Storm - stretches around the entire planet and can be seen throughbackyard telescopes

Quadibloc:
My point, though, was that "havoc" has been used to refer to even the
most minor sorts of tumult - anything which causes mess, disorder, or
confusion... as caused by characters portrayed by such actresses as
Katharine Hepburn or Lucille Ball... and thus your criticism of the
NASA news release was unjustified.

Perhaps I should simply extend my criticism to others who misuse te
word "havoc." Or, to keep it simple, kindly refer to my sig.

The Universe is a big place, with many energetic phenomena in it. It
is indifferent to the welfare of the intelligent life that has arisen
within it; and, in most places, it can _afford_ to be so.

Since I seem to be in a nitpicking mood, I would say that

a) You have stated the obvious in noting that nature is indifferent to
us.

b) I'm not fond of the anthropomorphism of nature as exhibited in
"...it can afford..." I don't think that nature can afford or not
afford anything. I, however, cannot afford the Aston Martin that I
want.

c) Accepting that nature can afford certain things and not others, I
believe that it can /always/ afford to be indifferent to us. That could
be wrong, as our place in the Universe is not well understood, and we
do not know if humanity is destined to do Big Things that will have a
universal impact. If that is our destiny, then nature should nurture us
so that we are around when the time comes to do those Big Things.

Davoud

--
I agree with almost everything that you have said and almost everything that
you will say in your entire life.

usenet *at* davidillig dawt cawm

On 20/05/2011 14:58, Davoud wrote:

I would suggest that NASA hire some real stickler-type English majors
over the age of 50 or so (to avoid "Like, Saturn is this planet with
these ringz, you know, and like, we sent a rocket there, so now there
are these stormz on Saturn, and we at NASA are, like, wow, this is,
like, totally awesome!") and also a PR firm to get its message of
discovery out to the public.


Yes, that would work!

Davoud wrote:
I would suggest that NASA hire some real stickler-type English majors
over the age of 50 or so (to avoid "Like, Saturn is this planet with
these ringz, you know, and like, we sent a rocket there, so now there
are these stormz on Saturn, and we at NASA are, like, wow, this is,
like, totally awesome!") and also a PR firm to get its message of
discovery out to the public.

That's, like, all I'm sayin', ya know, dude?

You misspelled "ZOMG."

More seriously (wait, is that even possible?), I saw some kind
of survey--I know, that's practically making it up--in which the
respondents significantly overstated NASA's budget, expressed
as a fraction of the federal budget. By about two orders of
magnitude, if I recall correctly. Some folks apparently thought
it was about a third of the federal budget.

--
Brian Tung (posting from Google Groups)
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