moon landing
gregladen | September 10, 2016In linguistic communication, a pattern generally emerges whereby the speaker or the listener (but not both) work extra hard to make the communication happens. This work (or lack thereof) consists of enunciation, use of contractions, various other things. You know about this because you make such adjustments all the time. When speaking to a child, or when speaking about your area of expertise but to a non-expert, etc., you not only use an adjusted vocabulary but also speak more clearly and maybe even more loudly; you end up doing more of the work than you would usually do.
Entire cultural…
gregladen | July 19, 2014We are celebrating an anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon. Here, I simply post a memo from William Safire, speech writer, to H. R. Halderman, felon, providing text to be read by Richard Nixon, World's Worst President (of the 20th century), related to that Moon Landing:
gregladen | July 16, 2009Or at least that's how I heard it, 40 years ago, when Astronaut Neil Armstrong jumped off the pad of the Lunar Modula of Apollo 11 and started kicking around moon dust.
Happy 40th Anniversary, Landing On the Moon.
(details here)
gregladen | July 15, 2009... Maybe .... Sorta....
We've been burned by this one before. As you will recall, the claim was made that the visuals we all saw of the first steps on the moon by humans were a black and white compressed image sent from Australia, shown on a TV at Mission Control (or someplace) and then shot with an old fashioned TV camera (they only had the "old fashioned" ones back in those days, of course).
But, we were told, high quality color videos were taken at the same time but then lost right away. Then, we were told, they were found.
Then we were told by other people who seemed to know what…