Bruce Cohen wrote (#17) above on a number of different skills involved in spelling including:
"ability to detect a misspelling visually".
This separation does seem to make some sense to me; in high school I always gave the teachers the impression of good spelling skills, but this was more due to my ability to tell if words were correctly spelled or not. However, sometimes I would look at a word I knew I had spelled wrong, and had no clue how to spell it; I would then usually find some other way of writing what I meant - and thus my teachers would rarely see misspelled words in my work.
I think one of the better objections to the proposed definition is one of the ones Phil Plait mentions here. Under the guidelines, the moon is not a planet, but would become one in something like 40 million years.
"A guy in an evasion situation attacking folks? That’s about as realistic as a fifteen-foot pink dinosaur shopping at Macy’s. The thing is, in the blurb for that scenario, they go on and on about how highly trained in survival SEALs are. Well, I took that same course, and y’know what? No one said a thing about how great a plan it would be to go sniping at mortar teams if you happen to see one on your way out of town."
That sounds like it would be better fashioned after the Thief games - where the highest accomplishment was to get through missions without killing anybody - or even being seen.
Jordin Kare wrote:
"One of the spent Apollo stages was deliberately impacted on the Moon, although I believe the intent was more to provide a known seismic source than to look at the impact spectra (since we could study chunks of the surface close up by then)."
Actually it was two - the S4B stages from both Apollo 13 and Apollo 14 were crashed into the moon - and for seismic measurements.
A13 S4B 44 km from A12 site
A14 S4B 175 km from A12 site
They also used the Lunar ascent stage from A12.
(Yes, this is getting way off topic - even for this open thread.)
Eric Sadoyama wrote:
"The one that gets me is tilapia, which in Hawaii has a reputation as a mud-eating trash fish. They've rebranded the farm-raised version as 'sunfish', but I still can't bring myself to try it."
The first place I read about Tilapia was in discussions of long-duration space-mission life support. It is fairly efficient in converting plant waste to meat and is thus a good match if you are already growing food. For similiar reasons, it is now popular as a farmed fish.
I find Tilapia to be a relatively mild white-fleshed fish. One recipe I have had is here, it came from this list of recipes.
One of the Texas posts mentioned SBC, to which I will just note that my view on SBC has been colored by reading Nathan Newman's posts such as AT&T Disappears into Pro-Labor SBC and SBC: Pro-Civil Liberties, Pro-Labor.
The second post I linked starts:
"Who'd a thunk it. From the heart of Texas comes one of the most pro-labor and pro-civil liberties company, SBC Communications."
In the vein of not exactly answering the question you asked:
Steve Taylor asked:
I imagine there probably is/was some white South African sf at some point, but what about black Africa?
White south African SF writer, living in South Africa:
Dave Freer
Anyone else notice that while people weren't looking, part of Ivan snuck back down the east coast, across Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, where it proceded to become Tropical Storm Ivan once again, and moved into Louisiana and Texas last night?
From here
Meanwhile, Accuweather.com hurricane expert Joe Bastardi predicted the remnants of the son of Ivan could venture back into the Gulf of Mexico for a weird, third attempt at becoming a tropical storm or hurricane.
Should we be calling it Ivan the Undead now?
Hunting the title:
An Australian review of a Pearl Jam concert:
Bono himself would have turned green during the pandemonic encore of Do The Evolution, in which Vedder rescued an intrepid stage-crasher from security, planted a George Bush mask on his head, danced him to his knees, clambered on his shoulders, wrestled him to the ground and then hugged him like a brother, all without missing a breath.
Although amusing, no.
How about embrace, not hug...
A translation of a poem about a mattress.
No again.
The Orson Scott Card short story Atlantis
Then he bumped against a log that was also floating on the current, and took hold of it, and rolled up onto the top of it like a dragonboat. Now he could use all his strength for paddling, and soon he was across the current. He drew the log from the water and embraced it like a brother, lying beside it, holding it in the wet grass until the rising water began to lick at his feet again. Then he dragged the log with him to higher ground and placed it up in the notch of a tree where no flood would dislodge it. One does not abandon a brother to the flood.
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Via Arthur Silber the unearthing of the University of Alexandria.
"A Polish-Egyptian team has unearthed the site of the fabled University of Alexandria, home of Archimedes, Euclid and a host of other scholars from the era when Alexandria dominated the Mediterranean.
The team has found 13 individual lecture halls, or auditoria, that could have accommodated as many as 5,000 students, according to archeologist Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities."
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