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Heck of a weekend...
Drew brought Huntur to the store yesterday morning. He was intent on staying just long enough to pick up and sort the mail, after which he was going to take Shannon and Huntur into Durango to do some shopping. As it turned out, having Huntur at the store was a blast. Galina came by after a while and then went for a walk with the kid (to Drew's increasing chagrin, as he wanted to leave!).
So Galina and I tended the store together, until closing. (We are such romantics!)
The prospect of baby-sitting Huntur came up during the morning, and although I thought to myself "Gee, it'd be great to start a little earlier than 8 pm, so we don't take custody of a sleeping infant!" it never occurred to me to ask about the job. As it turned out, Galina and I went to the kids' place around 8, and Huntur was sleeping!
Drew and Shannon left to go to where some friends of theirs were playing in a band, while Galina and I watched the latest Star Wars epic (Revenge of the Clones? The Clones Strike Back? Attack of the Clones? I can't keep track anymore.) Afterward, it struck me that Huntur has more books than do her parents, as I scoured the bookshelves for something to read.
As it was, I laid down the outline of a fairly extensive essay on educational attitudes in this country and how they have affected our country's intelligence effort and laid the basis for a police state set forth in recent legislation. It's not exactly the Unified Field Theory, but it's close.
Eventually, the kids made it home... well past midnight.
Between closing the store yesterday and going to baby-sit, I read a bit of a book that I first read in 9th grade, titled I Owe Russia $1200, by Bob Hope. (I know it was 9th grade because that was the (in)famous Year of Junior High Public Speaking, and I remember stealing some one-liners from the book to add spice to my subject: an encounter with a shark, in which the fish almost died of fright.) It was interesting to look at the book from the perspective of the intervening several decades; some of what Hope - or his writers - wrote is still applicable today.
I also looked at one of the DVDs that Drew ordered via my account on Netflix, the first of the Band of Brothers disks, which featured the first two episodes of the HBO mini-series. I'd not seen the very first episode, and watching the second episode was still entertaining.
Anyway, once home, Galina and I went immediately to sleep. Ming, however, insisted on being let out every two hours, which was a royal pain in the butt. We all eventually rose at 8:30 or so, and I went to do grocery shopping (the better to make soup with).
* * * The rest of the day was nothing to write home about, particularly, but plenty in which to write translations. I worked on the job received Friday for most of the afternoon. The highlight of the text was having to deal with the concept of "собственной атмосферой космического аппарата."
Ignoring, for the time being, the adjective собственный, this term denotes some kind of spacecraft atmosphere, and in that context, "atmosphere" generally denotes the gas inside the spacecraft's compartments (as in: atmosphere revitalization system). I mean, it's not as if spacecraft have an external atmosphere, right?
In any event, I had not seen the collocation собственная атмосфера before, so I hit my dictionary resources.
I had no luck for the word pair, but the dictionary definition of собственный is along the lines of "own, proper, inherent, intrinsic, native, indigenous, proprietary" and so on. Not much help there, either, so I turned to Yandex.ru and found a Moscow University article on собственная внешняя атмосфера космических аппаратов, which is the same elusive word собственная now linked to "external spacecraft atmosphere." The page included a reference to Skylab, which perked me up.
But what's this about "external spacecraft atmosphere"?
Another page at the same site convinced me that the concept under discussion is, indeed, an external "atmosphere" that surrounds larger spacecraft (e.g., orbiting stations such as Skylab, Mir, and ISS). It turns out that, as a result of outgassing, sublimation, thruster firings, airlock depressurization, and so on, a gaseous cloud that is subject to gravitation effects forms outside of spacecraft. This cloud is very, very rarefied (on Skylab, the surface density at various points around the vehicle was on the order of 10-9 kg/m2, or about a thousandth of a milligram spread out over a square meter), but you wouldn't want to breathe it anyway (many components are toxic).
Anyway, by doing a little research on "Skylab," I found a history page at NASA, which mentions a project to measure the "external atmopshere" of Skylab. At that point in the procedure, I figure I'd flogged that particular question into insensibility. Spacecraft have their own atmospheres (small, but measurable), and the term I was looking for is "external spacecraft atmosphere."
's what I love about the job. You learn something new every day.
Cheers...
So Galina and I tended the store together, until closing. (We are such romantics!)
The prospect of baby-sitting Huntur came up during the morning, and although I thought to myself "Gee, it'd be great to start a little earlier than 8 pm, so we don't take custody of a sleeping infant!" it never occurred to me to ask about the job. As it turned out, Galina and I went to the kids' place around 8, and Huntur was sleeping!
Drew and Shannon left to go to where some friends of theirs were playing in a band, while Galina and I watched the latest Star Wars epic (Revenge of the Clones? The Clones Strike Back? Attack of the Clones? I can't keep track anymore.) Afterward, it struck me that Huntur has more books than do her parents, as I scoured the bookshelves for something to read.
As it was, I laid down the outline of a fairly extensive essay on educational attitudes in this country and how they have affected our country's intelligence effort and laid the basis for a police state set forth in recent legislation. It's not exactly the Unified Field Theory, but it's close.
Eventually, the kids made it home... well past midnight.
Between closing the store yesterday and going to baby-sit, I read a bit of a book that I first read in 9th grade, titled I Owe Russia $1200, by Bob Hope. (I know it was 9th grade because that was the (in)famous Year of Junior High Public Speaking, and I remember stealing some one-liners from the book to add spice to my subject: an encounter with a shark, in which the fish almost died of fright.) It was interesting to look at the book from the perspective of the intervening several decades; some of what Hope - or his writers - wrote is still applicable today.
I also looked at one of the DVDs that Drew ordered via my account on Netflix, the first of the Band of Brothers disks, which featured the first two episodes of the HBO mini-series. I'd not seen the very first episode, and watching the second episode was still entertaining.
Anyway, once home, Galina and I went immediately to sleep. Ming, however, insisted on being let out every two hours, which was a royal pain in the butt. We all eventually rose at 8:30 or so, and I went to do grocery shopping (the better to make soup with).
Ignoring, for the time being, the adjective собственный, this term denotes some kind of spacecraft atmosphere, and in that context, "atmosphere" generally denotes the gas inside the spacecraft's compartments (as in: atmosphere revitalization system). I mean, it's not as if spacecraft have an external atmosphere, right?
In any event, I had not seen the collocation собственная атмосфера before, so I hit my dictionary resources.
I had no luck for the word pair, but the dictionary definition of собственный is along the lines of "own, proper, inherent, intrinsic, native, indigenous, proprietary" and so on. Not much help there, either, so I turned to Yandex.ru and found a Moscow University article on собственная внешняя атмосфера космических аппаратов, which is the same elusive word собственная now linked to "external spacecraft atmosphere." The page included a reference to Skylab, which perked me up.
But what's this about "external spacecraft atmosphere"?
Another page at the same site convinced me that the concept under discussion is, indeed, an external "atmosphere" that surrounds larger spacecraft (e.g., orbiting stations such as Skylab, Mir, and ISS). It turns out that, as a result of outgassing, sublimation, thruster firings, airlock depressurization, and so on, a gaseous cloud that is subject to gravitation effects forms outside of spacecraft. This cloud is very, very rarefied (on Skylab, the surface density at various points around the vehicle was on the order of 10-9 kg/m2, or about a thousandth of a milligram spread out over a square meter), but you wouldn't want to breathe it anyway (many components are toxic).
Anyway, by doing a little research on "Skylab," I found a history page at NASA, which mentions a project to measure the "external atmopshere" of Skylab. At that point in the procedure, I figure I'd flogged that particular question into insensibility. Spacecraft have their own atmospheres (small, but measurable), and the term I was looking for is "external spacecraft atmosphere."
's what I love about the job. You learn something new every day.
Cheers...
no subject
Technical English tends to be terse, so unless there is some reason to distinguish a "proper" external atmosphere from some other kind of external atmosphere, technical English would tend to drop the extra adjective. (I know, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, but in general... :^)
Thanks also for the pointer at the Energia page. After looking at it, I tried to go to the NASA page I'd cited, but found I'd misspelled the URL (since corrected). On the basis of the explanations, etc., I am pretty certain that simply "external atmosphere" is the English term.
Cheers...
P.S. Are you really going to come to the U.S. South?
Re:
no subject
Пиршли адрес. Я вышлю Фордовскую версию '14.5454 тонн' тебе.
Мой адрес, это моя ЖЖ-ская кличка + '@' + imap.cc
Cheers...