Slashdot Mirror
China Names Chang'e 3 Lunar Landing Site 'Guang Han Gong' Or 'Moon Palace' (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: One of the privileges of landing on the moon is that the country that does so gets to name the landing site. For example, the International Astronomical Union has officially recognized "Tranquility Base", using the Latin designation "Statio Tranquillitatis", as the site where the Apollo 11 astronauts first landed and walked on the moon on July 20, 1969. Now, according to a story in Moon Daily, the site where the Chinese Chang'e 3 probe landed has been named "Guang Han Gong" which translates as "Moon Palace." The name has also been recognized by the IAU.
Who's palace is this?
Votator.com implements a fair voting scheme (free
NOW we have the band's name....
Moon Palace is the name of my favorite local Chinese restaurant.
So, if the IAU accepted "Tranquility Base" in the Latin equivalent, I assume something similar happened with the Moon Palace name, right? There's no such mention in TFA, but I don't see why it would not be so...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Cultural sensitivity?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
for people with a very particular fetish.
I believe the USSR achieved that prior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1
Because one is not Chinese and the other is.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Wondering if Obama got to name the crater he made..
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
So how many centuries until it is acceptable to use names from anime, movies or Tolkien?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
a Paul Auster novel.
Why indeed? The scientific community in the West are fond of Latin and (classical) Greek, because those languages were until quite recently and important part of everybody's higher education. Historically, Latin was the language of the elite - it was used by the church in the middle ages and became the shared language in a Europe consisting of many languages and dialects - try to sample, for example, the current, German dialects to get a mild taste of how difficult it must have been to communicate across regions in Europe at the time. And since the church and the monastried became institutions of learning (and later universities), a major part of getting an education was to learn Latin. It clung on until very recently in some cicles - I remember reading in the forewords for one of the latest editions of the Flora Europaea, that he editors had been through a major discussion about whether to publish it in Latin or English (in the end they decided for English). A lot of the rules governing scientific communication was decided on at a time when Europe played the dominant role, so Latin/Greek still plays a major role in things like biological nomenclature - hences the ever more strained names of dinosaur species discovered in China; it's hard to fit the square peg of Chinese words into the narrow, round hole of Latin.
So that's why Latin - but there is no reason to expect that Latin - or indeed English - will forever be the dominant language in science. A lot of very worthwhile research has been published in both Russian, Chinese and other languages, and not all of it has been translated to English. There is still a lot of Russian maths being 'discovered', for example. And there is also Ramanujan, an Indian whose mathematical genius still hasn't been fully understood - how many other geniuses are there, that we in the West haven't heard of yet?
Now that nearly everything is made in China, nuking China may be actually be more damaging to us than nuking ourselves.
China today asserted its “indisputable sovereignty” over the landing site surrounding its Chang'e 3 moon probe.
The area under Chinese claim - approximately one lunar hemisphere - has been renamed the 'North China Ocean'. As justification, China noted its long cultural and historical ties to the moon, recently underscored by the arrival of Chang'e 3. China also angrily objected to a US lunar satellite currently orbiting the moon. "It is intolerable", said a Chinese Defense Ministry spokeswoman. "Our national sovereignty is violated during half of each orbit of the US craft". She demanded the United States immediately restrict its satellite to orbit the hemisphere outside of the Chinese claim.
Plans were also announced for a new Chinese heavy-lift spaceship. The first launch - planned for 2018 - will send 240 Chinese astronauts (or 'taikonauts') to the moon, accompanied by several hundred tons of construction equipment. Once on the moon, the taikonauts will launch a massive lunar rock-mining operation designed to provide raw material for new Chinese lunar city. The city (tentatively called "New Kangbashi") will eventually house 202 shopping malls, 2002 security personnel, and 20200 visiting tycoons. It will also serve as operating base for hundreds of Yutu Guàiwù (or 'Moon Rabbit') vehicles. A uniquely Chinese design, the Moon Rabbit is large 2-legged, hopping spacetank. The design takes advantage of the weak lunar gravity to use two 'legs' to propel itself long distances over the lunar surface. This allows the comparatively small Chinese security presence to patrol the large Chinese claim. Equipped with large footpads, each hop of the Moon Rabbit also flattens the lunar surface underfoot. Over time, it is hoped this action will create extensive flattened surfaces, jumpstarting further property development, especially in the highly coveted lunar maria areas.
Treaties prohibiting the weaponization of space also mean that each 'Moon Rabbit' patrol vehicle is unarmed. Instead, it enforces security by simply stomping security threats (or recalcitrant residents) underfoot. The Moon Rabbit is designed to detect the presence of cameras and other digital recording devices nearby. If detected, it can simply hop over protesters blocking its path without loss of face (A design feature developed in response to the Tank Man incident).
I took four years of Latin back in school. It has come in handy. I also took a couple of years of Greek. Those have come in handy. There are loads of languages that I do not speak but I can figure a lot of things out in text. It's not uncommon for me to be at a non-English site and still be able to grasp the gist of it. Obviously, no Cyrillic, Asian, or Arabic type things work for me - I don't know what the characters mean.
I do wonder why it's okay to change the English to Latin but not okay to change the Chinese to Latin. I don't really care, however. In three hours I will have forgotten this almost entirely and in a week I won't even remember the name. I figure that, by the time I hit 70, I should be able to hide my own Easter Eggs.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So we got naming rights after putting a man on the moon, but China gets them for what, dropping a couple pounds of plastic and metal?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Isn't anime traditionally Japanese or Korean?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.