Planet Earth

Acquired the 5 DVD box. Saw it presented in a shop on a Panasonic 150 inch (!!) plasma TV (80.000 Euro...). On our modest TV at home it is still visually gobsmacking, although admittedly, the storyline is not really educating. Generates lots of discussion in the household nevertheless!

Born on a blue day

Reading this at the moment: Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day, fascinating, somebody who can actually tell about how he thinks and, indeed what extraordinary ways to reason he has.

Away for the week, again

• Mon March 10: Deventer-Schiphol-Newcastle-Cleator (434.7 miles, as the crow flies, so add another 100+ miles for the distance actually travelled)
• Tue/Fri: Cleator-Sellafield v.v.
• Fri March 14: Sellafield-Newcastle-Schiphol-Deventer

Skybrary

At ATC2008 in Amsterdam, www.skybrary.aero will be presented by EUROCONTROL. The result of the effort of many (including a little bit of mine), this wiki-based site promises to provide a significant contribution to the sharing of aviation safety knowledge.

Dyslexia and spelling checkers

FOUR YORE I's ONLY
I have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye cannot sea
When eye strike a quay to right a word
I weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait away
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two late
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely, rarely grate
I've run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two noIts letter perfect in it's weigh
MY CHEQUER TOLLED ME SEW!

(Sauce unknown)

One the family members has been diagnosed with dyslexia. I started to look for some material and found this on several sites dedicated to dyslexia (starting with a site of the West Cumbria Dyslexia Association, a pure coincidence). I certainly do recognise the phonetic approach...

Dyirbal

George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things booktitle was based on this language. Fascinating. Lakoff's work (including Metaphors We Live By) was pretty cool in my AI days, but there was no Wikipedia article on the Dyirbal language back then!

Wiki

We're currently involved in setting up a wiki for aviation safety knowledge. We're using the mediawiki platform for this. Look and feel, content structure and content will change over time, but isn't that what it is all about? Thusfar, it has proven to be relatively hassle free. In the meantime, I learn a lot about aviation safety, in particular the Air Traffic Management part of it. Also, I'm really looking forward to seeing this wiki develop a community of contributors around it, resulting in high quality knowledge in this interesting field.