Slashdot Mirror
Has NASA Found the Lost Moon Tapes?
jra writes "For over 5 years, various people both inside and retired from NASA have been engaged in a quest. They were looking for the long-lost original slow-scan video tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing, which went missing in a record-keeping snafu, covered in unreasonable detail in a Wired article a couple years ago. Well now, according to the UK's Sunday Express newspaper, some tapes may or may not have been found which may or may not be the Apollo video. Apparently — I love the British press — the NASA boffins are a bit put out that it leaked; they were hoping to blow everyone's minds with the scoop themselves."
MALWARE WARNING! DO NOT CLICK ON PARENT'S LINKS!
not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling not yelling
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Ironically, Neal faced a similar decision. The computer was signaling an unknown overload and they were also running tight on landing fuel as he spotted some large boulders he wanted to avoid. He could have called to abort the mission, using the ascent engine to return to moon orbit. In fact, "abort" would have been the "right" decision in my opinion based on what was known at the time.
He gambled that the computer was still returning useful info despite the overload[1], and that he could manage his way to a landing on short fuel. I remember him saying afterward that even if he ran out of fuel, he was close enough to the ground for a "bounce" landing while jetting around the boulders, and thus mostly ignored ground-control's warnings. (The main ground announcer even joked about ground control "turning blue" just after landing because of the late landing.)
He was possibly thinking he might never get a second chance, and thus took on excessive risk.
[1] (It turned out the computer was still sufficient despite the overload, but they didn't fully know it then because they didn't know the cause yet. The cause turned out to be an extra un-docking service that they accidentally left on that wasn't needed for landing.)
Table-ized A.I.
It happens because 'formerly' has a rhotacized schwa in the second syllable, and 'formally' has an unrhotacized schwa. Since the following syllable begins with an apical consonant that also includes velar articulation, the rhotacized schwa tends to lose its rhotacization due to anticipatory reduction. With this one feature lost, the two words become homophonous. In many (all?) non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc., the two words are already homophonous.
Bob Jacobs, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, says the story's fiction.
(via Phil Plait)
But then again, I could be wrong.