ doubled consonants to show that the preceding vowel is short and single consonants when the vowel is long...His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous; for example, having originally used and inconsistently for words such as "beon" and "kneow," which had been spelled with in Old English, at line 13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all "eo" spellings, replacing them solely with "e" alone ("ben" and "knew"), to reflect the pronunciation.
Ormin resurrected today witnessing 21st century English would probably either utterly despair of what has become of the language he wrote and spoke, or go to Iceland.
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On 28 May, a group of artists from Miami began a petition to support the Alliance française. The AF, in Miami since 1967, may have to leave the building where it was moved to in 2007, on Calle Ocho.
Rumors of financial problems have been circulating around the Alliance française de Miami (AFM). The petition launched on Saturday by a group of artists confirmed these doubts. The non-profit association may have to leave its building due to difficulties in paying the rent.
Previously located in Coral Gable, the AF moved to Calle Ocho (nicknamed Little Cube) in 2007...land acquisition and construction cost a total of $5.6 million, which was to be assured through a contribution of $2 million, $600,000 of support from the French government, and a bank loan of $3.6 million from Mercantil Commercebank.
At the time the loan was to be repaid by funds generated by a restaurant, bookstore, hairdresser, cognac seller, travel agent and Italian Cultural Centre which had leased an area in the building.
...then along came the housing crisis, tenants wanted to leave, in short the project at creating a little village did not succeed and the association needs funds to survive. The article also states that the Consulate General of France in Miami has reiterated its support for the AF, and it will organize National Day celebrations there on 14 July. Not sure if this is exactly what it means by support, or whether it intends to directly obtain funds.
Anybody know more about this? As always I have little time to write on the weekday so I can't get into the subject in much depth.
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The Instituto Camões will create a cultural centre in the city of Toronto, Canada, where the Portuguese language will be learned not just by those of Portuguese/Lusophone descent, but anyone that wants to learn Portuguese as a foreign language.
The Instituto Camões Centre of Language and Culture will have a library and a school to teach Portuguese, and will be set up in a "very Portuguese" region of Toronto.
(skip a bit)
Also in the province of British Columbia on the west coast, the coordinator Ana Paula Ribeiro is in direct contact with officials from the University of Vancouver (I assume they mean University of British Columbia here), in order to make it possible to reintroduce Portuguese courses in the upcoming school year, which has been suspended for eight years. In Ontario the fight continues for official recognition of the Portuguese language in the educational system.
Not indicated in the article is the date when the centre will be opened. I'm sure Google alerts will keep me up to date and I'll write a post on that when a concrete date is given / I find another source with the exact date.
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A quick announcement: Marc Garneau (Canada's first astronaut, former head of the Canadian Space Agency and MP for Westmount Ville-Marie) will be the Liberal house leader in the upcoming Canadian parliament, quite a different post from his previous position of science critic, and the more visible role will help show whether Garneau should become the permanent leader of the party later on or not.
Each recognized party appoints one member to be its House Leader (a recognized party is one that has a minimum of 12 seats in the House of Commons). The House Leaders of all the parties meet regularly to discuss upcoming business in the Commons, how long bills will be debated and when special issues will be discussed.
Smoking in public places in France has been illegal since 2008, and there are more French smokers that intend to quit now in 2011 than in September 2006, when the last Tabac poll was taken. 64% of those who answered said so this time, compared to 49% five years ago...interestingly, 49% of smokers said that they had reduced their tobacco consumption since the new law was put in place.
Dawn's team has been irritatingly slow with releasing pictures of Vesta, imaging the asteroid/protoplanet once per week:
To help target the probe for survey orbit, controllers have commanded it to observe Vesta once a week since the beginning of the approach phase on May 3. As we saw that day, the pictures allow navigators to gain a better fix on Dawn's trajectory relative to Vesta. So far, the images reveal little more than the desired important information of where Vesta appears against the background of stars.
but without releasing a picture since the first one, take on the 3rd of May. We do however have an update from four days ago-, which is where that quote comes from.
In addition to that, it also tells us that 6 June will be the date at which Dawn reaches the incredibly close distance of that between the Earth and the moon. That distance takes three days for a conventional rocket to traverse, while Dawn with its ion drive will be slipping into orbit at a much, much slower speed. The journal does a good job going over the mechanics of this as it really is vastly different from conventional propulsion.
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