Those who cling to UFO superstition ought to join their televangelist Christian brothers and sisters who sell miracle healing hanker-chiefs. Just pray the right words and you will be healed of anything! even senseless superstitions!

Pareidolia is a powerful and deceptive mental faculty and everyone would do well to understand what it is and the tricks their own brains play on them. The government isn’t making cover-ups and telling you what to think, your brain does an excellent job of that without any help from the government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvPR8T1o3Dc

Re: BOLIDENATE… I second the comment from JSchu. I checked several dictionaries but apparently “bolidenate” is NOT a word. Taking it in context here, it obviously means to make larger, since when I clicked the pic, I got a larger version of it.

Can this columnist, or perhaps Discover’s editors, please address this? I work as a professional copy editor & proofreader, and consider myself a huge “word nerd,” so I have to say my curiosity is VERY piqued as to whether this is actually a new word, or if it’s just a typo. Either way, hope to hear from someone soon.

Cheers,
Shari K. in California

Phil is a great proponent of neologisms. They’re all perfcectly cromulent.

nunya @11:
i uncapitalized your name for you. you is welcome.

Wow, until I read this I never realised how amazing I am, being able to hold down the “shift” key while typing a letter. . .

Seriously, is it so difficult for you to use good English?

NASA’s policy is NOT to talk about UFO’s or acknowledge same. I have friends there (I live 5 minutes from JSC in Houston). They have photos of UFO’s but you won’t be seeing them…

Yeah, right, as if NASA could prevent employees from publishing photographs online.

Hope that helps!
- Ben H.
JSC, Houston, TX

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090012274_2009011981.pdf

I think part of the answer to your question is that it only takes a very small object to create an impact crater on the handrails that can be a hazard. We don’t know where they all are and they are hard to see, so the focus has been on avoiding them and improving glove design, rather than trying to find all the damaged hand rails and replace them – which would take a lot of time and as you say, EVA time is very valuable.

I believe the article on page 3 of the following document discusses some preliminary results of the tests that were later written about in the paper linked above. It also has some good pictures of what the real hand rail crater on ISS looks like (hint: its tiny!) and discusses how astronauts were told to avoid it on later EVAs.

http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/pdfs/ODQNv12i3.pdf

Since this was from back in 2008 I’m trying to figure out if we’ve replaced any hand rails since then. But I can’t find any documentation saying explicitly one way or the other. I did find some information that NASA has image documentation of over 100 MMOD strikes on ISS (not all hand rails).

- Ben H.
JSC, Houston, TX

Your article “How far away is the horizon” unfortunately applies only on the Moon, or similar anatmospheric bodies. On Earth, *particularly* near the horizon, atmospheric refraction makes the visible horizon much farther off. Even Tycho Brahe knew that the precision of observations low in the sky was unreliable, and I hate to think how many sailors had their beers delayed because the island was farther away than they thought.

The ISS is much larger then the shuttle windshields and spends a lot more time in the environment.

Mrs. Krabappel: “Embiggens”? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Ms. Hoover: I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

Both of these are made-up words, actually, and not (officially) part of the English language.
Embehemothated means “made larger;” from the word behemoth, an adjective describing something very large, usually a creature.

Cromulent is a pop-culture reference to an episode of The Simpsons. It means that the made-up word used – embehemothated, in this case – is acceptable in this context.