Category: Science

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Space Patrol

One of our favourite tv series from the very early 1960s was Space Patrol. This is the UK puppet (actually marionette) series about Captain Larry Dart and his crew who fly round the galaxy (actually, just the solar system) trying to keep the peace and sort out problems.

It was a black and white series, though you can find colourised episodes on YouTube. There are box sets available of the originals.

It’s a little forgotten these days, partially we suspect because it is not Gerry Anderson.

The stories were a bit silly. Science seemed to go out of the window. It took them months to fly anywhere so they went into deep freeze, while the people left behind got no older.

There’s also some oddly weird dialogue that you may hear if you watch an episode.

There were some things we liked: the design of New York and Space Patrol HQ, watching Galasphere 347 coming in to land on that building, and the electronic music and sounds. In truth, 60 odd years later and we still like them.

Here’s a clip:

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No number

I get very annoyed by some very simple things.

One is when people cannot read simple numbers, especially examples like this:

25.69

How do you say this number?

Twenty five point six nine

You may want to put a hyphen in, but that’s got nothing to do with saying it.

It is not:

Twenty five point sixty nine

How would you say this: 38.1234? Thirty eight point twelve thirty four? This is nonsense.

Adding “..ty” to something refers to the tens column in a number, so eighty means eight sets of tens. After the decimal point, we have tenths, not tens.

It also annoys me that people cannot write simple numbers. On a game show a couple of days ago, some big celebrity I had never heard of wrote, in answer to a question:

100,00

If you can’t read it, there’s a comma in there. This is not a real number, unless you live on the continent and then it is one hundred point zero zero. The number intended was one hundred thousand. You would imagine that grown up adult human beings could write down a simple number, wouldn’t you?

I also find it sad that we use a full stop (.) to substitute for a decimal point (ยท). This is just laziness on the part of computer programmers, and is just plain wrong.