Comments on Selenian Boondocks: Luna Road

"It's hard to think of NASA as being on the way to...

2008-03-02T10:40:00.000-08:00

"It's hard to think of NASA as being on the way to technological obsolescence."

Really? As one of that "generation y" group, I have a hard time thinking of things where Nasa is actually on the cutting edge.

Most of the interesting missions they're running are outsourced to universities or companies. Most of their launch money is being spent to fly technology from the 70s.

Being an organization that just distributes money would probably be the most effective thing Nasa could do, but completely removes any claim of being a technology leader and would require trimming a lot of fat. Or dumping a lot of ballast, or cutting a lot of guy wires, or whatever your preferred euphemism for firing most everyone whose actual employer is Nasa.

Ouch! Thanks Rand. I think the word was just lyi...

2008-03-01T18:46:00.000-08:00

Ouch! Thanks Rand.

I think the word was just lying around in my brain because it's in the EETC indenture that I'm picking apart at work. Of course, I should know the importance of the distinction between the last sentence in the clause and the penultimate sentence in the clause.

Let's see if I can salvage it in some way.

It remains the penultimate space mission because the ultimate space mission has not yet occured, the one where we go out there for good.

Rand's right, though, trying to use penultimate to convey greatest, best, none better, and so forth, (because the real best is yet to happen) is bad English. It's from the root word penult, meaning next to last, second to last, as close to last as you can get without actually being last. It does not come from the root word ultimate with a pen- in front of it.

My Random House desk dictionary says it's from a contraction of paene ultima, or almost the last, with ultima being 'the last syllable of a word'. From the Latin feminine of ultimus, the superlative of ulter, or far.

So whipping all of that around, the last syllable of a word is the farthest one. The Moon is the farthest we've gone (ignoring where we've thrown our tools into the void), but we are going further (hopefully). So it may not have been an entirely inappropriate use.

From a science standpoint it is still the penultim...

2008-02-29T05:46:00.000-08:00

From a science standpoint it is still the penultimate mission...

If it was the penultimate one, what was the ultimate one?