Here is a photo of the book — definitely looks like a custom cover
and here is a photo of the pilot writing in it
There must be a story behind this book; I’m not convinced it’s fake. Is one of the columns headed “Mars weather conditions”? Because that narrows it down too much for a generic logbook for flights on “Planets and Moons”. The time entries appear to be in LMST (local mean solar time).
Besides “Mars weather conditions”, there is a set of two columns for “Rotorcraft helicopter”, which is also pretty custom (then, under that, it has “single-engine”, which is not used in the entries we see, and “multi-engine”).
Seems obvious that they’re filling out a physical logbook so they can send it to a museum someday. Much nicer looking than some computer printout. No one’s looking at the logbook for scientific purposes.
Oh, I agree it’s PR & museum fodder and pretty obviously so.
I’m just wondering why they went to the trouble to create a custom logbook and leave columns in their custom book that are completely inapplicable to the custom situation they’re doing on Mars.
Engineers have odd senses of humor is all I can conclude.
Makes it look more logbooky. Almost, but not quite, like it was just some off-the-shelf thing. Even aside from the “single-engine” thing, it’s not like they had to fill out the “make and model” or “aircraft ident” each time, either. But real logbooks do that, so they do it here, too.
I still hesitate sometimes when writing lower case B and Ds. My solution was the word ‘bed’ – it just looks like such a nice flat bed with head and footboards IF you get the B and D loops right.
I was aware you had written novels. My claim is that it is no less useful to write entire novels in “cursive” than in “print”, and I personally do not feel a need to make such distinctions or aesthetic judgements of anyone’s handwriting unless I were judging a calligraphy contest.
Cursive may be useful for some people in some circumstances but that doesn’t necessarily mean every child in every school needs to be taught how to do it. My claim has nothing to do with aesthetics. Perhaps I misunderstood your point, but it sounded like you were saying it’s still a relevant skill for most people. To which I was saying, no, it’s not strictly necessary to use cursive to write large volumes of text. If someone wants to use cursive and wants to take the time to learn it, more power to them, but I don’t think most people use it on a regular basis, beyond the occasional signature, and I’m not convinced that much would be lost if generations of schoolchildren were never taught how to do it.
I was so happy when I googled “Defeat Caps Lock Key” and found out that Macs have a simple setting for that. That was after I spent a decade accidentally hitting it…
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That’s why my Password Hint says “Last Six Digits of Pi”.
But you see- one or two spaces doesnt matter- it affects understanding not at all. This is one of those things which has no importance at all , like which side should the TP roll hang. But people get all het up about these things. And yes, I know, in a long book, the extra space can lead to extra paper… meh.
I Sometimes us “MM” for million(s) since M is 1000 in Roman.
And that is the only way I ever saw grades.
Same here.
I have pointed out the hypocrisy of using CE rather than AD, while still using days of the week named after pagan gods. I get you want to take religion out, but be consistent.
Not in my case. When I am reviewing a report (at work) that contains two spaces, it’s a major distraction to me for some reason. I will do a global and replace all the double spaces with single spaces.
The spaces after the period are functional. Slightly more space after a period makes it more readable. It’s just that two spaces is how one did it on a monospaced typewriter, and now that word processors automatically control this spacing, it’s overkill. I get distracted & do the search-and-replace, too.
Microsoft Word ignores double spaces after a period. I used to double tap the space bar out of habit. It was irritating to see only one space after a period.
I finally broke my double tap habit because it was wasted effort. Word won that fight in 1993. I still think a document is more readable with 2 spaces between sentences.
So does Donald Knuth, though you have to keep in mind the Didone font he uses in his books.
The real point is, spacing around punctuation marks should be controlled by user options and not by how many times you hit the space bar, one time or six. Once should still give you the extra space if things are set up correctly.
Microsoft Word may be OK for producing a business letter or something, but not for preparing a final typeset version of a long document like a book. Certainly not if you have to “fight” with the layout.
I learned cursive in school of course, but the only time I’ve written cursive in the last 40 years or so is when I write my signature.
Which makes me wonder – kids these days who can’t write cursive: how do they sign things? Just print their name? Seems like that would be much easier to forge than a cursive signature.
