The illogical travel of the Lem to the moon

[LunarOrbit]

Nov 5, 2010 20:37:59 GMT -4 theteacher said:

Frankly we don't know if he has a degree in engineering. I know from experience that it's possible to have a degree without being qualified in the field, so to call him a liar is not appropriate and should have been brought to attention by the moderator according to the forum rules imho.

I understand what you're saying, but all too often people come here claiming to have expert knowledge because they don't expect us to question what they say. And when they are tested they fail horribly.

Maybe they somehow managed to get through university and really do have an engineering degree, but if they can't demonstrate that they have the knowledge then maybe that degree is worthless.

In this case IM has a history of claiming to be an expert in subjects that he clearly doesn't understand. If that is not lying, then what is it?

I do think people have unfairly given him a hard time about his misuse of Apollo acronyms simply because English isn't he native language. We knew what he meant, to complain about it just seems like nitpicking.

[PeterB]

Nov 4, 2010 9:39:32 GMT -4 PeterB said:

Inquisitivemind

I'd like to invite you visit the Apollo Flight Journal, which is a growing record of all the Apollo missions while in space. Its partner, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, covers the crew of the LMs in the landing missions from descent to ascent.

But in this case I'd like to draw your attention to this page: history.nasa.gov/ap08fj/02earth_orbit_tli.htm

It's the page covering the Apollo 8 mission while it was in Earth orbit, prior to heading to the Moon. In particular, please scroll down to the entry at 30 minutes 28 seconds Mission Elapsed Time. Immediately below the words of the astronaut you'll find an explanation of two ways a spacecraft can be aligned in an orbit - Orb Rate and Stellar Inertial. As you can see, NASA certainly expected it was possible for a spacecraft to be aligned with a distant star while in orbit.

You might also like to scroll down a bit further to 34 hours 9 minutes Mission Elapsed Time, where there's a discussion of, among other thing, an angle called Theta. In this case, it's used to define the angle between the spacecraft's X-axis (it's long axis) and the local horizontal.

Now if spacecraft were always pointing in the direction they were travelling, they'd always have a Theta of 0. The fact that Theta needs to be measured indicates there are times when Theta won't be 0. This in turn suggests that spacecraft routinely point in directions other than the direction they're travelling.

[gillianren]

Nov 5, 2010 22:45:57 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

I do think people have unfairly given him a hard time about his misuse of Apollo acronyms simply because English isn't he native language. We knew what he meant, to complain about it just seems like nitpicking.

I have to disagree. Using them wrong the first time is excusable under those circumstances. (You mean "his.") I try to be understanding of errors made by language problems. However, once the mistake has been corrected, it is only reasonable to expect that the person will take the correction on board and stop making the error. Correct language is important in science. "Well, you knew what I meant" only works for so long.

[JayUtah]

Nov 5, 2010 22:27:46 GMT -4 PhantomWolf said:

I disagree. His knowlegde of basic physics is wrong, that's not a mistake a person with a degree makes, they'd never have passed the exams.

He would never have been accepted into the program. In most engineering programs, you need to be accepted formally into the program sometime before your third year. That's a matter of merit; only the top-scoring percentage of first- and second-year students qualify.

Yes, his knowledge fails at a basic level -- and not just at physics. I'm holding out hope that by "computer engineer" he might mean something like calling a trash collector a "sanitation engineer," but regardless of the label he's clearly claiming expertise he just doesn't have. That by itself wouldn't be so bad, except that he's trying to talk down to everyone else from his self-erected pedestal. In my mind that precludes being given the benefit of the doubt.

[JayUtah]

Nov 5, 2010 23:56:52 GMT -4 gillianren said:

...

I have to disagree.

I have to agree with Gillianren's disagreement. I for one did not know what he meant.

Correct language is important in science.

Correct language is important in any specialized field. Science, engineering, finance, medicine -- all these fields and more involve specific, complex concepts. It is unwieldy and inexact to take a purely descriptive posture. A doctor can't say to another doctor, "that little thing that hangs down in the back of the throat." By convention it's the uvula. It doesn't matter what silly word you choose, as long as all practitioners agree on it, and it means exactly a certain thing. Similarly in the world of American taxation, "adjusted gross income" means exactly a certain, well-defined thing.

Because these complex ideas need to be referred to precisely and concisely, the specialized vocabularies evolve. And you can't hide behind a foreign language for very long. French scientists have specialized vocabularies that use French words. German scientists do the same in German. Regardless of your native language, the realization that you need to adopt the Anglicized specialized vocabulary when writing in English is expected of any practitioner. The legitimate practitioner knows that precision of speech is important.

Conversely, in the broader sense, one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is the propensity to make up new words for specialize concepts. Concise terminology arises because the need for it is largely self-evident. The pseudoscientist as well quickly realizes that he needs a word to mean "the rotational equivalent of linear inertia" if he's going to refer to it frequently. If he claims to be an expert in Newtonian dynamics but refers to that concept by making up a word "twirly-stasis," he can't just say that we all should have known what he meant. Experts in Newtonian dynamics have standardized for centuries on "moment of inertia" for that concept. You can't say you're an expert and then not know how important it is to use that word.

We simply observe historically that the misuse of terminology correlates strongly to charlatanism.

[gillianren]

We English majors use 'em, too--I've been referring to diacritical marks a lot lately--but no one ever takes me seriously about their use.

[LunarOrbit]

Nov 5, 2010 23:56:52 GMT -4 gillianren said:

Nov 5, 2010 22:45:57 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

I do think people have unfairly given him a hard time about his misuse of Apollo acronyms simply because English isn't he native language. We knew what he meant, to complain about it just seems like nitpicking.

I have to disagree. Using them wrong the first time is excusable under those circumstances.

I just think it's sort of like if you were to complain that I spell "colour" wrong. I'm not going to start spelling it "color" just to conform with all of the Americans in this forum because I believe (along with most of the English speaking world) that "colour" is correct.

Maybe Inquisitive Mind should try harder to use English acronyms, but I just don't consider it that big a deal.

I try to be understanding of errors made by language problems.

See, I don't consider it an error, just a difference between two languages.

If the French call the Apollo Command Module the LCM (because that acronym makes sense in French) then he's not wrong per se, he's just not communicating in proper English. And who am I to complain about his English when I can't speak a lick of French (despite the Canadian school system's many attempts to teach it to me for 10 years)?

In Canada we often see government agencies with two acronyms... one for English and one for French. Neither is wrong. For example, the Canadian Space Agency (Agence Spatiale Canadienne) is often shown as ASC/CSA.

Correct language is important in science. "Well, you knew what I meant" only works for so long.

If the LCM acronym was part of a math equation or a chemical formula then I agree that it would be very important, but it's just the name of spacecraft. Using the wrong acronym isn't going to have any dire consequences so I don't think we need to make a big deal out of it.

However, I'm not defending the English speaking hoax believers who use the wrong acronyms. People like David C. will use the wrong acronym just because they want to provoke us. That's an entirely different matter.

[JayUtah]

Nov 6, 2010 11:41:19 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

...

I just think it's sort of like if you were to complain that I spell "colour" wrong.

I don't think that's equivalent. Minor, well-known spelling differences don't matter as much as acronyms, which necessarily compress much meaning into few glyphs (hence the game of retasking them into much more amusing versions).

I'm not going to start spelling it "color" just to conform with all of the Americans in this forum...

Well I'm not putting that extra syllable in "aluminum."

If the LCM acronym was part of a math equation or a chemical formula then I agree that it would be very important, but it's just the name of spacecraft.

But which spacecraft? I honestly wasn't sure which one he meant. Is "LCM" the LM or the CSM? Yes, I tried to infer it from the context, but that's dangerous when you're dealing with people like Inquisitivemind, who, in addition to trying to communicate in a second language, are also generally clueless. Sam Colby doesn't know which name refers to which spacecraft, so how are we to distinguish language-related ambiguity from ignorance-related ambiguity? We do it by trying to correct for one, and failing that, the other. This is why we insist on proper terminology in specialized pursuits. The potential for ordinary misunderstanding is already too great.

[Bob B.]

Nov 6, 2010 11:41:19 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

I just think it's sort of like if you were to complain that I spell "colour" wrong. I'm not going to start spelling it "color" just to conform with all of the Americans in this forum because I believe (along with most of the English speaking world) that "colour" is correct.

I once got into an exchange of emails with an Englishman and the topic of different spellings of words came up. I haven't been able to confirm what he told me, but he said that spellings in American English adhere to the original English and are actually more correct. Apparently centuries ago the English tried to Europeanize their language to some extent and adopted some French-like spellings to their words. By this time the American colonies had already been established and were in many ways isolated from England. As such, the Americans retained the original English spellings.

I don't know if the story is true or not but it makes sense. I'd like to believe it - the Americans are the purists while the rest of the English speaking world changed to placate the French.

[Bob B.]

Nov 6, 2010 12:17:17 GMT -4 JayUtah said:

But which spacecraft? I honestly wasn't sure which one he meant. Is "LCM" the LM or the CSM? Yes, I tried to infer it from the context, but that's dangerous when you're dealing with people like Inquisitivemind, who, in addition to trying to communicate in a second language, are also generally clueless. Sam Colby doesn't know which name refers to which spacecraft, so how are we to distinguish language-related ambiguity from ignorance-related ambiguity? We do it by trying to correct for one, and failing that, the other. This is why we insist on proper terminology in specialized pursuits. The potential for ordinary misunderstanding is already too great.

And what about common courtesy? We was given the correct acronyms and asked to change to avoid further confusion. From what I can tell, he's refused to do so. It is he who has chosen to join an English-speaking forum and I find it rude not to assimilate when he's been told point blank what he should do to communicate more clearly and professionally.

[LunarOrbit]

Nov 6, 2010 12:29:56 GMT -4 Bob B. said:

Apparently centuries ago the English tried to Europeanize their language to some extent and adopted some French-like spellings to their words. By this time the American colonies had already been established and were in many ways isolated from England. As such, the Americans retained the original English spellings.

I always thought Americans changed the spelling of certain words because they wanted to differentiate themselves from the British.

But I've been reading about it on Wikipedia and I think we're both right.

The first large American dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, was written by Noah Webster in 1828; Webster intended to show that the United States, which was a relatively new country at the time, spoke a different dialect from that of Britain.

Some of the forms that now serve to distinguish American from British spelling (color for colour, center for centre, traveler for traveller, etc.) were introduced by Noah Webster himself; others are due to spelling tendencies in Britain from the 17th century until the present day (e.g. -ise for -ize, although the Oxford English Dictionary still prefers the -ize ending) and cases favored by the francophile tastes of 19th century Victorian England, which had little effect on AmE (e.g. programme for program, manoeuvre for maneuver, skilful for skillful, cheque for check, etc.).

[JayUtah]

Nov 6, 2010 2:17:31 GMT -4 gillianren said:

We English majors use 'em, too--I've been referring to diacritical marks a lot lately--but no one ever takes me seriously about their use.

Regarding diacriticals, some writers are naïve. Some are blasé. Most just don't know how to make their keyboards do it.

[LunarOrbit]

Nov 6, 2010 12:17:17 GMT -4 JayUtah said:

I just think it's sort of like if you were to complain that I spell "colour" wrong.

I don't think that's equivalent. Minor, well-known spelling differences don't matter as much as acronyms, which necessarily compress much meaning into few glyphs (hence the game of retasking them into much more amusing versions).

I see your point, and I agree that it should be up to InquistiveMind to conform to the English acronyms in this case, just like I think it would be proper for you to use the French acronyms if you were discussing Apollo in French.

But I think some people were seeing it as a lack of research on his part rather than as a language issue, and that is what I disagree with.

I'm not going to start spelling it "color" just to conform with all of the Americans in this forum...

Well I'm not putting that extra syllable in "aluminum."

I'm on your side in that case. "Aluminium" sounds weird to me too. But we're on dangerous ground here... there was a huge edit war on Wikipedia over that word.

[dickshane]

The regularisation of spelling has more to do with the first dictionaries: Samuel Johnson's in England and, later, Noah Webster's in America. Until these 18th Century notions of regularity and 'correct' taste, variety in spelling was largely accepted as inevitable, though some grammarians had tried to clean it up before, and failed.

Webster spent much of his time removing silent vowels (color for colour) or choosing more definite spellings (center for centre) which is why American words generally have fewer letters and seem a little more logical.

I don't think there was ever a conscious attempt to make English more 'European', except as it happened naturally after the Norman Conquest. It took hundreds of years for the peculiar hybrid of Germanic Old English and Latinate Norman French to combine and develop into modern English. It's this combination which is largely the secret of the extraordinary richness and variety of the English language.


ETA - Ah, point's already been made.

[lukepemberton]

I just can't cope with Americans who call a missile a miss-il. There's an 'e' on the end of the word that makes the 'i' long.

OK, I am now going to duck for cover...